Sheriff's Dept. accused of purposely not providing air support
L.A. County Sheriff's Department examines whether calls for aircraft to respond went unanswered so it would look like funding cuts were threatening public safety. Wasteful spending is also alleged.
By Robert Faturechi
Los Angeles Times
March 17, 2012
Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators are probing allegations that supervisors from the department's Aero division purposely delayed responding to calls for emergency air support.
At least one former Aero Bureau supervisor has publicly made accusations of impropriety. In a lawsuit filed against the county, Lt. Edison Cook said deputies were instructed by their supervisors to "slow down on service calls in order to miss calls for service." One sheriff's supervisor, Cook said, instructed other supervisors to complete their quota of required special shifts during the day, not the night, when most calls for service go out.
On one occasion, the three-decade veteran said, he drew criticism from his captain when, during one shift, he assigned an aircraft to a deputy without one: "We don't want to field too many ships because then it would look like we could get along without overtime."
During the period of the alleged manipulation, Sheriff Lee Baca was regularly alerting the Board of Supervisors, which controls his budget, to the negative consequences of funding cuts, often including a detailed accounting of calls for service that the Aero Bureau had to miss.
In his lawsuit, Cook quotes a 2010 email from an Aero Bureau sergeant: "If we go short and calls are missed we need to record the missed calls and provide our executives with the proper records so they can fight the fight."
Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said the allegations of misconduct are being thoroughly investigated.
He also said the department has completed a separate internal criminal investigation into allegations that Aero Bureau officials had improper relationships with contractors. Whitmore said that probe found no wrongdoing, though the results won't be presented to prosecutors until next week.
"When all is said and done," he said, "we are confident that the department will be cleared of any wrongdoing."
Elizabeth M. Kessel, an attorney representing the county in the lawsuit, described Cook in a statement as "a disgruntled former employee. This litigation will show that his allegations are meritless, based on gossip and innuendo."
Cook said he began noticing problems soon after he was transferred from his post as a unit commander on Catalina Island to the Aero Bureau in 2009.
His lawsuit alleges that in May 2010 he learned that some deputies and sergeants were getting more overtime than others.
Cook, now retired, also alleges that division supervisors were making use of the department's air fleet when commercial flights would have been significantly cheaper. One county aircraft, he said, "was used as the personal aircraft" by some officials when attending out-of-state meetings.
In his lawsuit, he claims he took his concerns about the wasteful spending to his chief, telling him "the department will have problems if the Los Angeles Times found out."
Cook also alleged that the Board of Supervisors was misled into believing that a project to outfit helicopters would cost $12 million more than needed. He said sheriff's officials also made a contract so narrow in scope that only one avionics company could compete.
He claims he was retaliated against as a result of his complaints, and eventually received a "punitive transfer" out of Aero Bureau to a post at a sheriff's jail.
Whitmore confirmed that department investigators are probing allegations that Aero Bureau officials improperly used county aircraft.
The accusation of financial irregularities in business with contractors was referred to the county auditor, which he said found no impropriety, Whitmore added. He quoted the audit, which was not provided to The Times, stating that the dealings "followed county standards for competitive solicitation."
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Washington State officials hid evidence that might have saved Joash Powell's sons
Powell had 'incestuous' images on his computer, police say
February 10, 2012
Associated Press
Before Josh Powell was going to try to win back custody of his children last week, Washington state authorities received materials from Utah police that had been discovered on a computer in Powell's home two years ago. Authorities say the images depicted "incestuous" sex and were disconcerting enough that they prompted a psychologist to recommend that Powell undergo an intensive psychosexual evaluation.
But a lawyer for Powell's in-laws, who had custody of the boys, wasn't invited to see the materials before the custody hearing - even though a Utah judge had specified in a sealed court order that he was one of the few people allowed to see them.
Had he seen the images, attorney Steve Downing said, he might have asked the court to change the terms of Powell's supervised visitation with the boys, such as by asking for the visits to be in a public place. Instead, Downing said he didn't learn until Thursday morning - four days after Powell killed himself and the boys in a house fire - that he was allowed to see them.
"That would have absolutely given me the opportunity to submit a declaration about our deep concern. I was approved ... to view those pictures and I was never notified," Downing said. "I could have gone into all the reasons why the visitation could have or should have been restricted."
Pierce County Sheriff's Detective Ed Troyer told The Associated Press on Thursday night that the images collected by investigators from Powell's home computer in Utah two years ago were realistic computer-generated depictions of "incestuous" parent-child relations.
"It's family-oriented in nature," Troyer said. "It is incestuous."
Troyer said the images couldn't be legally defined as pornography because they don't involve real people. Troyer said the judge in last week's custody hearing was apprised of the images at the proceeding.
Powell was the only person of interest in the disappearance of his wife, Susan Powell, from their home in West Valley City, Utah, in 2009. He was never arrested or charged in the case, and a month after she vanished, he moved with his boys back to his father Steve's home in Puyallup, Wash., south of Seattle.
Last year, authorities searched Steve Powell's home, computer and cars for evidence in Susan Powell's disappearance - and instead said they found thousands of voyeuristic pictures and videos, including child pornography recorded by Steve Powell. The state took custody of the boys and turned them over to Susan's parents, Chuck and Judy Cox.
Josh Powell repeatedly tried to regain custody of the boys. At one point late last year, he underwent a court-ordered psychological evaluation. The psychologist held off on finalizing his report for some time, anticipating that he would be able to review materials that West Valley City police had discovered on Josh Powell's computer, said Washington state assistant attorney general John Long, who represented the state in the custody case.
But as the Feb. 1 custody hearing neared, the materials hadn't arrived from Utah, Long said. It wasn't until after the psychologist finalized the report that the materials arrived at the Pierce County Sheriff's Department. When the psychologist saw them, he added an addendum to his report recommending the psychosexual evaluation of Josh Powell - an exam that can include a polygraph as well as more intrusive measures to determine the body's response to child pornography or other stimuli.
On Jan. 30, the sheriff's office arranged a viewing of the materials, said Sherry Hill, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social and Health Services.
Among the attendees were Long and a Child Protective Services social worker. Downing said he wasn't notified of the viewing. Long confirmed Downing had been listed as one of those allowed to see the images. However, Downing was not technically a party to the Feb. 1 hearing, which was between Powell and the state, so there was no rush to make sure Downing saw the materials beforehand.
Josh Powell's attorney, Jeffrey Bassett, also did not attend. He said in an email Thursday that there had been some "miscommunication," and he didn't learn about the viewing until after the fact. He wasn't able to immediately schedule another viewing.
Two days later, Pierce County Superior Court Judge Kathryn Nelson heard arguments from Josh Powell seeking to regain custody of his children. Long opposed that, noting only that "concerning" images from his computer had been provided by the police in Utah.
After considering Long's arguments and the recommendation for the psychosexual evaluation, Nelson denied Powell's request. She said she wouldn't consider granting Powell custody unless he underwent the exam. She didn't make any changes in the visitation schedule, which allowed Powell to see his boys, 5 and 7, at his house twice a week while supervised by a social worker.
On Sunday, the social worker brought the boys to see their dad at his rental home outside Puyallup. After the boys rushed inside, he slammed the door in her face, locking her out. He attacked the boys with a hatchet, then torched the home in a gas-fueled inferno.
Chuck Cox, Susan Powell's father, said the images were just another indicator of problems with Josh Powell. Cox said he did not know the details of the images. He believed the kids should have been fully taken away from Powell long ago and that they raised concerns about allowing him continued contact.
"How much does it take for them to figure out that he should not have the children?" he said. "It's just wrong. They needed to be taken out of that environment."
February 10, 2012
Associated Press
Before Josh Powell was going to try to win back custody of his children last week, Washington state authorities received materials from Utah police that had been discovered on a computer in Powell's home two years ago. Authorities say the images depicted "incestuous" sex and were disconcerting enough that they prompted a psychologist to recommend that Powell undergo an intensive psychosexual evaluation.
But a lawyer for Powell's in-laws, who had custody of the boys, wasn't invited to see the materials before the custody hearing - even though a Utah judge had specified in a sealed court order that he was one of the few people allowed to see them.
Had he seen the images, attorney Steve Downing said, he might have asked the court to change the terms of Powell's supervised visitation with the boys, such as by asking for the visits to be in a public place. Instead, Downing said he didn't learn until Thursday morning - four days after Powell killed himself and the boys in a house fire - that he was allowed to see them.
"That would have absolutely given me the opportunity to submit a declaration about our deep concern. I was approved ... to view those pictures and I was never notified," Downing said. "I could have gone into all the reasons why the visitation could have or should have been restricted."
Pierce County Sheriff's Detective Ed Troyer told The Associated Press on Thursday night that the images collected by investigators from Powell's home computer in Utah two years ago were realistic computer-generated depictions of "incestuous" parent-child relations.
"It's family-oriented in nature," Troyer said. "It is incestuous."
Troyer said the images couldn't be legally defined as pornography because they don't involve real people. Troyer said the judge in last week's custody hearing was apprised of the images at the proceeding.
Powell was the only person of interest in the disappearance of his wife, Susan Powell, from their home in West Valley City, Utah, in 2009. He was never arrested or charged in the case, and a month after she vanished, he moved with his boys back to his father Steve's home in Puyallup, Wash., south of Seattle.
Last year, authorities searched Steve Powell's home, computer and cars for evidence in Susan Powell's disappearance - and instead said they found thousands of voyeuristic pictures and videos, including child pornography recorded by Steve Powell. The state took custody of the boys and turned them over to Susan's parents, Chuck and Judy Cox.
Josh Powell repeatedly tried to regain custody of the boys. At one point late last year, he underwent a court-ordered psychological evaluation. The psychologist held off on finalizing his report for some time, anticipating that he would be able to review materials that West Valley City police had discovered on Josh Powell's computer, said Washington state assistant attorney general John Long, who represented the state in the custody case.
