On Q Professional Investigations

HERE’S a fraught encounter: one police officer, one civilian and anger felt by one or both. Afterward, it may be hard to sort out who did what to whom.

Now, some police departments are using miniaturized video cameras and their microphones to capture, in full detail, officers’ interactions with civilians. The cameras are so small that they can be attached to a collar, a cap or even to the side of an officer’s sunglasses. High-capacity battery packs can last for an extended shift. And all of the videos are uploaded automatically to a central server that serves as a kind of digital evidence locker.

William A. Farrar, the police chief in Rialto, Calif., has been investigating whether officers’ use of video cameras can bring measurable benefits to relations between the police and civilians. Officers in Rialto, which has a population of about 100,000, already carry Taser weapons equipped with small video cameras that activate when the weapon is armed, and the officers have long worn digital audio recorders.

But when Mr. Farrar told his uniformed patrol officers of his plans to introduce the new, wearable video cameras, “it wasn’t the easiest sell,” he said, especially to some older officers who initially were “questioning why ‘big brother’ should see everything they do.”

He said he reminded them that civilians could use their cellphones to record interactions, “so instead of relying on somebody else’s partial picture of what occurred, why not have your own?” he asked. “In this way, you have the real one.”

Last year, Mr. Farrar used the new wearable video cameras to conduct a continuing experiment in his department, in collaboration with Barak Ariel, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and an assistant professor at Hebrew University.

Half of Rialto’s uniformed patrol officers on each week’s schedule have been randomly assigned the cameras, also made by Taser International. Whenever officers wear the cameras, they are expected to activate them when they leave the patrol car to speak with a civilian.

A convenient feature of the camera is its “pre-event video buffer,” which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. In this way, the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera is more likely to be captured automatically, too.

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video.

As small as the cameras are, they seem to be noticeable to civilians, he said. “When you look at an officer,” he said, “it kind of sticks out.” Citizens have sometimes asked officers, “Hey, are you wearing a camera?” and the officers say they are, he reported.

But what about the privacy implications? Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, says: “We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse.” But requiring police officers to wear video cameras is different, he says: “When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that.”

Mr. Stanley says that all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints. “There are many police officers who’ve had a cloud fall over them because of an unfounded accusation of abuse,” he said. “Now police officers won’t have to worry so much about that kind of thing.”

Mr. Farrar says officers have told him of cases when citizens arrived at a Rialto police station to file a complaint and the supervisor was able to retrieve and play on the spot the video of what had transpired. “The individuals left the station with basically no other things to say and have never come back,” he said.

The A.C.L.U. does have a few concerns about possible misuse of the recordings. Mr. Stanley says civilians shouldn’t have to worry that a video will be leaked and show up on CNN. Nor would he approve of the police storing years of videos and then using them for other purposes, like trolling for crimes with which to charge civilians. He suggests policies specifying that the videos be deleted after a certain short period.

A spokesman for Taser International said it had received orders from various police departments, including those in Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City and Hartford, as well as Fort Worth, Tex.; Chesapeake, Va.; and Modesto, Calif. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the police department of BART, the transit system, has bought 210 cameras and is training its officers in their use, part of changes undertaken after a BART police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed man in 2009.

Before the cameras, “there were so many situations where it was ‘he said, she said,’ and juries tend to believe police officers over accused criminals,” Mr. Stanley says. “The technology really has the potential to level the playing field in any kind of controversy or allegation of abuse.”

Mr. Farrar recently completed a master’s degree in applied criminology and police management at the University of Cambridge. (It required only six weeks a year of residency in England.) And he wrote about the video-camera experiment in his thesis.

He says his goal is to equip all uniformed officers in his department with the video cameras. “Video is very transparent,” he said. “It’s the whole enchilada.”

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Police are looking for a Walmart cashier and her husband, who investigators say were the ringleaders in a store theft ring.

Jatmarie Merced and her husband David Burgos are accused of stealing $60,000 worth of merchandise, with the help of at least three other employees.

Police say the wife, who worked at the Bethlehem Township Walmart, would check out a large order of merchandise, but would only ring up a very inexpensive item and let the rest go unpaid.

