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Thursday, February 3, 2011

Ice on Front Porch

Ice on our front porch was over an inch thick in places today. Picture taken in Shelton, CT 2/2/11

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front porch ebook download, shelton ct

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Surfing, Lyall Bay-10-6.jpg

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Indian Ocean

We returned from bali last night on Cathay Pacific. A terrific airline by the way. Bali was beautiful and exciting again this time. Photos on the way.

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©Edmund Lowe

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

LAPD gang units dismantled in some high-crime areas

Gang unit LAPD officers find a gun and drugs during a search of a South Los Angeles apartment. Many are reluctant to join the LAPD gang units because of in-depth financial checks that are done on the officers. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles Police Department has temporarily dismantled anti-gang units in several of its most crime-plagued neighborhoods because officers in those squads refused to comply with a controversial financial disclosure rule that they view as misguided and invasive.

Police officials have sent the defiant officers back to regular patrol duties and expect that it will take several months to rebuild the gang units with others willing to abide by the policy, which requires officers to periodically submit information regarding their assets and debts. Until then, patrol officers have been saddled with trying to keep up with gang-suppression efforts, a move some gang unit supervisors and community advocates fear could lead to an erosion of expertise and hard-fought gains in reducing gang violence and crime.

"There is definitely a concern that we might start to lose some of the ground we've gained," said Sgt. Randy Goens, a veteran gang supervisor in South Los Angeles who reluctantly plans to complete the disclosure form.

"They have an essential role," the Rev. Ben "Taco" Owens, a former gang member who is now a prominent gang interventionist, said of the gang officers. "They are familiar with the gangs. They are familiar with the community.... They won't be around. It's detrimental."

The disclosure policy is intended to help identify and deter corruption among the estimated 600 gang and narcotic officers who frequently handle cash, drugs and other contraband. Adopted nearly two years ago, the plan gave officers who were already assigned to the units until the end of March to abide by the new rules or be moved back to regular patrol assignments.

Few narcotics officers objected, but discontent among gang officers has persisted. In recent months, field commanders have grown increasingly worried that the March deadline would not leave them enough time to recruit and train new officers before the onset of summer, when gang crime traditionally spikes. Department officials required officers to declare their intentions in December and gave commanders permission to take action before the end of March.

About three-quarters of the officers agreed to the disclosures, according to LAPD estimates. There were, however, significant holdouts: All but one of the roughly 80 gang officers in the department's Southeast, 77th, Northeast and Hollenbeck divisions — areas that are home to some of the city's most violent and active gangs — refused, LAPD officials confirmed. Likewise, all members of the smaller gang teams in Van Nuys and Devonshire said they would not adhere to the policy.

"The bottom line is it isn't going to be effective and it's insulting. If we were dirty, we wouldn't be putting cash into a bank account," said a veteran gang officer who, like others, asked that his name not be used because of concern that he would be disciplined. "It's a matter of principle."

In response, the LAPD captains in charge of those six divisions disbanded the gang units and have begun rebuilding them. Instead of keeping some or all of the veteran gang officers in the units until the end of March to help train new officers, field commanders said they decided it would be better to move them out at once and as early as possible. That decision was made in part to avoid possible tensions between the outgoing and incoming officers.

Other LAPD divisions have lost some portion of their gang officers but managed to keep the units operational.

Police Chief Charlie Beck and other LAPD officials downplayed the possibility that the decision to dismantle the units could lead to a rise in gang activity. With most of the former gang officers now on patrol assignments in the same neighborhoods in which they previously worked, Beck and the others said, there would be sufficient police presence to prevent a crime surge.

"The sky is definitively not falling right now," said Southeast Division Capt. Phil Tingirides. "This will work temporarily."

Several senior LAPD officials acknowledged, however, that the decision to disband the gang units inevitably will mean a less intense focus on gang activity and expressed concern that the longer-term risks are significant. With each week that passes, they said, the department will lose ground in the effort to stay on top of the shadowy and always-shifting machinations of the city's gangs.

"It's the intelligence gathering, the intimate knowledge of who these gang members are and where they're located, the upkeep with the informants and the constant stream of information on what the gangs are up to that I'm worried about losing," said Capt. Dennis Kato, commanding officer of the 77th Area, where more than 15 major gangs are active. "We're going to be a little slower in catching up to these guys."

Vic Corella, a recently retired detective who spent years battling gangs in South Los Angeles, noted that although the LAPD keeps tabs on gangs, the gangs are keeping tabs on the LAPD and may exploit the situation.

"They know about deployments," he said. "They may not be educated. But they are not stupid."

Corella added that prosecutors often rely on expert testimony of gang officers to win convictions. That testimony, he said, depends largely on whether the officers have up-to-date knowledge on a gang's activities. A constant presence is required, he said, or "your information gets stale, because the players change so often."