But as the Feb. 1 custody hearing neared, the materials hadn't arrived from Utah, Long said. It wasn't until after the psychologist finalized the report that the materials arrived at the Pierce County Sheriff's Department. When the psychologist saw them, he added an addendum to his report recommending the psychosexual evaluation of Josh Powell - an exam that can include a polygraph as well as more intrusive measures to determine the body's response to child pornography or other stimuli.
On Jan. 30, the sheriff's office arranged a viewing of the materials, said Sherry Hill, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social and Health Services.
Among the attendees were Long and a Child Protective Services social worker. Downing said he wasn't notified of the viewing. Long confirmed Downing had been listed as one of those allowed to see the images. However, Downing was not technically a party to the Feb. 1 hearing, which was between Powell and the state, so there was no rush to make sure Downing saw the materials beforehand.
Josh Powell's attorney, Jeffrey Bassett, also did not attend. He said in an email Thursday that there had been some "miscommunication," and he didn't learn about the viewing until after the fact. He wasn't able to immediately schedule another viewing.
Two days later, Pierce County Superior Court Judge Kathryn Nelson heard arguments from Josh Powell seeking to regain custody of his children. Long opposed that, noting only that "concerning" images from his computer had been provided by the police in Utah.
After considering Long's arguments and the recommendation for the psychosexual evaluation, Nelson denied Powell's request. She said she wouldn't consider granting Powell custody unless he underwent the exam. She didn't make any changes in the visitation schedule, which allowed Powell to see his boys, 5 and 7, at his house twice a week while supervised by a social worker.
On Sunday, the social worker brought the boys to see their dad at his rental home outside Puyallup. After the boys rushed inside, he slammed the door in her face, locking her out. He attacked the boys with a hatchet, then torched the home in a gas-fueled inferno.
Chuck Cox, Susan Powell's father, said the images were just another indicator of problems with Josh Powell. Cox said he did not know the details of the images. He believed the kids should have been fully taken away from Powell long ago and that they raised concerns about allowing him continued contact.
"How much does it take for them to figure out that he should not have the children?" he said. "It's just wrong. They needed to be taken out of that environment."
Friday, January 06, 2012
Intelius and the Dubious Art of “Post-Transaction Marketing
Intelius and the Dubious Art of “Post-Transaction Marketing”
A checkered success during the dot-com bubble, Naveen Jain has come charging back with a new venture—and the complaints are rolling in.
Nina Shapiro
Seattle Weekly
Mar 18 2009
It all started when Scott Bolsins found a lost schnauzer roaming around his suburban Dallas neighborhood. The dog's collar listed a cell-phone number, but when Bolsins called, no one answered. Bolsins, who once had a business selling homemade dog bones over the Internet, was perturbed. "I can't keep this dog, and I sure don't want to take him to the pound," he thought. So he went online to do a reverse lookup of the phone number in order to find the associated address.
He went to the Web site of the Bellevue company Intelius, which sells personal information obtained from public records and marketing databases, including addresses attached to cell-phone numbers. He plugged in the number, gave his credit card number to pay the small fee, and received an address in Grapevine, a neighboring city. He then delivered the schnauzer to its teary owners, who had thought their beloved pet was dead. "They're happy. We feel good. Everything's great," Bolsins recalls in a soft Texas drawl.
"Next thing I know," he continues, "I start getting these charges." Two of them, for $19.95 apiece, showed up on sequential credit-card bills beside unfamiliar names: "Privacy Matters" and "PMIdentity." Bolsins went back to the Web to investigate, and found one phone number for both names. He says he called and was told that he'd signed up for a "service" on the Intelius site. What service, and how did he sign up? It was never clear to Bolsins. All he knows is that Intelius forwarded his credit-card information to another company that ran this "service."
He got the charges reversed, but cancelled his credit card anyway to avoid any more mysterious charges. He then filed a complaint about Intelius with Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna. Almost a year later, Bolsins—himself experienced at running an online business—still seethes about what he considers a blatant "scam."
The word comes up a lot in 121 complaints, filed with McKenna's office, against Intelius, many of which detail the same kind of thing that happened to Bolsins. Even during a time when his office is getting more consumer gripes than it has in years, McKenna says, "That's a lot of complaints about one company." Intelius has drawn even more—822 to date—at the Better Business Bureau. On the BBB site, the company is currently listed as unrated, due to "one or more serious complaints" that the bureau has not yet had time to assess.
Partly because of concerns about Intelius, McKenna requested legislation this session aimed at stopping what he calls "deceptive" Internet marketing—although the resulting bills didn't succeed in getting scheduled for a vote by last Thursday's deadline. It's the second time McKenna has gone to the legislature in an attempt to curb the company's practices.
Last year, Intelius started a service in which you could input a name and for a fee receive that person's cell-phone number. (Intelius declined to tell the Weekly where it gets all that information.) In response, McKenna pushed through a billthat prohibits companies from selling people's cell-phone numbers without their permission. Faced with negative publicity, Intelius eliminated the service before the law took effect last June. The law, however, does not require people's consent to include their cell numbers in reverse directories, which Intelius continues to offer. One reason for the exception is to allow people to identify phone stalkers, the AG says.
The company's troubles don't stop with state regulators. In 2006, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation of Intelius for possible violation of laws regulating how credit information is disseminated. FTC spokesperson Mitch Katz says the investigation is ongoing. Intelius has also become enmeshed in litigation over fractious business relationships, and has provoked the ire of numerous people who feel the company has violated their privacy or simply provided bad information.
In the process, Intelius has become a nexus of all the appeal—and the dangers—of Internet commerce. It provides easy desktop access to information that previously might have required visits to courthouses and state government offices. But some of its practices have reinforced people's worst fears about handing over their credit-card information online. And the sometimes-questionable accuracy of its data has heightened anxieties about the ready accessibility of personal data on the Web.
Founded in 2003, Intelius employs close to 200 people. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year in preparation for a public stock offering, Intelius said it had revenue of $88 million and a profit of $11 million in 2007. (Amazon.com, in comparison, was still losing money four years after its launch, though it had nearly twice as much revenue.) The company's site was the 111th most-visited in January, according to Media Metrix. Its success has also been fueled over the years by an array of shifting partnerships, including ones with giants Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, all of which at one time used Intelius to provide directory searches on their own sites. Yahoo still does, as well as AT&T, Switchboard.com, and many others.
"I'm amazed," says Jon Staenberg, a Seattle venture capitalist. Staenberg was an early investor in InfoSpace, the previous start-up of Intelius founder and CEO Naveen Jain. "If the numbers are what Jain says they are, he's been able to build another large company," says Staenberg (who has not put money into Intelius). "Not many entrepreneurs can do that twice."
Remember, you still haven't gotten access to the information you paid for. To get it, you have two choices: Click on the big orange rectangle, off to the side of all these instructions, that says "YES, and show my report," or click on the small black one-line link that says "No, show my report." The YES button is what gets you monthly ValueMax fees.
Intelius also uses this technique to peddle Adaptive's identity-theft program, Privacy Matters. Last May, the business news site TechCrunch wrote a scathing pieceabout the practice. Intelius pitches its own identity-theft service as well, which purports to monitor public documents and consumer databases for suspicious activity.
The founder and CEO of Intelius: “kinetic personality.”
— Intelius Filing with the SEC
— TechCrunch on Intelius
— Iowa Attorney General Suit Against Ventrue
Related Content
Naveen Jain: Moon Man
May 18, 2011
Naveen Jain, Now Looking to Mine the Moon, Claims "$10 Million" NASA Contract That Could Actually Be Worthless
May 11, 2011
Mark Spangler, Seattle Investor, Accused of Defrauding Customers and Losing $46 Million of Their Money
October 3, 2011
Internet Wizard Loses His Magic: Intelius Hit with Two Class Action Suits
October 27, 2009
CORRECTED Classmates.com Finally Surrenders to Facebook, Announces Revamped Website
August 9, 2010
Stephen Kropp of Renton says he inadvertently signed up for an Intelius identity-theft subscription last summer after purchasing a phone number from the company. Sometime later, he says, he noticed a $19.95 charge on his debit card. Looking through past statements, he realized the company had been charging him for six months, collecting a total of $120. "I just wanted a phone number," says Kropp. "The service they were offering was completely unrelated to what I was asking for" and hadn't provided him any benefits that he could see. He says Intelius initially refused to refund all but one month of the fees, but agreed to return the rest after he wrote to McKenna's office.
Like many of those complaining, Kropp is not a computer neophyte. A civil engineer, he works for an environmental consulting firm called Entrix, where he designs salmon habitat restoration projects, among other things—all using software, of course. "I'm pretty much a computer nerd," he says.
That's the thing that bothers Brenda Piampiano, a Maine attorney who was hit with $40 worth of charges for an Adaptive service she says she never intentionally signed up for. The service is called "Family Safety," and promises to allow consumers the ability to monitor sex offenders in their neighborhoods. "I'm a relatively savvy person with a law degree, and I use the computer absolutely all the time," she says. "I feel like if I can get taken into these things, anybody can."
Adaptive spokesperson George Thomas says the company's offers on the Intelius site are "perfectly clear," and that people who say they didn't realize they were signing up for Adaptive programs must have "forgotten they enrolled." Connie Zimmerman, senior manager of compliance for Adaptive, adds that consumers are sent a confirmation e-mail.
Intelius originally declined to speak to Seattle Weekly for this story, citing the "quiet period" following its filing with the SEC. Many businesses choose to say little to the media after filing to sell shares to the public in order to avoid allegations of misleading potential investors. Shortly before this story was scheduled for publication, however, the company made available its executive vice president of sales and marketing, Ed Petersen.
Petersen says his company has responded to consumer complaints by sending its own confirmation e-mails, as well as by redesigning its check-out pages to make clear all the services people are buying. About six months ago, he says, Intelius formed a "consumer advocacy committee" of employees and board members, which reviews "everything that goes out on the site."
"We've evolved," Petersen says. He maintains that the complaints represent a small part of Intelius' volume of business, and that most customers come directly to the company's site, rather than via partners' sites, because "they have heard good things" about the company. "That says we're doing something right."
