911 – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Mistrial Declared In Bribery Trial Of AT&T Executive
from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept
I’ve covered telecom giants like AT&T for most of an adult life. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the company all but owns most state legislatures, who are happy to pass no limit of terrible, anti-consumer, anti-competitive legislation in exchange for a nice vacation trip or campaign contribution.
AT&T lawyers and executives are usually smart enough to avoid leaving any sort of paper trail, bribing officials within the pathetic confines of our existing, really flimsy lobbying and campaign finance laws. But in 2022, AT&T was hit with a $22 million fine for just outright bribing former state Rep. Edward Acevedo and his colleague, Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.
AT&T was trying to secure legislation that would free the company from having to maintain or repair traditional copper-based (and heavily taxpayer subsidized) phone and DSL service, often still in active use by the poor and elderly. AT&T’s been going state to state, with mixed results, trying to convince state politicians that it shouldn’t have to maintain the copper-based networks taxpayers paid handsomely for and still, in many parts of the country, help connect folks to 911 services.
AT&T used a lobbying firm as an intermediary to pay Acevedo $22,500 over nine months. That resulted in the indictment of Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza. But the attempted prosecution of La Schiazza was declared a mistrial last week in Illinois, after prosecutors failed to convince just one of twelve jurors hearing the case that bribery had occurred. La Schiazza’s attorneys were very happy about it:
“Defense attorney Tinos Diamantatos mocked the prosecutors’ case in his closing argument Tuesday, referring to the feds’ “dark and stormy night”interpretation of evidence and at one point calling his client “Mr. Unethical Bribester.” The reality, he said, is that there is no evidence that La Schiazza exchanged Acevedo’s money for AT&T’s legislative success.”
Prosecutors say they had ample email evidence bribery occurred (you can peruse the complaint and case details here). The complaint notes that Acevedo was paid “for supposed consulting services” but clearly “did no work in return for the payments.” The bribes are clearly bribes, but in email correspondence was often couched in the kind of rhetoric that leaves things open to interpretation. If you’re an imbecile.
If you recall, AT&T also was caught in a scandal paying Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen $600k to gain inside access to the former President.
Madigan, meanwhile, is facing his own broader trial on various corruption allegations.
In just the last decade or so AT&T has been fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families; fined $105 million for helping “crammers” rip off their customers; and fined $60 million for lying to customers about the definition of “unlimited” data. It’s also been accused of ripping off U.S. schools for decades, something I’ve yet to see properly investigated.
Usually AT&T cleverly skirts around the limits of our fairly weak lobbying laws, and when they are caught, routinely manages to reduce or avoid fines entirely. Here we have one of the most obvious bribery cases in years showcasing how AT&T literally purchases favorable state legislation, yet it’s still somehow a steep uphill climb toward anything even vaguely resembling accountability or justice.
Filed Under: 911, accountability, bribery, carrier of last resort, corruption, dsl, edward acevedo, paul la schiazza, phone, telecom
Companies: at&t
AT&T Has To Settle Over Another 911 Outage, This Time For $950k
from the oh-sorry-were-you-expecting-that-to-work? dept
Fri, Aug 30th 2024 05:27am - Karl Bode
As a “trusted ally” in the government’s vast and unaccountable domestic surveillance programs, AT&T receives oodles of government favors. From broad and often mindless deregulation and massive deployment subsidies to $42 billion in tax breaks in exchange for doing absolutely nothing, the U.S. government adores slathering its patriotic partner with cash.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that the company can’t do basic things properly, like keep the nation’s wireless callers connected to essential 911 emergency services.
Last February, a massive outage knocked AT&T wireless services offline for large swaths of the country, blocking more than 25,000 911 calls from being completed. Then the same thing happened in April, when a massive outage caused connectivity issues across South Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas. Now AT&T’s been fined $950,000 by the FCC for yet another 911 outage, this one from last April:
The FCC today announced a $950,000 settlement with AT&T to resolve an Enforcement Bureau investigation into whether the company violated FCC rules by failing to deliver 911 calls to, and failing to timely notify, 911 call centers in connection with an outage AT&T experienced on August 22, 2023, in parts of Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin.
AT&T, for what it’s worth, enjoys revenues of around $34 billion each quarter. This outage last year was apparently caused by an independent contractor that “inadvertently disabled a portion of the network” during unscheduled testing that didn’t adhere to existing protocols.
Keep in mind these outages are happening simultaneously with a series of hacks that have compromised the data of more than 73 million of its customers. And it comes as the company’s lobbyists work tirelessly to dismantle both federal and state oversight of telecom giants, including a recent Supreme Court Chevron decision that could ultimately destroy FCC oversight almost entirely.
At some point perhaps somebody in U.S. policy circles might be able to connect the mindless coddling of an unpopular, taxpayer money-slathered monopoly with the consistent sag in performance and network quality, but it may take another several decades of ugly hacks, financial fraud, consumer harms, or consistent 911 outages before somebody with a backbone and a brain connects the dots.
Filed Under: 911, deregulation, fcc, outage, telecom, wireless
Companies: at&t
Colorado Legislators Kill Off Police Accountability Bill That Would Have Deterred Cop-On-Cop Violence
from the going-back-to-the-same-old-bullshit dept
This didn’t go the way anyone (other than cops and their unions) wanted it to, but first let’s acknowledge the fact that the city of Denver is actually trying to make things better for both cops and the people they serve.
Here’s how that’s going:
In its first three months, STAR handled 350 calls — only a very small percentage of 911 calls. But the immediate developments appeared positive. A supposed indecent exposure call handled by STAR turned out to be a homeless woman changing clothes in an alley. A trespassing call turned out to be another homeless person setting up a tent near some homes. Suicidal persons were helped and taken to care centers. Homeless residents were taken to shelters. No one was arrested. No one was beaten, tased, or shot.
