Chavez uses soldiers to cut crime

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has ordered thousands of National Guard soldiers into the streets of the capital Caracas and surrounding states, urging them to help outgunned police curb widespread violent crime.

"We've been fighting and reducing overall crime rates, but we've fallen short when it comes to the number of homicides," Mr Chavez told National Guard troops holding assault rifles as they stood in formation at a downtown plaza.

More than 3,200 troops were deployed to the streets of Caracas as well as the surrounding states of Miranda and Vargas, according to Gen. Miguel Vivas Landino, commander of the new security force.

Venezuela has one of Latin America's highest murder rates.

The government has not released official statistics tallying annual killings for several years, but statistics released by human rights groups and academic organisations indicate Venezuela has become one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America.

From 1998 through 2010, the yearly homicide rate tripled, rising from 19 for every 100,000 residents in the South American nation to 57 per 100,000, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a Caracas-based academic organisation that closely tracks crime statistics and trends.

Other violent crimes such as kidnapping and armed robbery have also increased in recent years in Venezuela.

As ransom kidnappings have soared, the government passed a revised law in 2009 that stiffened prison sentences for kidnapping and also allows authorities to freeze the banks accounts of victims' families to prevent them from paying ransom.

Kidnappings have soared over the last decade, the Venezuelan Violence Observatory says. Reports of kidnappings increased from 52 in 1998 to 618 in 2009, when the organization last compiled complete statistics.

Last week, professional baseball player Wilson Ramos was seized at gunpoint outside his family's home in the city of Valencia. The Washington Nationals catcher was rescued by police commandos two days later at a remote hideout in the mountains of central Carabobo state.

View the original article here

Houston crime reporter Bardwell dies after cancer battle

Houston crime reporter S.K. Bardwell, who was called the "Queen of the Scene" by colleagues and remembered for her tireless work on behalf of the disenfranchised, died Friday after a six-month battle with lung cancer. She was 57.

"She treated people on the street the way you would treat people at a corporate office," former Chronicle reporter Peggy O'Hare remembered. "Susan was the real deal. She was a crime reporter to the core of her soul - someone who would walk into tough neighborhoods without fear, knock on doors and get the real story."

Bardwell was revered for compiling a database of possible Houston serial killers and was consulted frequently by law enforcement. She was honored as an advocate for crime victims and their families.

At the now-defunct Houston Post, Bardwell regularly competed against the rival Chronicle on crime stories. For a year, then-Chronicle reporter Lisa Teachey battled her.

"She always won," recalled Teachey, now a Harris County District Court staff attorney. Bardwell later became her mentor at the Chronicle. "She was tough and gritty, but she was compassionate … because she knew these were real people caught in awful circumstances."

Susan Kathleen Bardwell was born on July 9, 1954, in Tulsa, Okla., to Pat and Billie Miller and grew up in the nearby Turley community.

She adopted the byline S.K. Bardwell in honor of her mother - using the family matriarch's maiden name after she died - and to gain an advantage with readers, said Micheal Boddy, her husband of 36 years.

"In a strange way it gave her a little more credibility with her audience, sad to say," he said. "It really unhinged people to realize they were getting their butts kicked by a woman."

After working as a bartender and in the fiberglass business with Boddy, she became a journalist upon graduation from Brazosport College. She cut her teeth at the Angleton Times and The Facts before becoming a Houston Post reporter in 1988. She joined the Chronicle in 1993.

Boddy recalled that his wife once responded to a deadly house explosion and saw a man a few blocks away carrying a gasoline can.

"She drove into the alley and confronted him and he pulled a knife on her," he said. "She did manage to calm the guy down and kept him talking. He wouldn't admit that he had actually done it himself, but he did tell her how the arson was done and how it killed the people."

Bardwell left the Chronicle in 2005 to help her husband start a short-lived community newspaper. She also was an accomplished gardener, self-taught knitter and amateur painter.

"Susan … never stopped learning," Boddy said. "She went from being a junior high school dropout to becoming one of the premier police reporters in the United States."

Bardwell is survived by Boddy, sons Sean and Eric, two grandsons, a sister and a brother.

A private service is scheduled next month for relatives and friends.

cindy.george@chron.com twitter.com/cindylgeorge

View the original article here

Crime on Campus: Do Colleges Have Too Much Power?