The company declined requests for an interview with Jain.
Intelius is far from the only Web company to use these kinds of controversial marketing techniques. Nor is the Internet the only medium in which they flourish. McKenna recalls the record clubs from the time he was growing up: They'd draw you in with an offer of a half-dozen or more LPs for a penny, then automatically send you another record at full price every month.
More recently, McKenna and numerous other attorneys general sued Chase Bank and Trilegiant Corp. for a scheme in which consumers were offered rebates and trial periods for Trilegiant "membership" programs. The offers came attached to Chase mortgage or credit-card statements, and, unbeknownst to many consumers, resulted in monthly fees. The companies agreed to a $14.5 million settlement in 2006.
Internet transactions are especially tricky, says Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist for the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, because you're tempted to click through screens without close examination. And what you're agreeing to "can be buried behind a link or another page that you never thought to go to. Or they can have all these buttons and flashy graphics." Plus, she notes, the Internet allows personal information, like credit-card numbers, to be transferred electronically, smoothing the way for business partnerships that aren't necessarily apparent to consumers.
WhitePages.com, a Seattle-based competitor to Intelius, partners with a company called US Search, which employs techniques similar to those of Adaptive in order to push membership clubs and "Reservation Rewards" programs. John Lusk, marketing vice president for WhitePages.com, maintains that post-transaction marketing is "a viable business strategy. Once you've got someone on your site, you should be doing everything to cross-promote and cross-sell."
He concedes some companies don't do this in a "straightforward" way. He recalls signing up online for the Vancouver Marathon last year. When it came time to pay, he noticed all these already-checked boxes signing him up for various things, and he thought he'd unchecked them all. Sometime later, however, a $50 charge appeared on his credit card—the fee for a service that was supposed to keep him updated on similar events.
"This is bullshit," he griped when he called the company.
Last year, US Search paid $250,000 in penalties after the New York State Attorney General found the company had "illegally accessed and sold consumer data." Adaptive, too, has had trouble with state regulators. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller launched a suit in 2006 against Adaptive's parent company Vertrue, charging unfair and deceptive practices in the sales of its membership programs. "Many consumers don't know they are members, are not aware they are being charged yearly or monthly membership fees, and make no use whatsoever of the so-called membership benefits," a press release from Miller's office reads.
Two ongoing class-action suits on behalf of consumers, in Texas and Tennessee federal courts, make similar allegations. Thomas, a spokesperson for Vertrue as well as Adaptive, says the allegations "will be shown to be without merit," and a Tennessee judge issued a favorable ruling for Vertrue last year. The case is on appeal.
McKenna, known as one of the most active attorney generals in the country on Internet fraud issues, says he can't comment on open investigations, and so won't say whether his office is contemplating similar action against Intelius or Vertrue. But he says that the large number of complaints against Intelius spurred him to push for legislation designed to ensure that consumers give their "informed consent" before they are charged for products.
"We're basically trying to slow the process down," adds Assistant Attorney General Katherine Tassi, who helped draft the failed bills.
Under the bills, companies that acquire people's credit-card numbers would be required to ask customers to re-enter at least the last four digits before charging them for additional services. Businesses would also have to notify consumers at least five days before the first charge is made, a provision especially aimed at companies that offer trial periods that quickly convert to ongoing fees.
In addition to the services it sells to consumers, Intelius provides employers and landlords with criminal histories, credit reports, Social Security verification, and employment records on potential employees and tenants. All these services are regulated by the 1970 Fair Credit Reporting Act—"the nation's oldest privacy law," according to Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The act requires companies that sell such data to ensure that their customers have a legitimate purpose for using it—something that US Search failed to do, according to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. "With the crime of identity theft running rampant across the globe, it is critical that personal data, including sensitive credit-bureau information, not be readily available to anyone with Internet access," he said at the time.
Intelius is also being investigated for possible violations of the act, according to the SEC filing. (The FTC won't discuss ongoing investigations.) These violations could be in regard to privacy or accuracy, Hoofnagle speculates.
Both issues loom large in the consumer complaints about Intelius filed with McKenna's office, most of which had to do with ordinary people searches. Some correspondents are livid that information such as their birthdate and the names of their relatives is so readily available—even if, as a McKenna staffer often writes back, such information comes from public documents that are already "available to anyone who might request them." Intelius recently hired a "chief privacy officer" to deal with such concerns and "grow the relationship" with advocacy groups, legislators, and regulators, according to Petersen.
Many other consumers object to the spotty results. As Intelius itself concedes in its SEC filing, the information it and similar companies sell is often inaccurate and out of date.
One West Virginia woman wrote to the Attorney General's office a couple of years ago to say that she paid $69.95 for a background check on a registered sex offender in her neighborhood, only to get a report saying that the man had no criminal history. Another woman in New York wrote to McKenna that she got way more information trolling free Web sites than she did by paying Intelius.
Christine Fabris of California says she ran a background report on herself, and was shocked when it listed a 1998 case number under a category called "Criminal Check." She says she had no criminal record, and so thought, "Oh my God, someone's stolen my identity." She was especially concerned since at that time she was undergoing a separate Department of Justice background check as a tutor in the California public-school system. But when she looked up the case file at the Superior Court in Pittsburg, California, she discovered it was not a criminal case at all, but a traffic ticket.
Intelius reports contain caveats that information may not be accurate. Fabris' background report, for example, warns of "false matches" that "may not provide confirmation of an individual's criminal background." At times, though, the company seems to be selling something it can't deliver. A TechCrunch reader wrote in to say that he had searched for an obviously nonexistent person with the last name "Bullshit" and the Social Security number 123-45-6789. Intelius did indeed offer to sell him a report on Mr. Bullshit—just as it did when Seattle Weekly repeated the experiment.
An Intelius people search on Naveen Jain drives home the kind of information that is and isn't offered. The report lists Jain's birthday, some relatives (including his wife Anuradha, who serves as Intelius' vice president of community affairs), and three addresses, including his home in Medina (especially impressive since property records cite a trust as owner of the home; the Jains' ownership is revealed in other documents). But it doesn't say which address is current; Jain sold one of the listed properties in 1999. And the property value that is supposed to correspond to that house is wildly incorrect. The supposed value: $279,400. The actual value: $856,000. (Jain's current Medina house, incidentally, is valued by the Assessor's office at $16.2 million.)
Aware of its PR challenges, Intelius has been stepping up its philanthropy. In January the company issued a press release touting 2008 donations of nearly $210,000 to a dozen local and national nonprofits, including the United Way, Seattle Children's Hospital, and Overlake Service Center. Jain and his wife have personally given even more.
The Jains have contributed especially generously to causes related to their East Asian heritage. They gave $250,000 to the newly rebuilt Vedic Cultural Center in Sammamish, making them the largest contributors, according to the Center's executive director Naresh Bhatt. The pink, marble-floored edifice is a gathering place for local Hare Krishnas, a number of them Indian immigrants, like the Jains, in the Eastside's tech community.
Bhatt says he and two others from the Center went to the Jains' Medina house to pitch the rebuilding effort. He brought a computer presentation that normally took about 30 minutes. But Bhatt says Jain stopped him after about 10 or 15 minutes with a generous offer, and then moved everybody into the kitchen for snacks.
Vijay Vashee, a Zimbabwean native of Indian extraction, knows Jain from the time the two worked at Microsoft. Both have since supported some of the same causes, including the Hindu Temple & Cultural Center in Bothell and an India-based charitable organization called Child Rights and You. Vashee says he and other Seattle Art Museum supporters pressed Jain for a donation to the current Seattle Asian Art Museum exhibit of paintings from Jodhpur, India, and Jain complied. He "seems to be in a mode where he's preoccupied about wanting recognition and being perceived as a leader in the community," Vashee observes.
In recognition of the Jains' philanthropy, Overlake Service League, a Bellevue nonprofit, chose the Jains to be "honorary chairs" of its annual March luncheon. "They're just out there in every conceivable way," says Trish Carpenter, Overlake's fundraising director. Not only have the Jains donated tens of thousands of dollars, but they have encouraged Intelius employees to do the same, Carpenter says.
She adds that Jain told her recently, "In tough times, if businesses like Intelius don't step in, who will?"
On the business front, though, Intelius seems to be having mixed success of late. The company has not said when it will have its long-delayed IPO. (Obviously not anytime soon, given current stock-market conditions.) But Petersen says "all sides of our business are growing gangbusters," and notes that the company is adding a new office in Bothell. In February, Intelius started providing search services for sites run by AT&T, such as YellowPages.com.
But Intelius has also lost some contracts. Last year MSN switched from Intelius to WhitePages. WhitePages' vice president of business development, Young Lee, claims his company's service drew more traffic, in large part because it offers all its information for free, including age and household members. (Intelius offered some free information on MSN, but charged for more detailed reports.) The same goes, he says, for AOL, which switched several years ago from Intelius to WhitePages.
Petersen responds that "that is a load of crap," saying the switches had to do with larger marketing agreements rather than with customer satisfaction. (Both Microsoft and AOL declined to comment.)
In a medium that famously gave rise to the idea that "information wants to be free," Intelius' fee-based model has done remarkably well, but perhaps won't for long. "It is possible that competitors employing an advertising-supported business model with free or low-price information service offerings may emerge," the company wrote in its SEC filing. "Any such development may require us to re-evaluate our business model."
Intelius already has one strategy laid out. According to the filing, it plans to increase its focus on post-transaction marketing. Seems like McKenna's office is in for more complaints. Asked whether he plans to take any further action regarding the company besides the current legislation, McKenna only hints: "We'll be talking again."
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
A checkered success during the dot-com bubble, Naveen Jain has come charging back with a new venture—and the complaints are rolling in.