The zero arrests streak continues. STAR has released its six-month report [PDF] and the calls it has handled have yet to result in an arrest, strongly suggesting police officers aren’t the best personnel to handle crises like these — unless the desired result is more people in holding cells.
Denver decided to try what (far too few) other cities are trying: routing mental health/social services calls to professionals in those fields, rather than hand them off to police officers. And for good reason! Police officers aren’t trained to handle these sorts of issues. That lack of training tends to result in arrests, violence, and even the killing of people police have been asked to help.
Denver’s STAR (Support Team Assistance Response) has been able to handle many calls normally routed to cops without deploying cop tactics: you know, the command-and-control aggression that often manages to make these situations worse, if not actually deadly for those requiring mental health assistance.
So, there’s that. A limited test has shown consistently good results, which should be all the argument Denver legislators need to provide funding to expand STAR assistance to a round-the-clock effort.
But that’s just Denver. Even though it’s the state’s most populous city, its success story has been overlooked by state legislators who apparently feel the best thing for cops is the same lack of accountability they’ve enjoyed for years.
Legislators had a chance to impose greater accountability, but decided to go the other way, as Marissa Ventrelli reports for the Denver Gazette.
A bill that would have required law enforcement agencies to investigate all allegations of officer misconduct died in the House last week following significant revisions.
Sponsors said the measure would increase protections for officers who report alleged misconduct by their peers. Critics, notably law enforcement agencies and organizations, argued the sponsors did not include them in discussions for such an important measure.
Under House Bill 1460 as introduced, the failure to investigate reports of misconduct would have constituted workplace discrimination, for which civil action may be initiated.
The bill’s origin story is one of cop-on-cop harassment. Former Edgewater police officer McKinzie Rees helped craft the bill after being sexually assaulted twice by a fellow officer. Reporting it to supervisors did nothing but force Rees to resign, along with being placed on the state’s Brady list, ensuring she’d never be used as a witness in court, no matter what law enforcement agency employed her.
But it had obvious benefits for regular people, too. It strengthened whistleblower protections for cops reporting on other cops, but also would have benefited citizens who’ve filed complaints by forcing law enforcement agencies to instigate investigations, rather than just ignore the complaints of the policed.
The main opposition was none other than the state’s largest police union. Police unions routinely oppose efforts that might result in more scrutiny of officers. In this case, though, the union opposed any additional scrutiny being applied to cops who attacked, harassed, or sexually assaulted other cops.
The Fraternal Order of Police requested sponsors withdraw the bill and to instead convene a working group during the interim to discuss a multitude of issues related to whistleblowing, such as officer obligation to report misconduct, due process for officers facing allegations by whistleblowers, and protections for the whistleblowers themselves.
“We hope that you will accept this offer to engage in research and dialogue over the summer and fall so that all interested parties can feel assured that any future legislation on these topics in the upcoming session is founded in fact, necessity, and effective collaboration,” the group said.
This makes it clear police unions are there to protect the worst cops — the ones willing to cross the “thin blue line” to harm other police officers. While everyone expects cops to treat citizens like punching bags and doormats, the “thin blue line” illusion is supposed to trick everyone into believing cops stand together united against evil. But if it’s internal evil, the police union wants nothing to do with any efforts to root it out. That’s just fucking disgusting.
And that’s how a bill dies, with the approval of people who think cops shouldn’t be scrutinized — much less punished — for any misconduct they commit, even if the targets of their wrongdoing are their fellow officers. These are the words of a legislator who seems more willing to provide gratis car washes for officers’ personal cars than serve any member of his constituency that can’t be bothered to get a badge-wearing job.
Rep. Ryan Armagost, R-Berthoud, a former law enforcement officer and member of the committee that heard the bill, said he was “offended” that law enforcement agencies had not been involved in discussions about the bill to the extent they wanted to be.
Here’s an idea, Rep. Armagost: fuck ’em. If these agencies want to be involved, they’re sure to be involved. All this statement means is this rep is offended someone didn’t ask the kind of cops he likes (which would be the kind that sexually assault fellow officers) what kind of legislation they wanted and instead tried to right some wrongs by offering the state’s sexual assault victims (well… at least those in uniform) some form of protection, redress, and deterrence.
And it was state reps like Armagost who got what they wanted by stripping the bill of anything meaningful and parking it on blocks out in the front yard. For those of you who still think there’s nothing partisan about full-throated support of the worst cops this nation employs, please re-read the second quoted paragraph until the truth sinks in.
By the time the bill reached the floor for its third and final reading, all of its major provisions had been amended out, save for the creation of a working group.
Ultimately, the bill died, 31-33. All of the Republicans, except Soper, voted in opposition, though it’s possible he would’ve asked for a recount and switched his vote if the bill had passed.
To add insult to the injuries suffered by former officer McKinzie Rees, the union added this statement after the bill was carved up by bootlickers and left to die on the House floor:
“We appreciate that the majority of House members shared our concerns about the need for a robust stakeholder process before passing legislation of this importance. Ensuring law enforcement employees have due process protection and a safe and healthy work environment are serious, complex issues that warrant responsible and thoughtful solutions.”
It pretty much makes you want to vomit. The union cheered on “due process” and “a safe and healthy work environment.” But it really doesn’t care much about the first (the bill only required an investigation to be opened, which means plenty of due process was still available to officers) and obviously gives zero shits about the latter, since it means officers attacked/assaulted by other officers will continue to be frozen out by the worst in their ranks and expected to leave the force, rather than see their grievances adequately addressed by the government agencies that hired them.
