But prosecutors now say Detective Desormeau, 34, struggled with one aspect of police work: telling the truth. After relying on Detective Desormeau’s word in hundreds of cases, prosecutors no longer believe him credible. In two cases, prosecutors have accused Detective Desormeau and his partner of making up crucial details when arresting people, even testifying about criminal activity that may never have occurred. They have said they are reviewing some of his old cases, though how many is not clear.

The two detectives were indicted this year, adding to the body of evidence that police perjury and half-truths remain a persistent problem for the New York Police Department. And as more arrests and confrontations are being recorded, evidence of police falsehoods is more apparent.

The issue of false or misleading statements by the police has, on a national level, been intertwined with the issue of excessive force and the debate over whether officers are too quick to shoot people, particularly black men.

But the phenomenon of false or misleading police statements has not been confined to high-profile cases in which officers try to justify the use of deadly force. In New York, the practice of routinely making up facts to justify a dubious arrest was entrenched enough that it got its own nickname more than 20 years ago — “testilying.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/nyregion/he-excelled-as-a-detective-until-prosecutors-stopped-believing-him.html

The NYPD is increasingly turning to DNA to help solve crimes. And it's worked: The science has helped develop investigative leads and given prosecutors ammunition in court. But as the police have gotten more aggressive about collecting genetic material, they've quietly amassed a giant database of DNA profiles without any laws and little oversight over how they can use it.

As the science advances and the size of the databases grows, civil-liberties groups, defense attorneys and advocates are ringing alarm bells.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/nypds-growing-dna-database-raises-concern/

New York City is building a vast, unregulated DNA database that police are already using to connect suspects to evidence from crime scenes across the five boroughs.

In the last five years, the number of DNA profiles in New York's local database has grown dramatically, driven in part by a push to collect DNA in every gun case. As of July, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was storing about 64,000 genetic profiles, The Trace and WNYC have learned.

Details about the size of the database and its rapid growth have not been previously reported.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/push-solve-gun-cases-fuels-growth-new-york-dna-database-article-1.3516711

YONKERS – After nights of murder in New York City, the killer commuted from his grisly, blood-puddled crime scenes to his apartment here on quiet Pine Street.

Here, the "Son of Sam” slept on a mattress laid flat on the floor. Here, he posted sheets over his windows to block out a postcard view of the Hudson River and Palisades cliffs. Here, he worked on the anonymous letters sent to taunt detectives on his trail, tease the press and terrorize neighbors.

“How dare you force me into the night to do your bidding,” said one letter to downstairs neighbor Craig Glassman. “True, I am the killer. But Craig, the killings are your command.”

It was here that cops finally arrested postal worker David Berkowitz 40 years ago, on Aug. 10, 1977.

In eight random attacks over the course of a year, he’d crept up on young victims late at night, then unloaded his .44 at close range. Six people died. One was paralyzed and another blinded. In total, he’d shot 13 people, all of them in New York City boroughs — the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

http://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2017/08/02/son-of-sam-arrested-yonkers/486219001/

Sometimes the roads took him to work. He was a postal clerk in the Bronx General Post Office, a great, ugly building on the top of the slope at 149th St. and the Grand Concourse. In the wake of the killings, when murder fever was running through the city, David Berkowitz would sort mail in the bowels of this large, ugly building. He must have gone out to eat, but nobody remembered him.

“I Never Seen the Guy”

“I herd he came in here,” said a guy at the bar of the Glenroy Lunch & Tavern, across 149th St. from the Post Office. “But I don’t really know. I hear Tony seen him, inside there in the cafeteria. Ask him.” Tony was behind the counter in the cafeteria in the next room. “No,” he said. “I never seen the guy. I looked at the picture but I never seen the guy.”

It was the same in the Concourse Caffe and the gas station up the street. In Reed’s restaurant, the booths were crowded with young girls. Pretty girls. Girls with dark hair. But nobody who worked there remembered seeing David Berkowitz.

“Hey, listen,” the countermand said, “to me they’re all ham and eggs.”

David Berkowitz has a biography, of course, and there will be few secrets left about his life in the days to come. But when you rummage around the edges of his life, you see how little impact he had made on ordinary people in the ordinary course of his days. He was a zero. A zip. The cops have another word for him, that starts with an “s,” but it can’t be printed here.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/hamill-son-sam-phantom-face-article-1.3362160

It was a parking ticket. A simple, run of the mill $35 New York City parking ticket - one of eight million slapped underneath windshields each year - broke the case. This was the clue that led police to the Son of Sam at his filthy Yonkers studio where quilts were hung over light.

