Former Police Commissioner Reveals Crime Plan, by Anna Ditkoff, June 27th, 2007, the Baltimore City Paper.

“At a press conference on Tuesday, June 19, former Baltimore City police commissioner Ed Norris unveiled before an audience of four TV news crews and three print journalists a plan to combat the wave of homicides and shootings that has swept the city this year. Held at the WHFS (105.7 FM) studio in Mount Washington, from which Norris hosts a weekday radio program, he detailed a seven-point plan of attack that, among other things, calls for an independent audit of crime statistics, increased police salaries, focus on violent crime instead of drugs, and processing the police department’s backlog of DNA evidence.”

The complete article is here. [The article has since been removed.]

Ed Norris was the first commanding officer of the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad, and I wrote about him in The Restless Sleep. In 2004 he was sentenced to prison for six months, to be followed by six months of home detention for using up to $30,000 of police funds for personal use while Police Commissioner of Baltimore, and for filing false tax returns. I really don’t know the whole story behind the prosecution, I’m guessing politics were involved in some way, and I’m not excusing bad behavior, but I was very impressed with his police work and his management of the people working for him. He was smart. I couldn’t help feeling that in the end it was a loss to law enforcement. I hope he can help again in Baltimore, because crime-wise, they are in serious trouble there these days.

(The top picture is of Norris in his NYPD days working homicide, and the picture below is of him and his father.)

Last Wednesday the House passed a bill that will provide $10 million for the next ten years to go towards clearing close to 100 civil rights cold case murders. The bill includes $2 million per year for state and local law enforcement agencies.

76 of the cases came from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which has been compiling information about these cases as part of a list they call “The Forgotten.” I found one editorial in the Tuscaloosa News that was not in favor of the bill, but the arguments are not convincing, especially given the Hate Group Map on Southern Poverty Law Centre’s website (although I wonder about all the groups that are included — on the one hand it’s good that it’s so broad, hate should not be tolerated regardless of where it’s coming from, but on the other hand … it’s so broad!).

This picture is of Emmett Till and his mother. Emmett Till was a 14 year old who was murdered in 1955. Not that they weren’t all horrible, they were, but Till’s murder is just so brutal and ugly and so haunting. I can’t forget it.

In other cold case news, state DNA labs and law enforcement in Detroit are making excellent use of $370,000 from a federal DNA grant to go back and do testing for unsolved crimes. They’ve got hits on 72 cold cases going back to 1976. Good work, Detroit!

I was reading a number of people on an NYPD blog make a common mistake about women and suicide. They were saying that women don’t use guns to kill themselves as much and use other methods more. This was an unofficial NYPD blog, I should add, so their comments do not represent the collected knowledge of the NYPD. The only reason I bring this up is because it was in the context of a murder investigation and I thought it was important to try to clear up this common misconception.

The truth is the number one method of suicide among women IS shooting themselves. I believe I know how this mistake got started. It’s a combination of a persistent stereotype about women reinforced by a select representation of statistics that supports this bias.

Whenever you read articles about suicide you always hear “women use poison more than men.” That’s true. They do. But that said, they still use guns more than poison when they kill themselves. I’m going to simplify the numbers in order to explain how I think the confusion arose.

Take a 100 male suicides and 100 female. Say 90 of the men shot themselves and 10 took poison. Among the women, 80 shot themselves and 20 took poison. In this example, you can accurately say that women used poison more than men. But, as you can see, they still used a gun more than anything else.

I researched this a while back, that’s how I know. I also learned that men jump off buildings and other high places more than women. Anyway, the point was being made that this female gunshot victim was more likely a homicide because when women kill themselves they don’t use guns and that’s wrong. It’s the number one method of suicide among women.

UPDATE: Now I’m seeing that women do use poison more than guns to kill themselves! I wonder if I was researching this during a year when women used firearms more, but I have to correct my post. Women still use guns a lot (in the year I’m looking at now 32% used guns and 37% used poison) but they do kill themselves with poison more.

Last year I posted about a little boy named Bruce Kremen who went missing in California in 1960, and I just realized I never posted an incredible update to this story. Another writer, Weston DeWalt, who was investigating another boy who went missing in California, Tommy Bowman, actually came across new evidence and now the LAPD Cold Case Squad is investigating a serial killer named Mack Ray Edwards for murdering Tommy. They’re considering Edwards for the murder of up to 13 other children including Bruce Kremen.

I had originally called the Missing Person’s department of the LAPD to ask where the case was left, expecting to be told something along the lines of, “the last lead in the Bruce Kremen case was over forty years ago.” But then Missing Persons told me the Cold Case Squad had the case. I knew that meant a new lead.

Weston DeWalt, wrote a book with Anatoli Boukreev called The Climb, which was written as a rebuttal to Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, is working on a book about this investigation. Here’s an article about the story [the article I linked to is no longer there].