Filed Under: 911, colorado, police violence, social services, star
ProPublica Exposes Even More Cop Junk Science: Using 911 Calls To Determine If People Are Lying
from the let's-play-pretend-but-with-people's-lives dept
Cops like science. Not in the way that say, scientists like science. They just like science-y sounding mumbo jumbo that paves the way for criminal convictions.
And, sure, maybe you’re thinking this only applies to backwoods agencies that prefer to use a combination of Aunt Cleo and questionable testimony to lock people up. But it’s not just low-tech, underfunded departments with few investigative options. It’s also the DOJ and the FBI, both of which have continued to support forensic junk science despite admitting the science isn’t solid and that their “expert” witnesses have routinely misrepresented the accuracy of their findings.
Anybody who claims they can tell someone is lying or is otherwise suspicious just by watching or talking to them for a few minutes is lying to themselves, if not to jurors and judges. Claimed characteristics of suspected criminals overlap common human behavior so much that the Venn diagram is a single circle. A successful cop guess isn’t something that should be backdated as “behavioral detection.” Winning on a roll of the dice does happen. That it happens isn’t the result of anything the dice roller did.
And yet, cops continue to pay for the opportunity (with tax dollars obv) to be talked into believing their instincts are not only correct, but backed by actual science. The market for preaching to the converted — as well as those willing to convert — is immense. Cops who think they can actually distinguish one pair of mass-produced jeans from another pair simply by staring at low-quality CCTV footage are pretty much willing to believe anything. And they’re willing to use tax dollars to pretend their wild ass guesses are backed by science.
More junk science is upon us, wielded by people with the power to end lives and deprive people of their freedom. This latest report comes to us from ProPublica, which uncovered certain law enforcement agencies’ reliance on speculative fiction (i.e. “forensic science”) to convert writing samples pulled from statements to police into admissible evidence — despite there being no evidence (IRONY!) this was any more accurate than tossing coins to determine guilt.
If you think looking at people’s written statements is a stupid way to determine whether someone’s lying, just wait for this one. According to this ProPublica report by Brett Murphy, one person (and his law enforcement students) are convinced they can establish guilt by cherry-picking words and phrases from 911 calls.
Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. “I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like,” he once said.
Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.
Welcome to Premiseville, USA, where all the points are made up and actual science doesn’t matter! [APPLAUSE SIGN flickers, arrested for “furtive movements”]
[Waits for applause to die down] Well, it looks like we have a disqualification. [scattered boos]
So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.
Well, to quote Socrates: “Duh.” This ain’t science. This is someone tying a divining rod to their AMC Pacer before driving past the crime scene. The only difference is that cops didn’t yell at Deputy Police Chief Tracy Harpster for disturbing the integrity of the crime scene. Far from it. Cops — including some federal cops — appear to believe he’s the second coming of Columbo, capable of hearing guilt in phone calls made by extremely stressed people suffering through the worst days of their lives.
Being distraught is just evidence of wrongdoing, said Harpster. Despite not actually collecting any confessions via 911 calls, Harpster pressed forward with his behavioral observation theory. And despite collecting zero support from any behavioral scientists, law enforcement began to buy in. And prosecutors who value collecting wins over actual justice offered their support.
In 2016, Missouri prosecutor Leah Askey wrote Harpster an effusive email, bluntly detailing how she skirted legal rules to exploit his methods against unwitting defendants.
“Of course this line of research is not ‘recognized’ as a science in our state,” Askey wrote, explaining that she had sidestepped hearings that would have been required to assess the method’s legitimacy. She said she disguised 911 call analysis in court by “getting creative … without calling it ‘science.’”
The ends (even if completely wrong) justify the means. The means are wrong, too, but it’s the ends, baby! Locking people up! That’s what we do. Who needs evidence when you have a deputy police chief and his ridiculous assertions about 911 calls?
This prosecutor already had a wrongful conviction on her record, thanks to her reliance on Harpster’s unreliable narration. But having a conviction overturned and her “expert” 911 call testimony tossed didn’t deter her. She took this loss and turned it into a win, glossing over the overturning while providing a blurb for Harpster’s book and marketing materials.
Harpster continues to claim he’s just doing Law Enforcement God’s Work in his promotional materials, claiming that he can tell whether or not a 911 caller is a murderer. He also claims he has “personally consulted” in 1,500 homicide investigations. Perhaps his definition of “consulting” includes unreturned phone calls. Very few agencies are willing to admit they’ve used Harpster’s 911 tea leaves to secure convictions.
ProPublica recounts — thanks to public records requests and law enforcement sources — Harpster’s unlikely rise to a position of junk science prominence. Harpster may currently be a deputy police chief, but there’s nothing on his record that suggests he was ever anything more than an average cop. He worked for years serving a small Ohio town of 6,500. His commendations have little to do with law enforcement work. Instead, they show he was a decent human being capable of volunteering time to help the less fortunate.
That’s a good thing. More cops need to do more for their communities. But somehow, despite his lack of investigative experience or track record in closing difficult cases, Harpster became an “expert” in sussing out criminal intent via 911 calls. It all appears to have started with Harpster’s attendance of classes held by the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. In 2004, a regular cop named Harpster entered. Ten weeks later, he perceived himself as some sort of super-cop.
After he left the FBI Academy that winter, Harpster enrolled at the University of Cincinnati to pursue a graduate degree in criminal justice. For his master’s thesis, he collected 100 recordings of 911 calls — half of the callers had been found guilty of something and the other half hadn’t. Harpster believed he could analyze these calls for clues. In his thesis’ acknowledgments, he said he wouldn’t have started the project without Adams, “the best teacher I’ve ever had.”
