On Q Professional Investigations

A dramatic spike in the number of Americans with permits to carry concealed weapons coincides with an equally stark drop in violent crime, according to a new study, which Second Amendment advocates say makes the case that more guns can mean safer streets.

The study by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that 11.1 million Americans now have permits to carry concealed weapons, up from 4.5 million in 2007. The 146 percent increase has come even as both murder and violent crime rates have dropped by 22 percent.

“When you allow people to carry concealed handguns, you see changes in the behavior of criminals,” said the center’s president, John R. Lott, a Fox News contributor. “Some criminals stop committing crimes, others move on to crimes in which they don’t come into contact with victims and others actually move to areas where they have less fear of being confronted by armed victims.”

Increasing gun ownership, litigation and new state laws have all contributed to the rise in concealed carry permits. In March, Illinois became the 50th state to begin issuing concealed weapons permits. But the cost and other requirements for obtaining the permits varies greatly, from South Dakota, where a permit requires $10, a background check and no training, to Illinois, where the cost of obtaining a permit comes to more than $600 when the fee and cost of training programs are taken into account.

Six states don’t require a permit for legal gun owners to conceal their weapons, and Lott notes those states have some of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation.

The real measure of the deterrent effect of concealed carry permits, according to Lott, is not laws on the books, but the percentage of a given state’s population that holds the permits. In 10 states, more than 8 percent of adults hold concealed carry permits, and all are among the states with the lowest crime rates. Lott claims his group’s analysis shows that each one percentage point increase in the adult population holding permits brings a 1.4 percent drop in the murder rate.

Read More

Scientists in Newcastle could have made one of the largest leaps forward in crime scene investigation in decades.

Experts at Arro SupraNano, which is based in the Herschel Annex of Newcastle University, has created a new test that can give detailed information about a person just from one fingerprint, in minutes.

And such is the global interest in the new technique, which could save police huge amounts of time and money, that the firm is already winning awards for its work.

“A murder case could cost between £1m and £3m, with most of that in time and legwork,” said Arro’s managing director Eamonn Cooney, who describes existing fingerprinting techniques as a “pretty hitty-missy process.”

“But with this test you can say male or female, whether they are on medication, what their lifestyle is, are they taking or distributing drugs, or if they are a terrorists. And we can tell you that within minutes of a sample reaching the lab.

“If you took 100 suspects and had each of them take the test then you could narrow it down to two or three very quickly.

“Police say it has definite applications for serious crimes – murders, sexual assaults or arson.

“And we’ve even had defence attorneys in America come and ask whether they could use it to prove their clients are innocent.”

The technology behind the new powder – which its makers claim can alone improve the clarity of fingerprints by 40% – and test was first developed by Professor Frederick Rowell at Sunderland University in 2005, with Arro SupraNano founded in 2007.

After seven years of development by the firm, which employs six people, the powder launched in January and is now being sold around the world, with the patented analytic test set to go to market in the coming months.

The company recently received the Forensics and Expert Witness E Magazine’s annual product development award.

“Fingerprinting has not changed much in many years,” said Mr Cooney. “You go to a crime scene, brush with powder, lift the print with tape, take a photo and record it on a national database. But we’ve done two new things with nano particles.

“Our powder adheres much more closely to the ridges and troughs of a fingerprint, as the particles are chemically very sticky, which is really important as for comparison you’re looking for 12 to 20 points, and prints are often smudged, but you can now see the details much more clearly and there is less background staining.

“Then we decided to take it a step further because we found there is a lot of information of the fingertip itself.

“We can test for drugs, explosives or gun residue, or other substances that police might be interested in.

Read More

Identity surveillance schemes are thriving in developing countries but could “come back to bite” the West if allowed to continue as they are, a leading privacy group has warned.

Speaking at a London conference held by European security group EEMA on Wednesday, Privacy International executive director Gus Hosein told attendees that identity schemes “from the 1990s and 2000s” are “alive and well” in countries like Kenya and Pakistan.

He argued that such systems are problematic because they contain security holes and introduce dependencies on foreign suppliers, as well as social inequality.

