Salon.com > Graham Kates

A crusading newspaper takes on the NYPD

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:32:00 +0000

“It took all of two minutes to print out” sector-by-sector crime statistics the first time Bronx, NY journalist Alex Kratz asked Deputy Inspector James Alles of the New York Police Department (NYPD) for an in-depth readout of his precinct’s crime.

Kratz’s non-profit bi-weekly newspaper, theNorwood News, used the information in February 2008 to publish maps and a series of stories that illustrated crime trends in specific neighborhoods within the paper’s coverage area—the north Bronx’s 52nd Precinct.

Reader response in the roughly 130,000-person precinct was overwhelmingly positive.

Until that point, few locals had seen crime statistics beyond the NYPD’s weekly COMPSTAT reports, which track precinct-wide major crime trends.

“Although I feel safe in my neighborhood, evidently our autos are targets,” one reader commented on the paper’s website.

“Is it possible to receive these reports on a sector basis each month?”

Re-inventing college for prisons

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

At the height of the tough-on-crime era in the mid-1990s, prisoners in New York State seeking access to college-level courses were dealt a one-two punch that seemed to deliver a crushing blow to inmate higher education.

When then-President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, he revoked inmate access to federal Pell grants. In 1995, New York Governor George Pataki followed suit, eliminating Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) funding for prisoners in the state.

For Kathy Boudin, at the time an inmate of the maximum security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, it seemed like college programs “disappeared overnight.”

“When college was removed, instead of having a line of people walking to school, we had people sitting up in the day rooms playing cards, playing dominoes, getting in fights,” said Boudin, now the director of the Columbia University School of Social Work’s Criminal Justice Initiative.

Murder on the menu

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 14:00:00 +0000

On the third Thursday of every month, top detectives and forensics investigators from around the country gather for lunch at the French-Renaissance-style brick mansion that houses the Union League—one of Philadelphia’s oldest and most elite social clubs.

The menu one recent Thursday featured grilled chicken, scallion risotto—and a grisly five-year-old murder that happened 3,000 miles away.

Jodine Serrin, 39, was found stabbed and beaten to death in the bedroom of her Carlsbad, CA home on Valentine’s Day, 2007. But the trail to any suspects had long since grown cold, and the Carlsbad cops working the case—Detective Bryan Hargett and Sergeant Mickey Williams—had reached only dead ends.

So on the Thursday in question, Hargett and Williams found themselves eager (and hopeful) lunch guests of the Vidocq Society, whose unique self-appointed mission is solving cases that have defied the best efforts of law enforcement—on the theory that fresh ideas from colleagues can inject new thinking to help unravel even the toughest mysteries.

Death penalty opponents’ unlikely allies

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:52:00 +0000

Victoria Coward remembers hearing the gunshots ring out from Edgewood Park, not far from her New Haven, Conn., home in June 2007. Later that night her worst fears were realized when detectives knocked on her front door.

Her 18-year-old son, Tyler, was dead from gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

Two years later, when police arrested and charged Jose Fuentes-Pillich, a 23-year-old who she thought was Tyler's friend, Coward had already joined a campaign against the death penalty.

When she contacted Fuentes-Pillich after his conviction in 2010, she explained why she didn’t wish him dead.

“I told him it would be wrong for me to say, ‘You should die.’ That’s not in me. That’s in God’s hands … the first thing I need to do is forgive you for taking my son’s life,” Coward recalled in an interview with The Crime Report.

Connecticut became the 17thstate to abolish the death penalty in April. As opponents step up their national campaign, they are discovering some surprising allies among people like Coward — challenging the long-held stereotype that the families of murder victims automatically support capital punishment.