“Even people that work in the store think there’s a legitimate transaction going on and in reality there is not,” said Tony Stevens, Bethlehem Twp. Police, who showed surveillance video of one of these “fake” transactions to NBC10′s Doug Shimell.

Investigators are trying to track down Merced and Burgos, along with Kristopher Herrera, 19, but say there are several other participants in the theft ring who they are working to identify.

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Six cybertools have been designated as weapons by the U.S. Air Force, allowing the programs to better compete for increasingly scarce Pentagon funding, an Air Force official said on Monday.

Lt. Gen. John Hyten, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, told a conference held in conjunction with the National Space Symposium that the new designations would boost the profile of the military’s cyberoperations as countries grapple with attacks originating from the Internet.

“This means that the game-changing capability that cyber is, is going to get more attention and the recognition that it deserves,” Hyten told conference attendees, according to a Reuters account of the speech. “It’s very, very hard to compete for resources. … You have to be able to make that case.”

Hyten, who said the Air Force was working to integrate cybercapabilities with other weapons, offered no details on the new cyberweapons.

The Air Force plans to increase its cyber workforce by 20 percent, adding 1,200 people to its current 6,000, he said.
“We have to do this quickly. We cannot wait,” he said.

It’s widely believed that the United States and Israel created Stuxnet, a sophisticated computer virus that attacked a nuclear enrichment facility in Iran in 2010. Rather than steal data, Stuxnet left a backdoor, meant to be accessed remotely, to allow outsiders to stealthily knock the facility offline and at least temporarily cripple Iran’s nuclear program.

U.S. officials have blamed Iran for creating the Shamoon virus, which was responsible for a cyberattack that infected more than 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s natural gas firm Rasgas in mid-August.

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The Education Department’s contracting arm is investigating new ways to track paper documents even when regulations, security concerns or other technological limitations mean that those documents can’t be digitized, solicitation documents show.

The immediate goal is to track about 2,000 contracting files that are on paper, according to a request for information posted Thursday. The department is aiming to reduce its reliance on paper but expects it will have to maintain hard copies of many files for the next several years and some sensitive files forever, the document said.

The government’s struggle to move away from paper-based systems for information storage and citizen services has received significant attention in the past several weeks, spurred in large part by the uproar over the Veterans Affairs Department’s disability claims backlog. That backlog of paper-based benefit requests has not only forced veterans to wait a year or more for their claims to be evaluated, but it is threatening the structural integrity of a Veterans Benefits Administration office in North Carolina.

The public conversation has focused mainly on digitizing information rather than improving the tracking of paper files.

Education officials are looking into attaching Radio Frequency Identification tags to paper documents, but the department isn’t limiting the products it will consider at this point. RFID tags are essentially complex barcodes that that can transmit information using radio waves from a greater distance than traditional barcodes.

The State Department uses RFID technology in its new generation of e-passports. U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses RFID for trusted traveler programs at land borders.

The Education Department is looking for technology that can tack both a contract file’s location and the identity of the person who last accessed that file, according to the solicitation document.

The document is a request for information, which means the department is only surveying the field of possible vendors and hasn’t committed yet to purchasing any new technology.

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A philanthropist or business could sponsor a police beat and put more off-duty cops on the streets under a plan being put forth by a downtown Chicago lawmaker on the City Council.

Alderman Brendan Reilly originally pitched the idea last October but is pushing it again following weekend incidents of teen mob activity on the Magnificent Mile, an upscale area of the city.

Under his plan, off-duty officers would work minimum six-hour shifts and make $30 an hour. The money would be paid by businesses, civic groups and churches at a time when city finances are stretched thin. The officers would be in full uniform and under the command of police supervisors.

“This is a way to make use of well-trained police officers who are moonlighting doing other things, bringing them back on the street to do what they do best, which is great police work,” Reilly said.

And he said his plan wouldn’t just apply to the city’s more affluent neighborhoods. There would be nothing in his proposal preventing an organization from sponsoring police protection anywhere in the city.