More worryingly, they could be used to shape global standards in time if lawmakers decide “if they’re doing it there let’s do it here”, said Hosein.

He said that Western providers had created dependencies in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where data from a $200m biometric voting system was required to be stored only in the supplier’s European HQ.

Pakistan’s ID system suffers the same potential privacy risks and dependency, with data stored in a Canadian data center, he added.

“Can we deploy an identity solution which doesn’t create these dependencies? I haven’t seen a convincing system yet,” Hosein commented. “We have to pay attention to these issues or we’ll be taking lessons from the developing world and bringing them home.”

The ideas behind the UK’s abandoned national ID card scheme travelled to India but its attempt to implement a similar program was foiled by a Supreme Court ruling there, which said the system would introduce discrimination, Hosein explained. It then ended up in Rwanda.

SIM registration is another worrisome policy, spreading from African and Mediterranean countries to south-east Asia, introducing inequality, discrimination and social exclusion, he argued.

Hosein also cautioned that whether privacy breaches of such systems are intentionally caused by hacking attacks or accidental, “security is not easy to do”.

Read More

Citing a flood of lawsuits from applicants who were denied concealed carry permits because of objections from local law enforcement that were shrouded in secrecy, the Illinois State Police announced Monday that it will require a state review board to give more information about why applications are rejected.

The amendments direct the board to notify an applicant if their application is likely to be denied, giving them an opportunity to refute the objection.

The new rules, filed Thursday as emergency amendments and distributed publicly on Monday, are already in effect, according to the state police.

Under the previous system, the seven-member Concealed Carry Licensing Review Board met behind closed doors to consider objections raised by local officials, including an individual’s arrest record or other run-ins with police that did not result in criminal convictions. If the board sustained an objection, the applicant was notified by mail that their application had been denied, without any explanation as to why. Applicants were told that their only recourse was to take the matter to court, and more than 200 denied applicants sued.

The new rules were put in place less than a week after a Tribune report detailed the issue. State police spokeswoman Monique Bond said the board and the attorney general’s office “have been working on these rules for some time.”

Under the new rules, the board is required to notify an applicant if there is a credible objection to his or her application, give the basis of the objection and identify the agency that brought it. The applicant will have 10 days to respond.

Read More

To address the recent concerns and published research regarding erroneous exclusions, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (MN BCA), in collaboration with 3M Cogent, Inc., conducted a study that led to the adoption of Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) technology in a novel “Case AFIS” application to reduce erroneous exclusions and catch more missed identifications. Using a Case AFIS approach, a process by which AFIS technologies were applied to specific cases, previously reported decisions were reviewed in this study for erroneous exclusions and missed identifications. This study shows that using the Case AFIS application would lead to more identifications and would be more efficient than the manual searching process.

Beginning in 2011, several articles were published demonstrating under various study conditions that fingerprint examiners make erroneous exclusions.1,2 In these studies they were seven times more likely to erroneously exclude than erroneously identify an individual. While the identification results were reassuring for many of our partners in the criminal justice community, in the forensic community the high number of erroneous exclusions was alarming. Within agencies, various policies were instituted to reduce the number of erroneous exclusions that may have been reported in case work. One of those policies was to review all identification and exclusion decisions. As a result more erroneous exclusions were discovered, and agencies became aware of the number of erroneous exclusions committed by their examiners. These errors usually resulted in a quality review, root cause analysis, and sometimes included removing examiners from case work while reviewing all of their previous work for a period of time. This creates costly repercussions for a laboratory as labor hours are expended while no new work is produced; it negatively effects morale and increases backlog accumulation.

As reviews of the root cause of erroneous exclusions began, a variety of contributing factors (human and latent-dependent) were proposed. Some agencies became proponents of implementing specific criteria that were required before examiners could render an exclusion decision.3 While none of these policies have been tested and validated in structured research, they may be effective at reducing erroneous exclusions by limiting the number of exclusion decisions that can be attempted. The MN BCA briefly explored these policies but ultimately abandoned them to return to the traditional practice of rendering exclusion decisions based on the examiner’s expertise. During this period, the idea that the best solution to the erroneous exclusion problem may not be to limit the examiners’ ability for rendering exclusion decisions but to provide a tool for catching erroneous exclusions by helping examiners quickly recognize similarities and more efficiently search difficult latent prints.