Nina Shapiro
Seattle Weekly
Mar 18 2009
It all started when Scott Bolsins found a lost schnauzer roaming around his suburban Dallas neighborhood. The dog's collar listed a cell-phone number, but when Bolsins called, no one answered. Bolsins, who once had a business selling homemade dog bones over the Internet, was perturbed. "I can't keep this dog, and I sure don't want to take him to the pound," he thought. So he went online to do a reverse lookup of the phone number in order to find the associated address.
He went to the Web site of the Bellevue company Intelius, which sells personal information obtained from public records and marketing databases, including addresses attached to cell-phone numbers. He plugged in the number, gave his credit card number to pay the small fee, and received an address in Grapevine, a neighboring city. He then delivered the schnauzer to its teary owners, who had thought their beloved pet was dead. "They're happy. We feel good. Everything's great," Bolsins recalls in a soft Texas drawl.
"Next thing I know," he continues, "I start getting these charges." Two of them, for $19.95 apiece, showed up on sequential credit-card bills beside unfamiliar names: "Privacy Matters" and "PMIdentity." Bolsins went back to the Web to investigate, and found one phone number for both names. He says he called and was told that he'd signed up for a "service" on the Intelius site. What service, and how did he sign up? It was never clear to Bolsins. All he knows is that Intelius forwarded his credit-card information to another company that ran this "service."
He got the charges reversed, but cancelled his credit card anyway to avoid any more mysterious charges. He then filed a complaint about Intelius with Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna. Almost a year later, Bolsins—himself experienced at running an online business—still seethes about what he considers a blatant "scam."
The word comes up a lot in 121 complaints, filed with McKenna's office, against Intelius, many of which detail the same kind of thing that happened to Bolsins. Even during a time when his office is getting more consumer gripes than it has in years, McKenna says, "That's a lot of complaints about one company." Intelius has drawn even more—822 to date—at the Better Business Bureau. On the BBB site, the company is currently listed as unrated, due to "one or more serious complaints" that the bureau has not yet had time to assess.
Partly because of concerns about Intelius, McKenna requested legislation this session aimed at stopping what he calls "deceptive" Internet marketing—although the resulting bills didn't succeed in getting scheduled for a vote by last Thursday's deadline. It's the second time McKenna has gone to the legislature in an attempt to curb the company's practices.
Last year, Intelius started a service in which you could input a name and for a fee receive that person's cell-phone number. (Intelius declined to tell the Weekly where it gets all that information.) In response, McKenna pushed through a billthat prohibits companies from selling people's cell-phone numbers without their permission. Faced with negative publicity, Intelius eliminated the service before the law took effect last June. The law, however, does not require people's consent to include their cell numbers in reverse directories, which Intelius continues to offer. One reason for the exception is to allow people to identify phone stalkers, the AG says.
The company's troubles don't stop with state regulators. In 2006, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation of Intelius for possible violation of laws regulating how credit information is disseminated. FTC spokesperson Mitch Katz says the investigation is ongoing. Intelius has also become enmeshed in litigation over fractious business relationships, and has provoked the ire of numerous people who feel the company has violated their privacy or simply provided bad information.
In the process, Intelius has become a nexus of all the appeal—and the dangers—of Internet commerce. It provides easy desktop access to information that previously might have required visits to courthouses and state government offices. But some of its practices have reinforced people's worst fears about handing over their credit-card information online. And the sometimes-questionable accuracy of its data has heightened anxieties about the ready accessibility of personal data on the Web.
Founded in 2003, Intelius employs close to 200 people. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year in preparation for a public stock offering, Intelius said it had revenue of $88 million and a profit of $11 million in 2007. (Amazon.com, in comparison, was still losing money four years after its launch, though it had nearly twice as much revenue.) The company's site was the 111th most-visited in January, according to Media Metrix. Its success has also been fueled over the years by an array of shifting partnerships, including ones with giants Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, all of which at one time used Intelius to provide directory searches on their own sites. Yahoo still does, as well as AT&T, Switchboard.com, and many others.
"I'm amazed," says Jon Staenberg, a Seattle venture capitalist. Staenberg was an early investor in InfoSpace, the previous start-up of Intelius founder and CEO Naveen Jain. "If the numbers are what Jain says they are, he's been able to build another large company," says Staenberg (who has not put money into Intelius). "Not many entrepreneurs can do that twice."
Remember, you still haven't gotten access to the information you paid for. To get it, you have two choices: Click on the big orange rectangle, off to the side of all these instructions, that says "YES, and show my report," or click on the small black one-line link that says "No, show my report." The YES button is what gets you monthly ValueMax fees.
Intelius also uses this technique to peddle Adaptive's identity-theft program, Privacy Matters. Last May, the business news site TechCrunch wrote a scathing pieceabout the practice. Intelius pitches its own identity-theft service as well, which purports to monitor public documents and consumer databases for suspicious activity.
The founder and CEO of Intelius: “kinetic personality.”
— Intelius Filing with the SEC
— TechCrunch on Intelius
— Iowa Attorney General Suit Against Ventrue
Related Content
Naveen Jain: Moon Man
May 18, 2011
Naveen Jain, Now Looking to Mine the Moon, Claims "$10 Million" NASA Contract That Could Actually Be Worthless
May 11, 2011
Mark Spangler, Seattle Investor, Accused of Defrauding Customers and Losing $46 Million of Their Money
October 3, 2011
Internet Wizard Loses His Magic: Intelius Hit with Two Class Action Suits
October 27, 2009
CORRECTED Classmates.com Finally Surrenders to Facebook, Announces Revamped Website
August 9, 2010
Stephen Kropp of Renton says he inadvertently signed up for an Intelius identity-theft subscription last summer after purchasing a phone number from the company. Sometime later, he says, he noticed a $19.95 charge on his debit card. Looking through past statements, he realized the company had been charging him for six months, collecting a total of $120. "I just wanted a phone number," says Kropp. "The service they were offering was completely unrelated to what I was asking for" and hadn't provided him any benefits that he could see. He says Intelius initially refused to refund all but one month of the fees, but agreed to return the rest after he wrote to McKenna's office.
Like many of those complaining, Kropp is not a computer neophyte. A civil engineer, he works for an environmental consulting firm called Entrix, where he designs salmon habitat restoration projects, among other things—all using software, of course. "I'm pretty much a computer nerd," he says.
That's the thing that bothers Brenda Piampiano, a Maine attorney who was hit with $40 worth of charges for an Adaptive service she says she never intentionally signed up for. The service is called "Family Safety," and promises to allow consumers the ability to monitor sex offenders in their neighborhoods. "I'm a relatively savvy person with a law degree, and I use the computer absolutely all the time," she says. "I feel like if I can get taken into these things, anybody can."
Adaptive spokesperson George Thomas says the company's offers on the Intelius site are "perfectly clear," and that people who say they didn't realize they were signing up for Adaptive programs must have "forgotten they enrolled." Connie Zimmerman, senior manager of compliance for Adaptive, adds that consumers are sent a confirmation e-mail.
Intelius originally declined to speak to Seattle Weekly for this story, citing the "quiet period" following its filing with the SEC. Many businesses choose to say little to the media after filing to sell shares to the public in order to avoid allegations of misleading potential investors. Shortly before this story was scheduled for publication, however, the company made available its executive vice president of sales and marketing, Ed Petersen.
Petersen says his company has responded to consumer complaints by sending its own confirmation e-mails, as well as by redesigning its check-out pages to make clear all the services people are buying. About six months ago, he says, Intelius formed a "consumer advocacy committee" of employees and board members, which reviews "everything that goes out on the site."
"We've evolved," Petersen says. He maintains that the complaints represent a small part of Intelius' volume of business, and that most customers come directly to the company's site, rather than via partners' sites, because "they have heard good things" about the company. "That says we're doing something right."
The company declined requests for an interview with Jain.
Intelius is far from the only Web company to use these kinds of controversial marketing techniques. Nor is the Internet the only medium in which they flourish. McKenna recalls the record clubs from the time he was growing up: They'd draw you in with an offer of a half-dozen or more LPs for a penny, then automatically send you another record at full price every month.
More recently, McKenna and numerous other attorneys general sued Chase Bank and Trilegiant Corp. for a scheme in which consumers were offered rebates and trial periods for Trilegiant "membership" programs. The offers came attached to Chase mortgage or credit-card statements, and, unbeknownst to many consumers, resulted in monthly fees. The companies agreed to a $14.5 million settlement in 2006.
Internet transactions are especially tricky, says Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist for the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, because you're tempted to click through screens without close examination. And what you're agreeing to "can be buried behind a link or another page that you never thought to go to. Or they can have all these buttons and flashy graphics." Plus, she notes, the Internet allows personal information, like credit-card numbers, to be transferred electronically, smoothing the way for business partnerships that aren't necessarily apparent to consumers.
WhitePages.com, a Seattle-based competitor to Intelius, partners with a company called US Search, which employs techniques similar to those of Adaptive in order to push membership clubs and "Reservation Rewards" programs. John Lusk, marketing vice president for WhitePages.com, maintains that post-transaction marketing is "a viable business strategy. Once you've got someone on your site, you should be doing everything to cross-promote and cross-sell."
He concedes some companies don't do this in a "straightforward" way. He recalls signing up online for the Vancouver Marathon last year. When it came time to pay, he noticed all these already-checked boxes signing him up for various things, and he thought he'd unchecked them all. Sometime later, however, a $50 charge appeared on his credit card—the fee for a service that was supposed to keep him updated on similar events.
"This is bullshit," he griped when he called the company.
Last year, US Search paid $250,000 in penalties after the New York State Attorney General found the company had "illegally accessed and sold consumer data." Adaptive, too, has had trouble with state regulators. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller launched a suit in 2006 against Adaptive's parent company Vertrue, charging unfair and deceptive practices in the sales of its membership programs. "Many consumers don't know they are members, are not aware they are being charged yearly or monthly membership fees, and make no use whatsoever of the so-called membership benefits," a press release from Miller's office reads.
