Manhattan project

Last Wednesday was the third one of the month, and that means it was our regularly scheduled ACUDAT meeting to review crime trends and progress towards our goals. The June meeting was attended by visitors from the Riley County (Kansas) Police Department. Chief Brad Schoen and his command staff came up for the afternoon.

Capt. Tim Hegarty, who heads their patrol division, had arranged the visit after he was here a couple of months ago. The Riley County Police Department is unique in our part of the country, as an integrated police agency that covers the entire county. The largest cities are Ogden and Manhattan--home of Kansas State University. Way back in 1974 the Ogden Police Department, Manhattan Police Department, and Riley County Sheriff's Office were merged into a single police agency. That must have been quite the project, given the politics that swirl around such matters.

A non-political project--an effort to improve information and analysis--brought Riley County to Lincoln Wednesday. RCPD is in the process of acquiring the same geographic crime analysis software we use, CrimeView. They were interested in seeing how we use this in our department, and particularly how analysis of patterns, trends, and crimes is used to guide our strategies. We host visits like this a few times each year, and it's a great opportunity to share ideas.

You’ve won the lottery!

So far this year, LPD has investigated at least 67 Internet frauds. There may be a few more buried in our records with a different location code—I just didn’t have time to check there. Here’s a recap of a few of the successful cons that have relieved Lincoln residents of their cash this year. The demographics on the victims will be a little different than you might imagine.

A9-001497

85 year-old women was contacted by a man claiming to be in Ghana. He needed her help in collecting $23.5 million dollars on deposit here in the States. In return for her wiring him $3,655, she would receive one third of his fortune.

A9-OO4283

A 37 year-old man lost $3,505 after after responding to a job offer he found on craigslist. The person offering the job mailed him a bogus check, with instructions to cash the check then wire the bulk of the cash to a non-existent “travel agent” in the Philippines, who would be making arrangements.

A9-008044

A 20 year-old man was separated from $2,850 that he wired to the seller of a car on eBay. The car never arrived. The seller does not exist. The eBay listing was spoofed.

A9-012910

An 18 and 19 year-old couple found some concert tickets on craigslist, and contacted the seller by phone. The seller said she was in Laurel, NE, and would mail the tickets if the victim would wire her the $250. No tickies. Turns out the phone number the victim called (no longer in service) is in Santa Rosa, CA.

A9-015865

A 25 year-old man saw a good price on a 2006 Ford Expedition posted on craigslist and offered by a seller named Sarah in Quebec. “Send a moneygram for $4,800 to my eBay agent, David Wright.” No Expedition, no eBay agent, no Sarah, no David Wright, no more $4,800.

A9-041582

An 80 year-old women received a phone call from a male who called her “grandma.” He explained that while job hunting in Atlanta, he had been involved in a traffic crash, and needed to borrow $5,400 to pay his medical and vehicle expenses. She wired that amount to him in Atlanta, with the expectation that he would repay her after he received his insurance settlement. It wasn’t her grandson.

A9-043799

A 26 year-old man sent a $2,200 moneygram to Damian (was that a clue?) in San Diego for a motorcycle advertised on ebay. You know the rest.

A9-049191

The 36 year-old victim advertised her Blackberry on craigslist. She received an offer to buy from “Terry” who wanted her to ship the Blackberry to his daughter in Nigeria, and he would pay for the device and shipping through PayPal. She subsequently received an email from PayPal confirming a $160 transfer to her account, so she shipped the Blackberry off. The PayPal email was a fake.

A9-049845

A 24 year-old victim purchased a spyware program from a website for $49.95. The program turned out to be malware that has seriously fouled her computer. The company doesn’t exist, and the IP address resolves to the Netherlands.

A9-052547

The 19 year-old victim responded to a craigslist ad for a 2001 Honda motorcycle. The seller was in the United Kingdom, but said the motorcycle was at a business in Denver. The seller had the buyer wire $2,850 to a third party in London. Obviously, no Honda.

A9-052576

A 30 year old man was informed via email that if he would only wire the sender $300, the victim would in turn receive $50,000 for his trouble. Walmart’s fee for the $300 wire was an added $22.92.

A9-053932

A 27 year-old victim won the eBay auction of a 2004 GMC Envoy that was supposedly in Rock Rapids, Iowa. Curiously, she was required to wire $3,000 to London in order to consummate the transaction. No vehicle exists, and the seller has mysteriously disappeared from eBay and from the email address he employed.

A9-057403

A 27 year-old Lincoln woman won the Nigerian Lottery! She was notified of her good fortune via email on her Blackberry. All she needed to do to claim her prize was to send four separate wires from two separate Moneygram locations to Mr. Sunday Olasunkanmi in Sagamu, Nigeria. The total take was $2,635.

