CrimProf Blog

Judge Prohibits Blackberry Use by Jurors

There will be no Twittering in the courtroom.

As jury selection in the blockbuster trial of famed philanthropist Brooke Astor's son opened Monday, a Manhattan judge told 200 potential jurors to put away their BlackBerrys.

"I understand there is a temptation to review [news] stories," Supreme Court Justice Kirke Bartley said as he ordered panel members to stay away from their computers. "You are not to conduct research...particularly on the Internet."

"Blogging, BlackBerrys, whatever," are prohibited, he said in the nearly 10-minute lecture.

 "There have been reports from all over about jurors Twittering and blogging," said Ken Warner, a lawyer for Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, who is charged with looting his mother's fortune.

Warner was referring to the popular instant social-networking Web site Twitter. With easy access to the Internet, jurors around the country are increasingly turning to the medium to satisfy their curiosity about a case they are sitting on - and that is resulting in costly mistrials.

Read full article here. [Brooks Holland] 

Napolitano backs security tech

Gov. Janet Napolitano — President-elect Barack Obama's pick to run the Homeland Security Department — has strongly advocated using advanced security technology as a law enforcement tool, drawing praise from police and raising concern among civil liberties groups that warn about privacy invasion.

As Arizona's Democratic governor since 2003, Napolitano has:

• Pushed state police to use cameras that scan license plates of moving cars to find vehicles that are stolen or linked to a criminal suspect.

• Promoted "face-identification" technology that could help surveillance cameras find wanted people by comparing someone's face with a photo database of suspects.

• Signed a 2007 bill making Arizona one of 12 states that collect and store DNA samples of people accused but not convicted of certain crimes, including murder, burglary, sexual assault and prostitution.

• Proposed an optional state ID for legal citizens only that features a radio-frequency chip to allow authorities to read the card. State lawmakers blocked the effort this year.

"She sees technology as the panacea of all our law enforcement problems and immigration issues," said Alessandra Soler Meetze, head of Arizona's American Civil Liberties Union chapter. "It's like she's embracing these technologies without taking the time to appreciate the privacy implications."

Arizona Department of Public Safety spokesman Harold Sanders said the state's 25 license plate scanners are "tremendously helpful" because they check for stolen cars by instantly comparing a license plate with a national crime database. The system has read 1.6 million plates and led to 122 arrests since mid-2006, Sanders said.

If confirmed as Homeland Security secretary, Napolitano will have opportunities to deploy technology, including sensors along U.S. borders and airport body scanners that look for weapons on passengers by taking images underneath clothing.

"She's going to have a lot more money to play with" for technology, Meetze said. [Mark Godsey]

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Facial recognition software gives Pierce County help in tough cases

The forgery and theft case had victims, a witness and decent surveillance images from an ATM. What it didn't have were any leads on who committed the crime. But instead of being tossed aside, as happens in so many property crime cases, the ATM images were e-mailed to Steve Wilkins at the Pierce County Sheriff's Department.

Wilkins, the department's forensic services supervisor, picked the clearest image and used new facial recognition software to compare it with 16 years' worth of prisoner mug shots taken at the Pierce County Jail.

Within 15 minutes he'd found a match.

Detectives followed the new lead and eventually arrested Susan Bennett, who was charged in October with 11 crimes in connection with the ATM thefts. She pleaded guilty Dec. 11 and was sentenced to 9 1/2 years. Half of that will be served in prison, and half in community custody under Department of Corrections supervision.

The match was the first for the Sheriff's Department's six-month pilot project with Sagem Morpho Inc.'s new facial recognition software, MorphoFace.

The computer program runs with Hollywood-like ease and, with a click of a button, compares a suspect's image with a database of thousands of known Pierce County offenders.

"It's really cool," said Wilkins, who wants to buy the final version of the software when it hits the market in January and add it to his forensic tools.

Detectives and Tacoma-Pierce County Crime Stoppers officials are revisiting unsolved bank robberies, ATM scams and other crimes that have good surveillance images to see whether the program can crack the cases. [Mark Godsey]

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New Advancements in "Big Brother" Technology

From Inventhelp.com: Anyone who’s ever watched an episode of the thousand “CSI” or similar crime shows on CBS knows that, often times, crimes are solved with cell phones. Many criminals forget that data left on cell phones (e.g. - text messages, voicemails, call logs) can leave a trail a mile long. And investigators follow those trails using technology like the Cellebrite Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED).

