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| Blog and Media Roundup - Tuesday, February 3, 2009; News Roundup | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 3 2009, 05:15 AM (695 Views) | |
| abb | Feb 3 2009, 05:15 AM Post #1 |
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http://heraldsun.southernheadlines.com/durham/4-1087276.cfm? State of the city: Bell hints layoffs possible Mark Dolejs/ The Herald-Sun Durham Mayor Bill Bell delivers his state of the city address during Monday night’s City Council meeting. In addressing the possibility of staff layoffs, Bell noted that departments working on their fiscal 2009-10 budget requests are already under orders to offer spending reductions ranging from 3 percent to 10 percent. Because sales tax receipts will be flat or down, and a City Council vote to increase property taxes is “very unlikely,” city employees will have to “find new and effective ways of performing our jobs,” he said. By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun gronberg@heraldsun.com Feb 3, 2009 DURHAM -- Mayor Bill Bell hinted Monday during his annual state of the city address that Durham's budget problems could prompt officials to consider laying off some city employees. Departments working on their fiscal 2009-10 budget requests are already under orders to offer spending reductions ranging from 3 percent to 10 percent, Bell said. Sales tax receipts will be flat or down, and a City Council vote to increase property taxes is "very unlikely," Bell said. Because of that, city employees will have to "find new and effective ways of performing our jobs," he said. Bell tied the layoff issue to employees' cooperation with other cost-cutting efforts. "Implied in that statement is that we will all continue to have jobs, which are no certainty," Bell said. "I am sure that the administration and council will work hard to see that we can minimize any layoffs, but nothing is promised, so it behooves all of us to work together to keep the city family together. And I know we can do that." The mayor continued by saying that the city's strategy for fiscal 2009-10 will be to focus on core services, and take on only those construction projects that will produce jobs without requiring additional spending for operations once they're complete. Between added expenses officials know are coming and revenue shortfalls, the council and City Manager Tom Bonfield have to figure out how to close a 2009-10 budget gap that appears likely to come in somewhere between $24 million and $40 million, Bell said. Lagging sales taxes have contributed to a $5.5 million budget short in the current fiscal year. On top of a soft hiring freeze and other austerity moves, Bonfield has asked departments to shave 1 percent off their planned spending, Bell said. Though Business Week magazine has said Durham's underlying economic strength makes it the third-best city in the country in which to ride out the recession, "all city employees should be aware that we are entering a period of economic uncertainty that many of us have not experienced," he said. Predictions about when the recession will end vary widely, he added, noting that while some economists think the turnaround will begin late this year, others believe it won't occur until 2012, Bell said. Beyond the budget, Bell said the city has to step up efforts to promote energy efficiency and other "green initiatives." That should include asking all city grant and business-incentives recipients to explain how they're helping on that front, Bell said, adding that he's asked Bonfield and his staff to begin assembling plans to implement that requirement. The only other non-budget initiative Bell's speech addressed was transportation. He said it's "essential" that the General Assembly this year give Triangle governments new taxing authority to raise money for transit projects that link the region's cities. The only city in North Carolina with such authority is Charlotte, which is using the proceeds of a local-option sales tax to build a rail network. Council members didn't have much to say about Bell's speech afterward. The only comment from them about during Monday's meeting came from Councilwoman Diane Catotti, who praised what the mayor said about energy efficiency and transit. __________________________________________________ Bill Bell's States of the City - "If that means setting higher bonds, so be it. If that means stopping judges from reducing bonds so low that it allows them to get out of jail before trial, so be it. If we need to approach our legislators to get this authority from the General Assembly, so be it." -- On quelling violence, 2008 - "As mayor, when I come to the point that I no longer have confidence in the city manager to perform his job, he along with the City Council will be the first to know. Tonight, I am not at that point." -- On the future of City Manager Patrick Baker, 2007 - "It is common knowledge that as African-Americans, we are vastly overrepresented in the prison and jail populations in proportion to our representation in the overall population. But we can't blame injustice or lack of representation on the fact that we as a race are committing murders far out of proportion to how we are represented in the city of Durham." -- On the city of Durham's murder rate, 2006 - "No one has a monopoly on the solution to crime, and no one solution fits all." -- On combating crime, 2005. - "It's high time that this community says enough is enough ... We must demand a cease-fire." -- On fighting violence, 2004 |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 05:16 AM Post #2 |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 05:19 AM Post #3 |
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http://heraldsun.southernheadlines.com/durham/4-1087254.cfm Employee appreciation lunch a 'go' By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun gronberg@heraldsun.com Feb 3, 2009 DURHAM -- The city's annual employee-recognition lunch will go on as scheduled absent orders to the contrary from a majority of Durham's elected officials, City Manager Tom Bonfield said. Cancellation of the lunch, as proposed by City Councilman Eugene Brown, would save less than $3,000 because the city's obligated to pay for the venue and because administrators have already purchased the service awards that will be distributed at the lunch, Bonfield said. It's "absolutely appropriate," he added, for the council to consider cutting the lunch next year, he added in an e-mail to Brown. But "employee recognition programs are important organizational events to maintain positive employee morale and motivation," he said. Brown last week proposed eliminating the lunch to save money. The council budgeted $18,805 for this year's event, though the actual cost is likely to be less, Bonfield said. |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 05:35 AM Post #4 |
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http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1391517.html Published: Feb 03, 2009 12:30 AM Modified: Feb 03, 2009 01:23 AM Durham braces for a bad year Mayor outlines '08 accomplishments Jim Wise, Staff Writer Comment on this story DURHAM - Mayor Bill Bell ticked off a long list of the city's 2008 accomplishments before warning of tough times ahead in 2009. "What's for sure is that we must prepare for the worst," he said during his annual State of the City address Monday night to an overflow crowd at City Hall. That worst, however, is not likely to include a property-tax increase this year, he said. Bell said the city faces a $5.5 million shortfall in revenue for this fiscal year and projects a 2009-10 gap of $24 million to $40 million between anticipated expenses and the revenue to meet them. "We are entering a period of economic uncertainty many of us have never experienced," he said. "I don't want to scare anyone with my remarks, but all city employees should be aware that we are entering a period of economic uncertainty that many of us have not experienced." The city will have to improve its efficiency and decide its priorities, he said, and called for a "laser-like focus on the economy, jobs, transportation and green building [and] energy savings." Bell said the city has submitted construction projects for a federal economic stimulus package totaling $69 million, which could create 675 jobs. He also called on the state legislature to provide a "funding mechanism" for a light-rail system serving Durham, Wake and Orange counties, including the airport. Among last year's achievements, Bell mentioned the opening of the Performing Arts Center, the continuing renovation of Durham Athletic Park, partnerships to create affordable housing and clear urban blight, and the reorganization of city departments under new City Manager Tom Bonfield. jim.wise@newsobserver.com or 919-932-2004 |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 05:41 AM Post #5 |