Just that piece of paper, signed by an unsuspecting cop, Michael [Cataneo], on the morning of July 31, when Son of Sam claimed the last of his victims. After the cops had pieced it all together, after a year of work, several million dollars in expenses, 13 victims and countless other lives shattered, it was that familiar piece of cardboard that led to the 1970 Galaxie that Son of Sam, who is David Berkowitz, 24, postal clerk, used on his murder runs.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/clues-1-ticket-catch-son-sam-article-1.3370198

James Justus remembers hanging up the telephone convinced that he had something.

It was Aug. 9, 1977. He was a police detective checking on parking summonses issued in Brooklyn on July 31, the night the gunman known as Son of Sam shot a couple in a car in Bath Beach. He was assigned to look for witnesses who might have seen the serial killer, who by then had taunted the police and tabloid columnists alike. Maybe whoever owned a Ford Galaxie with a parking ticket had seen something.

It turned out that the owner of the Galaxie had seen everything, for he was the one who had pushed the city’s fright level as high as it would go in those pre-color-coded days. Tensions were so high that Mayor Abraham D. Beame directed the police to shoo couples away from places where couples would go to be alone. Suddenly, the fear was that being in such places could make them targets.

Suddenly, women with long brown hair were dyeing it blond or cutting it short, thinking they would be less vulnerable.

How different the city seemed then — emotionally exhausted and almost broke. Crime had reached a new high, and jobs were disappearing. “Lightning, looting and lunatics have so far given New York a heavy, angry summer,” an editorial writer observed in August 1977. The first two L-words referred to the blackout in July, which had begun with lightning strikes and had set off looting in some neighborhoods. The last referred to the man with the .44-caliber revolver.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/nyregion/son-of-sam-killings-david-berkowitz.html

Four decades ago, a lowly postal worker from Yonkers held all of New York City in the grip of terror, carrying out a deadly string of late-night shootings that killed six and injured seven, triggering one of the largest police manhunts in the city’s history.

David Berkowitz — the self-proclaimed “Son of Sam” — evaded police for more than a year but was arrested on Aug. 10, 1977, outside his apartment building.

http://people.com/crime/son-of-sam-david-berkowitz-arrest-anniversary/

Nearly four decades later, we rounded up some less familiar details about the case:

The news media called the gunman the .44-caliber killer — for his weapon of choice — until he left a note at the site of one of the murders calling himself the Son of Sam. Mr. Berkowitz has said in interviews that Sam was a demonic spirit, inspired by his neighbor Sam Carr, who spoke to him through Sam’s black Labrador, Harvey.

With a fear of more killings, New Yorkers changed their behavior: Mr. Berkowitz’s victims were often women with long, dark hair and couples, so women began cutting their hair short while lovers’ lanes sat vacant.

In addition to the shootings, Mr. Berkowitz said he had set nearly 1,500 fires in and around New York City.

A parking ticket led to his arrest. A woman who was approached by a man holding an object on the night of the final murder told the police that parking tickets were being issued near the scene. The police eventually traced Mr. Berkowitz’s car to his apartment.

After a decade in prison, Mr. Berkowitz became an Evangelical Christian and rechristened himself the Son of Hope. He has written about his experience on his website and wrote a book, “Son of Hope: The Prison Journals of David Berkowitz.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/nyregion/new-york-today-son-of-sam-40-years-later.html

The NYPD is notorious for flouting the New York State Freedom of Information Law for even the most routine requests about police activity, contracts, and policies. Regarding surveillance technology, the department has been or is being sued for refusing to release information about facial recognition software, its use of predictive policing software, controversial X-ray vans, and the “mosque raking” program that placed the city’s Muslim communities under mass surveillance. Most recently, the local news channel NY1 sued the NYPD for footage from officers’ body-worn cameras, which are being introduced to precincts throughout the city this year. The police demanded $36,000 to release the footage.

The NYPD also recently invoked the Glomar response — the FBI’s famous “we cannot confirm or deny” construction — in response to requests for public records. It represents a bold new frontier in opacity for New York state’s open records laws, which are supposed to require affirmative or negative responses.

