30 Dec 2011

December 30, 2011


Murders Up Again In "Kill-A-Delphia," Mayor's Goals Not Met

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Murders are up again this year in Philadelphia, and the city still has the highest homicide rate of the nation's 10 most populous cities, says the Philadelphia Daily News. At the same time, fewer murders are getting solved. The city's homicide tally stood at 324 Wednesday, including the eight victims allegedly killed in previous years by West Philly abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Last year, 306 people were killed, and the year before, 302. City officials prefer to focus on the past. When they compare numbers, they go back to 2007, when murders in Philly were at the five-year high of 392. Looking at it that way, they get a 17 percent decrease in the murder rate from 2007 to 2011.

Mayor Michael Nutter, during his 2007 campaign, pledged that he wouldn't seek re-election if the 2010 homicide tally was more than the 288 killed in 2002. At his inauguration in 2008, he set what turned out to be an overly ambitious goal of slashing the city's murder rate by 30 to 50 percent in three to five years. He won re-election this year. Everett Gillison, deputy mayor for public safety, said the city had been making progress, but when the economy tanked, the mayor was unable to implement some of his plans for reducing crime. Among the 10 most populous cities, Philly comes out on top, with 20.7 homicides per 100,000 residents. The next closest are Chicago, 15.7, and Dallas, 10.9.

Philadelphia Daily News


OR Panel Urges Sentencing, Parole, Juvenile Reforms to Avoid Prisons

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Oregon could spare itself a continuing run-up in its billion-dollar prison system with changes to sentences, parolee programs, and juvenile justice, a state commission is reporting to Gov. John Kitzhaber, The Oregonian reports. The panel said far more is known now about how to punish and reform offenders since the last thorough reform of sentences in 1989. Proved techniques could drive down recidivism, mitigating the need to build prisons and add thousands more beds.

Money motivated Kitzhaber to put the group to work. State forecasters estimate that Oregon's prison population will grow by 2,000 over the next decade. The state corrections department said it would need $608 million more in coming years to house that population, including building prisons. Some of that cost can be avoided, the commission said. "The commission has missed the mark by focusing on only one aspect of the criminal justice system: sentencing," said Wasco County District Attorney Eric Nisley, president of the Oregon District Attorneys Association. He said current sentencing policies work.

The Oregonian


Davis Looks at Britain to Improve Boston Homicide Clearance Rate

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Facing a growing backlog of unsolved slayings, Boston police commissioner Edward Davis will overhaul the way his detectives work homicide cases by employing modern sleuthing techniques - such as rapidly flooding murder scenes with a swarm of investigators and forensic experts - in a first-in-the-nation initiative aimed at bringing vicious killers to swift justice, reports the Boston Herald. "My goal is to improve the clearance rate," said Davis. "To get over the national average (of 65 percent) - and I think that's possible - we need to examine best practices. I want to shoot for the stars with this."

Davis said the last time a serious study of investigative techniques took place was 1975. "This is the first time in 35 years that anyone will take a hard look at what detectives do," he said. Davis is looking across the pond to the so-called "British model" for fresh ideas. The murder clearance rate in Boston this year is about 34 percent, the Herald calculates, although Boston police, using the FBI method of calculating, say their clearance rate this year was 55 percent. Keys to the British model are setting strict protocols for approaching each homicide and sending teams of detectives and crime scene specialists, known as "murder squads," to work the slaying scene in the first 48 hours while clues and witness memories are still fresh. The "golden hour," immediately after the call comes in, is critical. That's when decisions that lead to quick arrests and successful prosecutions are made, said Eugene O'Donnell of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Boston Herald


NYC Crime Up or Down, Depending on How Strangulation is Counted

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Major crime in New York City has risen in 2011 but less than 1 percent, says the New York Times. Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the number of felonies has gone down. His logic was rooted in a state law that created strangulation as a new class of crime. The law, which went into effect in late 2010, offered three definitions of strangulation (none resulting in a person's death); first- and second-degree strangulation were felonies, and third-degree strangulation was a misdemeanor. The city's theory is that many crimes now classified as second-degree strangulations would have been treated as misdemeanors or less before the new law took effect.