Two ongoing class-action suits on behalf of consumers, in Texas and Tennessee federal courts, make similar allegations. Thomas, a spokesperson for Vertrue as well as Adaptive, says the allegations "will be shown to be without merit," and a Tennessee judge issued a favorable ruling for Vertrue last year. The case is on appeal.
McKenna, known as one of the most active attorney generals in the country on Internet fraud issues, says he can't comment on open investigations, and so won't say whether his office is contemplating similar action against Intelius or Vertrue. But he says that the large number of complaints against Intelius spurred him to push for legislation designed to ensure that consumers give their "informed consent" before they are charged for products.
"We're basically trying to slow the process down," adds Assistant Attorney General Katherine Tassi, who helped draft the failed bills.
Under the bills, companies that acquire people's credit-card numbers would be required to ask customers to re-enter at least the last four digits before charging them for additional services. Businesses would also have to notify consumers at least five days before the first charge is made, a provision especially aimed at companies that offer trial periods that quickly convert to ongoing fees.
In addition to the services it sells to consumers, Intelius provides employers and landlords with criminal histories, credit reports, Social Security verification, and employment records on potential employees and tenants. All these services are regulated by the 1970 Fair Credit Reporting Act—"the nation's oldest privacy law," according to Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The act requires companies that sell such data to ensure that their customers have a legitimate purpose for using it—something that US Search failed to do, according to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. "With the crime of identity theft running rampant across the globe, it is critical that personal data, including sensitive credit-bureau information, not be readily available to anyone with Internet access," he said at the time.
Intelius is also being investigated for possible violations of the act, according to the SEC filing. (The FTC won't discuss ongoing investigations.) These violations could be in regard to privacy or accuracy, Hoofnagle speculates.
Both issues loom large in the consumer complaints about Intelius filed with McKenna's office, most of which had to do with ordinary people searches. Some correspondents are livid that information such as their birthdate and the names of their relatives is so readily available—even if, as a McKenna staffer often writes back, such information comes from public documents that are already "available to anyone who might request them." Intelius recently hired a "chief privacy officer" to deal with such concerns and "grow the relationship" with advocacy groups, legislators, and regulators, according to Petersen.
Many other consumers object to the spotty results. As Intelius itself concedes in its SEC filing, the information it and similar companies sell is often inaccurate and out of date.
One West Virginia woman wrote to the Attorney General's office a couple of years ago to say that she paid $69.95 for a background check on a registered sex offender in her neighborhood, only to get a report saying that the man had no criminal history. Another woman in New York wrote to McKenna that she got way more information trolling free Web sites than she did by paying Intelius.
Christine Fabris of California says she ran a background report on herself, and was shocked when it listed a 1998 case number under a category called "Criminal Check." She says she had no criminal record, and so thought, "Oh my God, someone's stolen my identity." She was especially concerned since at that time she was undergoing a separate Department of Justice background check as a tutor in the California public-school system. But when she looked up the case file at the Superior Court in Pittsburg, California, she discovered it was not a criminal case at all, but a traffic ticket.
Intelius reports contain caveats that information may not be accurate. Fabris' background report, for example, warns of "false matches" that "may not provide confirmation of an individual's criminal background." At times, though, the company seems to be selling something it can't deliver. A TechCrunch reader wrote in to say that he had searched for an obviously nonexistent person with the last name "Bullshit" and the Social Security number 123-45-6789. Intelius did indeed offer to sell him a report on Mr. Bullshit—just as it did when Seattle Weekly repeated the experiment.
An Intelius people search on Naveen Jain drives home the kind of information that is and isn't offered. The report lists Jain's birthday, some relatives (including his wife Anuradha, who serves as Intelius' vice president of community affairs), and three addresses, including his home in Medina (especially impressive since property records cite a trust as owner of the home; the Jains' ownership is revealed in other documents). But it doesn't say which address is current; Jain sold one of the listed properties in 1999. And the property value that is supposed to correspond to that house is wildly incorrect. The supposed value: $279,400. The actual value: $856,000. (Jain's current Medina house, incidentally, is valued by the Assessor's office at $16.2 million.)
Aware of its PR challenges, Intelius has been stepping up its philanthropy. In January the company issued a press release touting 2008 donations of nearly $210,000 to a dozen local and national nonprofits, including the United Way, Seattle Children's Hospital, and Overlake Service Center. Jain and his wife have personally given even more.
The Jains have contributed especially generously to causes related to their East Asian heritage. They gave $250,000 to the newly rebuilt Vedic Cultural Center in Sammamish, making them the largest contributors, according to the Center's executive director Naresh Bhatt. The pink, marble-floored edifice is a gathering place for local Hare Krishnas, a number of them Indian immigrants, like the Jains, in the Eastside's tech community.
Bhatt says he and two others from the Center went to the Jains' Medina house to pitch the rebuilding effort. He brought a computer presentation that normally took about 30 minutes. But Bhatt says Jain stopped him after about 10 or 15 minutes with a generous offer, and then moved everybody into the kitchen for snacks.
Vijay Vashee, a Zimbabwean native of Indian extraction, knows Jain from the time the two worked at Microsoft. Both have since supported some of the same causes, including the Hindu Temple & Cultural Center in Bothell and an India-based charitable organization called Child Rights and You. Vashee says he and other Seattle Art Museum supporters pressed Jain for a donation to the current Seattle Asian Art Museum exhibit of paintings from Jodhpur, India, and Jain complied. He "seems to be in a mode where he's preoccupied about wanting recognition and being perceived as a leader in the community," Vashee observes.
In recognition of the Jains' philanthropy, Overlake Service League, a Bellevue nonprofit, chose the Jains to be "honorary chairs" of its annual March luncheon. "They're just out there in every conceivable way," says Trish Carpenter, Overlake's fundraising director. Not only have the Jains donated tens of thousands of dollars, but they have encouraged Intelius employees to do the same, Carpenter says.
She adds that Jain told her recently, "In tough times, if businesses like Intelius don't step in, who will?"
On the business front, though, Intelius seems to be having mixed success of late. The company has not said when it will have its long-delayed IPO. (Obviously not anytime soon, given current stock-market conditions.) But Petersen says "all sides of our business are growing gangbusters," and notes that the company is adding a new office in Bothell. In February, Intelius started providing search services for sites run by AT&T, such as YellowPages.com.
But Intelius has also lost some contracts. Last year MSN switched from Intelius to WhitePages. WhitePages' vice president of business development, Young Lee, claims his company's service drew more traffic, in large part because it offers all its information for free, including age and household members. (Intelius offered some free information on MSN, but charged for more detailed reports.) The same goes, he says, for AOL, which switched several years ago from Intelius to WhitePages.
Petersen responds that "that is a load of crap," saying the switches had to do with larger marketing agreements rather than with customer satisfaction. (Both Microsoft and AOL declined to comment.)
In a medium that famously gave rise to the idea that "information wants to be free," Intelius' fee-based model has done remarkably well, but perhaps won't for long. "It is possible that competitors employing an advertising-supported business model with free or low-price information service offerings may emerge," the company wrote in its SEC filing. "Any such development may require us to re-evaluate our business model."
Intelius already has one strategy laid out. According to the filing, it plans to increase its focus on post-transaction marketing. Seems like McKenna's office is in for more complaints. Asked whether he plans to take any further action regarding the company besides the current legislation, McKenna only hints: "We'll be talking again."
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
Saturday, December 17, 2011
How a Bad Cop Evaded Detection in San Diego
How a Bad Cop Evaded Detection
December 15, 2011
by Keegan Kyle
Voice of San Diego
On a dark boulevard in Mission Valley, lined by department stores and spacious condos, the police officer spotted the suspected drunk driver. It was February 2010.
Someone had called police to report the 28-year-old woman. Officer Anthony Arevalos responded. For three years, he'd specialized in arresting drunk drivers for the San Diego Police Department. He measured up their slurred speech, dazed glares, and stumbling steps. A breath test sealed their fates.
And so it was with the woman in Mission Valley. Arevalos arrested her and put her in the back of his cruiser. They headed to the county women's jail, the Las Colinas Detention Facility.
But they didn't drive straight there, the woman later said. According to her story, Arevalos hit the brakes on another dark road, pulled over, and sexually assaulted her in the back seat, where no one could see them. Then he got back behind the wheel and took her the rest of the way to jail.
When the woman told the Police Department what happened, Arevalos was swiftly yanked from patrol. After weeks of investigation, police recommended criminal charges to prosecutors.
Arevalos, a 17-year veteran, had a reputation in the department. He targeted young, attractive female drivers. He arrested women more often than any of his colleagues. He sent lewd photos of women he stopped to fellow officers. He showed off women's driver's licenses like trophies. He had a nickname: "The Las Colinas Transport Unit."
Even Arevalos' supervisor, Sgt. Kevin Friedman, had taken note. "If someone was attractive, he would display it," Friedman would later say.
Yet nothing happened. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis declined to press charges and the Police Department sent Arevalos back to the same job, back to San Diego's streets. There he stayed until March 2011, when another traffic stop ended his career...
Police had assigned Thornton and Arevalos to the department's traffic division. Arevalos, a married father of two, worked in a special unit patrolling for drunk drivers, a job that offered extra pay and overtime.
Arevalos also got more discretion on the streets. While most patrol officers scurry between radio calls all night, DUI officers are supposed to be proactive, choosing whom they stop, where they stop, and when they stop. They work alone unless another officer provides cover.
Thornton's account isn't the only one. Other officers have testified that Arevalos acted unprofessionally. But his behavior never got him reassigned or fi red.
Those anecdotes from fellow cops concern Samuel Walker, a national expert on police reform. He said the Arevalos case highlights systematic problems with internal oversight at the San Diego Police Department and an inappropriate tolerance for misconduct.
"If he was sending pictures to other officers, they knew about it. They should have done something," Walker said. "I think all of that tells something about the culture within the department, which is very bad."
Police misconduct typically evolves over time, Walker said. Officers start with small infractions, learn what behavior is tolerated and then elevate to larger breaches of policy without reprisal.