Based on patterns he heard in the tapes, Harpster said he was able to identify certain indicators that correlated with guilt and others with innocence. For instance, “Huh?” in response to a dispatcher’s question is an indicator of guilt in Harpster’s system. So is an isolated “please.” He identified 20 such indicators and then counted how often they appeared in his sample of guilty calls.
That’s what Harpster said. He attempted to publish a study on his dubious findings with an FBI behavioral scientist (John Jarvis). It never happened, which means it was never peer-reviewed. The unpublished, unvetted work, however, gained traction in the law enforcement community. The party at fault? The FBI, which sent out the unpublished, unverified quasi-study as part of a law enforcement bulletin in 2008. The FBI never noted the study had not been published or vetted.
Cops assumed that if the FBI had linked to it, the study must be valid. A sheriff’s department utilized the minimal information to arrest a widow for the murder of her husband, claiming her use of the words “blood,” “somebody,” and “I’m sorry” during her 911 call indicated she had killed her spouse. The prosecutor secured a conviction using this report from the sheriff’s department — one based on an unpublished study by some dude who once attended FBI classes.
While it’s easy to point fingers at Harpster and his Midwestern, small-town under-qualifications as a forensic 911 phone call examiner, a whole lot of blame rests with the FBI, which apparently hasn’t met a junk science it doesn’t like.
For more than 12 years, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency helped 911 call analysis grow unabated. FBI officials at a charity fundraiser have even auctioned a copy of the book Harpster and Adams wrote about it.
After twelve years of treating Harpster’s unproven assumptions as actual science, the FBI finally decided to apply a bit of the old scientific method. What it discovered was that Harpster’s 911 call theories were unscientific garbage — something it could have easily ascertained more than a decade ago.
[The FBI] ended up warning against using that research to bring actual cases. The indicators were so inconsistent, the experts said, that some went “in the opposite direction of what was previously found.”
This fall, a separate group of FBI experts in the same unit tested Harpster’s model, this time in missing child cases. Again, their findings contradicted his, so much so that they said applying 911 call analysis in real life “may exacerbate bias.”
The FBI, with its billions in funding, arrived with too little far too late. Damage has already been done. Prosecutors and cops relying on this so-called “evidence” were unlikely to reexamine cases based on 911 call evidence. The FBI, meanwhile, has never bothered to do anything more than suggest more research is needed. No one from the agency has contacted Harpster to tell him the stuff he peddles to cop shops isn’t worth the paper local copy shops are charging him to produce brochures.
The last thing the FBI said publicly about Harpster’s voodoo logic continues to help cops lock up possibly innocent people.
Days after the arrest, he sent an email to Harpster, thanking him for analyzing Benning’s 911 calls. “It significantly helped our district attorney to realize the indicators of guilt in the phone calls,” Gibbons wrote, “as well as suggestions on how to introduce the 911 calls to the jury during trial.” He alluded to other forensic experts but said Harpster’s consultation was “instrumental in swaying the prosecutor to file charges.”
[The Santa Ana PD detective] said he didn’t just find out about Harpster by chance: The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit recommended him. Gibbons’ email came two years after the bureau’s own experts in that same division first publicly warned law enforcement not to use 911 call analysis in actual cases.
Harpster has no scientific leg to stand on. And that’s according to the FBI, which has long given junk science and faux scientists a long leash. Yet, Harpster continues to stand sturdily on his remaining pseudoscientific, hunch-abetting leg. He’s a tireless contributor to law enforcement investigations… even though he does not possess a single qualification that would make him worthy of law enforcement time, funds, or attention.
Harpster makes himself available day and night to take phone calls from police and prosecutors looking to validate a hunch or strategize for trial. He once hosted a former student from Florida at his lakeside vacation house in Michigan, where he claimed on his Facebook page that they “solved a murder.” Last year, a detective called him for input while standing over someone’s body at a crime scene.
Police often email him 911 tapes for consultations — men and women wailing on the phone as they plead with the dispatcher to save a loved one. Sometimes it’s a parent holding a dead child. In one case, Harpster listened to an Ohio mother’s desperate call for help and then wrote back, simply, “Call me. … DIRTY!!!!” The mother was not charged.
Keep this uncomfortable (for several reasons) fact in mind: violations of constitutional rights are crimes. That most may be handled in civil cases does not mean illegally convicting or incarcerating people isn’t criminal activity. If Harpster was showing people how to avoid law enforcement attention while distributing drugs, he’d be rung up on RICO charges. But somehow aiding and abetting law enforcement in violating rights isn’t considered worthy of criminal conspiracy charges, even if the end result is plenty of illegal activity by cops and prosecutors.
How does no one in law enforcement question testimonials like this these?
A police chief in Michigan said Harpster’s class paid off immediately after a man called 911 and said he had just found his mother and sister dead. “He made the mistake of saying ‘I need help,’” the chief explained.
What the actual fuck. A police chief claiming someone saying “I need help” while accessing the ne plus ultra of help lines is evidence of criminal intent should be greeted with riotous laughter. Instead, it’s just another feather in the cap of a guy who thinks he can hear lies through crackling phone lines during incidents nearly every private citizen is ill-equipped to handle.
Read the whole report. It will make you want to carve your spleen out and convert it into zealous defense lawyers and firebombs. Cops don’t care. Prosecutors don’t care. Some random dude attended some courses at the FBI and wandered out of them with a headful of bad ideas. And these bad ideas were propagated by the FBI, which only realized its error more than a decade later. At that point it was too late. The damage was done. And, with a decade of full support for some random cop and his “I can hear lies” theories, the FBI’s carelessness continues to do damage. Cops take the FBI’s word as gospel, even when it’s clearly horseshit. The only thing a cop trusts is another cop. So, when cops are wrong, cops will be the last to believe it. And while they come around to the uncomfortable truth, people’s lives will be ruined.