Let’s review:

1. You haven’t won any lotteries for which you bought no tickets. If you actually did win a lottery, they wouldn’t be contacting you by email, and you wouldn’t be required to send money to claim your prize.
2. You never pay for anything in advance, upon the expectation that it will actually be delivered, unless you can independently confirm its existence and deliverability--except a college education, in which case you have no other choice.
3. No legitimate buyer sends you a check for more than the purchase price and asks you to wire the excess to them, much less to a third party in another country.
4. Anyone can cut and paste the logo from PayPal or eBay and make that email you receive look legitimate, if you don’t have your…detector activated.

Fortunately, in several of the 67 cases, victims sensed something wasn’t right, and didn’t fall for the scam. There were some close calls, though. Caveat emptor.

And so it begins…

From the inbox, earlier this week:

“The 4th of July is nearly two weeks away and it is starting in my neighborhood already. Fireworks. Illegal fireworks. We don't want to tie up the phone lines to the police department every time we hear an m-80, a cherry bomb or bottle rockets going off but we also don't believe we should have to be subject to the harassment of the law breakers for simply reminding them that fireworks are illegal in our city. What do we do?

I have tremendous respect for our police officers and I know they are very busy but there is a complete lack of respect for our officers when people openly light fireworks they know are illegal. In fact there is a police officer who lives on the block to our South where fireworks routinely go off. I'm not trying to get the officer in trouble. I am merely showing the complete disregard some of our citizens have for adherence to this particular ordinance.

There is apparently a belief that even if caught there is no significant consequence to breaking this law. I hope that something can be done this year to change that perception.”

My reply:

“Illegal fireworks are an unbearable problem for us, because such a large percentage of the otherwise-law-abiding public chooses to ignore the law by either setting off illegal fireworks or allowing their children to do so. We have tried various approaches in recent years with scant success. You can read about our issues, attempts, and results on my personal blog. These three posts from 2007 and 2008 deal with the issue:

Let the games begin
Will it work?
Did it work?

We haven't given up, it's just impossible for us to effectively reverse this
trend without a lot more help than we are receiving from people who ought to know better--like your neighbors.”

Research needs

One of the sessions I attended after I presented my paper at the National Institute of Justice annual conference last week was titled The View from the Street: Police Leaders’ Perspectives on Research and Policy Issues Facing Law Enforcement. It was well attended, by researchers and academicians. Several police chiefs served on this panel and shared their thoughts: John Batiste from the Washington State Patrol, Ron Serpas from the Nashville PD, Nola Joyce the Chief Administrative Officer from the Philadelphia PD, Russell Laine from the Alquonquin (IL) PD, Mark Marshall from the Smithfield (VA) PD, Kathy Perez from the Bowie (MD) PD.

Here’s the topics that were on the minds of my colleagues: terrorism, active shooters, the impact of the economy on crime, emerging threats from heavily-armed criminals, hate crimes, leadership, personnel management, ethics, police training & education, technology, intelligence sharing. Our professional association, the International Association of Chief’s of Police, has adopted a National Law Enforcement Research Agenda to represent the interests and needs of police chiefs concerning research.

Of all the issues discussed by the panel, police human resources and technology seemed to dominate. Everyone is concerned about the development, implementation, coordination and integration of technology, particularly information technology. Everyone is also concerned about human capital, the recruitment, selection, training, and career cycles of police officers. There are a lot of smart people serving as police chiefs in cities large and small, they are very interested in using quality research to engage in evidence-based policing. This panel was representative of the diversity in U.S. policing, and the commonality of the issues we face.

Two more guns in Arizona

The Phoenix Police Department has recovered two more guns stolen in the 2007 burglary of Scheel’s All Sports in Lincoln. A Springfield Armory .45 caliber pistol and a Glock 10mm pistol were seized during the service of a search warrant for drugs in Glendale. This brings the total number of guns recovered to 46, while the number still out there moves to 33.

Reporter’s questions

Last Friday, I spoke with a group of journalism students from the University of Nebraska. This class always comes down to headquarters to learn a little bit about covering the police beat. I could tell that the students were a little intrigued that I publish a personal blog, and I got a couple follow-up questions via email on Sunday. They are a little hard for me to answer, because they are actually directed more towards you, the readers of the Chief’s Corner:

“What do you think or hope having a blog does for the residents of Lincoln who read it and/or know that you have one?

How do you think it impacts how they see the police department or just you? What kind of impression do you think it gives?”

Slow roll?

I received the following email Saturday night:

“I work at Ameritas at 5900 O and we happened to hear a collision at Cotner
and O St (approx 11 am on Friday). We were not witnesses, but saw the
accident from our building immediately after the collision.

I immediately notified our switchboard operator to contact 911 (she was
the second citizen to report the accident).

