FT has lunch with Bill Bratton

In the case of the British police, he thinks reform needs to incorporate several strands. First, he believes that police forces need plenty of bodies: in LA, for example, he campaigned successfully to hire another 1,000 police, in the face of severe political opposition. Second, he is strongly committed to the so-called Compstat technique of policing, which he helped develop. This involves using intensive data collection and intelligence to track detailed movements of groups in small neighbourhoods, and then follow up repeatedly, with so-called “predictive policing”.

But, contrary to his “supercop” tag, he also believes in community involvement: the police need to be constantly visible and accessible, and create community pride through small steps. This last policy is often referred as the “broken windows” policy, referring to the idea, put forward in the early 1980s by social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling, that you must address minor offences on the street in order to build morale and uphold a sense of order. Or as he says, the police must “address the little things as well as the big things”; cutting the murder rate will not have impact if residents still see graffiti and prostitutes.

“American and British policing to this day tends to be very exclusive and exclusionary, but my style of policing has always been very inclusive – I bring a lot of people together from different backgrounds, who might not always want to work together. Being a successful police chief today is like being in a circus: a centre-ring with lions, tigers and bears – you have these animals which would normally kill each other, but through your control and influence they perform. A successful police chief has to work with the good, bad and ugly.” he explains. ...

Instead, he talks about poverty and social responsibility. “Policing and society in both your country and mine in the 1960s and 1970s excused a way of behaviour and created entitlement programmes around the idea that crime was caused by racism, poverty, demographics and so on.

“But as a policeman I always had a different perspective. Crime can be influenced by poverty but it’s always caused by human behaviour ... Police are charged with controlling that behaviour. It is crucial to maintain social order,” he argues. Similarly, he does not want to blame the gang culture just on economics; what is also going on is the “distintegration of the family ... Humans are social animals, they want to belong to something.”

Bill Bratton says he can lead police out of 'crisis' despite budget cuts
Bratton said US police chiefs had shown their British counterparts the way, securing large falls in crime despite facing falling budgets. In LA, where he stepped down as police chief in 2009, despite high unemployment and a 15% budget cut, crime is down by 10%.

Bratton said: "You can run around saying, 'The sky is falling in, the sky is falling in,' or you actually do something about it. You have to play the hand you're dealt. I've always dealt initially with budget cuts.

"Out of crisis come opportunities. If you want to speed up the process of change, nothing does it better than a good old crisis."

When two mathematicians, an anthropologist and a criminologist meet

In July the Santa Cruz Police Department began experimenting with an interesting bit of software developed by scientists at Santa Clara University. The researchers behind the software are like an intellectual “Oceans Eleven” team of specialists: two mathematicians, an anthropologist and a criminologist. They’ve combined their cerebral forces to come up with a mathematical model that takes crime data from the past to forecast crimes in the future. The basic math is similar to that used by seismologists to predict aftershocks following an earthquake (also a handy bit of software in southern California).

Large earthquakes are unpredictable, but the aftershocks that follow are not and their occurrence can be predicted with mathematical models. It occurred to Dr. George Mohler, one of the Santa Clara mathematicians, that criminal activity might not be random and that, similar to aftershocks, some crimes might be predicted by other crimes that precede them. The reasoning is based on the assumption that crimes are clustered – it’s what police call ‘hotspots.’ Burglaries will occur in the same area and at the same houses because the vulnerabilities of that area will be known to the burglars. Gang violence is also clustered. A gang shooting will often trigger retaliatory shootings.

Using the aftershocks-inspired algorithms Dr. Mohler and his team came up with a model, then sought to test it. In collaboration with the LAPD they plugged in data on 2,803 residential burglaries occurring within a block of the San Fernando valley 11 miles by 11 miles throughout 2004. For a given day the software calculated the top 5 percent of city blocks most likely to be burglarized. The results convinced the LAPD that, had they been using the program, they could have prevented a quarter of burglaries across the entire test region for that day.