AFIS technology is the most obvious tool for this problem for several reasons. First, matching algorithms have significantly improved in the last decade to return matching candidates from databases with millions of individual records. If used in a case of narrowed donors to a database of known records of individuals directly related to the case—whether suspect, victim, or elimination—the results could only be improved. Second, AFIS technology can also be prompted to ignore level 1 information and focus solely on minutiae configuration. Third, it can quickly search any latent in 360 degrees in a single operation. This eliminates errors that can occur when examiners fail to properly orient the latent print, place too much reliance on a pattern type that has been distorted, or simply “miss” the corresponding similarities due to fatigue or inattention. AFIS technology offers a powerful remedy against the major contributing factors of examiner errors.

Read More

If you’re out at dinner next week, the person at the table next to you just might have a gun tucked under his or her coat. And it would be perfectly legal.

On Friday, Illinois State Police officials said they had approved 5,000 concealed carry applications. The new licenses are expected to arrive in mailboxes next week and upon receipt will allow bearers to carry guns in public.

The first round of licenses was approved weeks ahead of schedule, but those licenses represent only a fraction of the 50,000 applications state police have received since opening the process to the public in January. Officials had 90 days to process the applications, so many didn’t expect the licenses to start going out until April.

“A lot of people thought the state police was dragging their feet, but they really did a great job rolling this program out,” said state Rep. Brandon Phelps, D-Harrisburg, one of the sponsors of the concealed carry law approved by the General Assembly last summer.

The first round of licenses is being sent to security guards, firearms trainers and other residents who paid extra to be fingerprinted so they could move to the head of the line.

Valinda Rowe, spokeswoman for IllinoisCarry.com, a plaintiff in the lawsuit that forced Illinois to join all other states in allowing residents to carry firearms in public, said once people who are apprehensive about the new law get over their initial fears, life will go on as usual.

People with licenses to carry guns figure to be the ones whose lives change more, Rowe said.

“At first people will be excited,” she said of those getting licenses. “And the next moment, they will think, ‘What a responsibility.’ The excitement that we finally got it done will wane, and people will be taking their responsibility very seriously. You have to keep your mind on making sure you’re following the law and being sure you’re being safe.”

Gun carriers might initially feel a little “self-conscious,” but likely no one will know they are carrying a concealed firearm, Rowe said.

On the other side of the issue, Mark Walsh, campaign director for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, said he is not sure people will ever be comfortable with the idea of concealed carry.

“This is going to be a strange situation for people in Illinois because guns will be legal in public places, and we always thought that was bad public policy,” Walsh said. “Illinois has some of the strongest training requirements in the country, so hopefully we won’t see incidents of accidental shootings, guns being used in anger and other problems we have seen in other places.”

Of the 50,000 applications received, 300 were denied, said state police Col. Marc Maton, who heads the administrative process for the agency. An additional 800 were opposed by law enforcement officials and are still under review by an advisory board Gov. Pat Quinn appointed to review all rejected applications before making a final decision.

The approval process has been criticized by some law enforcement officials who say it will allow some violent people, including domestic abusers and those involved in gang crimes, to end up with a license to carry.

But Robinzina Bryant, chairwoman of the Concealed Carry Licensing Review Board, said the board considers each case individually.

“The board investigates those cases. We request additional information and look at the circumstances as a whole,” she said.

State police spokeswoman Monique Bond said the agency is confident that the approval process works as it should.

“We feel confident that the ISP has implemented the process with multiple layers of review that thoroughly review an applicant’s criminal history for the (prohibited violations) listed within the act,” Bond said in an email. “It is exactly how the legislature envisioned the process to work, collective law enforcement input with multiple reviews.”

She said the agency is still sorting out the logistics for applicants who are unable to apply for a license online. She said police are on track for taking paper applications by July 1.

View Source

The signs are everywhere.

The Firearms Concealed Carry Act is making its presence felt, meaning people with special permts are allowed to carry a concealed weapon in specially-designated areas.