If those crimes were excluded from the 2011 felony total, overall crime would have fallen by 1.2 percent, Bloomberg said. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly cited criminologist Franklin Zimring of the University of California at Berkeley, whose recent book, "The City That Became Safe," looks closely at the reduction in crime in New York City since 1991. "He says the reduction of crime in New York City is a Guinness Book of World Records reduction, not seen anywhere," Kelly said. "He says - he's a very definite voice in the business - that the reason for the dramatic, the Guinness Book of Records reduction over two decades, is police work. It's as simple as that, as direct as that."

New York Times


Post-Katrina Woes Contribute to New Orleans' Rising Homicide Total

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Stories of street killings in New Orleans continue to crowd nightly newscasts, despite vows by leaders to stem the violence, says USA Today. As of yesterday, police had counted 197 murders in the city - well above last year's tally of 175. The murder rate last year was 51 per 100,000 residents - 10 times the national average and five times larger than other similar-size cities. The violence is hampering the rebuilding and repopulating of New Orleans from the floods that followed Katrina.

As murder rates elsewhere continue to drop, New Orleans is trending the wrong way, says John Roman of the Urban Institute: "What's happening in New Orleans is completely different from what you're seeing in almost every major U.S. city." Why has it been so difficult to stop the killings, even with new leadership at the police department and the conviction of several officers involved in post-Katrina shootings of civilians? Katrina and the ensuing collapse of schools, home life and other support structures likely played a role, says Lance Hill of the New Orleans-based Southern Institute for Education and Research. Children displaced by the floods returned with their families to a wrecked city, bounced from school to school and lacked mental health professionals to help them through the trauma, he says.

USA Today


Chicago Crime Numbers Are Down, Police Role Debated

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Chicago is close to ending 2011 with fewer murders than last year, which saw the lowest number of those violent crimes in nearly a half a century, says the Chicago Tribune. From January through Tuesday, there were 423 murders in Chicago compared to 431 through the same period last year, say police statistics. That is a steady decline since 2008, when the city had 513 murders. A year later, that number was down to 459. Overall crime is down by 8 percent this year. Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy has overseen a makeover in the patrol division that included shifting more than 1,000 police officers from desk jobs, lockups and two specialized units to beat patrols.

Criminologist Dennis Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago that if violent crime were to rise, it could be attributed to such factors as unprecedented contact between rival gangs, gang members looking to reclaim their authoritative positions in the neighborhood upon their return from prison, and instability in the illegal drug market. "This problem should not be the sole responsibility of the police," Rosenbaum said. "Studies around the world consistently suggest that violence, including gang violence, is the result of concentrated poverty, low-functioning schools, stressors on the family that lead to family dysfunction, a culture of violence through entertainment, media and sports, discrimination and exclusion."

Chicago Tribune


CA Police Say ShotSpotter Works, Improves Community Relations

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The gunfire alert system ShotSpotter has become a basic component of police work in six San Francisco Bay Area cities that have bought it in recent years, says the San Francisco Chronicle. While offering mostly anecdotal evidence, and acknowledging some problems, police commanders say it's been a success and is likely to be a permanent feature of their jobs. San Francisco is expanding its network from 4.3 to 9.3 square miles.

Proponents say the system enables officers to respond faster, often reaching the spot where shots were fired before the first 911 caller dials in. In many rough neighborhoods, officials said, the vast majority of gunfire prompts a ShotSpotter alert but no human calls. As he displayed a series of ShotSpotter alerts on his office computer, San Francisco police Commander Mikail Ali said the system also did something less tangible: convince people that police were on their side. "We used to miss a lot of these (gunfire) incidents," Ali said. "People assumed we knew about them, but we didn't. They would say, 'They don't show up because they don't care.' It further polarized communities."

San Francisco Chronicle


Phoenix Sheriff Arpaio Rejects Black Leaders' Demands That He Resign

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The calls for Maricopa County, Az., Sheriff Joe Arpaio to resign amid a U.S. Justice Department investigation continued to grow as a group of black leaders implored the five-term official to step down, reports the Arizona Republic. Arpaio rejected the calls for his resignation and continued to depict the effort as a politically motivated ploy brought on by longtime opponents.