Like traditional patrol officers, members of the LAPD gang units are required to wear police uniforms and drive the black-and-white LAPD vehicles. Instead of being dispatched on radio calls, however, the gang officers concentrate exclusively on gang crime. They are the only police officers permitted to photograph gang members and access Cal-Gangs, a statewide database that law enforcement agencies use to keep information on gang members.

In recent years the LAPD has had some success pushing down the level of gang-related crimes, and officials say the specialized gang units played a large role in the gains. Gang killings and aggravated assaults by gang members, for example, both fell about 30% between 2007 and last year, according to LAPD statistics.

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gang suppression, lapd officers, financial checks, disclosure rule, community advocates, angeles police department, narcotic officers, violence and crime, disclosure policy, financial disclosure, gang unit, gang violence, los angeles times, michael robinson, gang member, police officials ebook download, discontent, gangs, narcotics, chavez

Latimes.com

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Tired old Britain has put its feet up and withdrawn from the world

Despite the enterprise and valour of our citizens, our leaders seem set only on managing the country's decline, writes Simon Heffer.

Why is Britain putting its feet up?

Why is Britain putting its feet up? Photo: PA

Simon Heffer

Simon Heffer 6:03PM GMT 01 Feb 2011

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Just three weeks into my
A-level economics course, in September 1976, the British economy imploded to the degree that the International Monetary Fund had to come and run it for us. As is the way with 16-year-old boys, we were rather naïve, and therefore shocked that the country our parents had believed was a serious world power should be reduced to a banana republic in this way. Our economics master strove to instil in us the correct level of cynicism. Did we not realise that, since 1945, the main job of Her Majesty's Government had been to manage decline?

We learnt that lesson, only to have it countermanded by our experience of the Thatcher era; but then we had to learn it again. What we have witnessed in the past few years especially has not merely confirmed the point, but has provided further stark examples. There is nothing like running out of money to force the recognition that whatever our parents might have grown up believing about Britain, no one can easily believe it now.

This is a pity, because we are a fundamentally decent lot, with morally acceptable values. When we were a world power during the 20th century we used that power responsibly and for the greater good. The legacy of having been on the right side during two world wars gave us a moral authority that has now been all but squandered. I do not mean purely because of our obedience to America in the contrived and lethal mess that was Iraq; I mean because of our steady determination, since 1945, to fritter away the means of exercising that moral authority.

We see this with the tide of change through North Africa, possibly on an unstoppable course through the Middle East. This used to be a part of world we understood, and prided ourselves on understanding. The Arabists in our Foreign Office were deemed, with justification, to be the most intelligent and subtle analysts of that culture in the world. The mess America has made in the region in recent years should have come as no surprise: the diaries and letters of staff officers and diplomats who saw the Americans arrive in North Africa in 1943 reflect all the portents. Yet now, in the second decade of the 21st century, our reach in such places is minimal. Our Foreign Secretary expresses pious hopes for something called "a transition to democracy" in Egypt, and no sane person can disagree with him – but his opinion, and indeed Britain's, counts for absolutely nothing, and we should not fool ourselves otherwise.

At the simplest level, the amount of influence we can exert as a power depends on our ability to back it up with force of arms, and the will to use them if necessary. We have no such force of arms. Perhaps the defence cuts, which still seem to have been so reckless in their conception and so wasteful of expertise and commitment, were deliberately designed to confirm the final surrender of our will to be a player on the world stage. We have for a long time been in the second rank of nations, but the way this Government and its predecessor have behaved, we are about to enter the third.

A country is of course the sum of its people, but also of its institutions. Since 1945, the institution that has come to characterise Britain is not our disciplined and professional Armed Forces, but the welfare state. It is what Peter Lilley called "the something for nothing society". Welfarism has always had at its core the sentimental belief that living beyond our means is simply something that a humane society has to do. What happens when the bills come in will always be a later generation's problem. That generation is ours. That the spending cuts are just over a mere three per cent a year is a sign of how, even now, the desire to protect the claimant society overrides everything else. It overrides having highly professional and well-equipped Armed Forces in which morale is high and which protect our place in the world and give us some clout. Indeed, our place in the world is not an edifying subject upon which to reflect.

We only look as good as we do to others in the Western world because of the misgovernment of their own countries. Most of Europe is a basket case, brought down by an unfeasible political fantasy. America is woefully misgoverned, with vast pockets of incompetence and corruption, and a toxic political class. Yet we do so little to make things better for ourselves. Our public services are poor not because of the sums spent on them – which have been vast – but because of their appalling management. Labour destroyed the ethos of our Civil Service when it was in power by politicising it. A similar problem has occurred in local government and the quangocracy. Part of the problem is that these institutions are run by the products of our pitiful education system, in which our rulers continue to resist the creation and promotion of an elite. As we have seen in the past couple of years, the politicians whom such people support and advise are often themselves devoid of any ethic of public service, and indeed pursue their own interests to the point of criminality. It is little wonder they take such bad decisions about how we are governed, and that the tunnel has yet to show any light.