But what does this mean for Illinois residents as a whole?

1. Permit application numbers are high

What has higher numbers: concealed-carry permits or healthcare enrollment?

According to the Chicago Tribune, about 61,000 people in Illinois signed up for new healthcare insurance plans since enrollment started in October through December. While the Illinois State police released that 23,000 people have signed up for a concealed-carry license within the first week applications became available. The number of carry permits has outpaced the number of people seeking health insurance.

Also, concealed-carry class enrollment remains strong, said Kemp Smith, a concealed-carry permit holder in 47 states, soon to be 48, and certified instructor. Smith said many instructors have full classes and are opening more and expect the numbers to stay high through the summer.

2. There are places people cannot carry

Walking through schools lately, someone might start humming the chorus from the 1970s hit “Signs” by Five Man Electrical Band. Throughout schools and other public areas “guns prohibited” signs are hanging from doors and windows.

La Salle–Peru Township High School’s board made a statement last week by adopting school policy which denied permission to carry a concealed weapon on school property. This means only an exempt group, like law enforcement, would be able to remove and carry a gun out of their vehicle. The motion is only a formality since this exemption is already in the law itself.

“There are a lot of restrictions on where people can carry guns,” Smith said.

Permit holders will not be able to carry their weapon into several public locations, including schools, government buildings, healthcare facilities, airports, sports stadiums, playgrounds andplaces which serve alcoholic beverages.

Local businesses and residents also retain the right to prohibit the carrying of a concealed weapon on private property through the use of the same sign. The free signs can be downloaded off the Illinois State Police website, ccl4illinois.com/ccw, and clicking on the sign information tab on the left. Many police stations also offer the signs.

Smith also suggested permit holders go to the state police website and print off the list of where they cannot carry a gun and keep it with them at all times. He added that just by putting a “guns prohibited” sign up will not keep a store free from gun violence since criminals will not care about the sign.

“I’m not a bad guy,” Smith said. “If I carry a gun into your store, I’m not going to do anything bad with it anyway.”

He added criminals would not be allowed to purchase a gun or apply for a permit.

Peru police chief Doug Bernabei said some local and corporate stores will place the signs f­or liability and company policy reasons, but some might do it out of “fear of the unknown.”

“Over time I feel that fear will be alleviated,” said Bernabei adding that restrictions should continue to remain at public areas like schools and government buildings.

3. Permit holders are limited

Don’t worry. The Illinois streets will not revert to the “old west.”

“It’s not the OK Corral and there aren’t going to be gun fights in the streets,” Smith said.

Smith said a concealed-carry permit holder cannot do much with their gun.

“The joke is they can only carry a gun standing in the middle of a cornfield 20 miles away from the nearest town,” said Smith. “And that’s not far from the truth.”­

The truth is that even though there are thousands of new permit holders, seeing a gun will be a rare thing. Why? The answer is in the name of the act: concealed. The weapon cannot be in the open and if it is the gun wearer will be picked up by the police for violating the law, said Bernabei. He added not to approach a person in violation of the law, but to report it and let law enforcement handle the situation.

However, in some cases a person wearing a gun underneath a jacket could be seen briefly by residents which is not a violation of the law. Smith added that in most cases people will just keep the gun in their car. Smith said personal security is the number one reason someone wants a concealed-carry permit and will use it as a deterrent to violent crimes and robberies.

Permit holders are still not allowed to draw their gun or fire it unless it can be proven it was done in self defense. After a gun is fired, a permit holder will still be arrested and charged.

“People really need to know the law at first because the state is not going to be messing around with it,” he said.

4. People getting permits go through background checks

Besides the background check already required to own a gun, a permit holder will go through another check to be approved for a concealed-carry permit.

Before receiving a five-year permit, applicants must submit a state driver’s license, Firearm Owner’s Identification card and fingerprints to the state police. A FOID card deems a person eligible to purchase firearms and ammunition. The bulk of the approval process will be handled by the state police, but other organizations will be able to help out with the process.

Illinois Department of Human Services has added new requirements to its Mental Health Reporting System to allow people to obtain a FOID card.