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/07/nypd-surveillance-post-act-lies-misinformation-transparency/

A police officer was fatally shot in the head while sitting in a police vehicle in the Bronx early Wednesday, according to law enforcement sources. The officer has been identified as 48-year-old mother of three Miosotis Familia.

Alexander Bonds, 34, came up and blasted Familia through the window without warning, sources said.

It seemed to be a deliberate “cop assassination,” one law enforcement source told The Post.

Bonds approached at 12:30 a.m. as Familia sat inside a temporary headquarters vehicle at East 183rd Street and Morris Avenue in Fordham Heights, according to sources.

Cops say Bonds was paroled in 2013 for a robbery in Syracuse after serving nearly seven years of an eight-year sentence. He was set to complete parole in May 2018.

Two other officers, Sgt. Keith Bryan and Officer Joseph Ayala, confronted Bonds about a block away and shot him dead, police said.

http://nypost.com/2017/07/05/nypd-officer-shot-on-duty-in-critical-condition/

Earlier today journalist Matthew Chayes reported that NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller called the department “the most transparent municipal police department in the world” in testimony before New York City Council.

In light of this rather bold claim regarding an agency routinely ranked among the worst in the state regarding openness and access, we thought we’d dig up some examples of the NYPD’s rather unique take on transparency over the years.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jun/14/five-examples-nypd-transparency/

RESEARCHERS AT GEORGETOWN University law school filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the New York City Police Department today for the agency’s refusal to disclose documents about its longstanding use of face recognition technology. The NYPD’s face recognition system, which has operated in the department’s Real Time Crime Center since at least 2011, allows officers to identify a suspect by searching against databases of stored facial photos.

Records pertaining to the NYPD’s program were requested in January 2016 by researchers at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology as part of The Perpetual Line-Up, a year-long study on law enforcement uses of facial recognition technology. After receiving public records from more than 90 agencies across the country, the study found that one in every two American adults is enrolled in a criminal face recognition network and that “few agencies have instituted meaningful protections to prevent the misuse of the technology.”

https://theintercept.com/2017/05/02/nypd-refuses-to-disclose-information-about-its-face-recognition-program-so-privacy-researchers-are-suing/

The NYPD’s proposed rules on officers using body cameras, released Friday, quickly ran into a stiff head wind from some police unions that threatened imminent legal action to stop their implementation.

The proposals governing the use of body cameras, set to roll out at the end of the month in the 34th Precinct in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, would mandate changes in the Patrol Guide, the bible of police procedures.

Under the rules, officers would be required to tell members of the public they were being recorded — unless notification would impede an investigation or create a danger. The rules also spell out when police must record, such as during arrests or car stops, and should not record, such as victims of sexual abuse or informants.

http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/nypd-to-roll-out-proposed-rules-on-body-cameras-1.13374030

The objective is to compel the good people within the NYPD who were scheduled to have a press conference regarding evidence of crimes against children on Anthony Weiner's computer, but were silenced by the DOJ. We urge them to have that press conference now or provide us with information to disseminate in regards to the evidence found.

https://www.ourchildrenmatter.net/

Undercover officers in the New York police department infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter activists and gained access to their text messages, according to newly released NYPD documents obtained by the Guardian.

The records, produced in response to a freedom of information lawsuit led by New York law firm Stecklow & Thompson, provide the most detailed picture yet of the sweeping scope of NYPD surveillance during mass protests over the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and 2015. Lawyers said the new documents raised questions about NYPD compliance with city rules.

The documents, mostly emails between undercover officers and other NYPD officials, follow other disclosures that the NYPD regularly filmed Black Lives Matter activists and sent undercover personnel to protests. The NYPD has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment or interview.

Emails show that undercover officers were able to pose as protesters even within small groups, giving them extensive access to details about protesters’ whereabouts and plans. In one email, an official notes that an undercover officer is embedded within a group of seven protesters on their way to Grand Central Station. This intimate access appears to have helped police pass as trusted organizers and extract information about demonstrations. In other emails, officers share the locations of individual protesters at particular times. The NYPD emails also include pictures of organizers’ group text exchanges with information about protests, suggesting that undercover officials were either trusted enough to be allowed to take photos of activists’ phones or were themselves members of a private planning group text.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/04/nypd-police-black-lives-matter-surveillance-undercover

The NYPD alerts federal immigration agents to the Criminal Court appearances of immigrants facing deportation, the Daily News has learned.