“You don’t need to live in the ZIP code where you want to provide some additional stability and public safety,” he said.

Still, he pressed that his plan is little more than a “creative tool” and isn’t a long-term solution to the department’s and the city’s woes.

“This is a stop-gap measure,” he said.”A long-term solution is we need to add more on-duty cops to the police department.”

More than two dozen teens were arrested Saturday night after dozens of mob groups began attacking pedestrians.

One community activist told NBC Chicago 300 to 400 teens were involved, with some of them “jumping” on people.

Supt. Garry McCarthy said incidents of mob activity like the ones that happened over the weekend occur every year as the weather gets warmer. But Reilly says police presence makes a difference.

“This is something that, unfortunately, the city’s had to struggle with on a seasonal basis for the last several years. But you’ll notice that those headlines went away just like that as soon as we saw a surge in police visibility,” Reilly said.

He said he hopes the budget committee will pass his bill and put it before the full Chicago City Council in an upcoming meeting.

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A Chicago police officer was found shot to death in his Far South Side home Wednesday morning in an apparent suicide, authorities said.

The officer had been under investigation for allegations of sexual misconduct, according to law enforcement sources. Chicago police were outside his home waiting to talk to him about those allegations shortly before they found him dead, one source said.

The officer suffered a gunshot wound to the head, authorities said. His name was not being released, but he lived in the 900 block of West 129th Place.

He was a 26-year veteran and was assigned to the Calumet District.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office said the officer suffered an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Officers at the scene referred all questions to a police spokesman.

Neighbors described the block as a quiet one where many police officers live.

A friend and neighbor, LaShereia Scales, said the officer was married to a woman who was in the military and stationed in San Diego.

Scales, 26, said she first met the police officer 10 years ago while living in the West Pullman neighborhood. She had called police for assistance and the officer happened to be the one who responded, she said.

The officer would attend neighborhood parties, bring his music collection and act as an informal DJ, she said.

She said the officer pushed her to receive training as an emergency medical technician.

“He encouraged me to go back to school,” she said. “I’m graduating this summer.”

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STATESBORO, GA—The federal grand jury sitting in Savannah, Georgia returned six indictments yesterday charging 12 defendants with 115 violations of federal law involving fraudulent tax returns. The federal crimes charged in these indictments range from a conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service to identity theft from medical records. All these indictments allege that the defendants illicitly obtained personal identifiers, such as names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, and used these means of identification to prepare and submit fraudulent tax returns in order to obtain tax refunds that were then converted to the defendants’ use.

Based on these federal charges and related state crimes, law enforcement officials are arresting 21 individuals today in Georgia, one defendant in Ohio, and one defendant in Florida, who are listed below. These arrests are part of the same long-term investigation that led to the execution of multiple search warrants in Statesboro, Georgia, in September 2012. Initial federal court appearances for the federally indicted defendants who were arrested in Statesboro, Georgia, are scheduled for April 4, 2013, in Savannah, Georgia.

United States Attorney Edward J. Tarver said, “These indictments and arrests demonstrate the commitment of the United States Attorney’s Office to protecting the privacy of medical records and the hard-earned money of honest taxpayers. While April 15th is traditionally seen as the end of tax season, this investigation is ongoing. Our law enforcement partners will continue to trace electronically filed fraudulent tax returns to track down these identity thieves and put them in handcuffs.”

IRS-Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge Veronica Hyman-Pillot said, “Today’s announcement exemplifies IRS-Criminal Investigation’s intense focus and rigorous pursuit of perpetrators of identity theft and refund fraud. IRS is extremely grateful for the cooperation and assistance we have received from our partners at the local, state, and federal level. Be assured that IRS Criminal Investigation, with our law enforcement partners, will continue to be proactive in the investigation of those individuals who engage in similar behavior.”

Mark F. Giuliano, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Atlanta Field Office, stated, “Today’s extensive joint law enforcement actions resulting in almost two dozen arrests demonstrates the growing problem involving tax refund related fraud and, more importantly, the growing law enforcement response to address it. The FBI will continue to work with its various law enforcement partners, to include providing additional resources, to disrupt such groups engaged in these types of tax fraud activities.”