“The new concealed carry law broadens the scope of the Illinois FOID Mental Health Reporting System, both in terms of who must report and what information they must report,” IDHS Secretary Michelle R.B. Saddler said in a press release.

Information is collected on people who have been declared mentally disabled in court, pose a “clear and present danger” to themselves or others, have been admitted to an inpatient mental health facility within the last five years or determined to be developmentally disabled. These people can be reported by social workers, registered nurses, clinical professional counselors and marriage and family therapists.

Local police also can assist with looking at permit applicants. Bernabei said the Peru police department has an account with state police and can see who applied locally. The department can object to a permit being approved if it felt the person might cause trouble or be a danger. He said they will be offering information that the state police might not have.

“It is obviously going to be labor intense for the state police, but they did a good job of making it easy for local police,” Bernabei added.

5. Local police are trained
Bernabei said the department attended classes and training for both an overview of the law and its impact on local law enforcement.

He said the process should be seamless and not cause much trouble for local departments. Since Illinois is the last of all 50 states to pass a concealed-carry law and he has seen rollouts in other states which did not have any trouble, Bernabei feels the law will not add extra stress to the department.

“The people applying for the permits are law-abiding people. They are not a threat to law enforcement,” he added.

View Source

Residents in Orland Park, Orland Hills and Homer Glen applied in January for concealed carry permits at rates higher than most of their neighbors in Cook and Will counties, according to data obtained from the Illinois State Police.

As of the last week of January, 7,843 Cook County residents had applied for permission to carry a concealed weapon, as allowed under the state law that took effect this year. That’s a rate of about 15 people per 10,000. Orland Park, by contrast, had about 40 people per 10,000 apply for a permit, and Orland Hills had 32 applications per 10,000 residents, state police data showed.

Interest by residents in Homer Glen was even higher, with 51 concealed carry applications per 10,000 residents. The rate in Will County is about 35 per 10,000, or 2,431 applications overall.

Illinois is about one month into its new law that allows residents to carry concealed guns on a permit-only basis. Illinois was the only state that still banned concealed carry until a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the state’s ban unconstitutional in December 2012.

The new law requires 16 hours of training before residents can apply for a permit.

Interest in Homer Glen may have been buoyed by local leaders.

Will County Board member Steve Balich, R-Homer Glen, said he wrote a resolution that urged Illinois lawmakers to create a concealed carry law before they were forced to do so. Illinois lawmakers passed the new law in July 2013.

The Will County resolution, which passed on a 15-6 vote in May, was a message to state lawmakers: “We in Will County want Second Amendment rights,” Balich said.

Balich has since helped put together two concealed carry classes to help residents who want to obtain a state permit. He said about 120 people signed up for those two safety classes.

“There are a lot of people that are waiting to see what’s gonna happen,” Balich said. “I think there’s a lot of groups” putting classes together.

Balich said he applied for his concealed carry license. “I didn’t get it yet, but I applied,” he said. He plans to put together a third class in Homer Glen in late February or early March.

County Board member Ragan Freitag, R-Wilmington, attended one of the classes Balich helped assemble. She said the course focused mostly on handling the weapons and safety, and not so much on when and where to appropriately use firearms.

“They’re not promoting to go out and be offensive with this license,” Freitag said, “but to be defensive.”

Freitag, an attorney who doesn’t own a gun but says she’s looking at picking up either a 38-special or a .357 if her application is approved, said she’s looking to bring residents from her district together for a safety class similar to Balich’s.

Colleen Daley, executive director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, said the group conducted statewide polls in April and the results showed “across the board people are typically in our corner.” She said Illinois residents support the idea of measures such as universal background checks and that “the majority of people (polled) were opposed to concealed carry.”

Daley doesn’t describe the group as anti-guns, but she says she works to educate people about the potential danger and violence associated with firearms.

Four weeks after the state’s new law took effect, data showed residents had lower interest in obtaining permits in Chicago and the collar counties than in the more conservative southern counties of Illinois, which didn’t surprise Daley.

“Cook County isn’t a huge gun culture,” Daley said. “Individuals in northern Illinois have very different views than people in southern Illinois.”