The conscious decision to accept decline rather than to fight it can only have terrible consequences for us. Mr Cameron seems to admire Sweden. But do we want to be Sweden? Do we so want to resign from the councils of the world and be of scant consequence, in a way we have not been since Spain ruled the known world in the 16th century? Do we feel we have so little to give? Or is it that our obsession with running a client state, and the costs of that, mean we cannot aspire to give any longer? Our Deputy Prime Minister is apparently so "fragile" that he mustn't be given any work after three o'clock in the afternoon,
so he can get home early and put his feet up with his children. Never mind that he may not have chosen the right calling in life, if that is the sort of regime he requires: is he not a metaphor for the Britain he and the rest of his class of politician now choose to run? Are we not now in an attitude of surrender to mental and physical exhaustion, and finding it hard to see how we can revive ourselves to count for something in the world?

All of us are confronted by evidence every day of the determination, enterprise, industry and valour of our fellow citizens. We do not sense acceptance of decline; we sense instead a frustration that so few opportunities are afforded us for improvement, that the tax system thwarts us, and that the unproductive and the defeatist are treated so lavishly at the expense of the productive and striving. We are not just in decline, but in withdrawal: and this is without the consent of most of us who pay the bills. If we do not now resolve to break out of this corrosive mindset, it will be nearly impossible for our children to do so.

simon heffer, 16 year old boys, banana republic, international monetary fund, level economics, economics course, british economy, serious world, acceptable values, moral authority, valour, north africa, cynicism, majesty, thatcher, obedience, 20th century, decline, tide, legacy

Telegraph.co.uk

Nets not worried Carmelo's in town

Virtually to a man, the Nets said Monday night's game against Carmelo Anthony and the Nuggets was about getting a winning feeling back on their homecourt where they completed a 4-1 homestand before a disastrous Midwest visit brought a 32-point defenseless loss in Indiana and a 10-point, no-offense setback in Milwaukee.

The meeting with Anthony and the Nuggets was just one-of-82 scheduled games.

If they say so.

“Just another game,” Anthony Morrow said.

“Take this game like any other game,” Stephen Graham said.

“You try to stay as focused as possible and do what you do every day, just come to work and put your best foot forward,” Ben Uzoh said.

“We just look more to try to protect home court and continue how we’ve been playing at home. That’s the main focus rather than worrying about things we can’t control,” Devin Harris said.

Morrow, Graham, Uzoh and Harris were among the eight Nets who heard, read, saw, were informed by text that their names were linked daily to the gargantuan proposed three-team trade for Anthony, a deal that died when Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov flew in from Moscow and ended the proceedings 13 days ago.

Whether the Nuggets call back and how hard the Nets listen (figure on yes answers to both theories) remains to be seen. But now the Nets insist it is all ancient history. The door has been closed, Avery Johnson said.

“We already closed it. It’s already closed for us. The owner is not in town. We’ve lost two in a row. They’re our next opponent. For us it’s closed,” Johnson said. “We’re just focusing on our plan we’ve had from Day 1: Continue to develop young talent. Hopefully, our young talent we’ll have somebody emerge in the next year or two in terms of being a star player.”

The most likely candidate -- or the one the Nets are banking on -- is Derrick Favors, who was the Nets' prime chip in the offer. Favors admitted he was a little upset (more like truly concerned) when his name first surfaced in preseason. But he learned to deal with it.

“The rumors are over, I don’t have to worry about them, I don’t have to worry about me, so I don’t care,” Favors said.

The Nets think it is over and done.

“I hope so. I’m not trying to worry about it too much. Everybody that wants to be here is here,” Morrow said. “I wasn't trying to find out anything (during the heaviest rumors). I was just trying to keep my head right. …Talking to some other guys around the league, who have been in the league for a while and I kind of look up to, they told me not to worry about it as much and go play my game.”

So that is what the Nets’ intent is from here. If Anthony moves elsewhere, he moves elsewhere.

The Nets just want to relive that homestand feeling after their owner pulled the plug.

“We’ve moved on. Denver’s moved on. We all know Carmelo Anthony’s an outstanding player. That’s why he’s been involved in so much trade talk. There are so many teams around the league that if Denver decides to do something would love to have on their roster,” Johnson said. “For us, that’s pretty much an open and shut case.”

mikhail prokhorov, devin harris, avery johnson, carmelo anthony, homecourt, playing at home, star player, best foot, ben uzoh, nuggets, setback, derrick, ancient history, monday night, next opponent, moscow, midwest, proceedings, milwaukee, rsquo

Nypost.com