More than 20 black community leaders, including Phoenix Councilman Michael Johnson and local leaders of the National Urban League and the NAACP, stood on the steps of the U.S. Courthouse in downtown Phoenix and said the results of the Justice Department's civil-rights investigation demonstrated the need for an immediate change in leadership at the Sheriff's Office. "They're ganging up on me," Arpaio said. "They know I can win next year. They think they can drive me out. It's never going to happen." The Justice Department findings, issued two weeks ago, accuse Arpaio of running an office that fosters institutional discrimination against Latino residents through the sheriff's immigration-enforcement efforts and treatment of Hispanic inmates.

Arizona Republic


Private Firm Taking Control of Ohio Prison This Weekend

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Management & Training Corp. of Utah takes over operation of Ohio's 2,300-inmate North Central Correctional Institution tomorrow, reports the Associated Press. The prison is among five state facilities seeing management or operations changes that night in a consolidation and privatization effort by Republican Gov. John Kasich.

Management & Training Corp. of Utah takes over operation of Ohio's 2,300-inmate North Central Correctional Institution tomorrow, reports the Associated Press. The prison is among five state facilities seeing management or operations changes that night in a consolidation and privatization effort by Republican Gov. John Kasich. The previously private North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility in Lorain County will be returned to state control and merged into one complex with adjacent Grafton Correctional Institution. Kasich put five state prisons on the block, but only the privately-run Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Conneaut was sold. It was bought by Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest prison vendor, for $72.7 million in the first deal of its kind in the nation. The vendor already ran the facility. The sale generated more than enough to close a $50 million prison budget gap that loomed, so other offers were rejected. Savings will be realized even as the state adds 702 beds to its overcrowded 50,200-inmate prison system, said prisons spokesman Carlo LoParo.

Associated Press/Columbus Dispatch


Will Luck of Immigration-Law Critics Run Out at the Supreme Court?

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Federal judges have blocked strict new immigration laws adopted by conservative legislatures in half a dozen states, including a ruling last week that said South Carolina may not set up a "street-level dragnet" to stop and arrest illegal immigrants, the Los Angeles Times reports. Immigrant rights advocates who have cheered those rulings may soon find their luck has run out as those rulings head for the Supreme Court. Legal experts believe the high court's conservative majority will take a sharply different approach.

So far, lower-court judges have mostly sided with the Obama administration, ruling, as U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel did in the South Carolina case, that regulating immigration is the province solely of the federal government, not the states. In addition to South Carolina, judges have blocked extensive parts of immigration laws in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah and some parts of an Alabama law. Immigrant rights advocates say nearly all the judges have agreed that states cannot make immigration offenses a state crime. "The common thread is that states can't be in the business of finding and locking up people they suspect of being undocumented immigrants," said Cecillia Wang of the national Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Alabama ruling is the one notable exception to that trend.

Los Angeles Times


U.S. Prosecutors Have Less Money to Spend; $2,800 to Close a Felony

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The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics offers a new, if a bit dated, profile of the nation's prosecutors. A 2007 census found 2,330 state prosecutors' offices, 11 fewer than found in a 2001 count. They serve a wide range of populations, from 500 to 9.9 million residents. The prosecutors had $5.8 billion to spend, down from $6.1 billion in 2001.

n full-time offices serving populations of under 100,000--three-fourths of the nation's prosecutors' offices--the average office includes one chief prosecutor, three assistants, one victim advocate, one legal services staffer, one investigator, and three support staff. Prosecutors' entry-level salaries in such officers are typically in the $44,000-$55,000 range. The budgeted cost per felony case closed was just under $2,800, in prosecutors' offices serving more than 1 million residents.

U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics


"Murderabilia" Sales Assailed as "Insidious and Despicable Industry"

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A calculator that retails for $99 is for sale at $3,700 on the crime memorabilia site Supernaught because it beloned to Seung Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, says the Washington Post. The calculator and hundreds of items like it--the personal effects, paintings, letters, and even fingernails of killers, are being sold to collectors on at least a half-dozen "murderabiliia" sites.

Collectors say Cho's calculator is the first item with a connection to the him available for purchase in more than four years - since the first 48 hours after his mass murder. "It's an insidious and despicable industry," said Andy Kahan, a Houston victims' rights advocate and law enforcement official who has led a campaign to prohibit the sale of murderabilia. Although eight states, including Texas and California, have laws that prohibit convicted killers from profiting from their crimes, efforts to push legislation through Congress have failed repeatedly.

Washington Post