Police chief Bill Lansdowne blamed the misconduct spike on officers' stress, the economy, and budget cuts. But his own decisions contributed to lagging oversight, too. Rather than reduce emergency operations like patrol and homicide, Lansdowne chipped away at counseling programs, supervisors, and Internal Affairs.
Some oversight tools disappeared entirely. After Lansdowne became chief in 2003, he dismantled an investigative unit police established in the early 1990s to proactively monitor for misconduct. It conducted stings and undercover surveillance on officers. The unit had more funding and time than Internal Affairs, which got bogged down in routine citizen complaints and clerical tasks.
To some officers, disbanding the investigative unit signaled that Lansdowne thought monitoring for misconduct was a lower priority. Lansdowne defends the shift, saying it saved money and streamlined investigations. Cases of internal misconduct are now handled by specialists of the alleged crime.
Long before the scandal, police recognized a need to strengthen internal oversight. The department created a system to track how often officers use force, respond to traumatic calls, and have complaints filed against them. They wanted to recognize patterns of misbehavior. But the Arevalos case and other recent allegations have shown the $450,000 program wasn't a high priority. It was tossed between managers until it landed on the desk of Sgt. Gary Collins — after the misconduct scandal struck.
"It's one of those things that probably isn't being as utilized as it should be," Collins said in May, "but I'm confident with everything that's going on that it will be."
A Missed Opportunity
Photo by Sam Hodgson
Former San Diego police officer Anthony Arevalos patrolled the Gaslamp Quarter for drunk drivers. Seven women he stopped say he solicited sexual bribes from them.
It was September 2009. The 26-year-old woman had to close shop for the night. She slammed a few drinks with co-workers, locked the Gaslamp Quarter restaurant's doors and got in her car.
A few blocks away, though, the woman made a wrong turn down a one-way street. Arevalos was driving toward her in a marked police car. He flipped on the car's lights and pulled her over.
Arevalos suspected the woman was driving drunk and took her to police headquarters for a breath test. The woman had double the legal limit of alcohol in her system. But Arevalos didn't book her. They drove back to the woman's car.
During that trip back, the woman later said, Arevalos pushed for a sexual favor in exchange for letting her go. She didn't agree to anything, she said, but Arevalos promised to show up at her restaurant and collect his favor soon enough.
The next day, the woman talked to a cop that a friend knew. She told James Clark, a detective, that a downtown cop had wanted a favor in exchange for not arresting her. She didn't know his name or which agency he worked for. She didn't specifically say what favor he wanted, but Clark figured it was something sexual.
"I remember thinking the officer was acting unprofessional, that he was trying to pick up on her," Clark testified.
Clark suggested the woman call Internal Affairs. But he didn't himself. And he didn't tell his supervisors about the conversation. He was off-duty and later testified that the complaint didn't seem important enough to merit investigation.
From Badge to Bars: Anthony Arevalos
Click on the graphic to enlarge.
The woman didn't call Internal Affairs either. She feared she'd be charged with drunk driving in retaliation and was planning to move out of state.
In an interview assistant police chief Boyd Long said it's unclear whether Clark violated department policy by not reporting the woman's complaint. Officers should normally report any allegation, he said, but the conversation could've been confidential.
Internal Affairs didn't learn about the incident until Clark reported it more than a year later, after Arevalos' arrest.
The detective's response is a stark contrast to the officer who received the complaint that ultimately took down Arevalos. That happened in March 2011. A woman called police and complained that an officer had taken her panties in exchange for not arresting her.
The officer who got that call, Kelly Besker, immediately reported the complaint to his supervisor. The woman identified the officer who had pulled her over as "Officer Anthony."
The investigation had begun.
Jury Verdict: Guilty...
December 15, 2011
by Keegan Kyle
Voice of San Diego
On a dark boulevard in Mission Valley, lined by department stores and spacious condos, the police officer spotted the suspected drunk driver. It was February 2010.
Someone had called police to report the 28-year-old woman. Officer Anthony Arevalos responded. For three years, he'd specialized in arresting drunk drivers for the San Diego Police Department. He measured up their slurred speech, dazed glares, and stumbling steps. A breath test sealed their fates.
And so it was with the woman in Mission Valley. Arevalos arrested her and put her in the back of his cruiser. They headed to the county women's jail, the Las Colinas Detention Facility.
But they didn't drive straight there, the woman later said. According to her story, Arevalos hit the brakes on another dark road, pulled over, and sexually assaulted her in the back seat, where no one could see them. Then he got back behind the wheel and took her the rest of the way to jail.
When the woman told the Police Department what happened, Arevalos was swiftly yanked from patrol. After weeks of investigation, police recommended criminal charges to prosecutors.
Arevalos, a 17-year veteran, had a reputation in the department. He targeted young, attractive female drivers. He arrested women more often than any of his colleagues. He sent lewd photos of women he stopped to fellow officers. He showed off women's driver's licenses like trophies. He had a nickname: "The Las Colinas Transport Unit."
Even Arevalos' supervisor, Sgt. Kevin Friedman, had taken note. "If someone was attractive, he would display it," Friedman would later say.
Yet nothing happened. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis declined to press charges and the Police Department sent Arevalos back to the same job, back to San Diego's streets. There he stayed until March 2011, when another traffic stop ended his career...
Police had assigned Thornton and Arevalos to the department's traffic division. Arevalos, a married father of two, worked in a special unit patrolling for drunk drivers, a job that offered extra pay and overtime.
Arevalos also got more discretion on the streets. While most patrol officers scurry between radio calls all night, DUI officers are supposed to be proactive, choosing whom they stop, where they stop, and when they stop. They work alone unless another officer provides cover.
Thornton's account isn't the only one. Other officers have testified that Arevalos acted unprofessionally. But his behavior never got him reassigned or fi red.
Those anecdotes from fellow cops concern Samuel Walker, a national expert on police reform. He said the Arevalos case highlights systematic problems with internal oversight at the San Diego Police Department and an inappropriate tolerance for misconduct.
"If he was sending pictures to other officers, they knew about it. They should have done something," Walker said. "I think all of that tells something about the culture within the department, which is very bad."
Police misconduct typically evolves over time, Walker said. Officers start with small infractions, learn what behavior is tolerated and then elevate to larger breaches of policy without reprisal.
Police chief Bill Lansdowne blamed the misconduct spike on officers' stress, the economy, and budget cuts. But his own decisions contributed to lagging oversight, too. Rather than reduce emergency operations like patrol and homicide, Lansdowne chipped away at counseling programs, supervisors, and Internal Affairs.
Some oversight tools disappeared entirely. After Lansdowne became chief in 2003, he dismantled an investigative unit police established in the early 1990s to proactively monitor for misconduct. It conducted stings and undercover surveillance on officers. The unit had more funding and time than Internal Affairs, which got bogged down in routine citizen complaints and clerical tasks.
To some officers, disbanding the investigative unit signaled that Lansdowne thought monitoring for misconduct was a lower priority. Lansdowne defends the shift, saying it saved money and streamlined investigations. Cases of internal misconduct are now handled by specialists of the alleged crime.
Long before the scandal, police recognized a need to strengthen internal oversight. The department created a system to track how often officers use force, respond to traumatic calls, and have complaints filed against them. They wanted to recognize patterns of misbehavior. But the Arevalos case and other recent allegations have shown the $450,000 program wasn't a high priority. It was tossed between managers until it landed on the desk of Sgt. Gary Collins — after the misconduct scandal struck.
"It's one of those things that probably isn't being as utilized as it should be," Collins said in May, "but I'm confident with everything that's going on that it will be."
A Missed Opportunity
Photo by Sam Hodgson
Former San Diego police officer Anthony Arevalos patrolled the Gaslamp Quarter for drunk drivers. Seven women he stopped say he solicited sexual bribes from them.
It was September 2009. The 26-year-old woman had to close shop for the night. She slammed a few drinks with co-workers, locked the Gaslamp Quarter restaurant's doors and got in her car.
A few blocks away, though, the woman made a wrong turn down a one-way street. Arevalos was driving toward her in a marked police car. He flipped on the car's lights and pulled her over.
Arevalos suspected the woman was driving drunk and took her to police headquarters for a breath test. The woman had double the legal limit of alcohol in her system. But Arevalos didn't book her. They drove back to the woman's car.
During that trip back, the woman later said, Arevalos pushed for a sexual favor in exchange for letting her go. She didn't agree to anything, she said, but Arevalos promised to show up at her restaurant and collect his favor soon enough.
The next day, the woman talked to a cop that a friend knew. She told James Clark, a detective, that a downtown cop had wanted a favor in exchange for not arresting her. She didn't know his name or which agency he worked for. She didn't specifically say what favor he wanted, but Clark figured it was something sexual.
"I remember thinking the officer was acting unprofessional, that he was trying to pick up on her," Clark testified.
Clark suggested the woman call Internal Affairs. But he didn't himself. And he didn't tell his supervisors about the conversation. He was off-duty and later testified that the complaint didn't seem important enough to merit investigation.
From Badge to Bars: Anthony Arevalos
Click on the graphic to enlarge.
The woman didn't call Internal Affairs either. She feared she'd be charged with drunk driving in retaliation and was planning to move out of state.
In an interview assistant police chief Boyd Long said it's unclear whether Clark violated department policy by not reporting the woman's complaint. Officers should normally report any allegation, he said, but the conversation could've been confidential.
Internal Affairs didn't learn about the incident until Clark reported it more than a year later, after Arevalos' arrest.
The detective's response is a stark contrast to the officer who received the complaint that ultimately took down Arevalos. That happened in March 2011. A woman called police and complained that an officer had taken her panties in exchange for not arresting her.
The officer who got that call, Kelly Besker, immediately reported the complaint to his supervisor. The woman identified the officer who had pulled her over as "Officer Anthony."
The investigation had begun.
Jury Verdict: Guilty...
Friday, October 21, 2011
Paying for bad cops: Crowe family settles civil rights lawsuit for $7.25 million
...[M]other Cheryl Crowe...told KPBS she believes the Escondido police doesn't regret the coercive interrogations, nor the arrests and jailing of their son and his two high school friends, Josh Treadway and Aaron Houser.
