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Category: Blog Posts

The Fallacy of De-Escalation

De-escalation, is a farcical concept, created by people who have never been in, nor will they ever be in, a dynamic situation like street officers face. Many incidents last mere seconds. A hesitation to act can be fatal.

The belief by the uninformed that any situation can be de-escalated will lead to injury or death to police officers and/or innocent people.

Police officers have been using de-escalation tactics forever, in those incidents where it is possible to do so. It’s time to bring sanity back to the City of Seattle, (a tall order).

Why in the world do politicians and police administrators take advice from people who have no experience or training in that area.

Instead of the usual, “you should go on a ride-along”, I propose that city leaders, police administrators, (including civilian over-seers) and journalists do go. But when a dangerous and dynamic situation arises, the hosting officer look to them and say, “You handle it.”

The obvious answer would be, “I’m not trained to do that!”

Exactly.

The flogging will continue until morale improves.

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Familial DNA Testing: It’s Time has Come

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of murder and rape cases out there where police have a DNA profile of the suspect, but he’s not in CODIS, the national DNA database of convicted felons.  But people who commit these types of crimes often come from families where this sort of thing is prevalent.  Enter familial DNA testing.  It searches the databases for someone who may be closely related to the unknown suspect in the case being investigated.

Familial DNA searches let the detective know that the suspect is closely related to a person in CODIS.  It’s a lead for investigators to follow. If they find a close hit, it’s up to them to figure out which relative is the suspect, and then that person’s DNA must be retrieved and compared to the profile recovered at the crime scene.

Claims that it is an invasion of privacy are bogus.  First of all, the person whose DNA is being hit on is in CODIS because they have been convicted of a felony.  Secondly, it doesn’t implicate them in the case being investigated; in fact it exonerates them completely.  It only indicates that a close relative is likely the suspect.

Many families languish not knowing what happened to their loved ones, and knowing that no one has been held accountable.

It’s their turn for justice.

This is an article on point.  Read it here.

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Golden State Killer Captured

Detectives in California have arrested the “Golden State Killer” suspected in the murders and rapes of dozens of victims in Northern and Southern California from the mid-seventies into the late eighties.

He was connected to the crimes by DNA, using innovative techniques only recently available.

I was interviewed as a subject matter expert by KIRO TV in Seattle.  That interview is here.

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Little Miss Nobody

I met Sylvia Pettem at a conference last year and had lunch with her.  She recently wrote as a guest on the blog: Defrosting Cold Cases, about an unidentified child whose remains were found in Prescott Arizona.  You can read that post here.

Sylvia also wrote a fascinating book about an unidentified woman’s remains that were found and buried in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado as a Jane Doe. (Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe.)

Sylvia painstakingly worked to identify the woman and discovered what happened to her.

That book is available here.

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Canadian Cold Case

Someone recently tagged me on Twitter about a case out of Ontario, Canada that is a cold case murder.  They suggested that a TV show may need to be done to drum up interest in the case.  (I’m all in for that).

The author of a book about the case said that there was blood collected at the scene that was the same type of his suspect, (who has since died).

If there’s blood, there’s DNA.  Don’t have his DNA?  Dig ’em up!

The article can be found here.

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FBI Policy to Blame for Pulse Nightclub Shooting Acquital

Jurors who acquitted Noor Salman, the wife of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen in Orlando, Florida last Friday, told news reporters that one of the deciding factors in their decision was that the FBI agents interviewing Salman did not record the interview, but instead, hand wrote notes.

The reason the FBI did that in this case is that it is FBI policy to do so.

I am a serious critic of the bureaucracy of the FBI. There are many skilled investigators, who work for the bureau, but everything they do is so regulated by pencil pushers at headquarters who likely have never done a criminal interrogation in their careers, they hamstring those agents.

No technique is less efficient that handwriting notes in an interrogation. The interrogator is so busy trying to write down what the subject is saying, they don’t look at the person they’re interviewing, potentially missing non-verbal cues to questions; don’t engage them in conversation, and the vast majority of what the investigator is told doesn’t get written down.

Having a word for word, accurate record of what the suspect said is huge.  Statements that don’t seem important enough to write down at the time of the interview, may become hugely important when the investigation is more complete and more facts are known.

I responded to a mass-shooter incident at Seattle Pacific University a few years ago. There were several hundred witnesses in need of interviewing. Dozens of Seattle Police detectives were there along with a handful of FBI agents who showed up to help.

We set up tables, and had witnesses report to a station for an interview.

I knew the FBI agents helping in the process. They were all good investigators. But the SPD detectives conducted four of five interviews for each one the agents did. Why? Because the agents were required to hand write their statements, while the SPD personnel recorded ours for future transcription.

This isn’t unique to the FBI. It is a problem with all federal agencies. They are much more interested in process than product.

I’ve often said:  A brand new police officer, fresh out of the police academy, has much more descretion to act than a twenty-year FBI agent.

It’s time for federal agencies like the FBI to take the handcuffs off their agents and entrust them with decision making and discretion to act, which is necessary to conduct a high-quality investigation.

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DNA not in CODIS

CODIS is the Combined DNA Index System, and theoretically, a person convicted of a felony has a sample taken and then the DNA is entered into state and national databases to compare against past and future crimes. I say theoretically, because in several instances, that DNA isn’t taken, at least in a timely manner and DNA from crime scenes sits without a match for years, when the suspect is in prison the whole time. It’s a problem in Washington State and nationally.  I bumped into this while investigating the Shannon Harps murder, of which I wrote in my book.  Harps’ killer, James Williams served ten years in prison for shooting a man.  His DNA was collected, but never processed and entered into CODIS.  Fortunately we collected it and submitted it to the lab, getting a match with DNA found on the murder weapon, but had we not come across Williams, that case might still be unsolved; unessisarily so.

Seth Augunstein is a reporter for Forensics Magazine. He wrote a great article about that issue last summer.

You can find that article here.

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Web Lecture

Me and my old partner, Mike Ciesynski, gave a web-based lecture on serial killers today for American Public University in West Virginia.

I thought the lecture was just for that school, but there were people logged in from around the world.  We had a great time, and the students asked some great questions.

It’s amazing how the internet has made the world a small place.

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Brown Pleads Guilty to Robbery in New Jersey

Ali Muhammed Brown, Jihadi serial killer, has pled guilty to the final charges of Armed Robbery in New Jersey clearing the way for his extradition to Seattle to face three charges of Aggravated Murder–charges he’ll also likely plead guilty to.  I discussed this case in my book.

The story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is here.

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