Filed Under: 911, fbi, junk science, lie detector, tracy harpster
New York City Shifting Mental Health Calls From NYPD To Actual Mental Health Professionals
from the keeping-more-people-alive-is-always-a-net-positive dept
In all honesty, we’ve been asking the police to do too much for years. If we really care about the most vulnerable members of our community, we would stop calling cops to handle it. But for years, that’s been pretty much our only option. We call 911 and 911 tends to send cops to deal with people in the throes of mental health crises.
This has worked out badly. Cops aren’t trained to handle mental health issues. They’re trained to apprehend criminals and meet latent threats with deadly force. People who just need a good doctor are ending up with bullets in them. In far too many cases, suicide threats end with the suicidal person dead. That’s not what we want from the police. Unfortunately, that’s all they really have to offer. And that’s how courts end up excusing cops for, say, tasing a person doused in gasoline, ensuring the latent threat they poised became a reality, killing the person needing help, and burning down the house around him.
Cities are beginning to take another approach to mental health issues. Wellness checks are better handled by mental health professionals. It’s a conclusion that seems obvious but is rarely embraced by law enforcement and the local governments overseeing them. There’s a time and place for law enforcement response. Someone suffering from mental health issues isn’t a police matter. Neither is homelessness. Neither is bog standard trespassing, which often just means someone saw someone where they didn’t expect to see someone.
Routing these calls to people trained to respond appropriately works. A pilot program in Denver, Colorado just wrapped up six months of rerouting, resulting in no deaths, no wounding, and no arrests, despite handling more than 350 calls. Police still handle most 911 calls, but even in a part-time capacity, Denver’s new mental health response team has shown an improvement over how these calls have been handled historically.
And now it appears the largest police department in the nation will be handing off mental health calls to mental health professionals. The NYPD will no longer be handling some calls related to issues that really don’t require a show of force in response. The program was first announced late last year in response to the killing of Daniel Prude — a man suffering a mental breakdown — by Rochester, New York police officers.
Mental health workers will replace police officers in responding to some 911 calls next year in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.
The test program, to be rolled out in two neighborhoods, will give mental health professionals the lead role when someone calls 911 because a family member is in crisis, officials said.
The initiative is modeled on existing programs in cities including Eugene, Oregon, where teams of paramedics and crisis workers have been responding to mental health 911 calls for more than 30 years.
The limited rollout is now expanding to cover one of New York City’s largest boroughs.
New York City police will stay out of many mental health crisis calls and social workers will respond instead in parts of northern Manhattan starting this spring, an official told lawmakers Monday.
The test program will begin in three Harlem and East Harlem police precincts that together accounted for a highest-in-the-city total of over 7,400 mental health-related 911 calls last year, said Susan Herman, who heads a wide-ranging city mental health initiative called ThriveNYC.
The program will continue to expand for the next couple of years. NYPD officers will no longer be expected to handle certain calls and will be able to ask for assistance from this unit if a call they respond to requires their assistance.
Officers will still respond to calls involving weapons or “imminent risk of harm.” This leeway should keep mental health professionals out of harm’s way. But it will also increase the risk that mental health crises will see force — rather than knowledge and de-escalation — deployed in response to certain 911 calls.
Still, it’s a positive step. The NYPD — and its union reps — have been uninterested in seeing EMTs and healthcare professionals insert themselves into this part of the law enforcement equation. And the stats show the NYPD hasn’t been as awful at handling health issues as some other police departments elsewhere in the nation. Fewer than 1 in 100 calls resulted in arrest. However, half of those calls ended with hospitalization. This could be a positive. Hospitalization is often the desired outcome in mental health crises. But the stats cited in this report do not break down hospitalizations to show which are due to injuries sustained during arrests/detainments and which were due to appropriate responses to mental health issues.
But overall this appears to be a positive step forward. It has worked elsewhere in the nation so there’s no reason to believe this won’t be a net gain for New York City residents. Cops don’t have all the answers. And they certainly don’t have all the training needed to handle problems better addressed by healthcare professionals. Anything that removes these judgment calls from the equation will help more New Yorkers stay alive and unharmed when suffering mental health issues.
Filed Under: 911, mental health, nyc, nypd, police
Mental Health Team Handling 911 Calls In Denver Wraps Up Six Months With Dozens Of People Helped, Zero People Arrested
from the more-people-alive,-unbeaten,-and-unjailed dept
In June of last year — as protests over police brutality occurred all over the nation — Denver, Colorado rolled out a program that combined common sense with a slight “defunding” of its police department. It decided calls that might be better handled by social workers and mental health professionals should be handled by… social workers and mental health professionals.
The city’s STAR (Support Team Assistance Response) team was given the power to handle 911 calls that didn’t appear to deal with criminal issues. Calls related to mental health or social issues were routed to STAR, allowing cops to handle actual crime and allowing people in crisis to avoid having to deal with people who tend to treat every problem like a crime problem.
In its first three months, STAR handled 350 calls — only a very small percentage of 911 calls. But the immediate developments appeared positive. A supposed indecent exposure call handled by STAR turned out to be a homeless woman changing clothes in an alley. A trespassing call turned out to be another homeless person setting up a tent near some homes. Suicidal persons were helped and taken to care centers. Homeless residents were taken to shelters. No one was arrested. No one was beaten, tased, or shot.
The zero arrests streak continues. STAR has released its six-month report [PDF] and the calls it has handled have yet to result in an arrest, strongly suggesting police officers aren’t the best personnel to handle crises like these — unless the desired result is more people in holding cells.
