School Principal Sues Over Alledged Shoplifting www.privateofficer.com

Kansas City, Mo. Nov. 5, 2007
Kansas City elementary school principal Yvette Hayes has sued, alleging the city of Independence and the JCPenney Corp. are legally responsible for the July 13 incident in which she – six months pregnant at the time – was forced to lie face down during a police stop.Hayes’ attorney, Philip A. Klawuhn, filed the lawsuit Monday in Jackson County Circuit Court. Hayes claims false arrest, false imprisonment and negligence against by JCPenney security officer Gary D. Magers. Magers’ call to Independence police from the store at 17610 E. 39th St. prompted Independence police officers to falsely arrest, imprison and act with negligence against Hayes, the suit also claims.The city is also accused of assault and battery against Hayes by police officers and negligent infliction of emotional distress to Hayes’ 4-year-old daughter, Candace. The city, Magers and JCPenney face a loss of consortium claim filed by Hayes’ husband, Casey Hayes.Hayes seeks damages from Magers and JCPenney for medical expenses, loss of income, pain and suffering, legal fees and other punitive damages on each count. Hayes seeks similar damages from the city on some of the remaining six counts. Hayes also filed a separate discrimination complaint with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights alleging Magers and the city of Independence discriminatorily subjected her to the stop based on her race and color.Hayes was pulled over July 13 by Independence police officers on Interstate 70 after Magers called police to report a green Jeep Cherokee like Hayes’ was suspected in several car thefts and break-ins on JCPenney’s parking lot. After the stop, Hayes, who had Candace and another small child in the Jeep with her, was ordered to throw her keys to the pavement and forced to lie face down on the shoulder of I-70.Videotapes of the incident, captured by police in-dash cameras, have been released and received nationwide attention recently.In a statement released Friday, Independence officials denied wrongdoing and addressed the stance of the Police Department’s final investigation that showed compassion for Hayes’ condition but no wrongdoing by the officers.”The Independence Police Department is truly sorry about the involvement of Mrs. Hayes and her children in the response to an call for service received around 10:00 p.m. on July 13th, 2007,” the statement read. “That regret was expressed repeatedly by police officers on the scene at that time, and subsequently by Police Chief Fred Mills. We are thankful that neither Mrs. Hayes nor her children were injured.”Offcials with JC Penney, who deferred questions about the suit to their corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas also expressed empathy for Hayes’ encounter, but denied wrongdoing.Hayes’ attorney, Klawuhn, says his client’s assertion of the charges would be proven in court.”Yvette appreciates the support she is receiving,” Klawuhn said. “She will pursue this so this sort of thing never happens again to anyone, let alone a pregnant woman.”
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Police Beat Expands Into Cyberspace www.privateofficer.com