Statesboro Director of Public Safety Wendell Turner said, “The Statesboro Police Department has been working with our local and federal counterparts to apprehend the persons responsible for defrauding the government and individuals through a variety of criminal schemes. We are very proud of these partnerships and the results they yield for our citizens. This investigation is just another example of everyone working together, sharing resources, information, and expertise for the common good of our community.”

If convicted, each federal defendant faces a maximum penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment for the conspiracy charge, 20 years’ imprisonment for each count of filing fraudulent tax returns, 10 years’ imprisonment for the charge of misusing medical records, and a two-year mandatory, consecutive prison sentence for each charge of aggravated identity theft. Each of these charges also carries a fine of up to $250,000.

United States Attorney Edward J. Tarver emphasized that an indictment is only an accusation and is not evidence of guilt. The defendants are entitled to a fair trial, during which it will be the government’s burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

FBI Special Agent Marcus Kirkland, IRS Special Agent Gwen Weston, and SPD Sgt. James Winskey, assisted by their agencies’ colleagues, are conducting the investigation that led to these indictments and arrests. Also assisting in today’s arrests are the U.S. Secret Service, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Georgia State Probation Office, and the sheriff’s offices for Bulloch and Richmond Counties. Assistant United States Attorneys David Stewart and Lamont A. Belk are the federal prosecutors in these cases. For additional information, please contact First Assistant United States Attorney James D. Durham at (912) 341-7842.

List of 12 federal defendants with their ages and current residences:

Erica Baldwin, 31, of Statesboro, Georgia
Tracy Denson, 44, of Statesboro, Georgia
Shakita Eason, 30, of Statesboro, Georgia
Yolando Edmond, 36, of Statesboro, Georgia
Gloria Evans, 44, of Statesboro, Georgia
Joshua Mincey, 20, of Statesboro, Georgia
Porsche Pinkney, 19, of Augusta, Georgia
Dwan Scott, 32, of Statesboro, Georgia
Jenna Scott, 28, of Jacksonville, Florida
Gregory Smith 21, of Statesboro, Georgia
Tidaesha Taylor, 27, of College Park, Georgia
Andrew Webb, 31,of Register, Georgia

List of 11 individuals arrested on state warrants with their ages and current residences:

Santravis Jerrod Brown, 23, of Statesboro, Georgia
Reginald Raynard Ellison, 29, of Statesboro, Georgia
Sanchez Ortega Harden, 28, of Statesboro, Georgia
Chrystal N. Harlie, 32, of Statesboro, Georgia
Victoria Quinn Johnson (Baldwin), 28, of Statesboro, Georgia
Sean Lee, 34, of Statesboro, Georgia
Myron Kelsey Rawls, 30, of Statesboro, Georgia
Vera Richmond, 69, of Statesboro, Georgia
Lanika Loyonda Walden (Mincey), 37, of Statesboro, Georgia
Melissa Shantel Whitfield, 33, of Statesboro, Georgia
Lasharett Genet Wilkerson, 30, of Statesboro, Georgia

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HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — State lawmakers are considering a bill that would provide immunity from civil liability for school security consultants, a measure that supporters say would help school districts attract specialists as they consider how to increase safety following last year’s deadly Newtown school shooting.

One of the backers, Republican Sen. Len Fasano, said the issue came to his attention when a building safety expert declined to provide security advice to North Haven Public Schools over concerns about liability.

‘‘Here’s a way to keep the kids as safe as possible, no cost to the state, no extra liability to the town that’s hiring the consultant,’’ Fasano said.

In 2008, the security consultancy MacNeil Environmental Inc. reached a $1.5 million settlement with victims’ family members and survivors of a 2005 school shooting in Minnesota. The security consultancy had been hired to provide a crisis management plan, train school officials and evaluate the school’s security weaknesses.

The Newtown elementary school gunman shot his way into the building on Dec. 14 before killing 20 first-graders, six educators and then himself. He had killed his mother at home before going to the school.