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson238.html For Justice, End Legal Immunity by William L. Anderson Much of what we read on the LRC page and elsewhere involves unjust or criminal actions by people employed by governments. Whether it be the aftermath of the infamous Duke Lacrosse Non-Rape, Non-Kidnapping, and Non-Sexual Assault Case, the Little Rascals Case, or yet another situation involving a wrongful prosecution and conviction, we are given example after example of government wrongdoing and outright criminal behavior. In any of these stories, one or all of the following will have occurred: (1) Prosecutors hide exculpatory evidence or just lie, (2) prosecutors suborn perjured testimony, (3) police officers lie on the witness stand, and (4) judges sit back and do nothing while an innocent person is railroaded. As it is my contention that there never is an excuse for a wrongful conviction, whenever we see someone wrongfully convicted, we can be assured that the authorities either were willfully dishonest or incompetent. What we rarely see, however, are the people who were at fault ever being charged as criminals or being on the end of lawsuits brought by the victims. Most of the times, the real victims have no recourse at all. The reason is that governments confer immunity upon those privileged to work in the police and "justice" systems. (In some places, like California, most government workers are given astounding amounts of immunity when they break the law, even if it is not "job-related.") The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that judges and prosecutors are absolutely immune for anything they do that is considered within the lines of their official duties. Many years ago, a lower-level judge in New York City purchased coffee from a street vendor, but did not like it. He had the vendor arrested, put into handcuffs, and then dragged before the snarling judge in his courtroom to be lectured on the evils of bad coffee. The outraged vendor sued and won a large judgment, but SCOTUS stepped in and overturned the verdict (and the judgment, of course) and ruled that since the judge was sitting on his bench, he had the power to do whatever he pleased. In subsequent rulings, courts have spread immunity to prosecutors and police and others in government "acting in their official duties." The reasoning of the courts and legislators (who also have written immunity into various statutes) is that the duties that these government employees are so important that they cannot work under the stress of being sued for their misconduct. For example, Michael Nifong, the architect of the infamous Duke case, is claiming that the law protects him for whatever he did in that case; the reason he is legally vulnerable, it turns out, is that Nifong also directed the police investigation of the case, and it was as an investigator that he engaged in much of his egregious conduct. However, he has absolutely no legal vulnerability for his lying in court, his public statements, his desperate attempts to manipulate the case timelines, and his changing of the charges after the infamous December 15 hearing in which attorneys were able to get one of his star witnesses to admit that he and Nifong agreed to withhold important exculpatory evidence. (Nifong’s vulnerability came because the North Carolina State Bar was able to file charges against him, and ultimately disbarred him for what he did as a prosecutor. Likewise, Judge W. Osmond Smith III jailed Nifong for a day for lying in court to him about the evidence. However, the real victims of Nifong’s predations could do nothing regarding what he did in his "official" prosecutorial actions.) Likewise, the police in Durham are claiming the same immunity and the two judges, Ronald Stephens and Kenneth Titus, who gave Nifong a free hand in their courtrooms to do a number of outrageous things, are absolutely immune for their official actions. Whether or not the federal judge handling the civil case will agree with the police officers is another matter. If one steps back and examines the reasons given for immunity, they translate to the following: judges and legislators are not willing to expose the government employees in the "justice" system to legal liability because it might "distract" them from their duties or make them legally vulnerable. This reasoning is rich, very rich, and absolutely ironic. What they are saying is that police and those employed by the courts should not be subject to the very legal procedures that they force upon the rest of us. They are saying that they cannot trust the courts to do what is right if THEY are sued. The same people who drag us into court, who charge us with ridiculous "crimes," and who impose judgment after judgment on us, cannot possibly be expected to face the system that governs the rest of us, as it might "distract" them from their duties. That should strike everyone as hypocritical at best and utterly dishonest at worst. If the court system is good enough for us, why is it not good enough for the people who are in charge of that system? This reminds me of the old Soviet Union, which had "yellow-curtain" shops in which only those who were paid in "Class-D Rubles" could shop. Those were the people who were politically-connected and who either were members of the Communist Party or who had the most "prestigious" jobs. All of the other workers in the "Workers’ Paradise" were paid in regular Rubles and were not permitted to enter those stores. The essence of modern American "justice" is precisely that of the "yellow-curtain" shops; all Americans are equal, but those employed as police officers, prosecutors, and judges are more equal than everyone else. If lawsuits for misconduct should not be imposed upon these miscreants, then why should the rest of us be left vulnerable to them? If these legal procedures are good enough for other Americans, then why are they not good enough for the government "law" employees? It is not enough to say that lawsuits would "distract" these "public servants" from their duties (as is claimed). After all, everyone outside this "justice" system faces such lawsuits, and the courts have ruled that such suits are just fine. No, the reasons given are not morally or even legally legitimate. They are nothing but an exercise in raw power, the power of the state. We cannot make police, prosecutors, and judges into honest people. However, we also have to understand that the very immunity that protects these government employees also provides a powerful incentive for fundamentally dishonest people to seek these careers. What other line of work (other than being an elected politician) permits those duly employed to lie, to kill, to kidnap, and to engage in other acts of oppression and bullying with almost no consequences for such behavior? The market system, which these same people constantly disparage and attempt to destroy via their own "justice" system, does not reward this kind of criminal behavior. As we have seen in the current economic meltdown, ultimately the lies that some of the players attempted to foist on the market were discovered, and the market participants exacted a brutal form of justice. That does not happen in the "justice" system. Instead, when someone like Nifong actually does face some small consequences for criminal behavior, we are told that it is "extraordinary." Wow. A prosecutor lies in court, hides evidence, foists a major frame on innocent people, and we are supposed to believe that it is "extraordinary" that he loses his job. No, we cannot make sociopaths like Michael B. Nifong honest people. However, we can take away their legal immunity and make them vulnerable to the same sanctions that the rest of us face. That would provide a small amount of justice in a system in which the participants no longer care about being just. February 3, 2009 |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 06:29 AM Post #6 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/01/29/DI2009012902433_pf.html Washington Post Magazine: Deadly Force Aftermath of a SWAT Team Raid Gone Wrong Cheye Calvo and April Witt Berwyn Heights Mayor; Magazine Staff Writer Monday, February 2, 2009; 12:00 PM When a SWAT team raided the Prince George's County home of Cheye Calvo and Trinity Tomsic on a mistaken drug trafficking suspicion, the couple's two dogs weren't the only ones whose lives were shattered. Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland and Washington Post Magazine staff writer April Witt were online Monday, February 2 at 12 noon ET to discuss Witt's cover story, "Deadly Force." A transcript follows. |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 06:33 AM Post #7 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012302935_pf.html Deadly Force What a SWAT team did to Cheye Calvo's family may seem extreme. But decades into America's war on drugs, it's business as usual. By April Witt Sunday, February 1, 2009; W08 Payton swung his big, goofy head onto the bed, worked his snout under a pillow and gave a gentle bump. The mayor's wife, nudged awake, opened her eyes and smiled. Payton, the couple's playful No. 1 dog, was letting her know that he and his timid little brother, Chase, needed their morning walk. As the mayor's wife stirred, the two black Labs -- known collectively as "the boys" -- panted and bounded round the bed gleefully. "Get up! Get up! Get up! Get Up!" the boys seemed to be saying. They did this every morning. Inside this sunny red-brick house on a well-tended corner lot in the tiny town of Berwyn Heights in Prince George's County, the family routines were precise from thousands of loving retracings; and they almost all revolved around the boys. After six years of marriage, Trinity Tomsic and her husband, Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye (sounds like "Shy") Calvo, still hoped for children. As the couple waited, the boys were more than a balm; they were a shared joy. Cheye, 37, and Trinity, 33, had even bought this quaint little house because it had a fenced yard with an expansive lawn where the boys could romp -- dog heaven. On this morning, Tuesday, July 29, Trinity fed the boys by 5 a.m., then planned to take Chase running before walking Payton. Running was the one activity at which shy Chase bested Payton, who had long ago been slowed by a leg injury. "Chase knew we were going to go running before I even had my tennis shoes on," Trinity later recalled. "I don't know how he knew. He just always did." Trinity snapped Chase in his running harness, then reconsidered. She was a finance officer for the state of Maryland. She had a stack of crucial reports awaiting her approval. Maybe she should just leave for the office now. "I came very close to telling him that we'd have to run later," she recalled. But Chase looked so ridiculously excited that Trinity couldn't stand to disappoint him. "He was jumping up and down, up and down, like, 'We're going to go running! We're going to go running.' It was the best thing to see him so happy." And so, they ran out from their tidy house with the pretty mailbox made to match, down familiar streets where they knew neighbors by name and habit, past the home of the sweet old man who always joked when he saw them running: "They went that-a-way." They ran until Trinity tired, and Chase looked back at her with an expression she read as, "Mom, could you speed it up?" "It's so important to me that we ran," Trinity says now. "I would feel so terrible if, on that last day, the thing he loved most I bailed on because I wanted to get to the office a few minutes early." *** Payton and Chase spent the day outside together in their fenced run. Weekdays in good weather, they'd loll there until they heard the R12 bus grinding down Edmonston Road -- bringing Trinity's mother home to feed them dinner. Then Payton, 7, would jump up on the fence and bark until Chase, 4, who copied everything Payton did, joined in. On this day, Trinity's mom, Georgia Porter, surprised the boys. She got home an hour early, pulling into the driveway at 5:30 p.m. in the used Toyota she'd bought two days before. Down the street, a stranger sitting in a parked car noted that a lone female had just arrived at the residence. Unaware they were being watched, Georgia fed the dogs, then knelt beside the lush organic vegetable garden that Trinity tended meticulously. Georgia, feeling celebratory, wanted to make their favorite summer pasta dish for dinner. She picked cherry tomatoes with one hand while tossing a ball to Chase with the other. It had been a year since Georgia, 50, had left her lifelong home of Price, Utah -- widowed, jobless, feeling defeated -- and moved in with Cheye and Trinity to try to begin again. It had been hard leaving her rural home, her beloved horses and mountain views, to commute three hours roundtrip daily -- by bus, then Metro, then bus again -- to a job in Takoma Park for a commercial floor estimator. She felt proud of her new used car and what it signified: She was, finally, moving ahead. The dogs followed Georgia inside. Maneuvering around the kitchen as she cleaned and chopped vegetables, Georgia had to keep stepping over them. She didn't mind. Georgia had bought Chase as a puppy as a surprise gift for Trinity and Cheye. Georgia, who is Greek by heritage, thought of herself as both dogs' "yaya," Greek for grandmother. "They were always right there with me when I cooked," she recalled. "Dogs who are loved like to be right by their people." At about 6:30 p.m., Cheye came home. He had just one hour to change into shorts, take the boys for their evening walk, change back into business clothes, eat, then head to the town center to chair a community meeting. He'd be gone before Trinity got home. At 33, Cheye had become the youngest mayor ever elected in Prince George's County. It was a part-time job that paid an honorarium of $150 a month. Cheye -- once voted "most school-spirited" in the class of '89 at Riverdale's Parkdale High School -- turned out to be a natural. A policy wonk, he had a passion for the minutiae of local governing. For weeks, he'd been drafting and redrafting a letter laying out precise arguments on why the state should crack down on a developer who had fouled Indian Creek. Tonight, mayors and council members from three neighboring towns were coming to sign Cheye's letter. Cheye was upstairs changing, thinking through the key points of his letter, when the dogs began barking downstairs. Georgia, talking on the phone as her pasta sauce bubbled on the stove, went to investigate. A man holding a big white box was on the front stoop. Georgia could barely see the man, who seemed, oddly, to be standing off to one side. She noticed a white van at the curb. Deliveryman, she thought. She motioned for the man to leave the box on the stoop. "Boys!" Cheye called as he came downstairs into the kitchen a few minutes later. He grabbed their leashes from twin hooks. The boys raced to the appointed spot near the back door, sat side by side and waited for Cheye to snap on their leashes. Together they stared up eagerly, tails fanning the kitchen floor in unison. "We had our routines, and they loved them," Cheye recalled. "They'd plop right down side by side. Payton always on the left, Chase on the right. I loved that little line." Cheye loved security and stability. In childhood, his family had moved around a lot, primarily in Prince George's, and struggled financially. Creating peace, security and stability not just for Trinity, Georgia and himself, but for all the families of Berwyn Heights, was deeply satisfying to him. He subscribed to the broken-window theory of community-building: If you let little problems slide, big problems follow. People here seemed to like the order. Berwyn Heights enjoyed 30 percent voter turnouts for town elections, a full calendar of community events and one of the lowest crime rates in Prince George's. When one of Berwyn Heights' eight police officers knocked on a homeowner's door to make an inquiry, he just might find himself invited in to dinner. Cheye