ARLINGTON, Va. Nov. 4 2007 – Raise your hand if you’ve heard of “Second Life,” police Lt. Charles Cohen asks a room of about 75 law enforcement officers from around the country. “Second Life,” a sprawling online universe, has had technology circles abuzz for a while. But here, it might as well be a watch repair shop. Only a few hands go up. Cohen has some explaining to do.
And so begins another session in the traveling classroom of this fast-talking Indiana state trooper at the forefront of the idea that cops need to be better at incorporating the online world into their patrols.
Many police departments have computer crews that perform skillful forensic analysis on hard drives and specialize in nailing online predators. Cohen’s lectures are not for them.
Instead he’s trying to reach everyone else in law enforcement: beat cops, homicide detectives and other investigators who might otherwise think monitoring the Internet is not their responsibility.
More and more, such boundaries don’t make sense. Whether it’s on MySpace, Facebook, “Second Life” or other Web flavors of the moment, criminals and victims — especially young ones — are leaving clues in plain sight online, even for offline crimes. Things people once wrote in private diaries now cascade through Web sites that stimulate free expression — and are open to anyone who comes looking.
In one recent example, a detective in Newark, N.J., tracked the alleged killers of three college students by mining MySpace pages maintained by the suspects and their friends. In another, pictures and prose posted online by the killer of Taylor Behl, a 17-year-old Virginia college freshman, connected him to the victim and ended up revealing where her body was stashed.
And in an Indiana case in which Cohen helped, a young man wrote on his MySpace page: “I just killed two cops.” (One officer survived the shooting.)
“People under 25 tend to think about what is public versus private information differently from the rest of us, and that is great for law enforcement investigators,” Cohen, 37, tells his audience in Arlington, at a conference of the National White Collar Crime Center. Later, he adds in an interview, “Your computer usage is in some ways a window into your soul.”
But the anonymity and the sheer scope of the Internet also can make it easier for criminals to cover their tracks. And today’s hot online hangout is tomorrow’s dead zone. The trick for cops is to figure out how to keep up — a proactive step that doesn’t come easy, given that most police departments have to concentrate their limited resources on reacting to crimes.
Les Lauziere, a computer crimes investigator for the Virginia Attorney General who was part of the Behl case, suggests that police need to incorporate Internet analysis into just about every investigation. In the coming years, he says, asking whether a police department has a distinct cybercrime unit will be like asking if there’s a telephone squad.
Steven DeBrota, a federal prosecutor in Indiana, argues that too much separation between cyber-specialists and other cops can be dangerous.
Typically, he says, detectives will transfer a suspect’s computer to forensic examiners who might need months to produce a full report on the contents, especially with hard drives ballooning to monumental sizes. In that time, DeBrota fears, the opportunity to find a suspect’s associates or additional victims may be lost.
So DeBrota has pushed an alternative approach in Indiana. Now computer specialists get out of their labs and assist detectives on sweeps and arrests. At the same time, front-line cops have been trained to do some of the basics. They can take hard drives out of computers, attach “write-blocking” clips that prevent data from being altered, and then do initial, targeted searches for evidence — Google searches typed, videos watched — that might be valuable in interrogations.
For all the logic of this approach, it is far from common. At best, several departments have launched profiles on social-networking sites like MySpace, so people can report tips or informally chat with cops.
“Not everyone watches the news at night. Not everyone reads the paper. Not everyone even reads news online. But it seems like everyone is on MySpace,” says Stephanie Slater, a police spokeswoman in Boynton Beach, Fla. Her department’s MySpace page gets more hits than its general Web site does.
Yet for all that MySpace reveals in its 200 million profiles, it’s just one of innumerable online avenues. Spending some time in Cohen’s class shows just how hard it is to track them all.
He suggests ways to hunt for clues not only on obvious social-networking zones like Facebook and MySpace but also the likes of Xanga, Bebo and Orkut. Given that people often don’t use their real names online, cops might have to ask friends of suspects and victims not only where they hung out in the physical world, but also which Web sites they frequented.
The answers likely go beyond social-networking sites. People jabber in “Second Life” or through chat programs in online games like “Runescape” or “World of Warcraft.” Sometimes they don’t say much but show a lot on real-time Web video sites like Stickam.
Each of those sites has different procedures required of law enforcement agents who want to match anonymous user names with the Internet Protocol address behind them. Then more work is needed to ask an Internet service provider to cough up the IP address holder’s real name and address, assuming it wasn’t a cybercafe or library.
Investigators say most sites are extremely cooperative with subpoenas, warrants and other requests for help. In particular, MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has a former federal prosecutor as its head of security and maintains valuable logs on site activity for at least 90 days. Some sites maintain such logs for much less time, if at all.
To listen to Cohen is to walk through dark corners of the Internet. There are gang members boasting on MySpace, killers revealing their obsessions on LiveJournal, teenagers sharing drug-making tips on YouTube, prostitutes hawking themselves on Craigslist, child pornography flourishing on Internet Relay Chat, a specialists’ slice of the Internet separate from the Web.
Yet Cohen, in a cop’s matter-of-fact manner, is measured in his approach.
“Social networks are not a bad thing. It’s a great thing,” he says. “It’s like any community, communities we all live in. There are going to be criminals in it.”
Cohen began his career with the Indiana State Police like any other trooper, writing speeding tickets and responding to accidents. Eventually he moved into complex fraud and corruption cases, and found that increasingly his work had an online component. But hardly anyone was available to coach him. So he mainly taught himself, with help from tech blogs and news stories.
Now he spends most of his vacation time and a few of his state police hours relaying what he’s learned to local, state and federal agencies. At the recent three-day conference of the National White Collar Crime Center, Cohen’s presentation was in such demand that it was the only one offered twice.
At one session, Cohen’s audience nods along as he shows how officers can plumb public pages of social-networking sites to get to know people’s likes, dislikes, friends and hobbies before questioning them in an investigation.
But his pupils have trouble accepting the particulars of “Second Life,” where people chat, shop, trade stuff and have sex — and in Cohen’s estimation, launder money occasionally — through animated characters known as avatars.
“Is this for people who don’t want social contact?” one investigator asks.
Cohen shakes his head as if to say it’s not that simple.
“This,” he says, “is our new world.”