--Voice of San Diego
"They did it with malice. They knew what they were doing," she said. "We were ready to go to trial to prove that. And they never admitted they did anything wrong."
ESCONDIDO: Crowe family settles civil rights lawsuit for $7.25 million
By TERI FIGUEROA
October 21, 2011
Nearly 14 years after Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death in her Escondido bedroom, her family agreed to a $7.25 million settlement with the cities of Escondido and Oceanside for what one appeals court called "psychologically abusive" interrogations of the slain child's then-teenage brother.
"There is a degree of vindication," said brother Michael Crowe, now 28 and a first-time expectant father.
The settlement, announced Friday morning, draws to a close a federal civil rights lawsuit related to a slaying investigation that grabbed national headlines ---- even spawning a made-for-TV movie ---- and split community opinion about just who killed the 12-year-old honors student in her Escondido home in January 1998.
"We are done, just done," Stephanie's mother, Cheryl Crowe, said Friday. "No amount of money will make them see their errors."
An Escondido police spokesman as well as an Escondido deputy city attorney handling the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The municipalities are the final defendants to reach a settlement with the Crowe family, which has long maintained it was victimized ---- and Michael mentally brutalized ---- by police so eager to make an arrest that they wrongly zeroed in on three innocent teenagers instead of a more likely suspect: a mentally ill transient who bizarrely approached their neighbors moments before the child was attacked.
With just 10 days until the trial started, the Crowes agreed to a settlement to be split with their longtime attorney Milt Silverman and then among family members. After years of fighting, fatigue took its toll, as did the family's excitement at a baby on the way.
"We wanted to go to trial so bad," Cheryl Crowe said. "The case is the strongest it has ever been, but we don't want to go anymore. We are just tired and we don't trust what could happen. We don't want to spend another 10 years of our lives with that garbage. ... I'm turning my thoughts to the new baby."
Crowe family attorney Silverman said insurer AIG will pay the settlement; no taxpayer money will be used.
"My clients are happy," Silverman said. "They thanked the courts for giving them justice."
Even though the settlement means the civil rights portion of the case is over, the matter of just who killed Stephanie remains very much alive in the criminal courts. The mentally ill transient convicted of sneaking into the home and killing the child was just this year granted a new trial. The courts are still weighing legal matters in that criminal case.
Stephanie's brother, Michael Crowe, was 14 when police suspected he and his high school freshman friends killed his popular younger sister, stabbing her to death in her bed. After hours of interrogations, the three teens made damning statements; one of them even made an outright confession. But in the years after the slaying, judges in both criminal and civil courts came to determine that the statements had been coerced by police.
The teens' lengthy interrogations were at the center of the civil rights suit the family brought against Escondido police and others, including an Oceanside police detective called in to assist during the questioning.
A federal trial judge in San Diego dismissed the bulk of the civil rights suit in 2004. But six years later, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived the lawsuit, finding that Escondido police violated the civil rights of Crowe and his friends during "hours of grueling, psychologically abusive interrogations."
The federal appeals court found that Crowe and his friends endured "psychological torture" during police questioning. The result was coerced confessions that led to murder charges against "innocent teenagers for a crime they did not commit," the appeals court found.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Escondido's request that it review the appeals court findings.
The settlements with a number of defendants followed.
Cheryl Crowe credited Silverman's tenacity in keeping alive a difficult and complex case that he had taken on contingency more than a decade ago.
"Without Milt, we would never have had a voice inside the court," she said. "He was ready to retire when he took this case. But he kept a promise to my mom that he would see this case to the end."
Cheryl Crowe's mother, Judith Kennedy, died in 2001. It was she who found her granddaughter's lifeless body.
Although Escondido police originally suspected Michael Crowe and his teenage buddies, DNA evidence linked a mentally ill transient to the child's slaying. The case was moved from Escondido police to a cold case detective with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's homicide unit.
In 2004, the transient, Richard Tuite, now 42, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for sneaking into the Crowe home and killing the girl while her family slept.
But earlier this year, a federal appeals court overturned Tuite's conviction, finding that the jury should have heard more about the backgrounds of dueling crime scene analysts who offered opposing theories of the slaying.
State prosecutors have asked the federal courts to reconsider the decision to overturn Tuite's conviction. As of Friday, with the courts still weighing the criminal case, Tuite ---- who has schizophrenia ---- remained in custody at the California Medical Facility, a psychiatric institution for the state's male prisoners.
Cheryl Crowe said it scares her that Tuite's conviction was overturned, and she worries about public safety once he is released.
"The thought of Richard Tuite hurting another child is very troubling to me," she said.
Michael Crowe said he agreed to the settlement even though Escondido police do not accept liability for wrongdoing.
"There is not any price that would make what they did right," he said when reached at his home in Oregon. "But in the end, the price was just fair enough for us to accept. ... It's unfortunate, but we came to realize that the police would never admit they were wrong. And that is unfortunate for everyone who lives in that city."
Cheryl Crowe, who has also relocated to Oregon, said one settlement item was non-negotiable: The amount of the settlement had to be made public.
"We refused to settle if it remained confidential," Cheryl Crowe said. "We said, 'No, that is not acceptable.' They know they did something wrong."
--Voice of San Diego
"They did it with malice. They knew what they were doing," she said. "We were ready to go to trial to prove that. And they never admitted they did anything wrong."
ESCONDIDO: Crowe family settles civil rights lawsuit for $7.25 million
By TERI FIGUEROA
October 21, 2011
Nearly 14 years after Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death in her Escondido bedroom, her family agreed to a $7.25 million settlement with the cities of Escondido and Oceanside for what one appeals court called "psychologically abusive" interrogations of the slain child's then-teenage brother.
"There is a degree of vindication," said brother Michael Crowe, now 28 and a first-time expectant father.
The settlement, announced Friday morning, draws to a close a federal civil rights lawsuit related to a slaying investigation that grabbed national headlines ---- even spawning a made-for-TV movie ---- and split community opinion about just who killed the 12-year-old honors student in her Escondido home in January 1998.
"We are done, just done," Stephanie's mother, Cheryl Crowe, said Friday. "No amount of money will make them see their errors."
An Escondido police spokesman as well as an Escondido deputy city attorney handling the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The municipalities are the final defendants to reach a settlement with the Crowe family, which has long maintained it was victimized ---- and Michael mentally brutalized ---- by police so eager to make an arrest that they wrongly zeroed in on three innocent teenagers instead of a more likely suspect: a mentally ill transient who bizarrely approached their neighbors moments before the child was attacked.
With just 10 days until the trial started, the Crowes agreed to a settlement to be split with their longtime attorney Milt Silverman and then among family members. After years of fighting, fatigue took its toll, as did the family's excitement at a baby on the way.
"We wanted to go to trial so bad," Cheryl Crowe said. "The case is the strongest it has ever been, but we don't want to go anymore. We are just tired and we don't trust what could happen. We don't want to spend another 10 years of our lives with that garbage. ... I'm turning my thoughts to the new baby."
Crowe family attorney Silverman said insurer AIG will pay the settlement; no taxpayer money will be used.
"My clients are happy," Silverman said. "They thanked the courts for giving them justice."
Even though the settlement means the civil rights portion of the case is over, the matter of just who killed Stephanie remains very much alive in the criminal courts. The mentally ill transient convicted of sneaking into the home and killing the child was just this year granted a new trial. The courts are still weighing legal matters in that criminal case.
Stephanie's brother, Michael Crowe, was 14 when police suspected he and his high school freshman friends killed his popular younger sister, stabbing her to death in her bed. After hours of interrogations, the three teens made damning statements; one of them even made an outright confession. But in the years after the slaying, judges in both criminal and civil courts came to determine that the statements had been coerced by police.
The teens' lengthy interrogations were at the center of the civil rights suit the family brought against Escondido police and others, including an Oceanside police detective called in to assist during the questioning.
A federal trial judge in San Diego dismissed the bulk of the civil rights suit in 2004. But six years later, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived the lawsuit, finding that Escondido police violated the civil rights of Crowe and his friends during "hours of grueling, psychologically abusive interrogations."
The federal appeals court found that Crowe and his friends endured "psychological torture" during police questioning. The result was coerced confessions that led to murder charges against "innocent teenagers for a crime they did not commit," the appeals court found.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Escondido's request that it review the appeals court findings.
The settlements with a number of defendants followed.
Cheryl Crowe credited Silverman's tenacity in keeping alive a difficult and complex case that he had taken on contingency more than a decade ago.
"Without Milt, we would never have had a voice inside the court," she said. "He was ready to retire when he took this case. But he kept a promise to my mom that he would see this case to the end."
Cheryl Crowe's mother, Judith Kennedy, died in 2001. It was she who found her granddaughter's lifeless body.
Although Escondido police originally suspected Michael Crowe and his teenage buddies, DNA evidence linked a mentally ill transient to the child's slaying. The case was moved from Escondido police to a cold case detective with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's homicide unit.
In 2004, the transient, Richard Tuite, now 42, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for sneaking into the Crowe home and killing the girl while her family slept.
But earlier this year, a federal appeals court overturned Tuite's conviction, finding that the jury should have heard more about the backgrounds of dueling crime scene analysts who offered opposing theories of the slaying.
State prosecutors have asked the federal courts to reconsider the decision to overturn Tuite's conviction. As of Friday, with the courts still weighing the criminal case, Tuite ---- who has schizophrenia ---- remained in custody at the California Medical Facility, a psychiatric institution for the state's male prisoners.
Cheryl Crowe said it scares her that Tuite's conviction was overturned, and she worries about public safety once he is released.
"The thought of Richard Tuite hurting another child is very troubling to me," she said.
Michael Crowe said he agreed to the settlement even though Escondido police do not accept liability for wrongdoing.