Daley said her group is pushing legislators for a statewide database that would log details of every shooting.

View Source

One of the main reasons that Americans hate to fly is the Transporation Security Administration (TSA). Not only is it annoying to have to strip down at security checkpoints, submit to the occasional patdown and stand in long lines to verify our identities, but the entire system is inefficient. So what happens if we take humans off of those jobs and use machines instead? Several European airports are looking to answer that question by installing eye and face scanners, along with fingerprint readers, at security checkpoints.

Many airports’ immigration checks have used these measures, but the idea of using biometric technology at security checkpoints is still relatively new. The move would take humans out of the equation and let machines, which don’t succumb to things like getting tired on the job, take care of ID’ing flyers instead. Airline industry officials believe this automation will make air travel better, keep flyers happier and make security more efficient. And obviously, using biometrics could also save the industry a lot of money.

So how does a biometric security checkpoint work? London’s Gatwick airport, which performed a trial earlier this year, started by getting rid of boarding passes altogether. Eye scans verified fliers, allowing security cameras to identify them not only for the security checkpoint, but also for their boarding gate. Next year, London’s Heathrow airport and Amsterdown’s Airport Schiphol will start using a new baggage-screening technology that will take humans entirely out of the process. According to experts, these new machines use algorithms that are more likely to find explosives than a human.

As you can imagine, this idea of replacing man with machine isn’t going well with some. Some would argue that a machine can’t identify things like behavioral patterns and that such machines are predictable, meaning that terrorists could outwit them. Others believe this unlikely as biometrics is harder to fake than a boarding pass. The naysayers also can’t argue with the statistics: when Amsterdam Schiphol tested its facial recognition scanners, the machines were right 98 percent of the time and only allowed 1 out of 1,000 false identities through the system. No numbers are available for similar human statistics, but these numbers are impressive.

More than likely, though, no TSA jobs will be lost when these systems go live in U.S. airports. Industry officials expect that using biometrics at security checkpoints will free up TSA agents to focus their time and abilities on watching for suspicious behaviors. Needless to say, these new measures will speed up getting through airport security, and that makes this technology, along with faster carry on luggage screeners, a very good thing.

View Source

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has a sobering new report finding identity theft cost Americans $10 billion more last year than all other property crimes measured by the National Crime Victimization Survey.

While identity theft cost Americans $24.7 billion in 2012, losses for household burglary, motor vehicle theft, and property theft totaled just $14 billion.

The BJS report measures both direct and indirect losses tied to identity theft. Direct losses, the majority of the $24.7 billion, consisted of the money thieves got by misusing a victim’s personal info or account information. Indirect losses included other costs associated with identity theft — like legal fees and bounced checks.

The BJS’s last report on identity theft, for the year 2010, measured just direct losses and put them at $13.1 billion. While that report didn’t measure indirect losses, a separate research firm called Javelin Strategy and Research found this year that identity thefts are indeed on the rise.

Here are some key points from the BJS report:

85% of theft incidents involved the fraudulent use of existing accounts, rather than the use of somebody’s name to open a new account.

People whose names were used to open new accounts were more likely to experience financial hardship, emotional distress, and even problems with their relationships, than people whose existing accounts were manipulated.

Half of identity theft victims lost $100 or more.

Americans who were in households making $75,000 or more were more likely to experience identity theft than lower-income households.

While the majority of victims spent a day or less resolving the issue, identity theft can also be a drawn-out nightmare. A dramatic instance of ID theft occurred after a man named David B. Dahlstrom lost his wallet in Utah back in 1985. For the next 17 years, a German immigrant named Yorck A. Rogge masqueraded as Dahlstrom, The New York Times in 2007.

The real Dahlstrom was denied a credit card and even received an insurance claim for an accident he had nothing to do with.

In more recent years, identity thieves have begun targeting smartphone users and people who use social media and aren’t cautious about that use, experts told Reuters in 2012.

Javelin Strategy & Research found that year that someone whose information is revealed as part of an online data breach becomes 9.5 times more likely to have their identity stolen.

View Source