liked to think of the town, population 3,000, as a diverse modern-day Mayberry. As Cheye and the boys took an evening constitutional, Cheye waved at the driver of every car that passed. He had a theory about waving; it is psychologically dissonant for drivers to speed if a smiling man walking two cheerful black Labs is standing in the street waving at them. Close to home again, Cheye noticed an SUV parked on the left side with a man sitting at the wheel. Cheye waved at the man. Behind that SUV was one with dark tinted windows, and Cheye couldn't make out who was inside. A few minutes earlier, he'd come across a car parked facing the wrong way on the street. It was in front of a fire hydrant. The motor was running, but Cheye couldn't see anyone inside the car. "That's three violations right there," he recalled thinking. "That's, like, $200 in tickets if you add them all up. I remember thinking: I hope an officer comes by here. We need to ticket that car." But officers were already there, all around them, watching. And before they left that night, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia would wonder if they could ever feel safe again. *** "Okay," Cheye said, as he reached his front gate and let Payton and Chase off lead. They raced ahead as Cheye stopped to lift the big white box from the front stoop. It was addressed to Trinity. "Trinity must have ordered something for the garden," Cheye remembered telling Georgia as he came in the back door. He left the big box on a table in their book-lined living room and went upstairs to change. It was past 7 p.m., but late sun still streamed through the large kitchen window as Georgia stood at the stove stirring her simmering tomato-artichoke sauce. Georgia turned, catching a glimpse of something out the window that sent a jolt of fear through her. Hooded, armed men, dressed in black, were fanning across the back yard. Still more men, crouching low, moved around the side of the house. Georgia's mind raced to make sense of the strange tableau. Was someone playing an elaborate practical joke? One of the men spotted Georgia gaping out the window. He lifted his high-powered assault rifle and pointed it directly at her, she recalled. Georgia -- still clutching her wooden spoon -- threw both hands up in the air and screamed. "Cheye, I think it's SWAT!" Cheye was sitting on the edge of his bed in his boxers. He was just about to put on his black dress socks, when he heard Georgia scream something that made absolutely no sense. He looked out a bedroom window to see armed, masked men running. He was still wondering if they were home invaders when he heard his front door shatter. In the kitchen, Georgia spun to face the sound of the splintering door. Men in black burst through the front door and into the living room. Georgia stood trembling in front of the kitchen stove. Payton, who had been stretched out in a corner of the living room farthest from the front door, his head resting near the threshold to the kitchen "turned toward the front door when I turned," Georgia recalled. "He didn't have time to do anything else." Almost instantly, men in black ran forward and shot Payton in the face, Georgia said. "They kept shooting," she recalled. "I didn't know how many times they shot Payton because there was so much gunfire." "Down on the ground!" Georgia recalled someone screaming at her. She was too terrified to move. Chase, always timid even when there was nothing to fear, did what he did best -- he ran. He ran away from the men in black, zipped past Georgia at the stove, Georgia recalled. The screaming, running men followed Chase, shooting as he tried escaping into the dining room, Georgia said. She watched in horror as men in black rushed the dining room from all directions. "I could hear Chase whimpering," Georgia said. Then she heard someone shoot at Chase again, she said. Men kept yelling at Georgia to get down, but she couldn't budge. "Somebody pushed me on the ground, and they put a gun to my head," she said. Face down on the kitchen floor, Georgia felt someone yank her hands behind her, rip the spoon away and secure her hands. When she lifted her eyes, she could just see Payton's big head resting near the kitchen threshold. He wasn't moving. "Where are they?" one of the men screamed at Georgia. "Where are they?" She had no idea what he was talking about. Georgia says she felt the barrel of an assault rifle against her left ear. "Where are they?" a man demanded. "In the basement?" Georgia remembers saying. Some of the men thundered down the basement steps. "It was a question, 'In the basement?' Because, if somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you a question, you better come up with an answer. Then I shut my eyes. Oh, God, I thought they were going to shoot me next." Upstairs, Cheye fell to the bedroom floor at the sound of gunfire. He heard: bang, bang, bang, bang, undecipherable shouts, bang, bang. "Downstairs!" Cheye heard men call to each other as they began to search the house. Then, more ominously, they yelled: "Upstairs! Upstairs!" "I'm up here," Cheye recalled calling out. "Please don't shoot. Please don't shoot." Somebody ordered Cheye to come down. He stood gingerly and peered down the stairwell. "I remember turning and seeing the barrels of two shotguns pointed at me," he said. "I don't know what kind. I'm not a gun person." "Turn around and walk down the stairs backwards," someone demanded. So, he did. Clad only in his boxer shorts, the mayor of Berwyn Heights walked slowly down his staircase backwards, his open hands held high. Ever so slowly, he felt for each tread before lowering his weight. "Somewhere around the bottom half of the stairs, someone came to get me," he recalled. "They led me down, pulled my hands down behind my back, bound me with those plastic cuffs very tightly, then pulled me across the living room." Cheye turned his head and saw Georgia facedown on the kitchen floor. She must be alive, he reasoned, because there was a man holding a gun to her head. He saw Payton slumped on the living room floor near the threshold to the kitchen. "I knew he was bleeding," Cheye recalled. "I knew he'd been shot. Nothing was processing. I saw Georgia, Payton, blood. No Chase." Men spun him around and forced him to kneel facing the shattered front door. Behind him, he could hear people ransacking his house. Drawers were yanked out. Cabinets opened and closed. Dazed and sick with terror, he also felt a dawning, helpless grief. All this, for what? Racking his brain for anything they owned worth stealing, all he could think of was Trinity's dual-chamber, rotating garden composter. As Cheye knelt, bound and half-naked, on his living room floor, "no one spoke to me about why they were here," Cheye recalled. "No one said, 'Prince George's County police' or 'Prince George's County sheriffs.' They never made that kind of announcement, just simply didn't do it." Out his ruined front door, Cheye could see that people were gathered on his front lawn. Some wore jackets with official-looking insignias as if they could be police officers in street clothes. "That was my first clue that these men might be law enforcement," he would later recall. "My thought was: If this were a home invasion, people wouldn't just be standing out there on the lawn. They'd be hiding." It wasn't a home invasion. It was a raid by the Prince George's County Police Department and the county Sheriff's Office. Both agencies declined to discuss specifics of the raid for this story. At one point, Cheye recalled, he noticed a familiar uniform in the growing crowd on lawn. Berwyn Heights police officer Pvt. Amir Johnson had been patrolling the neighborhood when he passed the mayor's house and saw officers dressed in tactical uniforms coming out the front door. He stopped. (Berwyn Heights and Prince George's police have overlapping jurisdictions within town limits.) "The guy in there is crazy," Johnson remembered a Prince George's County officer telling him when he arrived. "He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights." "That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights," Johnson replied. The detective looked very surprised, Johnson later recalled: "He had that 'Oh, crap' look on his face." Alarmed, Johnson used his cellphone to notify Berwyn Heights Police Chief Patrick