AUGUSTA, Maine — The state’s top law enforcement officials warned lawmakers that the cost of fighting crime is going up as criminals use the latest technology and investigators step up efforts to thwart them.
“Every time we break a meth lab, it costs $15,000 because of the care we have to take and the hazmat [team] that we have to send in,” said Public Safety Commissioner John Morris.
He said the chemicals used to make methamphetamine and other designer drugs are dangerous; some are toxic and others explosive.
Morris said those types of cases cause overtime, as do missing persons cases and homicides, and the associated costs are significant and seem to be on the rise.
“Right now in the Alya Reynolds case, [the tally] is more than $97,000 just for the state police,” he said. “The missing firefighter from Florida cost us a lot of money. We are spending more and more money on what we call the major crimes unit.”
Firefighter Jerry Perdomo’s missing person case later became a homicide case after his body was found near Bangor. The Reynolds case remains under investigation.
In answer to a question from Rep. Ken Fredette, R-Newport, Morris said the increasing costs would mean greater appropriations requests in the future.
“We are not only seeing increased costs, we are seeing reduced federal grant funds and special revenue funds,” Morris said.
Col. Robert Williams, chief of the Maine State Police, said overtime for complex cases is only part of the cost problem facing all of law enforcement. He said criminals are making use of the wide array of available electronic devices to commit crimes, and police are always playing catch-up with changing technology.
“We are solving more crimes today through science than we ever did,” he said. “The demand and the cost of doing that is increasing exponentially.”
Williams told lawmakers their initial approval of $362,000 for three additional positions at the computer crime lab will not reduce the backlog of work, but may keep it from growing. He said nearly everybody has a computer, a cellphone and other electronic devices.
“Just think of yourself and your children or grandchildren; every one of you and every one of them probably have some type of electronic appliance,” he said. “So when a crime is committed, that has to be looked at. When we stop vehicles now, we used to look for drugs and stolen property. The first thing we look for now are cellphones because that has a person’s life in it.”
Under questioning from Rep. Dennis Keschl, R-Belgrade, Williams said that search for a cellphone only happens when police have stopped a vehicle for probable cause of a crime.
Williams said while the caseload is growing, he could only think of one case lost in court, and that was because of a loophole in the law that lawmakers since have closed. He said in most cases there is a guilty plea and no trial.
The scope of the computer crime unit backlog is spelled out in detail in documents submitted to the Appropriations Committee. As of March 30, the backlog waiting for analysis included: 417 computers and hard drives, 71 cellphones, 54 thumb drives, 32 digital cameras, 25 memory cards, eight zip drives, eight Xbox game players, six iPods, three GPS units, two digital recorders, two e-book readers, and more than 600 individual CD and DVD disks.
“Some of these can take hours on hours to analyze,” Lt. Glenn Lang, director of the Computer Crime Unit, told the Criminal Justice Committee last month.
He said some of the additional positions requested in the supplemental budget would be modeled on the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency practice of hiring police officers from local agencies so they can get training and experience in drug cases.
The Appropriations Committee has given initial approval to the additional positions, but work has not been completed on the supplemental budget.
The Maine whisper stream knows Public Insecurity Commissioner John Morris by his street name of smoke and mirror Morris.
S&M Morris conveniently forgets to mention the three most expensive “crime costs”
to the Maine voters and taxpayers, you know them as the owners of the criminal justice system.
Maybe some day they will be know as the smart criminal justice consumer.
Here are the most costliest:
1. The Electronic Cesspool known as the Maine State Prison where it cost the Maine taxpayer $56,000.00 to warehouse 1 perp for 1 year.
This figure does not include court costs, arrest costs, victim costs nor welfare costs if the perp has a family. 7 out of 10 perps are released from the Maine State Prison system as more vicious and competent criminals and are re-arrested usually within 2 years and are sent back to the Maine State Prison where they repeat the cycle.
2. The long sordid history of Maine law enforcement bringing heroin and cocaine into Maine
with the assistance of the taxpayer funded CIA has long been documented by honest cops.
Google their names with the words CIA drugs. Who are they?
Serpico
Mike Levine
Celerino Castillo
Gary Webb
Mike Ruppert
So what we have here is taxpayer funded cops bringing drugs into Maine so your sons and daughters become addicted and have to steal to buy these drugs. Of course these same police are there to arrest them when they are caught stealing and sent to Maine State Prison where it cost &56,000.00 to
warehouse them for 1 year.
