Monday, September 26, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
Law Enforcement: William Bratton, The ‘General Petraeus’ Of Law Enforcement
This is pretty cool. William Bratton is looked at as a fixer or game changer in police departments around the US, and just look at his record? So it is cool to see him work as an independent contractor and consult in other parts of the world.
So what is his secret? Well I found a cool presentation he did last year at a GovSec Forum. (see below) William has also talked about predictive policing as another tool to use when he talked with Wired last year. He was also famous for implementing Broken Window theory in New York.
William is like the ‘Bar Rescue‘ of law enforcement, so it makes sense that the UK would be interested in his services. Oh, and did I mention that he works for Kroll? Not bad for a contractor. –Matt
Can American Supercop Bratton Clean Up London’s Streets?
By JAY NEWTON
Aug 15, 2011
Bill Bratton has made a career out of busting up gangs. Which is probably what makes the former top cop at police departments in Boston, New York City and Los Angeles an appealing source of advice for British Prime Minister David Cameron. Four days of looting and riots by unruly mobs in London last week left public trust shaken. And Cameron needs to restore that trust in the next 10 months, before London hosts the 2012 Summer Olympics.
That’s where Bratton comes in. “We should be looking beyond our shores to learn the lessons from others who have faced similar problems,” Cameron told a special session of Parliament, convened to address the riots, on Aug. 11. “That is why I will be discussing how we can go further in getting to grips with gangs with people like Bill Bratton.”
During his tenure heading three major American police departments – Boston from 1993 to ’94, New York City from 1994 to ’96 and Los Angeles from 2002 to ’09 – Bratton, 63, drastically reduced crime rates and won particular praise for his handling of gangs. It is in this area that he will try to help the British government in the coming months. “All these thugs and knuckleheads running wild in London this week, you can’t excuse away that behavior. I’m a progressive, but on crime I’m very tough,” Bratton tells TIME. His record speaks for itself.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Building Snowmobiles: Predictive Policing… Predictive Warfighting?
In the program’s first three weeks, the model has proven to be 71 percent accurate in predicting the place and day where crimes have occurred, said Deputy Chief Steve Clark. In other words, 71 percent of the time the model told an officer to be at a location, a crime was in progress or was reported.
At least one person has been arrested because of a patrol check initiated by the system, he said.
Police recently gave eight years of crime reports for residential burglaries, vehicle burglaries and vehicle thefts to an applied mathematics professor at Santa Clara University. The system essentially maps the time, location and recurrence of past crimes to help police predict crime and tailor their patrols.–Santa Cruz police have success with predictive policing
For this building snowmobiles post, I wanted to draw upon a new crime fighting technology and explore the idea of it’s possible uses. The idea here is to use predictive analysis, much like what retailers use for product research or what researchers use for earthquake prediction, and use it to predict where crime is most likely to happen to get resources to efficiently cover those areas via patrols.
So the question I ask is if this actually works for crime, then why not apply it to warfighting? And especially COIN and today’s conflicts, where the war is long and there is time to collect statistics of attacks and instances that would be needed to build such a model? Or how about for anti-piracy or for the drug war down in Mexico? The key is if you have statics over the course of several years, then a model could be made. And if war planners are wanting to use their resources more efficiently because they have less forces to use, or the host nation is limited in resources, then predictive warfighting might help with the more efficient use of manpower on the battlefield.
If anything, much like with policing, it will be the guy on the ground who patrols their areas daily that will have the intuition of where to go and how best to cover their AO’s. But what about units that cycle in and out of the battlefields? Where is their intuition coming from if they have never been to that AO? So predictive analysis might help in the transition periods and help build that intuition of the new forces. This predictive analysis will also make it easier to make judgements about setting up patrols. You could combine human intuition/experience/orientation with this predictive analysis, and make a better plan of operations.
Predictive policing also helps the COIN forces by efficiently guiding the local police forces to areas they need to be. With places like Afghanistan, you might have officers who do not want to go in certain areas or dwell more in certain areas than they should, or are not trained enough to recognize patterns, or they come from other parts of the country. They too could benefit from this predictive analysis to further reinforce their intuition. But it could also help determine if that police force is working efficiently.
The fear though is depending upon this predictive analysis entirely. To me it is an interesting tool that needs to be tested more to see where it can be most effective, or where it could fit in to the overall strategy for crime fighting or warfighting. Interesting stuff and definitely check out all of the articles and information posted below if you would like to read more about it.
On a final note, Santa Cruz and other police departments throughout the nation looked at this new system as a way to more efficiently use their police forces to deal with crime. But they were also looking at it because of economic reasons because there is less money available to fund police departments these days. So more and more departments will be looking at cost cutting measures, while still being able to ‘protect and serve’ their communities. So what say you? –Matt
#60: Fighting Crime With Mathematics
12.16.2010
By Daniel Lametti
One major problem in crime-fighting is that a police crackdown in one neighborhood may simply push criminal behavior into a nearby area. In March two mathematicians, working with an anthropologist and a criminologist, announced a way to quantify this reaction (pdf).