As a “sanctuary city,” the city currently only complies with Immigration and Customs Enforcement “detainer” orders to hold a defendant until federal agents can take custody in cases involving violent or serious felonies.

But in the process of verifying warrants against a defendant, officials said the NYPD will contact relevant law enforcement, including ICE, thereby alerting the agency to an immigrant’s upcoming appearance in a city courtroom.

Advocates slammed the practice, saying it amounts to “collusion” with immigration officials that goes against the spirit of Mayor de Blasio’s pledge that the city will remain a sanctuary city.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-alerts-feds-court-appearances-immigrants-article-1.3016935

New York City Police Department documents obtained by The Verge show that police camera teams were deployed to hundreds of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests from 2011–2013 and 2016. Originally acquired through a Freedom of Information Law request by New York attorney David Thompson of Stecklow, Cohen & Thompson, the records are job reports from the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) that document over 400 instances in which the unit’s video team attended, and sometimes filmed, demonstrations. More important than the records the NYPD turned over, however, are those that it claims it cannot find: namely, any documents demonstrating that legal reviews and authorizations of these surveillance operations took place.

While NYPD cameras have been regularly spotted at protests over the last six years, the frequency of their deployment and the departmental practices governing their use have remained unknown. Since mass protests broke out in New York City over the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner at the end of 2014, Black Lives Matter activists have pointed to the constant presence of cameras as one of the NYPD’s primary means of spying on the movement, in addition to the presence of undercover officers.

According to Interim Order 22, the NYPD’s guidelines for the filming of public activities, the department’s deputy commissioner of legal matters is supposed to review police requests for the filming of demonstrations, which include the operational objective of the recording, and forward approved requests to NYPD higher-ups. But in response to Thompson’s requests for these approved requests, the NYPD responded that no such records were located.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/15016984/nypd-video-surveillance-protests-occupy-black-lives-matter

That means, as NYPD sources highlight, the FBI knew Clinton did nothing to try and stop Weiner from repeatedly sexting a minor during the election. And the FBI likewise has apparently done nothing since the election to charge — or even question — Clinton for what appears to be intentionally endangering a minor entangled in a child pornography case. FBI Director James Comey said his agents combed Weiner’s laptop prior to the election and found no evidence indicating Hillary Clinton had engaged in any criminal conduct. Any. Somehow, Comey and his understudies were able to comb through over approximately 600,000 emails and files on the computer in a mere week. Yet found nothing linking Clinton to the Weiner child pornography case?

That information does not jibe with NYPD investigators. According to their intelligence, there was discussion of charging Clinton with New York statutes for not alerting law enforcement that a minor was being repeatedly exploited. But such talk was ultimately quashed by federal prosecutors who said this was now an FBI and Justice Department case and no charges like that would originate from New York or from local law enforcement where the girl lived.

“One bullshit road block after another,” a NYPD source said.

It was clear that Clinton was to get a free pass although NYPD said investigators held out some hope she would be charged after the election, especially when she lost. Now five months later, Clinton is talking about running for New York City mayor instead of defending herself against criminal charges.

“They (feds) sat on it,” The NYPD source said. “Fucking disgraceful.”

Some of the facts that Abedin, Clinton and the FBI apparently intentionally squelched include:

http://truepundit.com/nypd-turns-against-the-fbi-seized-laptop-shows-hillary-clinton-covered-up-weiners-alleged-sex-crimes-with-15-yr-old-during-election/

LEGISLATION INTRODUCED TODAY by New York City council members Dan Garodnick and Vanessa Gibson would finally compel the NYPD — one of the most technology-laden police forces in the country — to make public its rulebook for deploying its controversial surveillance arsenal.

The bill, named the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) act, would require the NYPD to detail how, when, and with what authority it uses technologies like Stingray devices, which can monitor and interfere with the cellular communications of an entire crowd at once. Specifically, the department would have to publicize the “…rules, processes and guidelines issued by the department regulating access to or use of such surveillance technology as well as any prohibitions or restrictions on use, including whether the department obtains a court authorization for each use of a surveillance technology, and what specific type of court authorization is sought.”

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/01/new-bill-would-force-nypd-to-disclose-its-surveillance-tech-playbook/