The Cellebrite UFED (pictured) is a tool that can be used to extract vital data such as contacts, pictures, videos, text messages, call logs and electronic serial numbers from over 1600 different cell-phone models - or 95 percent of the phones on the market today.

The UFED actually works pretty simply (requiring no PC for field operation): an investigator simply connects a cell phone to the device (which is somewhat similar in appearance to a credit-card reader), identifies the handset type via the onscreen menu, inserts a USB flash drive and hits “start” to extract information. As noted by Cellebrite: “field extraction of data insures that a suspect’s phone can be examined before the individual has a chance to destroy or erase data.”

The device can be used in covert operations or in the forensic lab for review and verification using the reporting/analysis tool. Cellebrite also notes that, since they work with most of the major service providers worldwide - including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint – the majority of future cell phones models will be compatible with the device.  

In addition to the UFED, which is designed primarily for use in law enforcement, Cellebrite has introduced a new device for the mobile-phone industry. It should be mentioned that this device is intended for professional use – not to turn everyday Janes and Joes into amateur spies and P.I.s. The Cellebrite Universal Memory Exchanger (UME) 36Pro is a “phone memory transfer and backup solution”, which, like the UFED, transfers all forms of content - including pictures, videos, ringtones, MP3s and phonebook contacts - between a wide range of mobile phones, smart phones and PDAs. The UME-36Pro works as an intermediary between one cell phone (the “source” phone) and another (the “target” phone) – copying data from of the source and pasting it on the target (or a “complete phone brain transplant” as Cellebrite refers to it).

While devices like the ones currently being produced by Cellebrite for phone-service professionals and law-enforcement agents offer a number of benefits in those respective fields, they also indirectly point to the lack of security on most cell phones. If data can be extracted so quickly and easily via the UFED and UME, what’s to stop anyone from snagging private information from a cell phone at any time. Personal devices have proliferated to the point where they have become yet another fingerprint a person leaves behind – making them a useful component in identity theft.

The evolution of technology, while making us stronger in some ways, has also made us more vulnerable in others. Information on cell phones, much like information on computers, now needs to be safeguarded – not to avoid ace CBS crime squads but identity thieves on the lookout for any advantage they can get. These days, it’s not just big brother whose watching (or listening to) us – it could be anyone.

Full Article. . . [Bobbi Madonna]

LAPD blames faulty fingerprint analysis for erroneous accusations

The Los Angeles Police Department has acknowledged in a confidential report that people have been falsely implicated in crimes because the department's fingerprint experts wrongly identified them as suspects.

The 10-page internal report, obtained by The Times, highlighted two cases in which criminal defendants had charges against them dropped after problems with the fingerprint analysis were exposed. LAPD officials do not know how many other people might have been wrongly accused over the years as a result of poor fingerprint analysis and do not have the funds to pay for a comprehensive audit to find out, according to police records and interviews.

This is something of extraordinary concern," said Michael Judge, public defender for Los Angeles County. "Juries tend to accord the highest level of confidence to fingerprint evidence. This is the type of thing that easily could lead to innocent people being convicted."

The two cases were used by investigators to illustrate broader problems with shoddy work and poor oversight that have plagued the department's Latent Print Unit. Rhonda Sims-Lewis, chief of the LAPD's administrative and technical bureau, acknowledged the findings, but said changes to the unit's leadership and protocols were made last year after senior officials became aware of problems.

Internal discipline investigations led to the firing of one fingerprint analyst, who had been involved in both of the mishandled cases. Three other analysts received suspensions, Sims-Lewis said. In addition, two supervisors responsible for overseeing the unit were replaced, staff was bolstered and oversight tightened, she said.

"This is very, very serious," Sims-Lewis said. "We feel very compelled to take quick action when something like this arises. Guilty people can be set free and innocent people can be jailed." [Mark Godsey]

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Technology to track criminals will expand

As the economy tightens the reins on the rest of us, San Bernardino County is shortening its leash even more on a special few.

This is a group almost everyone is glad that someone is watching. It includes child molesters, wife beaters, drunken drivers and gang members.

The Board of Supervisors last week voted to expand the county's use of surveillance technology to track criminal offenders who are on probation or serving time on house arrest or weekends in jail.

Some of the technology includes global positioning satellite surveillance, home-based electronic monitoring and alcohol monitoring.

Primary users of the technology will be the county Probation Department and the Sheriff's Department.

And in these days when the taxpayers are taking a beating, this program is expected to pay its own way by requiring the offenders to pay for the equipment that tracks them. It's either agree to that or jail.

