Newark Citizen Patrol Part of Crime-fighting Tactic

As we’ve cited in previous articles, New Jersey continues to lead the way in utilizing new, innovative approaches to community safety, emergency preparedness and citizen involvement.

New Jersey Alert A Preparedness Role Model

NJ Law Would Require Homeland Security Drills In Schools.

The latest involves convoys of vans led by Newark’s mayor and filled with more than 100 of its employees and residents, flooding the city’s neighborhoods in the middle of the night as a way to reduce crime. It’s a great idea that probably should also be looked at as part of the city’s contingency planning to to utilize during a crisis or emergency.

As part of Community Caravan Night Patrols, more than 120 volunteers have patrolled city streets with Mayor Cory Booker and a crew of off-duty police officers since Sept. 29. Each weekend and a few nights each week, they pile into long caravans of glaring white vans, which weave through the city’s wards, focusing on areas where 85 percent of the city’s shootings have been recorded.

The program’s goal is to disrupt normal crime patterns during typical high-volume hours, gather intelligence for police, and engage residents in the process of crime prevention, said Anthony Campos, the city’s director of public safety.

“You have this whole collage of people coming together for a common cause,” Campos said of the program. “They’re self actualizing by getting out there. They’re no longer spectators.”

Some of the largest caravans will be out this Halloween weekend, which has long been associated with mayhem in Newark. The patrols will start earlier and end later those nights, Booker said.

The initiative is similar to Operation Impact, a law enforcement technique designed by Police Director Garry McCarthy that saturates volatile areas with police to disrupt criminal trends. The essential difference with the caravans is that volunteers are doing the saturating, and the vans and radios are donated by Newark Now, a local non-profit founded by Booker.

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Largest Corporate Identity Theft Case in History

Breaking - Three men have been indicted in New Jersey in an identity theft case that the Justice Department is labeling as the largest in history. Authorities say more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen in a corporate data breach involving five different companies.

Developing – Read More

Update: Three Indicted in Major Hacking Case

Albert Gonzalez, 28 years old, of Miami, and two unnamed co-conspirators were charged with conspiracy and conspiracy to engage in wire fraud and accused of using a sophisticated hacking technique, which tries to find a way around a computer network’s firewall to steal credit- and debit-card information.
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Among the corporate victims named in the indictment are Heartland Payment Systems Inc., a New Jersey-based card-payment processor; 7-Eleven Inc., a Texas-based nationwide convenience store chain; and Hannaford Brothers Co., a Maine-based supermarket chain.

A data breach allegedly led by Mr. Gonzalez also siphoned off more than 40 million credit-card numbers from TJX Cos. and others, costing TJX $200 million.

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N.J. Law Would Require Monthly School Homeland Security Drills

Editor’s note - Excellent piece of legislation coming out of New Jersey House & Senate mandating monthly security drills. I encourage you to pass this article along to the legislators in your state. As Assemblyman Frederick Scalera points out, it makes little sense to have a plan and seldom if ever practice it.

A bill that is expected to enter the New Jersey Senate, would mandate that all public and nonpublic schools in the state of New Jersey to conduct monthly school security drills. If passed by the Senate, students and faculty would be required to practice emergency response procedures such as non-fire evacuation, lockdown and active shooter response drills.

Assemblyman Frederick Scalera, a primary sponsor of the bill, said that all schools in the state are currently required to have an emergency security plan in place, but many school staff do not feel comfortable with the procedures. “The problem brought up to me by teachers was that they knew they had a plan, but they don’t have a drill [to practice it], or they only have a drill one time a year,” he said.

This bill would require all schools to conduct one school security drill per month along with one fire drill per month, he said. Currently, all schools are required to conduct two fire drills each month.

Scalera said the primary goal of this bill is to familiarize school staff and students with non-fire evacuation procedures so students and staff would know what to do in case of an emergency. “Kids don’t panic for fire drills. I want to make Homeland Security drills the same thing so kids won’t panic,” he said. “This way everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing at all times.”