Penn State students gather at the university to express solidarity with the alleged victims in the Jerry Sandusky case

A lot of big colleges have their own police departments. They are staffed with sworn officers who have the ability to investigate everything from burglaries to murder. Depending on the type of transgression and how it gets reported, some alleged crimes are dealt with in on-campus proceedings and some are passed on to local prosecutors. One of the most troubling aspects of the Penn State scandal is that school officials who were notified that a young boy was allegedly raped in a campus shower in 2002 did not report the incident to local authorities. Their inaction begs the question that even though there are laws in place that stipulate the proper protocol to follow upon hearing reports of sexual abuse, assault and harassment on campus, What's to stop officials at large-scale institutions — many of which operate full-fledged police departments — from sweeping such unpleasantness under the rug?

It's often hard to know how alleged crimes are handled on campus, in part because honor committees and other campus judicial systems have confidential proceedings. One of the few oversight tools the government has is the Clery Act. Named after a Lehigh University student who was raped and strangled by another student in 1986 in her dorm room, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act requires all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial-aid programs to disclose each year the number of alleged criminal offenses, including sexual offenses, that are recorded on campus or in other areas that are under university control, such as remote classrooms and fraternity houses. In addition, schools must also issue timely warnings in cases in which the reported crime represents a threat to the campus community. Last week the Department of Education announced that it was launching Clery Act investigations at two schools: one at Penn State involving allegations that former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky had sexually assaulted boys on campus and the other at Milwaukee's Marquette University for allegedly failing to report in a timely manner allegations that two athletes had sexually assaulted female students. (Read about whether colleges are doing enough to combat sexual violence.)

"If these allegations of sexual abuse are true, then this is a horrible tragedy for those young boys," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement announcing the department's investigation into Penn State. "If it turns out that some people at the school knew of the abuse and did nothing or covered it up, that makes it even worse. Schools and school officials have a legal and moral responsibility to protect children and young people from violence and abuse."

But despite having such responsibility, disclosing campus crime has often been a process fraught with confusion, loopholes, inaction, inconsistencies and, in some cases, negligence and cover-ups. To date, seven colleges and universities have paid Clery Act fines for failure to comply with the law; sometimes the violation stemmed from not having the appropriate institutional structures in place, sometimes from failing to disclose information. The most egregious case to date took place at Eastern Michigan University in 2006 when administrators were found to have covered up the rape and murder of a student, letting her parents think she had died of natural causes. The university was fined $350,000, the largest fine ever paid under the Clery Act. (A lawsuit forced Eastern Michigan to pay the victim's family an additional $2.5 million.)

Going after Penn State and Eastern Michigan for violating reporting requirements in these instances is a bit like going after Al Capone for tax evasion. Where the Clery Act wields the most influence is in how schools handle the much more common transgression of students being sexually assaulted.(Read about fighting school violence.)

Some of the schools that have been investigated for possible Clery Act violations have their own police forces. Others, like Marquette, do not. Because the members of Marquette's public-safety department are not sworn officers, the university had an obligation to report any accusations of sexual assault to a law-enforcement agency, and in the two recent cases involving athletes, the investigations may have been harmed because police did not get the information quickly, according to a statement Milwaukee County district attorney John Chisholm made in May.

The ability schools have to make decisions internally and utilize in-house departments is what allowed a Penn State football player to admit in a campus judicial proceeding in December 2002 to raping a fellow student during the fall semester, but not to have his punishment — a two-semester suspension — kick in until after he played in a January bowl game.

Stories like that are why the Department of Education, which is charged with regulating schools under the Clery Act, says it has stepped up its efforts in the past few years, after facing criticism in the past for not conducting enough reviews and not imposing penalties when violations were found. Under the Obama Administration, the department created a team dedicated to compliance, monitoring and enforcement of the Clery Act. So far this year, six institutions have been found at fault and are facing fines — Oregon State University, Lincoln University in Missouri, the University of Northern Iowa, the University of Vermont, Washington State University and Yale University — which is the same number of institutions that were fined in the first 18 years of the law's existence. Four other institutions are either in the process of being fined or are appealing. "It takes vigilance," Justin Hamilton, spokesman for the Department of Education said. "We can never be in every university all the time, nor do we want to be. We want to trust the schools and believe that they are living up to their obligations, but when they're not, we will act decisively, effectively and fairly." Hamilton says the department now regularly conducts campus visits even on those campuses where no incidents have been reported, closely monitors media reports and has conversations with people on the ground in an effort to be more proactive.