“Crimes tend to cluster together in space and time, forming hot spots,” says UCLA mathematician Martin Short, the study’s lead author. Drawing on real-world data, his team developed a model showing that hot spots come in two varieties. One type forms when an area experiences a large-scale crime increase, such as when a park is overrun by drug dealers. Another develops when a small number of criminals—say, a pair of burglars—go on a localized crime spree.
The model suggests that a focused police response can relatively easily extinguish larger hot spots because the criminals there scatter randomly, making it unlikely that they will resume coordinated unlawful activity nearby. But for smaller crime waves, crooks just migrate together into an adjacent neighborhood, where they are likely to start another spree. By analyzing police reports as they come in, Short hopes to determine which type of hot spot is forming so police can handle it more effectively.
Link to Discover article here.
—————————————————————-
UC MaSC Project
Funded by the Human Social Dynamics Program at NSF, the UC MaSC Project centers on theoretical, methodological and empirical work to develop analytical and computational models of crime pattern formation. Crime mapping forms a key feature of current approaches to understanding offender behavior and is a tool used increasingly by police departments and policy makers for strategic crime prevention. However, despite the availability of sophisticated digital mapping and analysis tools there is a substantial gap in our understanding of how low-level behaviors of offenders lead to aggregate crime patterns such as crime hot spots. Thus, for example, we are unable to specify exactly why directed police action at crime hot spots sometimes leads to displacement of crime in space but, surprisingly, often can also lead to hot spot dissipation and a real reduction in crime incidences.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Bounties: 8 Million Pesos For Finding The Suspects In Mother And Daughter Escobedo Homicides, Mexico
I found out about this travesty of justice down in Mexico recently while watching this Dateline series. It is heart wrenching, and I am angry at the Mexican government and legal system there for letting down this mother and daughter. The system is also tainted by cartel influence and money, and this cowardly murderer named Sergio Bocanegra literally got away with murder. And the Mexican legal system helped him get away with it!
So if the legal system and the Mexican government is controlled and influenced by the money and killing power of the Los Zetas and other cartels, then what is the point of this bounty? Why would I even care to post this? Well actually, I want to help shame the Mexican legal system into doing what is right and to seek justice for the murder of these two women. To capture Sergio and execute him would be a fantastic symbolic gesture.
That, and to actually uphold the law and revamp the legal system so that the good people of Mexico can actually look up to their police and government as not corrupt. That they actually care to uphold the law. So if the government is serious now, after the mother and daughter were killed, and these two have basically become martyrs, then I will gladly help promote the capture of these guys and the story of what happened.
Like with a insurgency, the government must prove to the local population that is a good idea. So not only must they aggressively pursue these cartels, but they must also focus on the basic rule of law in the towns and cities. To actually use the military for war-like functions, and assign your police to do actual police work. Or at the least, make sure that you have enough police actually enforcing the basic rule of law in the cities and towns.
The other component is the corruption. Boy, if I was the government and I really wanted to clean up all the corruption, I would be checking bank accounts of all government employees and heavily using moles or mystery shoppers to find these despicable humans that have sold their souls to the cartels. Your justice system is broken, and it is time for serious and extreme measures.
Another idea is to actually take the weapons that you have captured from the cartels, and issue them to town and city defense forces that are being terrorized by the cartels. I look at Mexico much like any other counter-insurgency operation, and if there are local populations who want to fight the cartels, then the government needs to recognize how much of a gift that is, and support them. Get the population involved in this fight. But the government will not get anyone to join that fight, if they are as bad as the cartels or they are as heavily intertwined with the cartels. So eradicate cartel influence, and co-opt with the population-become the better idea.
To finish up here and get back to the main topic, I sincerely hope that these individuals are caught and correctly prosecuted and justice is served. Sergio actually confessed to the murder! The other guy was caught on tape, with several witnesses–to include the brother/son of these two murdered women. And with any luck, if Sergio and this other bastard made it up to the US somehow, that one of my readers potentially spots one of these guys and calls it in to collect the bounty. Or one of you might see Sergio down in Mexico and you never know? Let’s help catch these guys and hopefully the Mexican government will be serious this time. Oh, and here is my latest Letter of Marque catch phrase when referring to the rich cartel clowns.’Dish out the plomo, and take their plata! Arrrrrgh! –Matt
Mexican Federal PGR Raised Rewards For Suspects In Mother And Daughter Escobedo Homicides In Chihuahua
Rewards for murder suspect in sketch has been raised to $3 million pesos ($230,770 U.S.) and Bocanegra has been raised to $5 million pesos ($384,616 U.S.), the Mexican government announced.
