PI Newswire

Below are the eleven most popular news stories aggregated by PI Newswire in 2011 based on traffic and page views related to law enforcement, crime, and police officers.

Can police really trace a phone call in 60 (not 59) seconds?
http://bit.ly/uIuBZH

This Is The Police: Put Down Your Camera
http://bit.ly/tys8ZJ

Phone forensics basics and best practices for police investigators
http://bit.ly/swmRLa

When cops go to jail: Ex-Police officer, convicted fellon, now private investigator
http://bit.ly/s4I2Pu

Police Moonlighting As Private Investigators: New Bill Would Limit What Police Officers Can Do When Off-Duty
http://bit.ly/vIi2hG

Police Interrogation Techniques
http://bit.ly/tIrtZE

Cop mangles police surveillance van
http://bit.ly/unQR8H

3 rookie cops face ax over nude photos on FB
http://bit.ly/vtveQE

Become a cop in cyber world
http://bit.ly/rBIQx7

ACLU: Michigan cops stealing drivers’ phone data
http://bit.ly/taKrUU

Ex-Cop Hired Women to Get Divorcing Men Drunk
http://bit.ly/seTlVc

The London Metropolitan police e-Crime unit has broken up an elaborate cybercrime ring, arresting 19 people involved in a £6 million heist from online bank accounts.

The suspects are accused of hacking into thousands of computers using malware and then stealing money from people’s online bank accounts. The attacks utilised a Zbot trojan called ZeuS, malware that was recently used to attack business social networking site LinkedIn.

ZeuS is a notorious keylogging trojan aimed primarily at stealing bank details. It is usually installed through phishing campaigns, such as on websites like Facebook, or through forced or unauthorised downloads. It has become one of the top trojans, affecting millions of computers, many of which now operate as part of the virus’ extensive botnet.

The arrests, which include 15 men and four women, were made in London after a number of houses were raided on Monday. They are being held in custody and are currently being questioned over their involvement in the cybercrime ring.

The gang are accused of operating for over three months and face charges of suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and a number of offences listed under the Computer Misuse Act.

This is not the first time people have been arrested for using the ZeuS trojan to steal money. In November of last year a couple from Manchester were arrested for the same crime, revealing how dangerous the malware is and how many hackers are currently employing it.

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This summer the issue of recording on-duty police officers has received a great deal of media attention. Camera-wielding citizens were arrested in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts under interpretations of state wiretapping laws, while others were arrested in New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Florida, and elsewhere based on vaguer charges related to obstructing or interfering with a police officer.

So far Massachusetts is the only state to explicitly uphold a conviction for recording on-duty cops, and Illinois and Massachusetts are the only states where it is clearly illegal. The Illinois law has yet to be considered by the state’s Supreme Court, while the Massachusetts law has yet to be upheld by a federal appeals court. Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler recently issued an opinion concluding that arrests for recording cops are based on a misreading of the state’s wiretapping statute, but that opinion isn’t binding on local prosecutors.

In the remaining 47 states, the law is clearer: It is generally legal to record the police, as long as you don’t physically interfere with them. You may be unfairly harassed, questioned, or even arrested, but it’s unlikely you will be charged, much less convicted. (These are general observations and should not be treated as legal advice.)

One reason this issue has heated up recently is that the democratization of technology has made it easier than ever for just about anyone to pull out a camera and quickly document an encounter with police. So what’s the best way to record cops? Here is a quick rundown of the technology that’s out there.

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NORWICH, Conn. — A man accused of kidnapping his estranged wife in May before leading police on a 50-mile chase appeared in court Wednesday on new charges.

Police said Eric Stiggle was arrested after attempting to skip bond.

Norwich officers took Stiggle into custody Tuesday night in Norwich and he is now charged with three counts of failure to appear.

“Can I say something, your honor,” he said. “I turned myself in.”

Prosecutors said he used a bogus letter to convince a bondsman to post his more than $1.3 million bail Monday. Police said the bond letter he gave the bail bondsman claiming he had hundreds of thousands of dollars came from a Norwich attorney who died earlier this year.

Stiggle’s new bond was set at $2.5 million.

“Me and my father was having dinner,” Stiggle said. “I was going to turn myself in to Norwich police. I wasn’t going to run.”

Police said Stiggle stabbed his wife, Sara DeCoster, 31, multiple times on May 30 before kidnapping her. Neighbors reported seeing a woman wrapped in a blanket tossed into a white Toyota SUV.

