FLE

The new guard

A historic change is underway within the ranks of California's park rangers, a shift that signals a new era for the stewards of the state's 1.5 million acres of forests, deserts and seashores. During a recent 20-month period, nearly 100 of the state's 50 rangers and lifeguards left the service. Some retired as a normal matter of course, and others hung up their Stetsons early, thanks to an extra-generous incentive package adopted by state lawmakers last year. On the way out are '70s-era rangers who entered the park system at the height of the environmental movement with their shoulder-length hair, mutton chops and packing World War II-era six-shooters. Replacing them are a new generation of rangers — highly trained cadets donning military-style buzz cuts, Kevlar vests and assault rifles — deployed with an explicit directive and the requisite training to combat the parks' growing crime problems. The transition is, in part, a reaction to changing times. Rangers who once confronted drunk drivers, boisterous teens and petty thieves now face armed pot growers, street gangs and methamphetamine addicts. The job is increasingly a balancing act as rangers try to remain educators and naturalists while enforcing the law. Gary Watts and Danny Duarte are two rangers trying to find that balance....

Miami Police Take New Tack Against Terror

Miami police announced Monday they will stage random shows of force at hotels, banks and other public places to keep terrorists guessing and remind people to be vigilant. Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats. "This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It's letting the terrorists know we are out there," Fernandez said. The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security. Police Chief John Timoney said there was no specific, credible threat of an imminent terror attack in Miami. But he said the city has repeatedly been mentioned in intelligence reports as a potential target. Both uniformed and plainclothes police will ride buses and trains, while others will conduct longer-term surveillance operations. "People are definitely going to notice it," Fernandez said. "We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don't want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears."....

CDC Proposal Would Help U.S. Track Travelers

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a phone-book-thick proposed rule yesterday that would give the federal government new powers to track the comings and goings of individual travelers and expand the circumstances under which passengers exposed to a serious communicable disease could be isolated or quarantined. The proposed changes are the latest in a series of preparatory moves aimed at solidifying federal health officials' legal authority to take actions aimed at slowing the spread of emerging contagious diseases, such as pandemic flu. The new provisions -- the costs of which would fall mostly on the travel industry -- call for greater scrutiny of passengers for signs of illness and greater efforts by airlines and others to obtain personal contact information from travelers. They also broaden the list of symptoms that would make people subject to quarantine. Although the rules strengthen federal authority to isolate passengers suspected of being infected, they also spell out in unprecedented detail key legal rights, including appeals processes, for citizens. The agency will accept public comment for 60 days before issuing a final regulation. Officials said they are confident that the vast majority of Americans will support the changes so the government could better protect them from a major outbreak -- whether naturally occurring or from a bioterrorism attack. He added that although travelers would be asked to provide more personal information -- including phone numbers and e-mail addresses -- the goal is simply to be able to contact people if it becomes apparent they sat near an infected person while traveling. "There are some very rigorous standards of privacy with which this information will be treated," Cetron said....

Crooks covet justice databases

Adrian Minnis ran a heroin distribution ring that was violent and tightly knit, making it difficult for informers to penetrate it, federal authorities say. The gang also had a secret weapon: It cultivated a police officer to dig into a law enforcement database to figure out which of its customers might be undercover informers, according to an indictment filed against Minnis and 20 other alleged ring members. There is no indication the officer actually identified an informer, or that his prying into the REJIS database led to anyone being hurt. Yet the accusation against St. Louis police Officer Antoine Gordon, who has since resigned, suggests that crime rings can target REJIS or other databases to insulate themselves against investigations. "A police officer's participation in a drug conspiracy heightens the risk to civilians and other law enforcement officers," then-U.S. Attorney Jim Martin said at the time of Gordon's indictment in February. "Such conduct is inexcusable." The widely used REJIS system, formally known as the Regional Justice Information Service, was launched in the mid-1970s for sharing information between St. Louis and St. Louis County. It evolved to include some 200 organizations, in Missouri and Illinois. Most are police departments, but others include prosecutors, courts and correctional agencies....

Gitmo detainees and the courts

The self-styled "world's greatest deliberative body," the U.S. Senate, voted 84 to 14 on Nov. 15 on an "improved" Sen. Lindsey Graham amendment to the Defense Department authorization bill that prevents prisoners at Guantanamo from filing habeas corpus petitions to our federal courts regarding their conditions of confinement. This includes complaints of abuses and alleged torture from "enhanced" interrogations. In its present form, this Graham amendment was co-sponsored by Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, and Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican. Yet, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul et al v. Bush (2004) that Guantanamo detainees do have due process rights to challenge, under habeas corpus, the legality of their imprisonment. That decision led to lawyers going to Guantanamo Bay, telling us what's going on and then filing habeas corpus petitions in federal district courts in Washington. The Graham-Levin-Kyl amendment cuts off that judicial route except in a very limited form that does not include the actual conditions under which the prisoners are being held. On Nov. 10, the Senate had passed the original Graham amendment, which went much further to undercut the 2004 Supreme Court ruling. That amendment stripped all federal courts, including the Supreme Court itself, from considering habeas corpus petitions or any other "aspect of the detention" of these detainees, except in the very narrow question of whether the Defense Department's status review boards there were following their own rules. But "enhanced" interrogation techniques would continue. And by now, the world is all well aware of how "enhanced" these techniques can be. There was a strong backlash to the original Graham amendment from civil-liberties and human-rights organizations, and conservative libertarians. The objectors pointed out that this suspension of habeas corpus -- "the Great Writ" that has roots in the 13th-century Magna Carta -- had been passed after only an hour's debate, and without any previous committee hearings. Mr. Graham had swiftly persuaded a majority of his colleagues to give habeas corpus much less consideration than a funding bill for highways....