By H. Nelson Goodson?June 23, 2011
Mexico City, Mexico – On Thursday, the Mexican Federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) announced that it had raised the rewards for several suspects connected to the homicides of a mother and daughter. The PGR had released the sketch of the alleged 30-year-old suspect who shot Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, 52, several times including a fatal shot to the head.?The PGR is now offering $3 million pesos ($230,770 U.S.) from $200,000 pesos ($16,000 U.S.) it had previously offered for information leading to the arrest of the suspect. The suspect is believed to have been working with Sergio Rafael Barraza Bocanegra, 24, the alleged boyfriend and confessed killer of Ortiz’ daughter Rubi Marisol Frayre Escobedo, 16, from Ciudad Juarez.?Bocanegra is accused of taking part in the planned killing of Ortiz on December 16 and the September 2008 murder of Rubi Marisol. He had confessed to killing Rubi Marisol and even led police to a hog farm where her dismembered body was found. Mexican authorities are now offering $5 million pesos ($384,616 U.S.) from $500,000 pesos ($41,000 U.S.) it had previously offered for information leading to the arrest of Bocanegra. They issued an international warrant because Bocanegra could have left the country, but family members of the Escobedo’s believe he is leaving with his girlfriend and several kids in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, Mexico.?Bocanegra is an alleged member of Los Zetas and the Cartel de Sinaloa has also joined in the manhunt for Bocanegra, according to several large hand written poster signs discovered around Ciudad Juarez and the Chihuahua Capitol city.?Ortiz had struggled for two years to bring Bocanegra to justice for the murder of her daughter Rubi Marisol in 2008. The day Ortiz was killed, she was outside the Chihuahua state government building in the city of Chihuahua for nine days staging a protest and demanding justice from Governor César Duarte and the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office.
Story here.
—————————————————————
Mexican Mother who Sought Justice for Murdered Daughter is Herself Assassinated
Diego DiGhero
December 21st 2010
A chilling video, taken by CCTV camera, captured the assassination of Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, a Mexican human rights activist who – for more than two years – has demanded justice for her murdered 16-year-old daughter, Rubí Marisol Frayre. Rubi was shot to death, allegedly by a lover, and her body later burned and left at a garbage dump.
Marisela was arranging on the evening of December 16 her protest signs in front of the government house in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, preparing for yet another demonstration, when a man emerged from a car and shot her in the head. Falling to the ground, she was soon taken by local police to hospital while she still showed signs of life. However, she was finally pronounced dead despite medical attention.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Law Enforcement: Mexico And The US Just Took A Big Bite Out Of Cartel Meth Operations
This is fantastic news! Both La Familia and the Los Zetas just took it in the shorts with these latest operations. From a historic seizure of ‘meth precursors’ in Mexico, to 1,985 arrests of meth dealers in the US. Awesome news and good job to all involved. What is really cool, is that all of those arrests will lead to more information that could be fed into these fusion centers that have been created to take on the cartels. I love it.
But this also is interesting in that this is a major attack on the center of gravity of these cartels. These groups are all about business, and anything that disrupts that business will make them very mad. Now will that translate that into attacks on US or Mexican authorities? Already, we see the cartels targeting Mexican authorities, so to see the jump to targeting US authorities operating in Mexico or even in the US, would not be out of the question.
The other reason I mention this, is that this is more a war and not some police action. True, we use police to pry the bad seeds from society, but we are also dealing with a class of criminal that actually wages war. In Mexico, this combatant has no problems with ambushing the police or assassinating politicians. Or paying them. Anything to keep the business going. Hell, towns like Jaurez are more dangerous than any town in Iraq or Afghanistan, and that’s because the cartels are waging war for market share and territory.
The point is, is that we have attacked cartel business in a major way. Now what will they do in retaliation is the question? Did I mention that the State Department issued a warning early this month that stemmed from ‘recent successes against drug cartel figures‘? I also think that this is a war worth fighting, and I will cheer on any and all efforts that destroy these vile criminal organizations. –Matt
Mexican army seizes 840 tons of drug precursors
July 21, 2011
Mexico City – Troops found more than 839 tons of drug precursor chemicals at a warehouse in the central city of Queretaro, the largest such seizure in Mexican history, the Defense Secretariat said.
The chemicals, used to make synthetic drugs such as crystal meth, were discovered Monday at a warehouse in the city’s industrial zone, the secretariat said in a statement.
No arrests were reported in connection with the seizure.
This week’s confiscation tops the previous record of 200 tons of precursors seized almost a year ago in the Pacific port of Manzanillo.
Mexico, which produces most of the crystal meth consumed in the United States, has imposed tight restrictions on the import of chemicals used to make illegal synthetic drugs.
Story here.——————————————————-
Project Delirium Results in Nearly 2,000 Arrests During 20-Month Operation, Seizures of More Than 12 Tons of Drugs and $62 Million in U.S. Currency
U.S. Department of Justice July 21, 2011
• Office of Public Affairs (202) 514-2007/TDD (202)514-1888
WASHINGTON—Approximately 1,985 individuals have been arrested on narcotics-related charges as part of a 20-month multi-agency law enforcement investigation known as Project Delirium, which targeted the La Familia Michoacana drug cartel, the Department of Justice announced today.
As part of an ongoing takedown that began June 1, 2011, 221 individuals have been arrested across the United States as part of Project Delirium, including more than 70 individuals apprehended yesterday and today. In addition, $770,499 in U.S. currency, 635 pounds of methamphetamine, 118 kilograms of cocaine, and 24 pounds of heroin were seized by law enforcement agents since June 1, 2011.