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Security Officer Busted For Rape Attempt www.privateofficer.com

Security Officer Busted For Rape Attempt by; Rick McCann www.privateofficer.com

KANSAS CITY, Mo. Nov. 5 2007– A woman was allegedly attacked and forced to beg for her life in her home by someone she knew, police said.
KCTV5′s Ty Wilson reported that police said the two definitely knew each other. The alleged attacker is a security guard in a posh downtown condominium building where the victim lives.
The security guard was arrested and booked into the Kansas City, Mo., police headquarters building and is accused of attempted rape, police said.
On Sunday, some residents, who call The View, a pricey upscale downtown condo building, home, said they are in shock.

KCMO police said Mark Finley, 21, a security guard at The View, tried to rape a 44-year-old woman who lives there.
Residents called the act “despicable,” and said they want answers from the building’s management.
Police said the victim woke up at about 3 a.m. on Sunday to find Finley on top of her.
According to police the report, Finley put a box cutter-type knife to her neck and tried to force himself on top of her.
Police said Finley eventually grabbed the knife, a rung of building keys, his cell phone and a backpack and left.
Police said when they got to The View, Finley came out of the building with his hands up in the air and said, “I give up.” He also told them he needed a lawyer, police said.
Finley’s bond is $200,000 cash only, authorities said.

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Teacher Shot On Campus, School Locked Down www.privateofficer.com

High School Teacher Shot, Swat Swarming Area www.privateofficer.com

MIAMI FLA. Nov. 6, 2007
A teacher was shot Tuesday outside at a Miami-area high school during an apparent robbery, but was expected to survive, a school district spokesman said.
The suspected shooter had not been captured, and at least a dozen officers in SWAT gear were staking out an apartment complex near the school. Police had sealed off all the complex’s exits and a police helicopter was hovering above. Carol City elementary, middle and senior high schools were on lockdown, said Quintin Taylor, a spokesman for Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
No students inside the school have been injured,” he said. The male teacher was shot in the lower body, said Taylor. The hospital where he was being treated, Jackson Memorial Hospital, did not release his condition. The teacher had been taking a cigarette break across the street from the school during lunch when he was confronted by another man who tried to rob him, Taylor said. A 911 call reported the shooting before noon at Miami Carol City Senior High School, Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta said.

Four Students Kidnapped During Robbery www.privateofficer.com

Four College Students Kidnapped During Robbery www.privateofficer.com

Nov. 6, 2007

Four University of Central Florida students locked in a bedroom overnight instant messaged a friend on their laptop computer that a band of armed robbers was raiding their apartment, deputies said today.When deputies arrived at the Jefferson Village apartment complex, off Orpington Street and just south of UCF, they had to kick in the front door to get inside the locked apartment, the report shows. Deputies then searched the residence and found the four women locked inside one of the bedrooms.
Danielle Levine, 19, told deputies that sometime around midnight, she and her roommates were on their way out of their third-floor apartment when an unknown male tried to engage her in conversation. Levine ignored then man and returned inside the apartment with her roommates.Less than 10 minutes later, the students heard several knocks at the front door. Levine opened the door and the three suspects barged inside the apartment. The women, including Alyssa Gilluly, Christine Metzger and Elizabeth Kline — all 19 years old — were forced into the kitchen at gunpoint and then ordered into one of the bedrooms.While the victims were locked inside their bedroom, the men stole their cell phones, laptop computers and flat-screen television sets. One of the victims had a laptop in the bedroom and used it to instant message a friend to call police.A driver at the Pita Pit restaurant on Collegiate Way told deputies that three men matching the victims’ description tried breaking into his car earlier that evening. Jefferson Village security guard Ashlee Anderson also said he noticed the men walking in the apartment complex.