Taxpayers get another break out of the deal. When the offender is out and about and being monitored, the county isn't forced to provide him with room and board, which is a big savings. It also helps alleviate overcrowding in the jails - a chronic problem in San Bernardino County.

The county signed contracts with Total Court Services to provide alcohol monitoring and Sentinel Offender Services to provide GPS tracking and home-based monitoring.

GPS satellite tracking has been in use in the county for four years. But the alcohol monitoring is new and the Sheriff's Department is new to the home-based electronic monitoring.

Sgt. David Phelps said several hundred county prisoners work during the week and serve their time on weekends. This should enable them to complete their sentences sooner.

The offenders will be charged $15 a day on a sliding scale according to ability to pay. It will cost the county nothing, and the contractors will collect the money. [Mark Godsey]

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New fingerprint technology urged

When Stephanie Hartnett saw the man who had followed her 13-year-old daughter to her Roslindale home, she knew he was not the teenager he claimed to be in text messages and e-mails. But when Boston police responded to her call, it took them more than an hour to determine he was a level-three sex offender from Texas.

Now, Hartnett is trying to persuade city officials to purchase portable fingerprint scanners for police cruisers so police can quickly determine when a suspect is potentially dangerous. She will testify at a City Hall hearing today at the request of Councilor Rob Consalvo, who has proposed the purchases.

"If we had had the fingerprint scanner, in four minutes we would have known who he was," said Hartnett, a 38-year-old former Brockton paramedic.

Boston police plan to have a representative at today's hearing of the City Council public safety committee. Elaine Driscoll, spokeswoman for the Police Department, said officials were interested in considering the technology, but deploying it might require upgrading the department's wireless connections.

Hartnett said that last year her daughter met a man who claimed to be 17 on "what was supposedly a kid-friendly site."

In late September, the man boarded a bus in Austin and headed to Boston, where he waited for Hartnett's daughter at Hyde Park's Cleary Square. Hartnett said her daughter decided to continue home on the bus with the man following her, because she knew both her mother and father would be there.

From there, Hartnett described a scene similar to Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series, with her playing the role of NBC's Chris Hansen.

She called 911, and Boston police sent several cruisers to her home. After about two hours in which Hartnett said the man gave police multiple false names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, they were able to identify him as 28-year-old Aaron Johnston.  [Mark Godsey]

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D.C. Police Officers Carry iPhones, Panasonic Toughbooks

Tucked in with their Tasers and service weapons, some District of Columbia police officers are now sporting iPhones.

An initiative spearheaded by Vivek Kundra, chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, is putting Apple's smartphone -- along with Panasonic Toughbook laptops -- into the hands of public safety responders in a bid to make it easier for the police force to respond to incidents and process crime reports.

Police officers can use the iPhone to run traffic checks, track patrol routes and better respond to incidents, says Kundra.

"We are trying to create a cultural shift in public safety needs," he says. "The idea is to change from using radios and simple data devices to something that can facilitate real-time and two-way information exchange."

Kundra says he zeroed on iPhones after testing devices from Samsung, Nokia and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.

"Apple has done an amazing job with the user interface," says Kundra. "The browser application and application integration is so simple that adoption becomes a lot easier in terms of change management, which is what we are driving for."

The D.C. government has been testing the iPhones since Apple launched a beta program for the device among enterprises. About 75 iPhones are being used in the areas of public safety, education and healthcare.

Kundra says he realized consumer technologies have greater use for public deployment than expensive enterprise solutions because they are easy to use and are low cost.

"The first time I walked out in D.C. I realized I have more computing power in my hand than the average police officer or teacher," says Kundra. "Traditionally we have invested in massive multi-million dollar initiatives that have never lived up to their promise. But if you look at the consumer space, whether it is with the iPhone or Google Apps it works well and is less expensive." [Mark Godsey]

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Video from 11th Circuit Excessive Force Case Finds Way to YouTube

When Judge Beverly B. Martin this month dissented to a federal appeals decision in favor of a sheriff's deputy accused of civil rights violations for using a Taser on a handcuffed man, she urged that a video of the events in question be published with the opinion.

The suggestion of Martin, a district court judge sitting by designation with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, went unheeded. But James V. Cook, the Tallahassee, Fla., attorney representing plaintiff Jesse Daniel Buckley, apparently took Martin at her word.