"There is not any price that would make what they did right," he said when reached at his home in Oregon. "But in the end, the price was just fair enough for us to accept. ... It's unfortunate, but we came to realize that the police would never admit they were wrong. And that is unfortunate for everyone who lives in that city."
Cheryl Crowe, who has also relocated to Oregon, said one settlement item was non-negotiable: The amount of the settlement had to be made public.
"We refused to settle if it remained confidential," Cheryl Crowe said. "We said, 'No, that is not acceptable.' They know they did something wrong."
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
U.S. widens inquiry into abuse at L.A. County jails
U.S. widens inquiry into abuse at L.A. County jails
Sheriff's Department seeks to curtail the extent of subpoenas, which seek data on workers since 2009.
By Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard
Los Angeles Times
October 15, 2011
Federal authorities have widened their misconduct investigation into the Los Angeles County jail system, demanding internal Sheriff's Department documents detailing deputies' use of force on inmates over several years, as well as other records.
Sheriff's officials balked at the size and scope of the subpoenas when they were served several weeks ago and are negotiating with federal prosecutors to reduce the number of documents they must produce.
A source familiar with the demand said it sought the names of everyone who has worked in the jails since 2009, even janitors, and whether they have been disciplined for misconduct. Federal prosecutors also sought employees' Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers and personal email addresses.
The records demand is the first sign that federal authorities are not simply looking into several individual cases of jail brutality and other misconduct but are taking a broader look at potential wrongdoing by deputies going back years.
"I was caught completely flabbergasted," Sheriff Lee Baca said of the growing federal scrutiny of his jail system, the nation's largest. "It's like your best friend digs up your favorite rose bed."
In an interview with The Times, Baca said the subpoenaed records were so voluminous that even federal investigators "would have had difficulty ferreting through it all." Nevertheless, Baca said, the county has begun collecting the records.
Federal officials declined to comment about the subpoenas or discuss details of the investigation.
Rebecca Lonergan, a USC law professor and former federal prosecutor, said the demand for the records suggests that investigators are looking for witnesses who would be willing to cooperate as they explore whether there might be a pattern and practice of deputy misconduct in the jails.
"The question becomes whether it rises to a supervisory level," said Lonergan, who handled police misconduct cases while supervising the U.S. attorney's public corruption section in Los Angeles. "If so, it may not be just the individual deputies who are culpable. It may be supervisors all the way up to higher-ups in the Sheriff's Department."
The subpoenas come amid renewed scrutiny over the county's jail system, which has been plagued over the last decade by inmate riots, killings, the formation of a gang-like deputies clique, early release of inmates, antiquated facilities and huge legal settlements. Over the last three years, the county has paid $8.4 million to resolve claims of excessive force and failure to care for inmates, a spokeswoman for Supervisor Gloria Molina said.
Last month, The Times reported that the FBI is investigating allegations of inmate beatings and other deputy misconduct. Among the claims under review are those made by an American Civil Liberties Union jail monitor who said she witnessed deputies knock an inmate unconscious and beat him for two minutes at the Twin Towers jail...
Sheriff's Department seeks to curtail the extent of subpoenas, which seek data on workers since 2009.
By Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard
Los Angeles Times
October 15, 2011
Federal authorities have widened their misconduct investigation into the Los Angeles County jail system, demanding internal Sheriff's Department documents detailing deputies' use of force on inmates over several years, as well as other records.
Sheriff's officials balked at the size and scope of the subpoenas when they were served several weeks ago and are negotiating with federal prosecutors to reduce the number of documents they must produce.
A source familiar with the demand said it sought the names of everyone who has worked in the jails since 2009, even janitors, and whether they have been disciplined for misconduct. Federal prosecutors also sought employees' Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers and personal email addresses.
The records demand is the first sign that federal authorities are not simply looking into several individual cases of jail brutality and other misconduct but are taking a broader look at potential wrongdoing by deputies going back years.
"I was caught completely flabbergasted," Sheriff Lee Baca said of the growing federal scrutiny of his jail system, the nation's largest. "It's like your best friend digs up your favorite rose bed."
In an interview with The Times, Baca said the subpoenaed records were so voluminous that even federal investigators "would have had difficulty ferreting through it all." Nevertheless, Baca said, the county has begun collecting the records.
Federal officials declined to comment about the subpoenas or discuss details of the investigation.
Rebecca Lonergan, a USC law professor and former federal prosecutor, said the demand for the records suggests that investigators are looking for witnesses who would be willing to cooperate as they explore whether there might be a pattern and practice of deputy misconduct in the jails.
"The question becomes whether it rises to a supervisory level," said Lonergan, who handled police misconduct cases while supervising the U.S. attorney's public corruption section in Los Angeles. "If so, it may not be just the individual deputies who are culpable. It may be supervisors all the way up to higher-ups in the Sheriff's Department."
The subpoenas come amid renewed scrutiny over the county's jail system, which has been plagued over the last decade by inmate riots, killings, the formation of a gang-like deputies clique, early release of inmates, antiquated facilities and huge legal settlements. Over the last three years, the county has paid $8.4 million to resolve claims of excessive force and failure to care for inmates, a spokeswoman for Supervisor Gloria Molina said.
Last month, The Times reported that the FBI is investigating allegations of inmate beatings and other deputy misconduct. Among the claims under review are those made by an American Civil Liberties Union jail monitor who said she witnessed deputies knock an inmate unconscious and beat him for two minutes at the Twin Towers jail...
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Crowe case plaintiff Houser settles lawsuit
Crowe case plaintiff Houser settles lawsuit
J. Harry Jones
SDUT
Oct. 12, 2011
DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO — Aaron Houser, one of three teenagers wrongfully accused of murdering Stephanie Crowe in 1998, has settled a lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money against four Escondido police officers, one Oceanside police officer and a psychologist.
Michael Crowe, the only remaining plaintiff, has not settled, and a trial in federal court is tentatively to begin Oct. 31, although a request to continue the proceeding into November has been made.
Joshua Treadway, the third teen who was arrested, opted out of the lawsuit years ago.
The notice of settlement was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego on Tuesday.
How much money Houser will receive as a result of the settlement is confidential, lawyers for Houser, the officers, and the city of Escondido say. The San Diego Union-Tribune plans to challenge that assertion with the argument that settlements regarding public employees, represented by attorneys working for city-authorized insurance companies, should be a matter of public record.
Twelve-year old Stephanie Crowe was found stabbed to death in her Escondido home on Jan. 21, 1998. Her older brother Michael, 14 at the time, and his friends, Houser and Treadway, were arrested soon afterward. Following hours of interrogations by Escondido police and an Oceanside police officer called in to help, authorities said that Crowe and Treadway confessed. The courts later said the confessions were coerced.
About a year after the killing, on the eve of the boys’ trial, all charges against them were dropped. DNA testing showed that Stephanie’s blood was on the sweatshirt of a transient who had been in her neighborhood the night of the slaying, acting oddly and banging on doors.
That man, Richard Tuite, was eventually convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
A lawsuit brought by all three boys claiming violation of rights against self-incrimination, false arrest and prosecution was brought soon after, but U.S. District Judge John Rhoades threw out the bulk of the case in 2004 and 2005. Rhoades ruled that while the interrogations were harsh, they could not be considered coerced because they were never used against the youths at a criminal trial.
In 2010, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S., Circuit Court of Appeals revived key portions of the lawsuit, setting the stage for the settlement and trial to come.
The Crowe case has had far reaching implications. District Attorney Paul Pfingst was defeated in 2002 while seeking a third term in office. His challenger, Bonnie Dumanis, aired television ads leading up to the election that featured a picture of Stephanie Crowe as an example of why a new county district attorney was needed.
The case was even made into a 2002 TV move called “The Interrogation of Michael Crowe,” which continues to be shown all these years later.
J. Harry Jones
SDUT
Oct. 12, 2011
DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO — Aaron Houser, one of three teenagers wrongfully accused of murdering Stephanie Crowe in 1998, has settled a lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money against four Escondido police officers, one Oceanside police officer and a psychologist.
Michael Crowe, the only remaining plaintiff, has not settled, and a trial in federal court is tentatively to begin Oct. 31, although a request to continue the proceeding into November has been made.
Joshua Treadway, the third teen who was arrested, opted out of the lawsuit years ago.
The notice of settlement was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego on Tuesday.
How much money Houser will receive as a result of the settlement is confidential, lawyers for Houser, the officers, and the city of Escondido say. The San Diego Union-Tribune plans to challenge that assertion with the argument that settlements regarding public employees, represented by attorneys working for city-authorized insurance companies, should be a matter of public record.
Twelve-year old Stephanie Crowe was found stabbed to death in her Escondido home on Jan. 21, 1998. Her older brother Michael, 14 at the time, and his friends, Houser and Treadway, were arrested soon afterward. Following hours of interrogations by Escondido police and an Oceanside police officer called in to help, authorities said that Crowe and Treadway confessed. The courts later said the confessions were coerced.
About a year after the killing, on the eve of the boys’ trial, all charges against them were dropped. DNA testing showed that Stephanie’s blood was on the sweatshirt of a transient who had been in her neighborhood the night of the slaying, acting oddly and banging on doors.
That man, Richard Tuite, was eventually convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
A lawsuit brought by all three boys claiming violation of rights against self-incrimination, false arrest and prosecution was brought soon after, but U.S. District Judge John Rhoades threw out the bulk of the case in 2004 and 2005. Rhoades ruled that while the interrogations were harsh, they could not be considered coerced because they were never used against the youths at a criminal trial.
In 2010, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S., Circuit Court of Appeals revived key portions of the lawsuit, setting the stage for the settlement and trial to come.
The Crowe case has had far reaching implications. District Attorney Paul Pfingst was defeated in 2002 while seeking a third term in office. His challenger, Bonnie Dumanis, aired television ads leading up to the election that featured a picture of Stephanie Crowe as an example of why a new county district attorney was needed.
The case was even made into a 2002 TV move called “The Interrogation of Michael Crowe,” which continues to be shown all these years later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