S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security on Campus, a nonprofit dedicated to the prevention of campus crime, said the Administration's efforts have helped. "One of the keys to ensuring that colleges and universities do not keep crimes, including sexual violence, secret is for the Department of Education to continue improving its Clery Act oversight," he said. At the time of the March 2002 incident involving Sandusky and a young boy in a Penn State locker room, only nine schools had ever even been reviewed under the law and only one fine (a modest $15,000) had ever been paid. Now a total of 49 schools have been reviewed, and 26 of them have been reviewed in just the past three years. According to Carter, the majority of the investigations in the past three years were randomly selected, whereas in the past, reviews were generally only conducted in the aftermath of a high-profile incident. Additionally, six-figure fines are now the norm rather than the exception. "The random reviews in tandem with six-figure fines are a strong incentive for institutions to not try and sweep things under the rug," Carter said. Still, he added, "Ultimately, sometimes there's no way to know what's happening on campus unless someone who does know comes forward."

Read about Yale's secret society.

Read about the top 10 crimes of 2010.

View the original article here

Penn State scandal among most-covered crime stories

The sex abuse scandal at Penn State has been one of the most heavily covered crime stories in recent years, reports a media tracking group.

The Penn State scandal ranks fourth among crime stories since the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism began tracking media "newshole" in January 2007. PEJ measures how much time and space media outlets devote to topics and people in the news. (For newspapers, the center counts only stories that appear on the front page.)

Crime stories that got more news coverage:

1.) The Jan. 8, 2011, fatal shootings of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and five others in Tucson Arizona. It accounted for 56.6 percent of the media newshole in the week that followed.2.) The April 16, 2007, massacre at Virginia Tech in which the gunman killed 32 people and himself. It accounted for 50.9 percent of the newshole that week.3.) The July 5, 2011, acquittal of Casey Anthony in her daughter's killing. It accounted for 17.3 percent of the newshole that week.

According to PEJ, the Penn State scandal occupied 16.9  percent of the newshole from Nov. 7 to Nov. 13.

The story appeared just once on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on Nov. 10. That story reported the immediate ouster of Penn State President Graham Spanier and football Coach Joe Paterno, who initially offered to resign at season's end.

The bulk of the Post-Dispatch's coverage of the scandal appeared in the Sports section. Editors decided this week to move the coverage into the main news section because of the criminal nature of the allegations.

PEJ's News Coverage Index measures how the press uses its newshole -- the space devoted to each subject in print and online, and the amount of time devoted on cable, network and radio news. The index surveys 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio.(The Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com weren't among the media outlets in the survey.)

View the original article here

Crime QA: Answers to reader questions

Diane Greening pleaded no contest to willfully causing her newborn child's death.

A few years back, a girl I went to high school with in Elk Grove, by the name of Diane Green, was arrested for killing her baby and dumping its body in a Dumpster behind Food Source on Mack Road in Sacramento. Whatever happened to her?

– Mich, Elk Grove

According to Sacramento Superior Court online records, Diane Greening pleaded no contest to willfully causing the death of her child.

Greening, who was 24 at the time, was arrested in August 2004, more than three months after she abandoned her newborn son near a supermarket on Mack Road. According to a story in The Bee, detectives believe the baby was alive when Greening dumped him in a garbage bag near the vacant store.

When a homeless man discovered the baby, it looked as though the infant had been dead about two days, according to police, who said the baby's umbilical cord was still attached.

The child was found less than a mile from a Sacramento fire station, where the infant could legally have been abandoned under the Safely Surrender Baby Law.

Greening was sentenced in May 2005 to 367 days in jail and 10 years probation.

Back in the early '90s, a very popular, well-respected female day care owner living in the suburbs and operating a day care out of her home was either accused or then charged with causing the death of an approximately 1-year-old boy named Loren in her care. What was the outcome of her case?

– Anonymous, Carmichael

Jamie Lynne Stone was acquitted of second-degree murder in the September 1991 death of 17-month-old Loran James MacDonald.

Stone operated a licensed day care service at her North Highlands home.

According to stories in The Bee, on Sept. 20, 1991, emergency medical technicians were summoned to the residence and found Loran McDonald suffering from head injuries. The child died 20 hours later.

An autopsy determined that he had suffered compound fractures of the skull and massive brain injuries.

Stone said the child fell against an oak coffee table in her living room.

The prosecution argued that Stone killed Loran in the first hour after he was dropped off at her day care facility by his mother.

But the defense raised doubts about the behavior of the child's mother and contended that the youngster must have been hurt prior to his arrival at Stone's home, then died after aggravating his injuries in the fall against the coffee table.

Eight of the 12 jurors voted for acquittal, and the court subsequently cleared Stone of criminal responsibility in the child's death.

