Enforcement Agencies

LOS ANGELES -- California Attorney General Bill Lockyer released statewide statistics yesterday on 1998 hate crimes before announcing the creation of an advisory commission and a new strategy to combat the problem.Lockyer was flanked by politicians, law enforcement and civil rights leaders as he spoke at a news conference at the city's Museum of Tolerance."Whether hatemongers use gun violence, arson or other illegal means to spread their poison, we in law enforcement and communities throughout California must respond swiftly and make it clear that such behavior will not be tolerated," Lockyer said.

Sick K-9 dog elicits concernOn the evening news recently was a report of a dog that is a member of the Anne Arundel County canine corps. This 8-year-old highly decorated shepherd has been in service for 7 years. He is working now because the cancer he has is in remission due to chemotherapy he is receiving.These animals work side by side with an officer in the field. They apprehend the bad guys. They find lost children. They locate cadavers. They search for drugs and explosives. Look what they are doing in Turkey at this moment.

THE GRUESOME fixation on, and fear of, Andrew Cunanan is mercifully ended. He is no longer the Scarlet Pimpernel who may show up in fiendishly brilliant disguise anywhere. He has not misled pursuers with brilliantly scattered false clues. He is not -- or is no longer -- following a hit list of wealthy homosexual men who may have befriended or offended him. Neither is he any longer a menace to the random stranger, target of convenience, who might be in his way or possess a car he covets. All that is over.

Municipal police officers may go outside town limits when backing up other law enforcement agencies on nonemergency calls -- if the municipal governments authorize such a mutual aid policy, the state attorney general's office said.Betty Stemley Sconion, an assistant attorney general who is the principal counsel to the Maryland State Police, said state law clearly permits mutual aid between police agencies in nonemergency situations -- even under oral agreements like those between some Carroll towns and neighboring law enforcement agencies.

Two law enforcement agencies became a little richer yesterday.U.S. Marshal George K. McKinney presented the Maryland State Police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration with a check for $254,163.96. The money represents the proceeds from several drug investigations carried out in the state last year.Under forfeiture laws, prosecutors can seize cash, cars, boats, houses and other items used in the course of drug trafficking operations. The goods are sold and the proceeds distributed to law enforcement agencies in the region.

Criminals can run, but surging computer technology -- including digitized color mug shots -- is making it ever harder for them to hide.Before the turn of the century, electronic packages containing the color photos, fingerprints, detailed physical description and criminal history "rap sheet" will be available to law enforcement agencies everywhere.People may not even have to go to the post office to check out the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" -- in a few years they may be on the Internet, available on home computers.

Police departments in Aberdeen and Bel Air will be hiring an additional officer each for community patrol with federal grants announced last week by Democratic U.S. Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Paul S. Sarbanes.The grants are available through the COPS FAST program, authorized by the $8.8 billion federal crime bill recently passed by Congress.The program will add 59 new officers throughout the state, the senators said in a statement released from Ms. Mikulski's headquarters.Aberdeen police will receive about $50,500 and the Bel Air department about $70,000.

WASHINGTON -- The White House is pressing for legislation to force telephone and cable television companies to install computer software on their networks that would enable law enforcement agencies to eavesdrop on phone calls and computer transmissions, Clinton administration officials said yesterday.The move, intended to preserve the law enforcement agencies' ability to conduct court-authorized wiretaps, is intended to overcome the difficulty of intercepting telephone conversations and other electronic transmissions in the on-off pulses of digital computer code, which is being used increasingly for everyday communications.

Representatives of Anne Arundel County's two law enforcement agencies -- the Police Department and the sheriff's office -- have signed an agreement that defines their roles when their duties overlap.The guidelines laid out in the memorandum of understanding have been observed informally for some time, but were made official with yesterday's signing."The big winners of this agreement will be the citizens of Anne Arundel County," Sheriff Robert G. Pepersack Sr. said in a written statement. "They will receive more efficient law enforcement services for their tax dollars."