The current, real world test of the software involves generating a map of the city areas most likely to be burglarized, the time of day they are most likely to get hit, and deploying personnel accordingly. The software is recalibrated every day when burglaries from the previous day are added to the dataset. They don’t actually expect to catch people in the act, but to deter more crimes with more effective patrolling. The test that is underway will be evaluated at six months, but already the data is encouraging. Zach Friend, crime analyst for Santa Cruz police, confirmed to the New York Times that the program led to five arrests in July. Even more impressive, compared to July 2010 burglaries, the number of July 2011 burglaries are down 27 percent. Whether or not that trend holds remains to be seen, but so far it appears that being in the wrong place at the right time works.

-Pre-Cog Is Real – New Software Stops Crime Before It Happens

Headline of the Day

US man charged for shooting mower;

A 56-year-old man from the Midwestern US state of Wisconsin has been arrested after shooting his lawn mower in his garden because it would not start....

Police officers said Mr Walendowski had told them: "It's my lawn mower and my yard, so I can shoot it if I want."

Illicit Mexico

Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?

The Gangs of Central America

The mind of mad man

"I constantly knew, during the entire 24 years, that what I did was not right, that I must have been crazy to do something like this," the magazine quoted Fritzl as saying to his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer. "With each week that I held my daughter captive," he said, "my situation got crazier."...

"When I went into the bunker, I brought flowers for my daughter, and books and stuffed animals for the children," he said. They watched adventure movies while the daughter, Elisabeth, cooked their favorite meals. "And then we all sat around the table and ate together," he said....

In his account, Fritzl describes himself as the product of Nazi-era Austria, with its mania for order and discipline, as well as of a domineering mother, whom he loved desperately. She did not sexually abuse him as a child, he said, though he admitted to nourishing fantasies about her....

But as Elisabeth grew into a teenager, Fritzl said, he became alarmed when she began smoking, drinking and staying out all night. "I tried to get her out of that swamp," he said, by arranging work for her as a waitress. He also began digging the underground bunker that became her prison in 1984, when Fritzl drugged her and dragged her downstairs.

"I had to create a place in which I could keep Elisabeth away from the outside world, by force if I had to," he said.

Fritzl, however, was unable to keep himself away from his daughter, who he said reminded him of his mother. "My drive to have sex with Elisabeth grew stronger and stronger," he said, describing it as an addiction. "I knew that Elisabeth didn't want me to do what I did to her. I knew that I was hurting her."

- Austria's dungeon man: 'I must have been crazy'

Wrongly Convicted in US

The Innocence Project

Insanity Defense is Insane

Josef Fritzl 'will plead insanity' to dodge prison;

Josef Fritzl, who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her locked in a dungeon as a sex slave for 24 years, will plead insanity to avoid a prison sentence.

Lawyers for Mr Fritzl, 73, will argue that he was not responsible for his actions and will try to acquire a certificate of insanity...

Colonel Franz Polzer reported that Elisabeth, Kerstin and Stefan were kept in a single narrow room designed to be a nuclear shelter from 1984 until their father started expanding their prison in 1993.

Colonel Polzer said: “She [Elisabeth] said that there was only one single room at first. The dungeon was expanded as the children were getting born.” In the first nine months of her captivity, Elisabeth was kept tethered on an extended cable, resembling a dog leash, which allowed her to reach the lavatory but otherwise restricted her movement.

The life in the narrow concrete cube also meant that the children would witness how Fritzl would sexually abuse their mother. The children are now being treated in a local clinic together with their mother and grandmother.

Doctors have installed an aquarium with goldfish for Stefan, 18, who is having difficulties speaking and moving in open space after years of captivity. They have also brought teddy bears for Felix, who is seen as having the best chance of recovering from the ordeal.

Authorities have stepped up security around the Amstetten-Mauer clinic, where the family are being treated, after several violent incidents involving reporters attempting to enter the premises. One reportedly dressed as a police officer and tried to walk in at the front door. The Austrian Cobra antiterrorism unit has now been deployed to secure the hospital.