Granted, this is a very limited data set. At this point, STAR only has enough funding to support one van to handle calls during normal business hours: Monday-Friday from 10 am to 6 pm. Despite these limitations, the team handled 748 calls (about six calls per shift). Roughly a third of the calls handled came from police officers themselves, who requested STAR respond to an incident/call.
Not only did none of the 748 calls result in an arrest, but STAR got things under control faster than law enforcement officers.
The median STAR response required 24.65 minutes of on-scene personnel time to resolve the call compared to 34.08 minutes for a traditional response.
And things should continue to improve once STAR is given a bit more funding to work with.
The City and County of Denver has identified approximately $1.4 million in the general fund to support the STAR program in 2021. If we use the current budget estimates for the cost of purchasing and outfitting additional vans and hiring additional medics and mental health clinicians to staff the expanded units, we believe the City could move forward with the purchase of four vans and six teams (one medic and one clinician) to staff alternating schedules seven days a week. This will allow for coverage during the times of day when there would be the call load to support the units based on our pilot data and the hours with which most providers would be available for a warm hand-off of individuals.
This is a positive move forward for Denver and it’s something that can scale and be replicated by other cities. One of STAR’s goals was to “divert individuals away from the criminal justice system” and it has definitely accomplished that. Not every 911 call requires a law enforcement response. It makes the most sense to send people with the best set of skills to handle these calls, rather than the people who just have the most weapons.
Filed Under: 911, defund the police, denver, mental health, police brutality, police reform
Denver Now Routing 911 Calls About Mental Health Issues Away From Cops, Towards Trained Health Professionals
from the saving-lives-by-limiting-state-violence dept
Sending out armed law enforcement officers to handle mental health crises has often been a bad idea. Situations that require compassion, de-escalation, and nuance are far too often greeted with force, more force, and deadly force. Since there’s always “excited delirium” to excuse the deaths caused by officers ill-equipped to deal with mental health issues, very little has changed. Until now.
Recently, there has been a nationwide uprising against police brutality and the senseless killing of unarmed citizens by law enforcement officers. Legislators are actively pursuing reform efforts and finally suggesting some things cops just aren’t trained to do well should be handled by others who can handle them better. Some police officials believe this is “defunding.” But it isn’t. It’s just taking money being used badly and rerouting it to programs and personnel who are specifically trained to work with people suffering from mental health issues.
A lot of city lawmakers are talking about shifting resources away from the “guys with guns” approach that has seen a great many people in need of health intervention “assisted” to death by police officers. The city of Denver is actually doing something about it. Denver’s Support Team Assistance Response (STAR) — launched four days after George Floyd-related protests began in Denver — sends out health professionals and paramedics to respond to 911 calls about people behaving erratically.
Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, [Carleigh] Sailon said.
This limits the number of interactions involving weapons with the power to maim or kill. This makes it a program that saves lives — not only because the STAR team gets people the help they need, but because it prevents situations from escalating to the point where jailing or force deployment (or both) seem to be the only options. This new task force is all that much more important since so many Denver residents appear to feel 911 is just a city customer service line.
The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.
The STAR team only handles a small percentage of the city’s 911 calls. Most are still handled by law enforcement. But it does free up police resources to handle situations requiring their presence, rather than asking under-trained officers to handle everything residents ask them to handle because they don’t know who else to ask.
Police are always talking about working smarter. But they rarely seem to recognize their own shortcomings could be addressed by others who won’t take an approach that ends in death, arrest, or injury. They should embrace programs like these that allow them to pursue actual criminals, rather than treating people who are victims of mental illness, homelessness, or suicidal thoughts like criminals because that’s how they’re trained to treat everyone.
Filed Under: 911, denver, mental health
New York Residents Unprotected, Served Up To Criminals By NYPD Employees
from the YEAH-BUT-WE'RE-THE-ONLY-GAME-IN-TOWN dept
Yeah, it’s real easy to sit back and second guess the hard work of law enforcement officers. Secure and safe in our warm homes, far away from the mean streets and thin blue line separating us from the criminal apocalypse, we have it easy. As one of the NYPD’s unions pointed out, citizens like us are clueless. We’ve (and I’m directly quoting here) “grown up on the nipple of what’s easy.” We “have no clue what a NYPD officer does,” and yet we criticize and disparage them.
Then one day — after years of criticism and disparagement and [re-reads tweet] nipples — we’ll find we need them. “Evil will be at our door,” as the NYC PBA says. When that happens, we cop-haters will call for help. We will finally recognize we need them. After all, when all hell breaks loose, who else is going to respond to our calls for help and… um… sell our personal info to insurance scam artists?
Six current and former NYPD employees, which included one cop and five 911 operators, were arrested by the feds as authorities smashed a massive $18 million New York insurance fraud operation, the Daily News learned Thursday.
Police Officer Yaniris Deleon was taken into custody in Manhattan while on duty Wednesday after federal agents surrounded her with assault weapons drawn, sources with knowledge of the case said.
[…]
Deleon, five 911 operators and a supervising 911 operator allegedly provided the medical insurance scammers with names, phone numbers and confidential information about car accident victims. The runners then reached out to the victims and steered them toward clinics that would bill medical insurance companies for treatments and procedures they didn’t need.
This is fantastic news for first responders and New York’s Finest. Not so much because it makes some “bad apples™” look bad, but because it shows them there’s a faster route to extra cash than timecard abuse.
If you give people in power access to a lot of personal info, they will abuse this access eventually. It’s not an “if.” It’s a “when.” Not everyone will abuse this access as much as these government employees did, but a wealth of personal data just a couple of clicks away is a very tempting target. Especially when it can significantly boost the income of the underappreciated heroes keeping the city safe.