Stiggle crashed the car in Chatham, N.Y., during a chase that began in Holyoke, Mass. DeCoster survived.

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A suspect using a front-end loader hauled away a bank’s automated teller machine, but police said the man ran away when an officer spotted him.

The man drove up to the ATM at the Capital One bank at Ingram and Hwy. 151 on what police said was a possibly stolen front-end loader.

Investigators said the man smashed down the structure holding the ATM, scooped the machine into the tractor’s bucket and started to drive away.

But officers then showed up at the bank. They said they saw the man driving the front-end loader and the ATM out of the parking lot.

Police said their officers followed the man as he drove the loader into a weed-covered field.

But the man’s escape attempt fizzled when the loader got stuck in mud.

Police said he jumped off the loader and ran. Officers searched for the man on the ground and from the air, but could not find him.

Investigators said he left behind the stolen, but unopened, ATM.

They also suspect the front-end loader was stolen from a construction site. Investigators said no money was taken from that stolen ATM.

View Source…

NASHUA, N.H. — Nashua police are crediting an alert off-duty police officer who heard fireworks with cracking a burglary ring that targeted homes known to be empty because of Facebook postings.

Police said they recovered between $100,000 and $200,000 worth of stolen property as a result of the investigation.

Police said there were 50 home burglaries in the city in August. Investigators said the suspects used social networking sites such as Facebook to identify victims who posted online that they would not be home at a certain time.

“Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites,” said Capt. Ron Dickerson. “We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites.”

In one case, a specific type of fireworks was taken, and police were told to listen for anyone who might be lighting off fireworks in the city.

“The burglary unit advised all the officers within the department that there was a large amount of fireworks that were stolen, and if they heard any fireworks going off or come across anyone in possession of a large amount of fireworks to be suspicious and investigate,” Dickerson said.

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A British spy may have locked himself inside a sports bag and suffocated during a sex game gone wrong, newspaper reports say.

A female police officer climbed into the large bag and locked herself in from the inside during a re-enactment of the events that are believed to have led to the MI6 intelligence officer’s death, Britain’s Mail on Sunday reported.

Gareth Williams, 31, was found naked inside the $250 North Face bag in the bath in his top-floor Pimlico apartment on August 24.

Police have worked for several weeks to determine the cause of death.

Initial toxicology tests showed no traces of alcohol or drugs in Mr Williams’s system.

The results of further tests will not be known for at least a fortnight.

The latest theory is that the fitness fanatic managed to zip up the bag and padlock it from the inside for sexual kicks, the paper reported.

It is believed he might have panicked and suffocated after being unable to re-open the bag.

A key for the padlock was found next to his body, lending weight to speculation his death was an accident, the newspaper reported.

Erotic asphyxiation is defined as the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for sexual arousal.

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How far is too far?

The capacity for a police department to surreptitiously affix a GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) unit under a suspect’s car and track the hapless individual for weeks at a time without his knowledge (and without a warrant) is not only raising the hackles of human rights activists—it’s also fostering disagreements amongst judges.

Either way, the Fourth Amendment needs an overhaul in this day of high-tech, advanced technology.

I suppose there were complaints about this same thing in a bygone era, when telephones were all the rage (land phones, not cell phones) and police figured out that if they tapped into someone’s phone line, they could recover secrets and private conversations (read: evidence) they would otherwise not have access to.

But they needed a warrant for that. And a warrant for searching someone’s premises. Approaching the court and seeking permission to invade the privacy of a suspect for the purpose of an investigation—assuming the police could provide adequate grounds for the request—added a welcome buffer into the mix.

But should the police require a warrant to put a GPS tracking device under someone’s car?

The courts are divided on the differences between long-term, and short-term surveillance.

Traditionally, the Fourth Amendment is held by the courts as not covering the trailing of a suspect due to the fact individuals have no expectation of privacy for actions exposed to public view.

But in July an appeals court overturned a drug trafficking conviction because the police used a GPS tracking device, hidden under the suspect’s SUV and so affixed without a warrant, to gather the evidence used to initially convict him.

And there is a difference, said the Court, between limited surveillance and prolonged surveillance—and how that impacts an individual’s rights for their overall movements to be private.

“Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble,” wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg, in a summary of his ruling published earlier this summer in The New York Times.

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Police believe the MI6 spy found dead in a sports bag in a bath inside his flat may have died after a bizarre sex game went wrong, according to well-placed sources.