McMafia- Fall of Communism and Rise of Organized Crime?

Lush Life

Richard Price talks about his new novel

One of the winners of the collapse of Soviet Communism

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
Misha Glenny

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and entrepreneurs alike became intoxicated by forecasts of limitless expansion into newly open markets. No one would foresee that the greatest success story to arise from these events would be the globalization of organized crime. Current estimates suggest that illegal trade accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.

McMafia is a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labor smugglers, Misha Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West.

To trace the disparate strands of this hydra-like story, Glenny talked to police, victims, politicians, and members of the global underworld in eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, and India. The story of organized crime’s phenomenal, often shocking growth is truly the central political story of our time. McMafia will change the way we look at the world

14-year-old Bronx boy charged with manslaughter.

Two teens who watched their buddy attack a Columbia University graduate student will not be charged in the talented scholar's death, cops said Sunday.

After studying surveillance tape and interviewing the two teens, detectives determined only one of the trio punched Minghui Yu - who ran into Broadway to escape the attack and was struck and killed by a southbound Jeep Cherokee.

"We saw that it was only the actions of one of the kids that sent the victim into his flight," a police source said.

A 14-year-old Bronx boy was arrested Saturday and charged with manslaughter. Police said he punched Yu, 24, repeatedly at Broadway, near W.122nd St., as Yu walked back to the Morningside Heights campus at 8:50 p.m. Friday. The student was headed home after dinner with his girlfriend, classmates said.

Cops have not released the suspect's name because of his age.

"It's a mistake. That's it," the boy's aunt said as cops hauled him to a juvenile detention facility early Sunday.

-No charges for teen pals in fatal Columbia chase

China Fact of the Day

Official statistics indicate that between 1978 and 2001, there was a 300 percent increase in crime. Between 1990 and 2000, the total number of crimes reported by Chinese police rose from 2.2 million to 3.6 million. In that same period, the number of recorded assaults doubled and recorded robberies tripled. And between 1995 and 2000, the Chinese police recorded a five-fold increase in the number of burglaries. Drug abuse has also sharply escalated; in 2006, for example, Chinese officials put the number of registered drug addicts at 1.16 million, about double what it was in 1995 (some analysts believe the actual number is closer to 15 million). A majority of registered addicts are heroin users, which has led to an alarming rise in the rate of hiv infection.

-Religion and Social Order, Amitai Etzioni

War is what give us meaning

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65;

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

Is Philadelphia worse than Iraq?

Pablo Escobar, a saint for some

Pablo Escobar is revered as a saint by some Colombians, having built houses for the poor and provided jobs for the unemployed, before he was killed in 1993.

Related;
Pablo Escobar's Hippos


The True Story Of Killing Pablo Escobar

Management Lesson of the Day- ‘You go with what you have’

One way to look at a ComStat meeting is as a live audit of overall police performance, one in which the leadership’s goals sometimes borders on the unreasonable because that’s the only way to ensure at least reasonable results. But before that, a ComStat meeting is a way of sharing crime data that recognizes why the first step to crime reduction itself- the gathering and analyzing of accurate, timely intelligence- has to be quickened by the heat of accountability.

The reason is simple: Most people in the world learn things faster when they know they’re going to be tested on them. Cops are no different. If we had been satisfied to just sit in a circle and chat about the intelligence we all had (which is the way some departments run their knock-off versions of Comstat), a lot of cases in New York would never have been solved and a lot of more people would have been victimized….

When the process started, kids in the suburbs were doing their homework on Pentium machines, but Yohe was punching in crime data from all seventy-six precincts and writing his own code for a simple spreadsheet into a borrowed 386. When we started moving from hand maps to computerized mapping, Yohe quickly found out even the best mapping software around couldn’t plot multiple crimes at any single address. Here we relied on Yohe’s creative ability, because he was able to devise a way to get around the software’s logic and make out hot spots look like real hot spots...

