Real World Sniper assassination

Crazy...

Sniper Executes a Police Chief of Nuevo Leon with a .50 Caliber Rifle

Cyanide mystery

I’m talking of course, about the murderer of dry-cleaning owner Urooj Khan who died on July 20, just one day after the Illinois lottery issued him a check for some $425,000.

The Chicago Tribune broke the poison news last week. Khan’s death was first judged a natural one. He had died unexpectedly during the night. Yes, he was only 46 but he was overweight, imperfectly healthy, and the cause of death was given as heart disease. The standard toxicology screen, which checked for common exposures such as narcotics and carbon monoxide, was clear.

A Cyanide Murder in Chicago

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro: A Gun Ban That Misfired

...As a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who enforced firearms and ammunition cases while a severe local gun ban was still in effect, I am skeptical of the benefits that many imagine will result from additional gun-control efforts. I dislike guns, but I believe that a nationwide firearms crackdown would place an undue burden on law enforcement and endanger civil liberties while potentially increasing crime...

Read the rest: WSJ

Tide for Crack

Tide detergent: Works on tough stains. Can now also be traded for crack. A case study in American ingenuity, legal and otherwise

The call that came in from a local Safeway one day in March 2011 was unlike any the Organized Retail Crime Unit of the Prince George’s County Police Department had fielded before. The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team. When Thompson and his officers arrived to investigate, they stumbled onto another apparent Tide theft in progress and busted two men who’d piled 100 or so of the bright-orange jugs into their Honda. The next day, Thompson returned to the store’s parking lot to tape a television interview about the crimes. A different robber took advantage of the distraction to make off with twenty more bottles...

Suds for Drugs

FBI Bank Robbery Map

The FBI is turning to a custom Google Map to help solve bank robberies.

John Miller, Cop and Journalist

A police reporter in New York for 20 years for various television stations, he was hired by William Bratton, New York’s police commissioner, in 1994 as a deputy commissioner. He went back to reporting at ABC in 1995 and became co-anchor of “20/20,” where he interviewed Osama bin Laden. He wrote a book on the Sept. 11 attacks and then went back to work for Mr. Bratton in 2003, this time in Los Angeles as head of the counterterrorism and criminal intelligence bureau, along with the major crimes division.

Mr. Miller went on to the F.B.I. and the office of the director of national intelligence, where he worked as deputy director of the analysis division. But he found himself thinking about a return to reporting after Bin Laden was killed.

NYT: A TV Voice Rang True in Clamor of Shooting

Recommended Reading: Cocaine Incorporated

NYT: How a Mexican drug cartel makes its Billions

“Drug cartel,” it turns out, is a whopper of a misnomer; neither the Mexicans nor the Colombians ever colluded to fix prices or supply. “I wish they were cartels,” Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, told me. “If they were, they wouldn’t be fighting and driving up the violence.”

Insurgents and Gangs

Springfield, Mass., Fights Crime Using Green Beret Tactics, How is this news?

In early 2005, my unit in Iraq was replaced by a Army National Guard unit in which many of the members were cops. It is hard to believe that seven years later, law enforcement organizations are just now realizing that lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan can be useful.