On Monday Cook placed a copy of a video shot by a squad car camera on YouTube. The six-minute video can be found under the term "Buckley v. Haddock." Cook said Tuesday he is preparing a motion for an en banc rehearing.

The video shows how Florida sheriff's deputy Jonathan Rackard three times used a Taser on Buckley, who had been stopped for speeding and then refused to sign the traffic citation. Buckley is handcuffed, sobbing and sitting cross-legged on the ground. Each Taser jolt administered a five-second, 50,000-volt electric shock, according to the 11th Circuit decision.

In the majority opinion, Chief Judge J.L. Edmondson found that Rackard's actions were "not outside the range of reasonable conduct under the Fourth Amendment." Judge Joel F. Dubina concurred, although he wrote separately that Rackard's third use of the Taser against Buckley was unconstitutional.

Martin disagreed, writing "that the Fourth Amendment forbids an officer from discharging repeated bursts of electricity into an already handcuffed misdemeanant -- who is sitting still beside a rural road and unwilling to move -- simply to goad him into standing up."

Article from Law.com available here. [Brooks Holland]

Brain test could be next polygraph

A Seattle scientist who has developed an electronic brain test that he says could improve our ability to force criminals to reveal themselves, identify potential terrorists and free those wrongly convicted may have finally broken through the bureaucratic barriers that he believes have served to stifle adoption of the pioneering technique.

"There seems to be a renewed surge of interest in this by the intelligence agencies and the military," said Larry Farwell, neuroscientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories based at the Seattle Science Foundation.

Contrary to the Hollywood image of law enforcement always employing the latest science to track down the bad guys, Farwell's years of struggle suggest that law enforcement and intelligence agencies are just about as reluctant to change as any other entrenched government bureaucracy.

"There is always this ignorance, inertia and active resistance by those who benefit from the status quo," Farwell said.

The technique he calls "brain fingerprinting" is an electronic test of a specific kind of brain wave that he says can identify incriminating information despite an individual's attempt to conceal the knowledge.

"The lack of acceptance has been more about turf than science," said Drew Richardson, a former top anti-terrorism investigator with the FBI in Virginia who teaches forensic science and also consults with Farwell. "If this had just been about the science, I think this technique would have advanced much more quickly."

Law enforcement and other investigatory agencies still routinely use the standard lie detector "polygraph" stress test today even though most scientific organizations (including the National Academy of Sciences) have found the polygraph to be highly unreliable -- a finding that makes it legally inadmissible in court.

The disturbing news that some in the military and intelligence community have resorted to waterboarding or other forms of "physical" interrogation of prisoners appears to have provided a potential breakthrough for brain fingerprinting. [Mark Godsey]

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Newark and the Future of Crime Fighting

One recent spring day, two cops in the Newark Police Dept. watched a shoot-out erupt in broad daylight. Two suspected drug dealers started blasting away at each other in the middle of an apartment complex. The cops didn't witness the violence on the beat, though. They watched it from the city's new communications command center, which collects live video feeds from more than 100 surveillance cameras scattered across the crime-ridden city.

As the shooting broke out, the policemen zoomed in on the scene with a joystick controller. They saw one gunman flee, while the other dragged himself into a nearby apartment, one blood-soaked leg trailing behind. Because of the camera network, the Newark police were able to dispatch a team to the crime scene immediately—90 seconds before the first 911 calls. The gunman who crawled into his apartment was arrested on the spot. "Those complexes are like mazes, but we knew exactly where to send the unit," says Sergeant Marvin Carpenter, commanding officer of the communications post.

The surveillance system is the centerpiece of Mayor Cory Booker's ambitious plan to use cutting-edge technologies to slash Newark's violent crime rate. This August, Newark finished its initial deployment of 111 cameras, adding 76 to the 35 that were in place last summer. Newark is investing in a whole range of tools, everything from mundane PCs to more novel technologies such as a new citywide broadband wireless network that will let cops fill out police reports from their squad cars instead of schlepping back to the station house. By late fall, Newark expects to complete the deployment of an audio sensor system to pinpoint gunshot locations that cameras fail to catch. "We are trying to leave the Flintstones and get to the Jetsons," says Booker. [Mark Godsey]

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Odor sensor could help find decomposing bodies

Cadaver dogs searched for more than two days but could not find the body of a young woman who disappeared in 2000 while jogging in a Nashville park.

A day later, a searcher spotted the body in a place the highly trained dogs had been. With the August heat wearing on the 24-year-old's body for three days, it was already too badly decomposed to determine a cause of death.