Ken Trump, president of consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services, said that more and more states are adopting similar legislation to require lockdown and other school security drills. “Practicing security drills, like fire drills, saves lives and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be preparing students for that potential threatening situation, just as we do for weather and other natural disasters that can potentially occur,” Trump said.

Trump encourages schools to not only run these drills, but to diversify the time of the day to make it more challenging and complicated for students. “Schools should make students think on their feet and seek alternative routes and strategies,” he said. “An evacuation drill during lunchtime is more challenging and disruptive, but school administrators tend to avoid practicing during that time, but that’s when students are more vulnerable and an incident is more likely to occur.”

House Bill A3002 unanimously passed the Senate Education Committee on May 4 and Scalera said he expects it will pass the Senate.

via Law would require monthly school security drills – Security Director News | The Business Newspaper for Security Practitioners.

Suspect In Alleged NY Terror Plot Released In Lebanon

A Lebanese man arrested three years ago on terrorism charges for allegedly plotting to blow up New York City commuter tunnels has been released on bail, Lebanese officials said Tuesday.

The case was said to have been an al-Qaida plot involving Assem Hammoud and seven other people.

Hammoud was arrested in April 2006 in Lebanon. The FBI said the plotters planned to bomb and flood Hudson River train tunnels that carry tens of thousands of commuters between New York and New Jersey.

U.S. federal officials said the eight suspects — including Hammoud and two others in custody elsewhere — had hoped to pull off the attack in October or November 2006.

After Hammoud’s arrest, Lebanese authorities said they found maps and bombing plans on his personal computer, that he confessed to the plot and swore allegiance to al-Qaida.

Following a trial before the military court last year Hammoud was released on a bail of 1 million Lebanese pounds ($667) pending a verdict, the judiciary officials said.

via Source

2 Mice Carrying Plague Disappear From NJ Lab, FBI Says No Public Health Risk

The frozen remains of two mice injected with the organism that causes plague have not been accounted for seven weeks after being discovered missing at a University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey facility in Newark, the university said Friday.

The FBI investigated and determined there was no risk to public health or any indication of the terrorist link.

It wasn’t the first time plague-infected mice have disappeared from the New Jersey facility. Four years ago, in September 2005, three live mice infected with bubonic plague bacteria disappeared from various cages. Officials later said they believed the rodents had died.

UMDNJ’s Public Health Research Institute issued a four-paragraph statement about the December incident late Friday saying it believes the red hazardous waste bag containing the dead mice was sterilized and incinerated along with another bag.

“Although the mice in the missing bag were used in vaccine experiments involving the bacteria Yersinia pestis, the organism that causes plague, UMDNJ has no reason to believe that this situation poses a risk to the safety or health of UMDNJ staff or the community at large,” the university said in its prepared statement.

University spokesman Jerry Carey said he did not know why UMDNJ waited seven weeks to disclose the missing mice.

via FOXNews.com – 2 Mice Carrying Plague Disappear From New Jersey Lab, FBI Says No Public Health Risk – Health News | Current Health News | Medical News.

Five Found Guilty In Fort Dix Terror Trial

A jury has found five men guilty of conspiring to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office said Monday.

The defendants were acquitted of attempted murder charges but face life in prison.

The jury spent six days deliberating.

Six men were arrested on May 7, 2007, in New Jersey, as two of them were meeting a confidential government witness “to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006,” according to a criminal complaint.

The sixth defendant, Agron Abdullahu, pleaded guilty in October to a reduced charge of providing firearms to illegal aliens and received a sentence of 20 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

Abdullahu told the court in October that, from January 2006 to May 2007, he and Turkish-born Serdar Tatar provided firearms to brothers Dritan Duka, Shain Duka and Eljvir “Elvis” Duka.

The Duka brothers, born in the former Yugoslavia, were in the United States illegally.

Tatar and Abdullahu are both legal U.S. residents. The other defendant, Jordanian-born Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, is the only U.S. citizen among them.

The alleged Fort Dix plot came to light when two men gave an 8 mm videotape to a clerk at a Circuit City store in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and asked him to convert it to DVD format.

Authorities said the tape showed 10 young men shooting at a practice range and shouting in Arabic, “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great.”