City Mayor Arrested On Sex Charges www.privateofficer.com

MASCOTTE Fla. Nov. 6 2007- Allegations against Mayor Jeff Krull, who was arrested on Monday night on sex charges, came to light during an investigation of a gun theft from Krull’s house, police Chief Steve Allen said this morning.Krull is accused of molesting two girls and one boy, ranging in age from 13 to 16, according to Allen. The charges relate to touching and rubbing of children who visited his home, according to Allen.Krull was close to many city employees including Allen.
I was very sad and disappointed,” Allen, who arrested Krull before a City Council meeting, said at a news conference at the police department. “It was the saddest day of my job.” He said he had no choice but to arrest Krull, and that if he could prevent one child from being molested it was worth it.Police in the southwest Lake County city arrested Krull on eve of today’s city elections and Krull’s bid for a second term as mayor.
Krull, 66, was charged with six counts of lewd and lascivious molestation and one count of showing lewd and lascivious material to a minor. Allen would not say who reported the allegations against Krull except that it was not the victims or their parents. A computer taken from Krull’s home will be searched for child pornography, Allen added.
Meanwhile, Krull was taken to South Lake Hospital on Monday night with chest pain.Krull’s longtime girlfriend and Mascotte council member-elect Barbara Tillman said she and Krull drove to the city building on Sunset Avenue just before 6:30 p.m. Monday. Tillman said Krull got out of the vehicle and spoke with Allen before the arrest. Officers then took Krull to the city police station. He was expected to be booked at the Lake County Jail after his release from the hospital.”I know Jeff would not do anything to hurt a child,” Tillman said.City Manager Marge Strausbaugh said she informed other City Council members about Krull’s arrest just before their meeting.Allen said the arrest occurred Monday night because the investigation had come together at that point.
He chose to arrest Krull in a public place because the mayor has weapons at his home and Allen didn’t want Krull to harm himself, police or the public.Krull is running for re-election today against Felix Ramirez, who is leaving City Council Seat 1 to challenge him for mayor. Tillman, who previously served on the council next to Krull, filed election papers to run for Seat 1 and is not challenged by any other candidates.Ramirez also is father-in-law to fellow council member Stephen Elmore, who will run for re-election to Seat 5 against Louise Thompson — one of Krull’s neighbors in a neighborhood off South Bay Lake Road.His biography on the city’s Web site also says he volunteered as a reading tutor and an assistant CPR instructor for the American Red Cross. He was a volunteer for the Boy Scouts of America and Habitat for Humanity. And he has four adult children and six grandchildren.Krull and Tillman have lived in Mascotte for about six years.They often have neighborhood children around their house, where Tillman said Monday they sometimes used the computer to download programs from the Internet. Publicly, Krull has been a colorful member of the City Council.He proudly wore a badge on his belt that identified him as the mayor.
He drove around the 4,000-resident community with a sign on his car that also identified him as mayor.

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Police, club security face shooters www.privateofficer.com

Police, Security Confront Shooters At Club www.privateofficer.com

Indianapolis IND. Nov. 6 2007

Police arrested three Indianapolis men Sunday after someone fired a gun outside a nightclub on the Far Westside.
Joseph Clark, 22, Dietrich T. Rhodes, 24, and Dashaun Bush, 28, were arrested after a confrontation at 1:20 a.m. Sunday outside Dirty Nellie’s, 2805 Franklin Road.
The men got into a fight in the parking lot and Bush fired at least two shots from a handgun, according to a police report.
Officer Kerry Morris, who was off-duty working security, stopped the three men as they were trying to leave the parking lot in a Chevrolet Suburban with the headlights off. Maurice Gilespie, a security guard, assisted as Morris ordered the three men out of the vehicle and onto the ground.
Officers Richard Kenny, Douglas Simmons and Barbara Johnson arrived to assist Morris.
Police seized three handguns, a 9-mm Glock, a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson and a .38-caliber Interarms, according to the report. Officers also allegedly found crack cocaine in Rhodes’ baseball hat.
Clark faces initial charges of dealing and possessing cocaine, criminal recklessness and public intoxication.
Rhodes faces initial charges of dealing and possessing cocaine, carrying a firearm without license and public intoxication.
Bush faces initial charges of carrying a handgun without a license and public intoxication.

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Security Guard Arrested For Burglaries www.privateofficer.com

Security Guard Arrested For Burglaries http://www.privateofficer.com

Gresham Ore.
November 05, 2007 17:18PM
Gresham Police arrested an officer with the private Wackenhut security company on Saturday night, charging him with burglarizing the offices he was employed to protect.
Detectives charged Matthew Maedche, 20, of Portland, with 16 counts of second-degree burglary and three counts of attempted second-degree burglary
Police detectives had set up surveillance at the Adventist Health Medical Plaza, 831 NW Council Dr., in Gresham, after a string of burglaries that began Sept. 13.
Gresham Police Detective Tony Cobb suspected somebody with access to the buildings was involved because in many of the burglaries, only interior doors were tampered with.
Detectives searched Maedche’s home and said they recovered several items that had been taken.
Maedche is being held at the county jail pending a bond hearing.

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