Murphy that, as improbable as it sounded, the Sheriff's Office SWAT team had apparently broken down the mayor's door, shot his dogs and confiscated a box containing 32 pounds of marijuana. Murphy -- home gardening 54 miles away in St. Mary's County -- sat down, stunned. The 35-year veteran of law enforcement searched his memory for any clue he might have overlooked that the nice young mayor who loved his wife, those two goofy Labs and code enforcement could be involved with drugs. He couldn't come up with anything. The chief told Johnson to go find their department's second-in-command, Det. Sgt. Ken Antolik, who was moonlighting a few blocks away from Calvo's house at the Blue Bird Driving School, to help him find out what in the heck was going on. Inside the house, Cheye was starting to ask questions, too. "Do you have a warrant?" he recalled asking more than once, until someone said: "It's en route." "I kept saying: 'This is a very terrible thing. This is just horrible.' The context in which I told them I was the mayor, I said, 'I'm the mayor of Berwyn heights, and I have to get to a community meeting tonight.' " Finally, one of the deputies, the men in black, nodded to the recently delivered big white box on the living room table and barked accusingly, "Do you know what is in this box?" "A box," Cheye recalled thinking. "This is about the box?" Someone shifted Cheye, his hands still bound behind him, into a chair. He could see blood pooling from beneath Payton's head. An officer picked up one of the boys' dog beds and used it to cover Payton's corpse. Cheye asked if they'd killed Chase, too, and someone said that they'd called animal control to remove two dead dogs. "You shot my dogs," Cheye recalled saying over and over. "You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs." At home in St. Mary's, Murphy dialed the cellphone of his second-in-command, now standing on the mayor's front lawn. Murphy's officer handed the phone to a Prince George's narcotics investigator, Det. Sgt. David Martini. This is how Murphy later recalled their conversation: "Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them," Murphy recalled. "And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot." "I later learned," Murphy said in an interview, "that none of that is true." Martini said he was not free to comment for this article. *** It was about 7:45 p.m. when Trinity turned her 1997 Suburu Outback with the kayak rack on top onto Edmonston. The road was so jammed with police vehicles that she couldn't reach her driveway. Assuming that the house had been robbed, Trinity abandoned her car and searched frantically for any sign of an ambulance. "Is my husband okay?" she asked when Ken Antolik met her near her front gate. "Is my mom okay? "Yes," he told her. "They are in the house. Then it struck her. It was too quiet. She didn't hear dogs barking. She knew, even before she asked: "Payton and Chase?" "I'm sorry," he said. Trinity collapsed against his chest. A female officer eventually came and led her gently around to the back door. Trinity started in to find her husband and mother, then saw blood. There was so much blood. There was blood pooled near the door. Officers were tracking her dead dogs' blood all over the house. She backed outside. "I remember sitting on the steps thinking, 'I'm never going to be able to live here again,' " Trinity recalled. "I found something," Georgia heard a detective yell excitedly. The woman held a white envelope filled with cash. Inside, was $68. Across the front of the envelope were written two words: "yard sale." The detective seemed crestfallen, Georgia said. Georgia, who had been moved, still bound, into the downstairs bedroom, says she overheard the woman saying something like: "It's my first raid, and we got the mayor's house." Cheye, struggling to understand, pieced together questions officers asked him and comments he overheard. Narcotics investigators for the Prince George's police had apparently left that white box on his front step, then sent SWAT officers from the Sheriff's Office to retrieve it. The box contained marijuana. Officers from the two county law enforcement agencies had apparently been parked watching his house all day. Yet they had apparently done so little investigatory work -- they hadn't even taken 30 seconds to Google Cheye -- that they didn't know they were launching a paramilitary attack on an elected official's home until after they'd broken down the door and shot the dogs. Cheye was particularly disturbed when he discovered that narcotics investigators seemed to have known that criminals had been mailing drugs addressed to innocent people, in hopes of intercepting the packages before the addressees claimed them. Yet, here he was, hands bound behind him, trying to convince county police that he and Trinity were not drug lords. "Look around," he tried arguing. "We own almost nothing but books. We live on 70 percent of our salary and bank the rest." Do drug lords tend organic gardens and store the decorations for the community's holiday parties in their garage? In fact, the officers searching his house were unable to find any evidence of drugs other than the box they'd delivered. They didn't find gun caches or, aside from the yard sale money, stacks of cash. Cheye and Trinity didn't have a bong or hookah, not a single rolling paper, stem or seed. Cheye watched their search efforts grow halfhearted, he said. Nobody seemed to know how to remove the plastic cuffs still binding his and Georgia's hands behind their backs. The deputies from the SWAT team who had put them on were gone. When Georgia and Cheye complained to detectives that the cuffs were cutting off their circulation, they said the detectives just shrugged. After awhile, the officer moved Cheye into the kitchen. From his new vantage, he could see into the dining room. Chase was lying dead in a pool of blood. The scene at the house was so terrible and odd to Berwyn Heights officer Johnson that he planted himself in the living room. He couldn't see a search warrant posted anywhere. The mayor looked so vulnerable that Johnson wanted to make sure nothing even worse happened to him, such as getting shot. "Not that I didn't trust the police," Johnson would later say. "But I wanted to personally witness what is going to happen to my mayor, so if they try to say this guy went for a gun -- and he didn't -- it's not going to happen on my watch." When animal control officers finally came for Payton and Chase, Cheye lost it. Payton's big head tumbled limply off the stretcher as they lifted it to take him away. "I roared," Cheye later recalled. "I broke down sobbing." Cheye had named his big boy for the late, great Chicago Bear Walter Payton, whose nickname was "Sweetness." Cheye's Payton ran more like a 350-pound lineman than like Walter Payton. But he was the sweetest, most wonderful dog Cheye had ever known, and strangers were taking him away forever. "My hands were still bound, so I couldn't get my hands to my face as tears just flowed down. I remember turning, and looking away." Out on the back stoop, it seemed to Trinity that the detectives in their house had shifted into damage control. One pleasant woman, trying to make pleasant conversation, asked Trinity if she and Cheye ever planned to have children. "All I could think was, Our dogs were our kids, and I can't believe you are asking me that," Trinity recalled. "I let it go and said that we were thinking about adopting." *** Nearly four hours after the SWAT team broke down the front door, the detectives were ready to leave. Someone had figured out how to cut the cuffs off Cheye and Georgia. They had led Georgia outside to Trinity. Georgia was still so hysterical that she could barely speak. Cheye says the lead officer at the scene, Prince George's Det. Shawn Scarlata, told him and Trinity that he could haul them all into jail because the box had been addressed to Trinity. But he said he wasn't going to as long as they cooperated. (Scarlata later said he could not comment on the case for this article.) Johnson stayed to help Cheye lift the splintered door back into its frame and prop it there. There was no way to make the lock work. "I just felt so sorry for them," Johnson recalled. "I didn't know what to say. I told them I'd keep an eye on the house." Cheye grasped Trinity by