FBI peers criticize discipline of agent

FBI agent Richard B. Marx spent a year atop 1.8 million tons of debris from the World Trade Center towers, searching for September 11 evidence at the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, N.Y. For his devotion to the grungy job, he earned the gratitude of victims' families, the respect of his peers, a nomination as the federal employee of the year -- and a 10-day suspension and letter of reprimand from his superiors. The reprimand bars him from a major part of his job -- collecting evidence for use in court. The FBI suspended Mr. Marx after the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General said he "lacked candor" in answering questions during an investigation into whether agents took evidence from the Fresh Kills site as souvenirs. Evidence that the inspector general thought was missing, which led to the inquiry, turned out to have been sent to museums nationwide and to FBI headquarters in Washington, all on orders of Congress. The disciplining of Mr. Marx has outraged many rank-and-file agents, and several current and former high-ranking FBI officials have demanded a criminal investigation into what they say was an "unprofessional and unethical" Justice Department investigation....

Proposition H: Mythology Instead of Criminology

San Francisco voters recently enacted Proposition H which confiscates all handguns and bans purchasing of all guns. Unfortunately this is based on the unfounded belief that the more guns in an area the more violence will occur. If that were true, the United States, with 280 million guns today, should have a far higher murder rate than after WWII when we had only 48 million guns. Instead, the murder rate is the same. During the intervening decades, murder rates varied dramatically—but not because of rising gun ownership. In the last 30 years the number of guns owned by civilians more than doubled, yet murder declined by one third. Accepting the mythology that guns cause murder, areas with high violence rates ban guns. But violence stems from basic social factors, not the mere availability of one among the innumerable deadly instruments in the world. In a study published last December, the National Academy of Sciences, having reviewed 43 government publications, 253 journal articles, 99 books, and its own research, could not identify even one example of gun control that reduced murder or violent crime. Drastically increasing homicide led Washington, D.C., to ban handguns in the 1970s. So useless was this that D.C. soon had (and continues to have) some of the nation’s highest murder rates. Anti-gun advocacy is built on decades of erroneous claims that the United States, with the world's highest gun ownership rate (true), has the highest murder rate (false). Russia’s recently disclosed murder rates since 1965 have consistently exceeded U.S. rates despite Russia’ ban of handguns and strict control of long guns. Since the 1990s Russian murder rates have remained almost four times greater than American. Anti-gun advocates used to compare the United States to England, Canada and Australia, nations specially selected because they once combined low violence rates with severe gun controls. But gun controls and initially low violence rates did not prevent their violent crime rates from steadily outpacing ours in recent decades. Although these nations banned and confiscated hundreds of thousands of guns in the 1990s, today their violence rates are among the highest in the world—more than twice ours....

Girls, Get Your Guns

When the authorities in New Orleans systematically confiscated lawfully owned firearms, many commentators protested against leaving residents defenseless. They echoed Dave Kopel, Research Director of the Independence Institute, who declared in Reason Magazine: "To the extent that any homes or businesses were saved, the saviors were the many good citizens of New Orleans who defended their families, homes, and businesses with their own firearms." Now those same good citizens were deprived of self-protection. New Orleans may be one reason that Gallup's annual Crime Poll, released in mid-October, revealed that people's confidence in their local police to protect them from violent crime fell from 61percent last year to 53 percent this year, which is a 10-year low. Whatever the cause, a grassroots movement toward self-protection is quietly growing; in short, people are arming themselves. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, some 60.4 million firearm transactions were approved between 1994 and 2004. According to the National Rifle Association, a gun advocacy group: "The number of NICS checks for firearm purchases or permits increased 3.2 percent between 2003-2004." The personal trend is paralleled by a political one. The number of "Right-to-Carry" States has risen from 10 in 1987 to 38 currently. Generally speaking, the term 'right-to-carry' refers to the right of responsible people to carry a concealed weapon. Packing.org provides a good overview of the differences between states. Pro-gun women have gradually become more prominent in both the personal and public arenas, though the evidence is largely anecdotal. Statistics on this trend are difficult to locate and confusing; they have become a source of controversy in-and-of themselves, as gun control advocates argue that claims of female gun ownership are often inflated. Organizations dedicated to female gun ownership are spreading from well-established organizations like Second Amendment Sisters and Women and Guns to relatively new ones like Mother's Arms, which urges mothers to protect their children with armed force if necessary....