It's a problem that occasionally punctuates the search for a missing person: search dogs refuse to work or miss the scent they came for, leading to thousands of wasted dollars and manpower. And with the clock ticking to find the woman, Metro officers may have lost their chance to prove whether it was a medical problem or murder.

"Really what should've happened based on their training, is the dogs should have been able to seek the body out due to the decompositional odor,'' said Metro Police Sgt. Pat Postiglione. "In this case, they were not able to do it.'' [Mark Godsey]

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Lawyers Conned by Internet Scam

Atlanta securities lawyer Gregory Bartko said he is the victim of an Internet fraud scheme that is apparently targeting law firms throughout the country and the banks where lawyers have their escrow accounts.

As a result, Bartko is now a defendant in a federal suit by Wachovia Bank -- which is seeking reimbursement for nearly $200,000 that the bank wired, on Bartko's instructions, to a Korean bank on behalf of a company that had hired Bartko via the Internet.

Wachovia has also notified the State Bar of Georgia that Bartko's firm escrow account was overdrawn by more than $190,000, Bartko said.

The scheme that entangled Bartko matches one in a fraud alert issued in February by SunTrust Bank in Atlanta.

An overseas company contacts a U.S. lawyer by e-mail and retains that attorney as a settlement agent to collect a debt from a U.S. company. The U.S. company sends a settlement check to the lawyer, who deposits it into his trust account and then wires the settlement amount, minus his fee, to the "client." But the settlement check is counterfeit, and the lawyer loses the money he wired abroad.

"I'm pretty upset about it," Bartko said last week. "I got conned by someone who I thought was a client."

Bartko is not the first to have been taken in by the scam. The July issue of the California Bar Journal reported on two unnamed California attorneys, one in Long Beach and one in San Francisco, who fell for a similar Internet pitch, but their banks noticed the counterfeit checks before any money was sent abroad.

Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco and City National Bank in Los Angeles have reported at least six other lawyers who were drawn in, according to the California Bar Journal.

Read full article here. [Brooks Holland]

Michigan will join states that use GPS to track domestic abusers, stalkers

Mary Babb was in her SUV last year when her estranged husband slammed into her with his pickup truck. The crash overturned Babb's vehicle and left her suspended upside-down by her seat belt.

As she hung there helplessly, Thomas Babb fired two rounds from a shotgun, killing his wife in front of horrified witnesses outside the office where she worked.

Now Mary Babb's family has lobbied successfully for Michigan to join a growing number of states that have expanded electronic monitoring to include domestic abusers and stalkers.

Before her death, the 30-year-old Mary Babb had filed for divorce and moved out of the dwelling she had shared with her husband. She changed jobs and obtained a court order protecting her from her husband. But he kept following her.

"She did everything the law provided her, and it wasn't enough," said Mary Babb's brother, Michael Anderson.

Michigan's new law allows judges to order domestic-violence suspects to wear GPS devices -- even before they go to trial. The idea is to alert victims if alleged abusers are nearby.

That measure joins another law signed this month by Gov. Jennifer Granholm that requires paroled prisoners who have been convicted of aggravated stalking to wear GPS tethers.

GPS devices have been used for years to monitor sex offenders. But technological advances have now made it possible for the systems to issue warnings by cell phone if the offender gets too close to a specific victim.

Massachusetts adopted a law last year that lets judges require electronic monitoring of people who violate personal-protection orders. Michigan, Oklahoma and Hawaii followed suit this year with GPS laws, bringing to 11 the number of states with related measures, said Diane Rosenfeld, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who proposed the Massachusetts law. [Mark Godsey]

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Questions about Best Approach to Fixing Pervasive Internet Security Flaw

Since a secret emergency meeting of computer security experts at Microsoft’s headquarters in March, Dan Kaminsky has been urging companies around the world to fix a potentially dangerous flaw in the basic plumbing of the Internet.

While Internet service providers are racing to fix the problem, which makes it possible for criminals to divert users to fake Web sites where personal and financial information can be stolen, Mr. Kaminsky worries that they have not moved quickly enough.

By his estimate, roughly 41 percent of the Internet is still vulnerable. Now Mr. Kaminsky, a technical consultant who first discovered the problem, has been ramping up the pressure on companies and organizations to make the necessary software changes before criminal hackers take advantage of the flaw.

Next week, he will take another step by publicly laying out the details of the flaw at a security conference in Las Vegas. That should force computer network administrators to fix millions of affected systems.