Local law enforcement agencies from Western Maryland to the Eastern Shore said yesterday that they have no policies prohibiting the hiring of homosexuals.Neither does the FBI, according to a bureau spokesperson in Washington.On Tuesday, a 25-year-old woman filed suit against the Maryland State Police, claiming she was prevented from becoming a trooper solely because she is a lesbian.The woman alleges in the suit that she was never told of a state police policy against hiring homosexuals until she inquired why her application was rejected.

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy. These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

WASHINGTON -- The account, buried in a mountain of documents assembled for a congressional investigation, describes a decidedly local yet brutal crime: a Navajo man charged with beating his girlfriend nearly to death and then hanging her by a rope outside their Arizona trailer home to make the attack look like a suicide attempt. The incident has none of the political intrigue of the other cases, mainly dealing with government corruption or voter fraud, before lawmakers as they examine the circumstances surrounding the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

A growing problem for our nation's law enforcement community is the "cop crunch" that is leaving police departments across the country understaffed. The solution to this growing crisis is for Congress to reconstitute the Law Enforcement Education Program to attract qualified men and women to the field. From coast to coast, it is estimated that 80 percent of the nation's 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies have vacancies they cannot fill. The Los Angeles Police Department has more than 700 vacancies, and in March, New York City announced plans to hire 800 more officers.

As Maryland Transportation Authority officer Verlon Morrow drove an unmarked Pontiac yesterday on Interstate 95 just north of Baltimore, about a half-dozen cars zoomed past, doing at least 80 mph. On this stretch of highway, Morrow says, he finds an almost unlimited array of aggressive drivers. "Look how close these people are to each other," he said. "They teach you not to do that in Driving 101." Morrow is among the police officers from Maryland and beyond who are set to participate in a crackdown on aggressive driving.

Pakistan is striving to stop terrorists The suggestion in the article "U.S. military data for sale in Bagram" (April 13) that there are contacts between Pakistan's military and the militants in Afghanistan is totally incorrect. Indeed, it is as a result of the wholehearted efforts of Pakistan's intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hundreds of al-Qaida activists have been apprehended and deported from Pakistan, with many of them killed. The anti-terrorism campaign has met with considerable success inside Pakistan, and we have arrested some of al-Qaida's top leaders.

A team of assessors from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies Inc. will visit the Howard County Police Department this month to examine its policies, procedures, management, operations and support services. Members of the community are invited to offer comments at a public information session to be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Ellicott Room of the George Howard Building, 3430 Court House Drive, Ellicott City. The assessment team is made up of members of law enforcement agencies in other states.

The National Security Agency used law enforcement agencies, including the Baltimore Police Department, to track members of a city anti-war group as they prepared for protests outside the sprawling Fort Meade facility, internal NSA documents show. The target of the clandestine surveillance was the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, a group loosely affiliated with the local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee, whose members include many veteran city peace activists with a history of nonviolent civil disobedience.

The city Police Department's aggressive strategies led to a record number of arrests in August, surpassing the previous record set in July, according to figures released yesterday by the city state's attorney's office. Prosecutors reviewed 8,964 arrests in August, nearly 1,300 more than in the preceding month, and declined to prosecute 2,961 cases, about 33 percent, the figures showed. Arrests - most of them made by city police and some by other law enforcement agencies - decreased last month.

The Carroll County Sheriff's Department asked the county commissioners yesterday to fund its effort to become a nationally accredited law enforcement agency within a year. The department won recognition 15 months ago from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, the first step in the process that traditionally leads to stronger crime prevention and control as well as improvements in management practices, confidence among residents and interagency cooperation, according to the commission.

The Carroll County Sheriff's Department asked the county commissioners yesterday to fund its effort to become a nationally accredited law enforcement agency within a year. The department won recognition 15 months ago from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, the first step in the process that traditionally leads to stronger crime prevention and control as well as improvements in management practices, confidence among residents and interagency cooperation, according to the commission.