I was concerned and disappointed that it took more than 10 minutes before
the first police response and there was NO fire or ambulance response. Of
course, it was some distance from where we were so I don't know if there
were injuries, but it did appear that at least one person was pinned in
their vehicle.

I do not know the policy for response, but since the intersection is a
busy one, considering the time of day and the fact there were multiple
cars involved, I'm curious as to why this did not get more (and faster)
attention by fire/police. And, the fact that two fire stations (Cotner
and A and Cotner and VIne are so close).”

I hate to let people down. I checked the dispatch record, and to me it looks like our response time was within acceptable norms. So here is the response I sent:

“Fire apparatus and ambulances are dispatched to traffic crashes only when injury is involved. In this crash, fortunately, no one was injured. Usually there are several first-hand reports from the scene (it’s common to get cell phone calls from the people actually involved), but when there is doubt, it has been my experience that the 911 Center always errs on the side of caution, by dispatching a full medical response. I assume that the information was clearly reported from the scene that no one was injured, and that is why the Fire Department was not dispatched.

As to the police response, the officer who was assigned arrived in 13 minutes. I do not know where she responded from, but I note that about half the patrol force was engaged in other incidents at the time of this crash. She works on the Southeast Team, which encompasses the entire City to the south and east of 27th and O Streets. We do not respond to traffic crashes with lights and sirens, in order to avoid creating a greater risk by our emergency response than the risk that exists at the crash scene.

I think a 13 minute response time to a non-injury traffic crash is pretty good in any city of a quarter million. Keep in mind that your police force is the smallest per capita in the State. To give you some perspective, if we were the same size per capita as Omaha, Lincoln would have 440 officers rather than our 317. If we were the same size per capita as Grand Island, we would have 423 officers--105 more than the 317 Lincoln police officers authorized in our budget. Among all the cities in Nebraska and the surrounding states, we rank as the 180th smallest of 194—right in between Thornton, CO and Marion, IA.

Thanks for the feedback. We will try to do the best we can with the resources the citizens of Lincoln provide. I am sorry we failed to live up to your expectations.”

NIJ conference

The National Institute of Justice is the research arm of the United States Department of Justice. I was at their annual conference earlier this week, at their expense, to participate as a panelist during a presentation focusing on the consequences of sex offender residency restriction laws. This is a topic that has appeared in the Chief’s Corner on several previous occasions. This is another example of the use of GIS to inform public policy.

The conference is attended mainly by academicians, with a few practitioners like me interspersed here and there. My specific role on the panel was to serve as a discussant—sort of a friendly critic, as my colleague and former Charlotte police chief Darrel Stephens put it. Earlier this year, I authored a paper for an academic journal, Crime and Justice Policy Review. The focus of my paper was how research in this field could more effectively influence public policy, and this was the same theme as my panel presentation.

In a nutshell, the research shows that residency restrictions don’t impact reoffending and that these laws have the side effect of destabilizing offenders; making it more difficult for them to find employment, obtain housing, preserve family relationships, and participate in aftercare or treatment. With a restriction that seriously reduces housing availability, there is a greater likelihood multiple offenders will live together or in very close proximity to one another, will lie about their place of residence, or will just drop off the radar altogether by not reporting their address changes as required by law. These unintended consequences, in my opinion, actually increase the risk of reoffending, rather than decreasing it.

My critique is centered on the fact that we have not done a good job in translating the research into practice. Despite this knowledge, city councils and state legislatures have scrambled to enact increasingly strict laws that prohibit sex offenders from living near schools, child care centers, parks, even bus stops.

This is not the case, however, in Lincoln or in Nebraska, where reason ruled in the City Council and the Legislature. Rather than the 2000 ft. restrictions common around the country, Lincoln (and later Nebraska) adopted a restriction of 500 ft. from schools. I believe this is the least restrictive law of the 30+ States that have adopted such statutes. The comparative impact is displayed in a very short PowerPoint—five slides:

Since they aren’t narrated, I will explain:

Slide one: The City of Lincoln

Slide two: A buffer of 2000 ft. from schools

Slide three: A buffer is added of 2000 ft. from parks. The blue areas would all be off limits if Lincoln had adopted the same law as Iowa. The areas that remain all have a story: many of these are Lincoln’s most exclusive residential areas. Others are places such as industrial tracts, Holmes Lake, and the Lincoln Municipal Airport.

Slide four: Zoomed-in view of one of those donut holes. How long does it take you to identify the type of place this is?

Slide five: The results of the law actually passed, a 500 ft. excluded zone around schools for high-risk (level 3) registered sex offenders whose victims were under the age of 19. As you can see, there is a lot of land available for sex offenders to lawfully reside—which I believe strikes a good balance by preventing some of those unitended consequences, such as more offenders disapparing and failing to report their address changes.