– Cathy Locke

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

What You Should Know About Comments on Sacbee.com

Sacbee.com is happy to provide a forum for reader interaction, discussion, feedback and reaction to our stories. However, we reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments or ban users who can't play nice. (See our full terms of service here.)

Here are some rules of the road:

• Keep your comments civil. Don't insult one another or the subjects of our articles. If you think a comment violates our guidelines click the "Report Abuse" link to notify the moderators. Responding to the comment will only encourage bad behavior.

• Don't use profanities, vulgarities or hate speech. This is a general interest news site. Sometimes, there are children present. Don't say anything in a way you wouldn't want your own child to hear.

• Do not attack other users; focus your comments on issues, not individuals.

• Stay on topic. Only post comments relevant to the article at hand.

• Do not copy and paste outside material into the comment box.

• Don't repeat the same comment over and over. We heard you the first time.

• Do not use the commenting system for advertising. That's spam and it isn't allowed.

• Don't use all capital letters. That's akin to yelling and not appreciated by the audience.

• Don't flag other users' comments just because you don't agree with their point of view. Please only flag comments that violate these guidelines.

You should also know that The Sacramento Bee does not screen comments before they are posted. You are more likely to see inappropriate comments before our staff does, so we ask that you click the "Report Abuse" link to submit those comments for moderator review. You also may notify us via email at feedback@sacbee.com. Note the headline on which the comment is made and tell us the profile name of the user who made the comment. Remember, comment moderation is subjective. You may find some material objectionable that we won't and vice versa.

If you submit a comment, the user name of your account will appear along with it. Users cannot remove their own comments once they have submitted them.

View the original article here

Crime scene police 'tweet-a-thon'

Forensic investigators are tweeting live from crime scenes in a bid to "dispel a few myths" about criminal investigations, police said.

The initiative, involving forensic scene investigators from West Midlands Police, is a UK first.

A force spokesman said Twitter updates would include forensic facts, photographs of equipment and advice for the public on how to preserve evidence.

The "tweet-a-thon" will reach more than 8,000 people who follow police in the west and centre of Birmingham on the micro-blogging site.

Forensic scene manager Helen Evans said: "We hope that we can captivate followers with our tweets and share some of the work that is undertaken on a daily basis.

"Most people seem to think that the role is similar in nature to CSI or other American TV dramas, so hopefully we can dispel a few myths while also showing how varied and challenging the role of a real forensic scene investigator can be."

Tweets on the @brumpolice account cover Birmingham city centre, Perry Barr, Oscott, Ladywood, Handsworth, Lozells, Nechells, Aston and Soho.

View the original article here

A Campus Crime Story that Stunned the Nation

No. 4 - Rank of the Penn State scandal among biggest crime stories since January 2007

The sexual abuse scandal rocking Penn State and shocking the nation—triggered by the arrest of former defensive football coach Jerry Sandusky on charges of sexually abusing young boys over a 15-year period—was the No. 2 story in the news media from November 7-13. With coverage building as the scandal mushroomed, leading to the firing of the school’s president and its iconic 46-year head football coach, Joe Paterno, the story accounted for 16.9% of the newshole, trailing only the presidential campaign (24%).  

That makes the Penn State saga, the fourth biggest U.S. crime story since PEJ began tracking news coverage in January 2007—although it received a fraction of the coverage of the top two stories. (Not counting acts of terrorism or political scandals.)

The No. 1 crime story since 2007 was the January 8, 2011, shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on the representative and shot 19 people—killing six—in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson Arizona. The event accounted for 56.6% of the newshole from January 10-16, 2011. (This past week, Giffords talked about her long recovery from those grave injuries in a TV interview.)

The second-most covered crime story was the April 16, 2007, massacre on the campus of Virginia Tech when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people before taking his own life. That tragedy accounted for 50.9% of the newshole the week April 15-20, 2007.

Just ahead of the Penn State scandal, the third-biggest crime story was the July 5, 2011, acquittal of Casey Anthony who was accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter Caylee three years prior. The verdict stunned much of the nation and the story accounted for 17.3% of the newshole the week of July 4-10, 2011.

Rounding out the top five crime stories was the September 16, 2007 arrest of O.J. Simpson for armed robbery and kidnapping while trying to retrieve sports memorabilia at a Las Vegas Hotel. The story filled 13.5% of the newshole the week of September 16-21. Simpson is serving 33 years for the charges.

Tricia Sartor of PEJ

Date Posted: November 16, 2011

View the original article here