Under the proposal co-sponsored by Fasano and Republican Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, any person hired by a school board, charter school or regional educational center as a consultant and who designs a security plan for a school or a district would be immune from civil liability for damage or injury resulting from any errors. There would be an exception for damages and injuries caused by reckless and willful misconduct.

The legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard public testimony on the proposal on Monday.

The bill originally was part of the recommendations from the bipartisan task force’s subcommittee on school safety formed after the Newtown shooting. However, McKinney said that due to disagreement among members of the task force, it will not be included in the final package.

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WASHINGTON—A Detroit doctor at the center of a $13.2 million psychotherapy fraud scheme, which used the Medicare information of mentally-disabled Detroit residents to defraud Medicare, pleaded guilty today for his role in the scheme, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Barbara L. McQuade; Special Agent in Charge Robert D. Foley, III of the FBI’s Detroit Field Office; and Special Agent in Charge Lamont Pugh, III of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), Chicago Regional Office.

Dr. Alphonso Berry, 51, of Orchard Lake, Michigan, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Stephen J. Murphy, III in the Eastern District of Michigan to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and five counts of health care fraud. Marcus Jenkins and Beth Jenkins, Dr. Berry’s co-conspirators in the scheme, pleaded guilty on January 7 and January 3, 2012, respectively, to the same charges for their roles in the scheme.

Dr. Berry admitted that he and others conspired to defraud Medicare through Quality Recreation & Rehabilitation LLC (QRR) and Procare Rehabilitation Inc., two Detroit adult day care centers. Dr. Berry admitted that he created a Medicare provider number for these businesses to allow them to bill Medicare for psychotherapy in his name. According to court documents, the Medicare recipients at QRR and Procare were severely mentally-disabled residents of Detroit adult foster care homes. Dr. Berry admitted that, although he did not provide any psychotherapy to these patients at QRR and Procare, he signed psychotherapy progress notes that were used at these companies to submit psychotherapy claims to Medicare, including claims that he provided psychotherapy to a dead person.

Court documents allege that Dr. Berry and his co-conspirators used Dr. Berry’s Medicare number to submit more than 116,000 psychotherapy claims in his name, amounting to more than $8.2 million. From 2004 through 2011, QRR and Procare submitted more than 185,000 claims to Medicare totaling more than $13.2 million for group and individual psychotherapy that was not provided. According to court documents, Medicare paid $4,777,792 on these claims.

At sentencing, scheduled for April 26, 2013, Dr. Berry faces a maximum penalty of 60 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine.

This case is being prosecuted by William G. Kanellis and Tarek Helou of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section. It was investigated by the FBI and HHS-OIG and was brought as part of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, supervised by the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan.

Since its inception in March 2007, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, now operating in nine cities across the country, has charged more than 1,480 defendants who have collectively billed the Medicare program for more than $4.8 billion. In addition, HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with HHS-OIG, is taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers.

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The Russian government has turned to censorship on the Web.

According to the New York Times, the government is utilizing a new law, which the Russian parliament approved in July and which took effect in November, that allows the government to selectively censor Web pages within its borders because of content that it believes is illegal or harmful to children. The law’s supporters have said that it protects against child pornography and other harmful content, but detractors say that it’s giving the government too much power to block whatever it deems unfit for its citizens.

Although smaller sites have been affected, major social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, have also been targeted under the new law. Both companies have complied with requests from the government, with Facebook recently removing a page that had to do with suicide. Both companies complied because the content violated terms of use, according to the Times. So far, however, Google has refused to comply with the initiative and last month filed a lawsuit in a Russian court, arguing that it should be allowed to keep videos on its site, regardless of the government’s issues.

So far, according to the Times, the Russian Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology, and Mass Communications, the governing body that determines what can stay and what must go, has stuck to topics that are nonpolitical in nature. Critics, however, say that political censorship could be coming.

Web censorship is certainly nothing new. Around the world, including in China and several Middle Eastern countries, censorship is commonplace. In some cases, the censorship is designed to protect a country’s ruling party. In others, the censorship is designed to “protect” users from unsavory topics across the Web. In either case, it draws the ire of organizations that believe the Web should be free and open.

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