According to this report, these employees made about 4,000amonthfromfeedingpersonalinfotoscamartists.Italsosaysoperatorswerepromisedabout4,000 a month from feeding personal info to scam artists. It also says operators were promised about 4,000amonthfromfeedingpersonalinfotoscamartists.Italsosaysoperatorswerepromisedabout24-30,000 “off the books” for continued supply of contact info, so it’s unclear how much any of the arrested employees actually made assisting scammers. However, this selling of personal data allegedly dates back to 2014.
But the officer and 911 operators were only making pennies on the dollar. The middle men were making themselves millionaires.
The scammers received about 3,000areferraltoattorneysandshadydoctors,accordingtocourtpapers.Thegroupmadeabout6,000successfulreferralsoverthelastfiveyears,nettingabout3,000 a referral to attorneys and shady doctors, according to court papers. The group made about 6,000 successful referrals over the last five years, netting about 3,000areferraltoattorneysandshadydoctors,accordingtocourtpapers.Thegroupmadeabout6,000successfulreferralsoverthelastfiveyears,nettingabout18 million, officials said.
The names, addresses and contact numbers for about 60,000 car accident victims were steered to the scam artists over the last five years, officials said.
Oh my. This is going to lead to a whole lot of litigation. Government employees misusing their power and access to serve up citizens to scam artists is the sort of abuse that can’t be handled solely through prosecution. The government may go after the involved employees and everyone on the non-government side who benefited from this arrangement, but plenty of residents are going to be legitimately pissed that the government they were told to trust sent them off to undergo unnecessary medical procedures.
Maybe this set of prosecutions will act as a deterrent. Or maybe it will just be seen as the exception to the rule, and abuse of access will continue at its normal pace. Whatever the result, at least more citizens will be aware how much damage the government can do with all the information it demands we relinquish in exchange for government goods and services.
And they’ll see how much of this “thin blue line” crap is self-righteous bullshit. The blue line doesn’t stand between civilians and evil. It stands between cops and accountability. Because if anyone took accountability seriously, this sort of thing would be far rarer than it is. It only becomes common when few people are worried about the potential downsides of abusing their positions. And when it’s common practice, that’s when people start getting caught.
Filed Under: 911, fraud, insurance, medical fraud, medical insurance fraud, ny, nypd, scams
Wireless Carriers Busted Sharing User 911 Location Data
from the bottomless-well-of-dysfunction dept
Fri, Feb 8th 2019 06:26am - Karl Bode
Recent scandals involving companies like Securus and LocationSmart made it clear that cellular carriers are collecting and selling an ocean of user location data without any meaningful oversight. Several reports have highlighted how that data is then being routinely abused by everybody from ethically dubious local Sheriffs to bounty hunters. Subsequent investigations have shown how easy it is for bounty hunters and others to access this data, and how the FCC under several administrations has failed utterly to hold cellular carriers and data brokers accountable for any of it.
This week, Motherboard exposed another location data scandal with a report highlighting how cellular carriers are also selling private user A-GPS data with companies that aren’t supposed to have access to it. A-GPS, or assisted GPS, involves using a device’s onboard GPS chip as well as cellular network data to more quickly and precisely determine a user’s location. Wireless industry filings with the government indicate this data can pinpoint a user’s location indoors up to 50 meters; more precisely if a device’s MAC and Bluetooth data are also utilized.
Motherboard’s investigation focused specifically on a now-defunct location data broker by the name of CerCareOne, which had been selling cellular user location data — including A-GPS data– as recently as 2017. As with the other scandals, this scandal involves a universe of shady middlemen who buy and sell an ocean of such data, often without carriers understanding (or bothering to understand) how widespread the practice had become:
“Like with the companies involved in Motherboard?s previous investigation, CerCareOne?s real-time location data trickled down first from telecom companies, and then to a so-called location aggregator called Locaid. From there, Locaid sold that data access to a number of different companies, including CerCareOne, which in turn sold it to its own clients. Locaid was purchased by a company called LocationSmart in 2015 . The documents Motherboard obtained indicate that LocationSmart continued to sell data to CerCareOne after it obtained Locaid, and LocationSmart confirmed that to Motherboard.”
The scale of the data collection was… not subtle:
“CerCareOne?s phone tracking service was not a one-off tool for bounty hunters and bail agents. A list of a particular customer?s phone pings obtained by Motherboard stretches on for around 450 pages, with more than 18,000 individual phone location requests in just over a year of activity. The bail bonds firm that initiated the pings did not respond to questions asking whether they obtained consent for locating the phones, or what the pings were for.
Another set of data is more than 250 pages long and covers around 10,000 phone pings. Another list of a different bounty hunter?s activity includes nearly 1,000 phone location requests in less than a year; a third details more than 4,500 pings.”
The irony in this instance is that the FCC had crafted rules to specifically address this problem. Back in 2015 as the FCC was contemplating some new rules for enhanced 911 services, a coalition of privacy and consumer groups (including Public Knowledge, the EFF, and the ACLU) had written the agency warning that A-GPS and other granular data specifically used to aid in pinpointing 911 caller location (especially indoors) created the potential for some major privacy issues:
“The development of highly-precise location technologies designed to comply with the new regulations will raise a host of privacy concerns that have not been sufficiently addressed in the E911 proceeding. Public safety should not come at the expense of consumer privacy?nor should it have to.”
The FCC obliged, and in 2017 finalized rules with carrier approval that specifically stated that this kind of A-GPS data should never be used for any purpose other than tracking user location for emergency services:
“CMRS providers must certify that they will not use the NEAD or associated data for any non-911 purpose, except as otherwise required by law.”
Many carriers claim to have completely stopped sharing this and other forms of location data entirely with data brokers or anybody else. But it’s going to take a comprehensive investigation to not only confirm that, but also to confirm that they’re not currently engaging in even worse behavior. Especially since every time we think we’ve gotten to the bottom of this scandal, the floor drops out revealing countless additional layers beneath.