I’ve seen some of the Mike Ruppert story. I’m surprised the man is still alive. I’ve heard of Gary Webb, too, although I don’t know all of his story (now I’ll look it up).
Maine can’t afford these Cadillac social services. We need to cut them back as we are doing our schools, our highways, our social services, and regulatory agencies. What’s good for some is good for all.
You want to cut, fine. We’ll all keep cutting, all the way until you find someone putting a picture of one of your children on one of these site’s Sir. Look at your kid’s Sir and then think about it.
It SHOULD be about priorities…Less time sitting and watching for the VERY dangerous Inspection Sticker violator or the even more dangerous seat belt violator(sarcasm INTENDED) and more time doing the serious stuff there wouldn’t be overtime issues..It’s all about priorities and NOT about growing your budget with inflated nonsense…
I suspect most readers would agree with me that if there was a law enforcement agency
that represented the best in law enforcement most people would say the FBI.
I also suspect most Maine voters and taxpayers who don’t work for or
have a relative working in the booming CRIME IS A BIG BUSINESS
industry have no say in how they want to spend their tax dime for crime and punishment.
Their elected representative does that for them. You know these people as the best politician
the FBI and DIEBOLD can elect.
This just in from the Maine whisper stream about your bodyguards and how they spend your
tax dime.
1st tax dime
Bet you don’t know how many millions you had to
shell out for this lawsuit.
Retaliation Over Race Suit
by Dina Temple-Raston
May 13, 2009
A former FBI agent at the center of one of the biggest discrimination cases in the agency’s history has filed a new lawsuit, in which he says the FBI continues to exact retribution for a case he settled back in 1990.
Donald Rochon was 37 years old when he filed his landmark discrimination suit against the FBI. Rochon, who is black, was a young agent in Omaha, Neb., when some troubling things started to happen. In one incident, Rochon returned to his desk to find that someone had put a picture of monkey over his son’s face in a family photograph.
Another episode took place shortly after Rochon learned to scuba dive. “Their ideology [was that] blacks couldn’t swim,” he says. “And they put up a photograph of me and another black person swimming in a garbage dump.”
The situation escalated when Rochon and some of his tormentors were transferred to Chicago. He started getting death threats. In one instance, white agents said they would cut off his genitals. Then, about a week later, a death and dismemberment insurance policy appeared on Rochon’s desk.
“That was traced back to an FBI agent,” he says. The agent forged Rochon’s signature on the policy.
The FBI supervisor said it was harmless fun and wrote the incidents off as pranks.
In separate investigations, the Justice Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission saw it differently. They found that Rochon was humiliated by agents because he was black. The former special agent in charge of the Omaha office told the EEOC that he considered the pranks to be “healthy” and a sign of “esprit de corps.” He said he was aware of Rochon’s racial harassment complaints, but he didn’t take any formal action.
2nd tax dime
Bet you don’t know how much you paid to train her as a FBI agent
FBI agent charged with beating her father
Thu, March 29, 2012
YOUNGSTOWN — A 46-year-old woman, who police listed as a former FBI agent, has been charged with domestic violence for allegedly assaulting her partially blind father this week.
The man told police Lawson hit him in the back of his head and on the shoulder. Lawson told police she did hit her father because he was getting on her nerves.
The statement, reportedly sent Lawson into a frenzy, causing her to curse the man and punch him in the head in front of officers.
Lawson still threatened to do her father bodily harm as she was being led away by police.
3rd tax dime
CNN exclusive: FBI misconduct reveals sex, lies and videotape
By Scott Zamost and Kyra Phillips, CNN Special Investigations Unit
January 27, 2011
An FBI employee shared confidential information with his girlfriend, who was a news reporter, then later threatened to release a sex tape the two had made.
A supervisor watched pornographic videos in his office during work hours while “satisfying himself.”
And an employee in a “leadership position” misused a government database to check on two friends who were exotic dancers and allowed them into an FBI office after hours.
These are among confidential summaries of FBI disciplinary reports obtained by CNN, which describe misconduct by agency supervisors, agents and other employees over the last three years.
Add to which, maybe they could stop arresting the same people 30 times a month, and actually give them some time in jail. Maybe the catch and release program isnt helping
john morris looks like the smoking man from The X-Files.