the shoulders. "Whatever happens," he said. "I don't want this to affect us." He was a romantic idealist. He had proposed to Trinity at the Jefferson Memorial. But he wasn't naive. This night had been so terrible, Cheye knew that it would change each of them forever in ways they couldn't predict. He felt only a determination not to allow this horror to creep inside their love. Trinity, sobbing, said nothing could ruin their marriage, but they might have to move. She didn't know if she could live in this house. She didn't think she could stay in Prince George's County. They toured their home room by room. Everything they owned was thrown on the floor, a table or a bed. Their meticulous files had been dumped, the paper scattered. But the blood was the worst. Exhausted, Cheye telephoned a friend and asked him to come over and help him scrub the blood off the floors. They had to do it for Trinity. It was after 1 a.m. when the two men stopped scrubbing. Cheye dragged an air mattress into the living room so that he, Trinity and Georgia could huddle together through the night. Nobody slept. Somewhere out there was a drug dealer who might be thinking that they had his box of pot, and they couldn't lock their front door. About 3:30 a.m., Cheye typed an e-mail on his Treo trying to explain why he wouldn't be coming to the office that morning. "I'm on the Beltway," Cheye's boss, Rajiv Vinnakota, said, when he called at 7:30 the next morning and said he was on his way. "My only question is, 'Do I bring bagels?' " Cheye earned his living working for SEED, a District-based educational foundation trying to expand its network of schools to several states. There was no way a drug raid on a mayor's house where police broke down the door and shot the family dogs wouldn't become news. Cheye's boss counseled him to get a lawyer, because innocent people go to jail all the time, and to be proactive about reaching out to the media. Cheye felt confident that people who knew him and Trinity would know they'd never have anything to do with drugs. But what about everyone else? As they talked, it dawned on Cheye that police hadn't just killed his dogs, terrorized his family and destroyed his once-happy, pretty home. They might just have ruined his life. By mid-morning, Cheye had agreed to let a television reporter tour the house and had sent a mass e-mail to everyone he knew and the entire town of Berwyn Heights' mailing list. "We try to make sense of it," Cheye wrote in the e-mail. "They invaded our home and killed our dogs! That above all else, can't be undone." The Berwyn Heights annual employee-appreciation luncheon was scheduled for noon. Cheye went, feeling unsteady from lack of sleep and wondering if he were still in shock. He sat next to Murphy, who Cheye felt was acting cool toward him. "I'm always highly suspicious because of all the things I've seen in 35 years in law enforcements," the chief later said. "Sometimes, I look at the priest in church, and I wonder what his thing is, which isn't all that healthy. But there's always a suspicion there. At the same time, I think I'm a pretty good judge of character." Cheye, he concluded, couldn't have been the criminal the county detective had described on the phone. As Cheye implemented his plan to let people know that they were innocent, Trinity labored to make their house minimally habitable. Her father -- Georgia's first husband -- flew in from Wyoming to help. One of the first things they did was throw away the blood-soaked dining room rug. At bedtime, Trinity and Cheye stared at each other. Trinity had always gone upstairs first, leaving Cheye reading downstairs, Chase at his feet. Payton had always followed Trinity, crept onto Cheye's side on the bed, snoozed until he heard him coming, then jumped down guiltily. Now their hearts sank, not just at all they'd lost, but at how everything either of them said or did, anyplace they looked in the house, was a reminder. They got into bed, but kept the lights on. Trinity was afraid now to sleep in the dark. After a few minutes, Cheye got up and turned off the fan. They wanted to be able to hear in case someone broke in again. *** The first news reports on the raid at the Berwyn Heights mayor's house quoted spokesmen for the Prince George's police saying that the mayor and his family remained "persons of interest" in an ongoing drug-smuggling investigation. Police said they became aware of the box addressed to Trinity when a drug-sniffing dog had alerted them to it at a package hub, and authorities notified the county police. A police spokesman told reporters that Prince George's narcotics investigators had sought, and been granted, a "no-knock" warrant before searching Cheye and Trinity's house. Maryland law authorizes police to request a no-knock warrant, one intended to be served by force and unannounced, if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that evidence would be destroyed or officers' lives placed in danger if they knocked on a suspect's door and demanded entry. Those same news reports quoted law enforcement officials around the region saying it was a known tactic of traffickers to ship a package containing drugs to an innocent stranger's home, planning to retrieve it before the recipient opened the box. In fact, law enforcement officials told reporters, recent incidents in College Park and Dunn Loring had been foiled when surprised innocents alerted police after opening the packages before the dealers could snatch them. Cheye was flabbergasted. Given that, how could the police who had broken down his front door with a battering ram, terrorized his family and killed his dogs not at least have considered the possibility, even the likelihood, that he might be innocent? On Friday, Aug. 1 -- 71 hours after the raid -- the lead detective, Scarlata, returned to their home. He came alone. Cheye met him at the fence. The detective handed Cheye the warrant he had first asked to see while handcuffed in his living room. Scarlata also gave Cheye a list of what they'd confiscated in the raid. It consisted of a single item: the box police had brought there in the first place. After the detective left, Cheye studied the document. There was nothing anywhere to indicate that Scarlata had asked the judge who signed it for permission to break his door down for a no-knock search. He hadn't presented the judge with evidence that anyone in the household was armed and dangerous. He'd basically said that police had intercepted a box of drugs addressed to Trinity, delivered the box and watched as it was taken inside. The tomatoes still hung ripe and sweet in the garden. The sun still streamed prettily through the kitchen window. The thought still came to Cheye each time he walked through the kitchen: I need to fill the boys' water bowl. Then he remembered. Everything had changed. He left the water bowl unfilled where it had always sat. He left the leashes hanging on two hooks by the back door. The first Saturday after the raid, during that happy stretch of time when Cheye would have taken his dogs on an extra-long walk looking for would-be speeders to wave at, there was now a void so large that he was only beginning to take its measure. Trinity was downstairs, still trying to right the house, when she heard a strange and terrible sound. She raced upstairs to find Cheye, sitting naked on the shower floor, letting the water stream over his head as he sobbed. "I just want to walk my dogs," he told her. "I just want to walk my dogs." Trinity's father had to leave Sunday afternoon to go back to Wyoming. He spent his last day with them scrubbing the front walk. He scrubbed until he'd erased the last traces of the blood that had dripped there as animal control had carried the boys away. In late afternoon, Cheye and Trinity were driven to a local ballpark where Berwyn Heights activists had organized a community rally to support them. Rally organizers presented Cheye and Trinity with a banner signed by hundreds of people who had written messages of support and encouragement. Speaker after speaker expressed certainty that the mayor and his family were innocent and outrage at the death of the dogs. Police Chief Murphy was angry that Prince George's police hadn't given him the courtesy of notifying him before their raid, allowing him to help them execute their search warrant