In New York City, we were eventually able to establish drug motive in about 25 percent of all the city’s murders, but we knew that a lot of other people were being gunned down in street disputes in which the drug connection was never firmly established. In the end, the consensus was that, at the very least, 40 percent of the city’s homicides were by-products of the drug trade.

-The Crime Fighter: How You Can Make Your Community Crime Free
by Jack Maple , Chris Mitchell

Selective use of overbroad criminal statutes?

The federal criminal investigation that has led to Eliot Spitzer's resignation as governor of New York illustrates the great dangers all Americans face from vague and open-ended sex and money-transaction statutes.

Federal law, if read broadly, criminalizes virtually all sexual encounters for which something of value has been given. Federal money-laundering statutes criminalize many entirely legitimate and conventional banking transactions. Congress enacted these laws to give federal prosecutors wide discretion in deciding which "bad guys" to go after.

Generally, wise and intelligent prosecutors use their discretion properly -- to target organized crime, terrorism, financial predation, exploitation of children and the like. But the very existence of these selectively enforced statutes poses grave dangers of abuse. They lie around like loaded guns waiting to be used against the enemies of politically motivated investigators, prosecutors and politicians.

There is no hard evidence that Eliot Spitzer was targeted for investigation, but the story of how he was caught does not ring entirely true to many experienced former prosecutors and current criminal lawyers. The New York Times reported that the revelations began with a routine tax inquiry by revenue agents "conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks." This investigation allegedly found "several unusual movements of cash involving the Governor of New York." But the movement of the amounts of cash required to pay prostitutes, even high-priced prostitutes over a long period of time, does not commonly generate a full-scale investigation....

Even if Mr. Spitzer's derelictions were serendipitously discovered as a result of routine, computerized examination of bank transactions, the dangers inherent in selective use of overbroad criminal statutes remain. Money laundering, structuring and related financial crimes are designed to ferret out organized crime, drug dealing, terrorism and large-scale financial manipulation. They were not enacted to give the federal government the power to inquire into the sexual or financial activities of men who move money in order to hide payments to prostitutes.

Once federal authorities concluded that the "suspicious financial transactions" attributed to Mr. Spitzer did not fit into any of the paradigms for which the statutes were enacted, they should have closed the investigation. It's simply none of the federal government's business that a man may have been moving his own money around in order to keep his wife in the dark about his private sexual peccadilloes...

In this case, if the serendipitous bank audit really led federal agents to Mr. Spitzer, and Mr. Spitzer led them to the Emperor's Club, and federal prosecutors really wanted to get the Club, they could easily have sent an undercover cop to pose as a john, instead of tapping phones and reading emails -- tactics designed to catch and embarrass Mr. Spitzer with his own recorded words, which could be, and were, leaked to the media. As this newspaper has reported: "It isn't clear why the FBI sought the wiretap warrant. Federal prostitution probes are exceedingly rare, lawyers say, except in cases involving organized-crime leaders or child abuse. Federal wiretaps are seldom used to make these cases . . ."

Lavrenti Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin's KGB, once quipped to his boss, "show me the man and I will find the crime." The Soviet Union was notorious for having accordion-like criminal laws that could be adjusted to fit almost any dissident target. The U.S. is a far cry from the Soviet Union, but our laws are dangerously overbroad.

Both Democrats and Republicans have targeted political adversaries over the years. The weapons of choice are almost always elastic criminal laws. And few laws are more elastic, and susceptible to abuse, than federal laws on money laundering and sex crimes. For the sake of all Americans, these laws should be narrowed and limited to predatory crimes with real victims.

-The Entrapment of Eliot, by ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

Pakistan Fact of the Day

Reported Crimes in Pakistan

Also have a look 'crimes by type'- the majority are in the others- what are they?

Sudhir Venkatesh meets Colbert

Sudhir Venkatesh