Hey, the October issue of Police Magazine has a pretty good - but too short - feature story on the great Joseph Wambaugh, retired LAPD detective sergeant. Certainly the greatest police storyteller of all, in my book he's one of the greatest writers of our time, period. No one paints a picture of a time and place like Wambaugh. My personal favorite, the nonfiction Line And Shadows, can still put me out in the San Diego canyons in an instant, with all the looming menace that hung over the place in the time of the book.

After long periods of apparent silence, it is a great thing to see Wambaugh back on the shelves and out in the public world, so to speak. Lieutenant Chris Davies of my former police department, a longtime contemporary and great friend, speaks of coming to his decision to retire when he looked around the lineup table one morning on a day shift and realized that not one of the young cops on his squad had a clue who Joe Wambaugh was. Time to go!

But now they get a chance to climb onboard, along with us old dinosaurs, with last year's Hollywood Station and the pending sequel. In the meantime, the Police article is a good place to start if you see a copy lying around the station. GREAT writer, apparently a pretty good guy too, from what I've heard. One of the top people I'd like to sit around and have lunch with someday. Chris could come, too!

Classic stuff, found, I believe, only in the police/fire world. juvenile, asinine, and I miss it! We did have a hell of a good time through the years on the job. As usual, the NYPD continues to lead. Click the link:

Police Tactical Training

Stay safe out there!

Granville is a small upstate NY town along the Vermont border not far from here. The PD recently had to deal with yet another gruesome, tragic and possibly preventable domestic murder/suicide case - preventable not by the police department per se, but perhaps if the victim had not wavered on following through on an Order of Protection. Maybe, maybe not, but the end result is three orphans, families torn apart, and the PD about to come under the gun for alleged inaction in the face of a paper trail of building incidents at the residence of the victim and her killer.

You can clearly see the trend coming that is going to eventually require police to proactively intervene when these patterns start to emerge. Then you'll have the inevitable gray area surrounding at what point that occurs, and all the Monday morning quarterbacking emanating from the attorneys jumping aboard after the smoke clears. In at least one county in New York State, police are now required to proactively go out and contact sex offenders in their jurisdictions at regular intervals; at what point will they be required to start supervising troubled families? After all, in a climate where everything is the fault of some arm of government, where better to place the blame than the police department?

Here's the first shot fired in this particular story, from the Albany Times Union.

If you're a police administrator, you have got to keep ahead of this stuff, like you didn't have enough to do already. Given that it actually involves real tragedy and loss of this magnitude, its somewhat hard to argue with, unfortunately. In the meantime, document, document, document, and make sure that someone in the department is keeping on top of these things as they emerge. PolicePro can actually be a big aid in doing this. We make spotting and watching trends like this extremely easy.

Does this make us sleazy opportunists? Maybe to some cynics, but again, I've got the street creds to back up these opinions. I well recall the one we had where the girlfriend - after taking out an Order of Protection against her boyfriend who had assaulted her - two or three days later allowed him back in to spend the night and ended up with a couple of bullets in her. The idiot boyfriend told us later he'd saved a bullet for himself after shooting her, but chickened out when the cops started rolling up. If we had known about the issues there, maybe we would have been a little more forceful in our dealings with them before the night of the shooting. Instead, she ended up shot and the PD had another lawsuit on the pile, accused of failing to protect her.

Or if you do, you might as well send the PD a postcard about it... apparently 911 ain't all it's cracked up to be there. Amazing.

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52559

The march continues. The latest cause celebre in the social engineering world appears to be sex offenders, now that the bloom is off the rose on domestic violence... every time a cop is called to a domestic dispute nowadays pretty much anywhere, he or she spends more time filling out meaningless forms than actually intervening in whatever is going on. We have every kind of civilian oversight group in the world meeting regularly to second guess the decisions that the cops made at any given DV call; money has been thrown at the problem and stolen, misspent or just wasted creating all kinds of new beaurocracies of people who have never seen the inside of a working cop's car; marches and crusades and finger pointing go on all the time, and the root problem hasn't changed one iota. If anything, it appears to be worse than ever in most places.

So now we have Sex Offenders in the community. Heaven forbid these people go to jail and actually stay there... we now live in a world where it is perfectly normal to release people who have committed incredible, horrific acts against helpless children and adolescents. But of course they have rights, and the rest of us basically get to sit around and wait until one of them attacks someone we know, and then we can join a victims' advocacy group, or go to candlelight vigils, or find other new and interesting ways to spend our time.

Okay, so once it became public knowledge that these people were out there, some scrambling had to be done by political types, and here came Sex Offender Registries. Now there's a great thought! Never mind that in New York State at least, for several years while I was still a working cop, we were not allowed to release any more than absolute bare bones information, and then only on Level 3 offenders... the lower level guys were just cited as being in a general jurisdiction, since their privacy rights were more important than the those of normal, law abiding citizens.

And isn't it a fine thing that we actually accept a world where we not only have known sexual predators walking around among us, but there are so many of them that we actually classify them! Does anyone else see the sickness in that? Is there some status or award that goes with being kidnapped by a Level 3 offender instead of a Level 1 or 2? Do we win a prize?

Moving right along, in my day these guys had to check in with the local police at set intervals. That'll make you feel safe, for sure. Of course half of them never did, and the various probation authorities never went out and apprehended anyone anyhow... and the ones that did check in were subjected to the most rigorous cross examination (again, what we were allowed to ask):

"So, you still living in the same place?"

"Yep."

"Working anywhere?"

"Nope."

"Okay, we'll see you in three months! Have a great day!"