But his explanation of the flaw will also make it easier for criminals to exploit it, and steal passwords and other personal information.

Mr. Kaminsky walks a fine line between protecting millions of computer users and eroding consumer confidence in Internet banking and shopping. But he is among those experts who think that full disclosure of security threats can push network administrators to take action. “We need to have disaster planning, and we need to worry,” he said.

The flaw that Mr. Kaminsky discovered is in the Domain Name System, a kind of automated phone book that converts human-friendly addresses like google.com into machine-friendly numeric counterparts.

The potential consequences of the flaw are significant. It could allow a criminal to redirect Web traffic secretly, so that a person typing a bank’s actual Web address would be sent to an impostor site set up to steal the user’s name and password. The user might have no clue about the misdirection, and unconfirmed reports in the Web community indicate that attempted attacks are already under way.

The problem is analogous to the risk of phoning directory assistance at, for example, AT&T, asking for the number for Bank of America and being given an illicit number at which an operator masquerading as a bank employee asks for your account number and password.

The online flaw and the rush to repair it are an urgent reminder that the Internet remains a sometimes anarchic jumble of jurisdictions. No single person or group can step in to protect the online transactions of millions of users. Internet security rests on the shoulders of people like Mr. Kaminsky, a director at IOActive, a computer security firm, who had to persuade other experts that the problem was real.

“This drives home the risk people face, and the consumer should get the message,” said Ken Silva, chief technology officer of VeriSign, which administers Internet addresses ending in .com and .net. “Don’t just take for granted all the things that machines are doing for you.”

Read full article here. [Brooks Holland]

The New "DNA": Antibody Testing.....

From associated press: Federal researchers say they've developed a human identification test that's faster and possibly cheaper than DNA testing. It would be a handy new weapon in the arsenal for detectives, forensic experts and the military, though no one expects it to replace DNA analysis — and its promoters say it is not intended to. The new method analyzes antibodies. Each person has a unique antibody bar code that can be gleaned from blood, saliva or other bodily fluids. Antibodies are proteins used by the body to fend off viruses or perform routine physiological housekeeping. "DNA is a physical code that describes you ... and in many ways so are your antibodies," said Dr. Vicki Thompson, a chemical engineer at the Idaho National Laboratory who's been working with other researchers to perfect the test for the past 10 years.   Rest of story here.  [Mark Godsey, hat tip Marty Yant]

Text Message Scandal Builds In Detroit

From NPR.com: The office of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is reeling following publication of a series of e-mails between him and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty. The messages suggest that the pair lied under oath last year in denying they were having an affair. Beatty is resigning. Their testimony last summer was part of a lawsuit by two police officers who claimed they lost their jobs because they investigated whether Kilpatrick used his security officers to cover up extramarital affairs. Listen. . . [Mark Godsey]

Remote Handcuffing Device

Got a call from the inventor of a product that allows law enforcement officers to restrain a person without getting close to them--a remotely operated mechanical restraint attached to the bumper of the car.  Remote handcuffing could improve officer safety because an individual could be restrained without the officer getting close enough to come into physical contact.  Here's a link to a Youtube Video.  Leave a comment if you have an opinion about the device. [Jack Chin]

Boston'a Text Message Tip Line is a Success

From bostonherald.com: Boston cops’ anonymous text-message tip line has busted at least two murder suspects and popped up hot leads in other high-profile homicides - including the shooting of 8-year-old Liquarry Jefferson - in the two months since the first-in-the nation program was unveiled, the Herald has learned.

     “It has performed beyond our wildest expectations. We had no idea it was going to work as well as it has,” Boston police Commission Edward Davis said yesterday. “It’s a great method by which the community can talk to us without fear of retaliation.”

     Anonymous tipsters have tapped out some 230 text messages to the Boston Crime Stoppers unit since the line opened June 15, the BPD said. By comparison, the unit averages a paltry 10 phone calls from tipsters a month. Rest of Article. . . [Mark Godsey]

GPS Tracking for Violent Robbers

From NPR.com: One month after two paroled burglars were arrested for a brutal home invasion that killed a mother and her two daughters in Cheshire, Conn., state officials have announced new plans to crack down on violent burglars.

Offenders will have to wear GPS tracking devices, so officials know where they are at all hours. Most states use the devices to keep tabs on sex offenders.

Connecticut's plan raises questions about whether it's wise to do the same for this whole new category of criminals. Listen. . . [Mark Godsey]