peacefully and avert tragedy. "I never imagined, when I set out to protect people from the crooks and the criminals, that I would have to protect them from my fellow police officers," Murphy told the crowd. Cheye thanked the townspeople he'd served for five years as mayor. "Injustice in this county, in this country, in this world happens every day," he said. "But people who experience it most often don't have the support, don't have the community, don't have the resources that we do." *** Cheye and Trinity flipped channels waiting for the 5 o'clock news, certain that -- finally -- they would be officially cleared. It was Wednesday, Aug. 7, more than a week after the raid. Then-Prince George's Police Chief Melvin C. High and Sheriff Michael Jackson held a joint news conference to announce the arrests of a FedEx deliveryman and a second man alleged to be involved in a scheme to smuggle marijuana by shipping packages addressed to unsuspecting recipients, including the one to Trinity. Police refused to release their names. Yet neither High nor Jackson apologized to Cheye, Trinity and Georgia or declared their absolute innocence. The mayor of Berwyn Heights and his family "most likely, they were innocent victims" of the drug traffickers' scheme, High said. "But we don't want to draw that definite conclusion at the moment." High and Jackson defended the raid on the mayor of Berwyn Heights as reasonable and restrained, given the information they had at the time. "In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor, which it is not," High said. "This was about an address; this was about a name on a package . . . and, in fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact." The chief and sheriff admitted to what Cheye had already deduced: They did not specifically seek a no-knock warrant before breaking down the mayor's door. Jackson said his deputies were justified in entering the house so forcefully because Georgia screamed when she saw them outside the house, and her cries could have alerted any armed occupants of the home to attack police or destroy evidence. Deputies were justified in killing Payton and Chase because the dogs had "engaged" them, Jackson said, although he acknowledged under questioning that neither dog had bitten anyone. Watching accounts of the news conference on television, Cheye grew livid. Not only had the brass refused to apologize or clear them, they were now blaming poor Georgia's terrified scream for the botched raid. They were saying dogs barking at masked men justified slaughter. Georgia could not be consoled later that night. Was everything her fault because she'd screamed? Trinity held her close. She and Cheye tried to explain that the police were trying to get themselves out of trouble. If they were ever going to reclaim their lives, Cheye was now certain, they were going to have to make the story of their exoneration bigger than the story of the drug raid on their home. Cheye held a news conference the next morning on their front lawn. As Cheye spoke -- "We have witnessed a frightening law-enforcement culture in which the law is disregarded, the rights of innocent occupants are ignored and the rights of innocent animals mean nothing." -- Trinity began to sob at his side. By the next morning, the story of the nice attractive young mayor and his photogenic family who were terrorized by police was traveling the globe. Cheye turned on the radio at 5 a.m. to find the BBC leading off the world news with his story. As Cheye fielded interview requests from Paris, sympathy cards, letters and flowers arrived from all over. Cheye opened the door one day to find a DHL deliveryman holding a box. Cheye froze. "I'm going to need you to open the box," Cheye recalled telling the shocked deliveryman. "This may seem silly to you, and I'm not going to go into details, but I'm going to need you to open the box." The deliveryman opened the box so Cheye could peer at the contents: a spray of roses. *** Cheye and Trinity arranged for the frozen corpses of Payton and Chase to be transferred to a University of Maryland laboratory for animal autopsies. They were examined Aug. 11, and the veterinarian later issued a report consistent with Georgia's account and the physical evidence inside the family home: Payton had been shot four times, twice in the chest/flank region, once in the jaw and once in the neck. Chase was shot twice: once in his rear left legs, once in the chest. The shot to Chase's legs had been fired from behind. After the shot to his chest, he bled to death. If angry dog lovers around the world puzzled over why police had behaved as they did, Cheye thought he was beginning to understand. Someone mailed Cheye a copy of a 2006 Cato Institute report, "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America." Trinity found the cover photo of a SWAT officer wielding an automatic assault rifle so unsettling that she asked Cheye not to leave it around the house. So, he made his way through the report as he rode the Metro to and from his office in the District. The report's author, a civil liberties advocate named Radley Balko, offered a context for the raid. Americans have defended their right to privacy and the sanctity of their homes since Revolutionaries denounced British soldiers entering homes and businesses with impunity to search for contraband rum and tea and generate taxes for the British Crown. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable government searches and seizures. But civil libertarians argue that this constitutional protection has been seriously eroded in recent decades, largely as an unintended consequence of the nation's war on drugs. In Balko's summary, paramilitary police units called Special Weapons Attack Teams, or SWATS, grew out of the social unrest of the 1960s. They were used to quell protesting migrant farm workers led by Cesar Chavez, then against urban rioters and in a shootout with the Black Panthers in Los Angeles. Balko writes: "Until the 1980s, SWAT teams and other paramilitary units were used sparingly, only in volatile, high-risk situations such as bank robberies or hostage situations. Likewise, 'no-knock' raids were generally used only in situations where innocent lives were determined to be at imminent risk. America's War on Drugs has spurred a significant rise in the numbers of such raids, to the point where in some jurisdictions drug warrants are only served by SWAT teams or similar paramilitary units, and the overwhelming numbers of SWAT deployments are to execute drug warrants." Federal policies and funding stemming from the war on drugs gave local police financial incentives for making a high volume of drug arrests, even if they netted only users and low-level dealers, not drug kingpins, and spurred the military to arm SWAT teams with its excess military equipment. Laws allowing police to seize -- and add to their own budgets -- cars, cash, jewels and other items gathered during drug raids, even if nobody was convicted of any crime as a result of their search and seizures, became further incentive for police to use military-style raids against suspected drug traffickers, Balko argues. In a landmark 1995 case, Wilson v. Arkansas, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the longstanding common-law endorsement of the knock-and-announce approach to serving search warrants was enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. But it also recognized significant exceptions to the knock-and-announce approach. In a unanimous opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that police could enter a home unannounced under "exigent circumstances." Among them: if police had a reasonable belief that their safety would be imperiled by announcing themselves, if they were pursuing a fleeing suspect or if an announcement would allow suspects to destroy evidence. In the Berwyn Heights raid, police appeared to suggest that Georgia's terrified scream created the kind of exigent circumstance envisioned by the court. Last year, Prince George's police deployed SWAT teams to serve search warrants more than 400 times, a police spokesman said. The department's narcotics unit now deploys its SWAT team to serve the overwhelming majority of its search warrants, Maj. Andy Ellis said. The Prince George's Police budget shows that the county expects to spend at