Ah, but a problem exists! If they have to check in with the cops and whether they do or not, something unpleasant happens, there could be some liability for the County! I mean, heaven forbid the county authorities who are supposed to keep track of these people - having had them dumped in their laps from the State - actually have to do that... there must be an answer...

And of course the solution is simple, once you look for it: Let's take the cops, who are already well on their way to being social workers anyhow, and stick them with the responsibility. Perfect! If someone acts up now, either the cops are at fault for not going out and finding him every three months - they've got nothing else to do, after all - or the cop who DID go out showed poor judgement and is personally responsible along with the police department. It doesn't matter... it's all cash on the pile for the lawsuit. If another child is damaged for life or even killed, well, that's just the way it is.


When I read a story in a regional newspaper the other day and saw that the police in that county have now actually been mandated to go and seek out their sex offenders on a regular basis - and therefore become responsible for what they may do under the "special relationship" court precedents (check out Torrington, Ct and a domestic violence murder that happened several years ago) - I was once again relieved to be out of the active game, and paradoxically faced with an opportunity arising out of this crap. We went back to the Sex Offenders file we created a year ago and really wound it up tight, added a ton of function to it, and have started calling around on it. Hopefully we can actually help out some of these agencies without costing them an arm or a leg, and that's a great thing. Too bad we even have that opportunity to benefit from ridiculous circumstances like these, though.


***Don't for one minute mistake this as an attack on the probation or parole people, either... they're drowning under all these mandates as well, the people actually in the trenches. But stuff tends to flow downhill, and the PD always seems to be the last stop. In a few years, the cops and the probation people will probably be taking turns delivering the Meals On Wheels to the Elderly Sex Offender Society people anyhow.

During the predawn hours of November 15, 2004, 52 year old Peter Porco and his wife Joan were attacked in their bed with an axe in the Albany, NY, suburb of Bethlehem. Mr. Porco died; Mrs. Porco managed to survive, though terribly disfigured and suffering permanent injuries.

Yesterday afternoon, at the end of the most sensational case and trial in a long time in upstate New York, their son Christopher Porco was found guilty of the murder of his father and attempted murder of his mother, who - mercifully - has no recollection of the attack.

This case is a terrible tragedy for everyone concerned, with plenty of "collateral damage" inflicted both by circumstance and by the actions of the defense team. Seeking a scapegoat, the defense attacked the Bethlehem police department and particularly one detective who worked the case and conveniently - for them - died during the investigation. It was not long before that detective in particular became the corrupt, manipulative and vengeful bad cop, and his family along with his memory were tarnished in the news - pretty much constantly.

Well, they got an intelligent jury who looked at the evidence - which was in fact the result of an outstanding investigation by the Bethlehem cops and the New York State Police and their amazing forensic team - and not only found Porco guilty, but vindicated the Bethlehem cops and gave their detectives, alive and deceased, their good names back. The circumstantial case that the cops and the Albany County DA's office put together is a textbook of intelligent detective work and thinking outside the box on occasion. Nice job.

The Albany Times_Union's coverage and summary of the case is pretty good, too, and includes the timeline put together by the prosecution that put the jury over the top. We did plenty of timeline cases in my detective days as well - they're a damn good way to turn a bunch of information into a compelling story.

Kudos to all the cops in this caper, and wishes for some sort of peace and hope for Mrs. Porco and her other son, Jonathan.

Greg advised me several weeks ago about Copcast, a weekly podcast on police culture, police news and technology. It is uploaded every Sunday, the work of Mack Pettigrew and Rich Schumaker, cops from Ontario, Canada and Salem, Virginia. These guys mix general police banter with training announcements, guest discussions, technology news, and, unfortunately, weekly updates on police deaths across the US and Canada.

Copcast is an intelligent and entertaining effort by working cops who know their subjects. You can even subscribe to the podcasts on iTunes and put them on an iPod for something to listen to on the night shift, if you're a midnight marauder! I worked nights as a patrol cop and a sergeant for years - in those days, we didn't even have AM radios in the police cars. Times change...

I don't know either one of the Copcast guys, and have no affiliation with them - just feel it's worth listening to and wish them well.

Two guys doing their job have been killed in upstate New York in the last two days. What the hell is going on in this - and every other - state?

A 10 year NYSP trooper, Andrew Sperr, out of SP Horseheads, was shot and killed by two idiots who had just robbed a Chemung County bank - which the trooper apparently did not know about - when he stopped to check their suspicious vehicle by the side of the road. Trooper Sperr managed to return fire and shot both of them. They were arrested separately when they showed up at two Elmira hospitals whining about gunshot wounds.

The day before, Wednesday, March 1, New Hartford PD officer Joseph Corr was shot and killed while chasing yet another worthless bastard who had - you guessed it - robbed a jewelry store. A vehicle chase ended with the robbers crashing their car into a gas station, and in the ensuing foot pursuit of one of them, officer Corr was killed. Corr was all of 30 years old, with six years on the job.

In the only bit of good news in the whole story, the person who killed Corr was killed himself the next night in a battle with cops in Chester, Pa - but not before shooting a US Marshall, though not seriously.

Governor Pataki - from his hospital room in New York City, where he is recovering from two surguries - is coming out strongly for getting the death penalty law back on the books in connection with killing police officers. While I doubt it would deter so-called people like these from shooting at the cops, it would be nice to see them removed from the world afterwards, at least.

So it doesn't matter if you do this work on a 26 officer job out in Oneida County or in the South Bronx or East LA - it's all the same, every time you get out of the car or approach anyone you don't already know. Be careful out there. I was lucky to get through 27 years pretty much unscathed. It is a damn shame that so many good people aren't.