The Mail on Sunday has learned that a woman police officer climbed into the holdall in which codebreaker Gareth Williams’ naked body was found, re-enacting the events which it is thought could have led to his death.

She managed to zip up the bag and padlock it from the inside, leading investigators to conclude that Mr Williams may have done the same for sexual kicks and suffocated when he could not reopen it.

The theory was bolstered by the fact that a key to the padlock was found alongside his body inside the £150 bag.

Despite being crouched in the holdall, the police officer was able to squeeze her hand through a small gap between the padlock and the zip fastener and lock it from the inside.

Police believe Mr Williams may have gone through the same extraordinary routine, and then passed out, possibly as a result of panic when he was unable to reopen the padlock.

The identity of the officer who undertook the unusual police assignment is not known.

She was chosen partly because her petite size is similar to the slim and short frame of 31-year-old keep-fit fanatic Mr Williams.

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Hired and trained to uphold the laws of the land and protect local citizenry, there is something especially tragic when it is “the law” found to breaking the law. Such is the case in a recent trial of a 40 year-old Providence policeman that has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for the March 2007 rape of a woman.

The Boston Globe reports that Marcus Huffman has been convicted of first-degree sexual assault for the on-duty rape of his then 19 year-old victim. Huffman encountered the intoxicated female outside a bar when he offered to drive her home. Instead, Huffman took her to a local substation, raped her, and left her on the side of the road until she eventually made her way to her aunt’s house. The encounter did not end at the substation — when authorities were called, Huffman was one of the responding officers on the scene.

Superior Court Judge on the case, Netti Vogel, is quoted by the Globe: “This is something out of a horror movie. The defendant used his authority as a police officer to lure his victim, a physically helpless woman, into a police cruiser with the pretense of taking her home. He never intended to take her home. The substation was the perfect place to commit the perfect crime.” Before sentencing, Huffman gave a tearful apology to his victim. The only defense offered for his actions was that the encounter was consensual.

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A Houston Independent School District (HISD)police officer is under investigation, accused of beating a student.

Derrick White, 16, said his broken jaw and cuts were the work of an HISD police officer.

“I didn’t know if my child has trauma to his brain,” said Molica Lewis, Derrick’s mother.

Lewis said her son was on a school bus outside of Jack Yates High School on Thursday when a fight broke out.

She said HISD officer Christopher Harris, 27, tried to remove her son from the bus.

A camera was rolling when Harris confronted the teen, according to community activist Quanell X.

“The cop punched him in the face three or four times, jumps on top of him, continues punching him in the face,” Quanell X said.

“The doctor said that he’s going to have two steel plates placed in his jaw and surgical braces with screws in them,” Lewis said.

As a result of the allegations, Harris, who has been with HISD Police Department for two years, has been removed from the Yates campus.

Chief Jimmie Dodson said the video is compelling.

“There was enough information to make me suspicious that we needed to conduct an investigation,” Dodson said.

White said he wanted to play basketball for Yates’ successful program. But, his mom said he has been in trouble for fighting in the past.

She said this was not his first run-in with this officer.

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Westchester County Police along with the U.S. Secret Service have arrested a Bronx man and charged him with stealing credit card information and then using it to buy more than $100,000 worth of consumer electronics.

Officials say 31 year old James Davis of Decatur Avenue used a skimming device to steal credit card information while he was working as a waiter at the Cheesecake Factory restaurant in White Plains in late 2008.

Davis was charged with 11 counts of 4th Degree Grand Larceny, 11 counts of 3rd Degree

Unlawful Possession of Personal Identification Information, all felonies, as well as one count of Scheme to Defraud, a misdemeanor.

Police say Davis was found in possession of several small bags of cocaine when he was arrested. An addition charge of 5th Degree Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance, a felony, is pending.

Authorities say the investigation into Davis’ alleged activities began in January 2009, when the U.S. Secret Service contacted County Police about suspicious transactions involving credit card information that was stolen in Westchester. The credit card information was used to make unauthorized online purchases from Best Buy and AT&T.

Westchester County Police determined that the Westchester identity theft victims had all dined at the same restaurant in White Plains–the Cheesecake Factory.

Davis, who was a waiter at the restaurant, was identified early on as a suspect in the thefts, but resigned before the investigation was complete. Cops have been searching for him since early 2009.

Police ultimately took Davis into custody Thursday morning at a home on East 161st. Street in the Bronx.

Officials believe davis did not make the unauthorized purchases himself, but sold the information to other parties who used the numbers to buy merchandise.

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