Even with Ajit Pai’s efforts to neuter FCC authority over ISPs, I’ve spoken to at least four telecom and privacy experts who say the FCC very clearly has the authority and responsibility to stop this sharing of private data, they’ve just chosen not to — despite the fact the agency had the foresight to craft rules specifically designed to stop this from happening.
Filed Under: 911, a-gps, bounty hunters, e-911, enforcement, fcc, location data, privacy
Companies: cercareone
Texas Deputy Sues 911 Caller For Not 'Adequately Warning' Him Of Potential Danger Or 'Making The Premises Safe'
from the so,-you-want-to-get-paid-for-investigating-only-'safe'-situations? dept
A very unique lawsuit being filed by a Texas sheriff’s deputy has the chance to set a very chilling precedent if the court finds in favor of the plaintiff. In the history of ridiculous personal injury lawsuits, this one sets a new standard. Sure, we’ve seen criminals sue homeowners for injuries sustained during burglaries and customers sue businesses for their own failure to recognize that traditionally hot liquids are hot [a false equivalent as pointed out by many, many commenters — my bad {TC}], but this is a brand new angle.
Here are the details on this recently-filed lawsuit.
A Houston-area deputy has sued the family of a man he fatally shot following a 911 call last year, alleging he and others who responded were not properly warned about the danger they faced.
In a lawsuit filed this week, Harris County sheriff’s Deputy Brady Pullen is seeking up to $200,000 from Carmina Figueroa, a relative of Kemal Yazar, for injuries he suffered, including a concussion and a broken nose…
Figueroa “had a duty to exercise ordinary care in adequately (warning) others that her resident or guest Kamal Yazar posed a violent threat to others due to his ingestion or smoking of ‘bath salts’ or some other mind altering substance, and to make the premises safe,” according to the lawsuit.
Pullen is seeking damages for past and future medical expenses, mental anguish and loss of past earning capacity.
Yes, a deputy is suing the family of a man he killed because he escaped the presumably deadly situation with a concussion and broken nose. Notably, other responding officers have decided not to file suit — perhaps because they sustained no injuries, or perhaps because doing so would be incredibly stupid.
Two things that should be noted:
First, Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia admits the lawsuit is “unusual” but is taking a hands-off approach to Pullen’s legal battle. But more interesting than that is that the shooting itself is still “under investigation” despite occurring nearly 8 months ago on December 30, 2012. Apparently, Pullen and others involved have been on “paid administrative leave” since that point.
Second, and more pertinent to the case at hand, Pullen’s own filing claims that he was called to the scene by EMS responders, which would place the liability for an “improper warning” on the EMS unit, not the homeowner. The first responders should have been able to convey any warning about the potential danger of the situation, and from Pullen’s own words, they actually did.
On information and belief, someone at Defendant Figueroa’s residence placed a “911” call on December 30, 2012, and requested that an ambulance be sent to Defendant’s residence to treat Kemal Yazar who had been either smoking or ingesting a drug commonly called “bath salts” or some other mind altering substance for days. At some point in time, prior to calling EMS, because of Kemal Yazar’s state of mind, Defendant decided to evacuate the children from the home for safety reasons. Plaintiff, a Harris County Deputy Sheriff, was dispatched to Defendant’s residence to assist EMS with an “aggressive or non compliant person“.
It certainly isn’t the 911 caller’s duty to provide the officer with all the details he or she will need to assess the situation. They aren’t trained professionals who can provide an accurate assessment of the danger level. 911 callers are often in danger themselves, something that often prevents them from going into detail.
More bizarrely, Pullen claims 911 callers have a “duty” to “make the premises safe.” If for no other reason, the lawsuit should be tossed because of this claim. What does Deputy Pullen think the emergency phone number is for? Reporting jaywalking and check fraud? The logic Pullen’s deploying absolutely boggles the mind.
And even if you buy all of Pullen’s ridiculous arguments, the fact remains that the defendant didn’t call him to the scene. The EMS unit did and that’s where the “liability” should lay.
Beyond that, there’s the fact that law enforcement officers know that every situation they walk into is potentially dangerous, as Sheriff Garcia himself points out.
“As trained public servants, our presumption when receiving and responding to emergency calls is that there is an element of danger present. As public servants, it is our duty to respond to those calls as quickly as possible,” Garcia said.
Attorney Joel Androphy says this lawsuit is highly problematic for citizens who find themselves in dangerous situations.
He adds, “if you allow suits like this to go forward, it will have a chilling effect on all people that want to make 9-1-1 calls because they will be afraid if something happens to the police officer”.
Valerie Salvati points out how far a suit like this would extend liability:
It would also raise the question of if an officer gets hurt on your property if you didn’t call them for help. Should a homeowner be responsible for the injuries of someone he didn’t want there in the first place? What if the homeowner isn’t aware of the extent of the danger in a given situation? It would seem more appropriate for this to be handled by workers compensation than in suing the homeowner.
Another attorney is even harsher in his assessment of Pullen’s case:
Criminal Attorney Brian Wice calls the lawsuit “a slap in the face to first responders everywhere.”
“Look, police officers know everyday, everywhere they go, they could be in a dangerous situation, so this guy is going to try step out and collect money for taking that risk,” said Wice.
Holding individuals responsible for the actions of other adults has always been a terrible idea. Pursuing a personal injury lawsuit against someone else simply because the person who actually injured you is dead is a new low bar for vindictive pettiness. Doing this as a law enforcement officer whose job expectations include the possibility of being injured or killed — and as someone who was warned the situation would be dangerous — sets the bar so low its indistiguishable from the ground.