least $2.5 million this year reaped from assets seized in drug raids. Ellis, like police nationwide, defends the burgeoning use of paramilitary-style units to serve routine search warrants, arguing that the increase of force has been necessary to counteract more violent, and better armed, drug dealers. Prince George's SWAT officers recovered 241 firearms while serving search warrants last year, Ellis said. "Conducting narcotics is very dangerous work," Ellis said. "The officers who conduct narcotics search warrants never know what's on the other side of the door." Civil libertarians argue that military-style raids escalate the level of violence in what could be routine police action, and are leaving a growing number of innocents terrorized, wounded or dead. "Botched raids are a staple of law enforcement," said Graham Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Drug Law Reform Project. "There is a never-ending stream of ruined homes, ruined lives and innocent people who are killed or terrorized." The Cato Institute Web site features an interactive map tracking hundreds of botched paramilitary police raids nationwide beginning in the late 1990s, including dozens of instances in which innocent people were killed. Many victims of botched or abusive drug raids are poor minorities whom the public is unlikely to hear about or rally around, Boyd said. Legal immunity granted to police makes it difficult for victims to successfully sue for compensation, he said. Cheye's reading and research on botched drug raids left him chilled. "This wasn't just about me and Trinity and Georgia anymore," Cheye said. "It was about my community." Cheye decided that he would push the Maryland state legislature to require police to track, report and curtail the indiscriminate use of SWAT teams to force entry into people's homes unannounced to serve routine search warrants. *** On a Saturday morning in mid-August, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia parked in a lot outside a pet store in Northern Virginia. They walked down a line of excited Labs available for adoption from a rescue organization, stroking noses, offering treats and asking the handlers about temperaments. Then they spotted a small black Lab who seemed calmer than the others, and they knew their search was over. He looked like Chase. Cheye went inside the pet store to try to buy the newest member of their family, Marshall, a leash and a toy. The woman behind the counter recognized him from the TV news and wouldn't let him pay. "Marshall doesn't make us miss the boys less, but he steps into a void," Cheye later said. "I think we would have gone crazy if we didn't adopt him." When the first chills of October came, Trinity lifted a jacket that had hung unused for months on a coat rack by the back door. One sleeve was spattered with blood. Another night, Trinity awakened to get some cold medicine and heard her mother having a nightmare. "Oh, no," Trinity heard Georgia murmuring. "Oh, no. Oh, no." Georgia had suffered the worst violence during the raid. She was having the toughest time recovering. Outside by a garden bench, a flower pot stood testament to Georgia's state of mind. It was filled to overflowing with the butts of the cigarettes she had smoked. She kept replaying in her mind the police claim that her terrified scream was their justification for breaking down the front door. She kept replaying the first awful seconds and wondering what she could have done to save Chase and Payton. Trinity and Cheye told her over and over that there was nothing she could have done, but consolation eluded her. In that strange way that every loss in life evokes every other loss, the helplessness and self-blame Georgia felt the night she had lost her husband 16 years ago haunted her now. Bradley Porter, 37, was a helicopter pilot caught in heavy fog outside Price, Utah. He radioed the airport for someone to telephone Georgia to drive out and pick him up along with his passenger. By the time Georgia reached the distant field, Bradley had a new plan. He wanted Georgia to shine her headlights on power lines that ran parallel to the road. If he safely cleared those lines, he told her, he could follow the road to fly the helicopter in rather than leave it overnight where vandals might damage it. Georgia urged him to leave the helicopter until morning, but he insisted. So Georgia did as he asked. She maneuvered her car to light up the power lines, then watched as the helicopter lifted slightly. Investigators would later determine that one of the helicopter skids struck a knoll on the uneven, snow-covered field. Georgia watched helplessly as the helicopter flipped, crashed and exploded in flames, killing her husband and his passenger. "I couldn't get to him," Georgia said. "For the longest time, I thought I should have tried harder to talk him out of trying to follow the road that night. It was just that terrible feeling. I could have done so many things differently." Determined to recover for her children's sake, Georgia enrolled in college in Colorado, hoping to get her degree and become a veterinarian. But the science courses defeated her, and dissecting dead animals in the lab broke her heart. "I was sick of dead animals." The lagging economy in Utah left Georgia with so few job prospects that she came to live with Cheye and Trinity to begin again. She thought she was finally making her way, and then the front door shattered. Trinity took most of November off from work to reclaim the house. She cleaned every surface and reorganized every corner the raid had disturbed. She not only was no longer interested in moving; she was changing jobs so she could work from home. They were going to do what it took to be happy there again. "We love our life," Cheye said. "We love our marriage. We love our home. We are determined not to let it slip away." They were also determined to hold the police accountable. Through a lawyer, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia have filed a notice of intent to sue the Prince George's County Police Department and the Sheriff's Office. By the time, Cheye and Trinity hung ornaments on the Christmas tree in December, their sunny little brick home seemed almost as cozy as it used to, but different. Some damage couldn't be repaired. Georgia couldn't live in the house any longer and moved to an apartment in the area. Payton and Chase's ashes rested in a wooden chest, topped by their framed photo. Cheye likes to sit near the chest on winter nights, Marshall at his feet, as he reads. Often, he sits up late researching Supreme Court rulings on police searches and seizures. He's read the court's decision in one 2006 case, Hudson v. Michigan, more than once. In Hudson, the court found that even when police make a clearly illegal no-knock raid, the evidence they seize can still be used against a defendant at trial. "In other words, police can do what they did to us with impunity" Cheye concluded. "There are no consequences, not for them." April Witt is a staff writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at witta@washpost.com. |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 08:10 AM Post #8 |
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http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2009/02/03/News/Donations.Down.20.In.Fy.2009-3609961.shtml Donations down 20% in FY 2009 Recession likely cause behind drop in giving By: Julia Love Posted: 2/3/09 At the half-way mark in the 2009 fiscal year, private donations to the University were down about 20 percent from the same point the year before, said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations. Duke netted a record-breaking $351.6 million in contributions last fiscal year, including pledges, according to Fiscal Year 2007/2008 Financial Reports. Private donations-which were made by more than 100,000 individuals-accounted for about 18 percent of Duke's $1.93-billion operating budget for the year, Schoenfeld said. But Duke's donors have not been immune to the nation's financial woes, and it seems the faltering economy has impacted their ability to give to the University, Schoenfeld added. Although the number of donors to date is on par with last financial year, the dollar total is trailing considerably, Peter Vaughn, executive director of alumni and development communications, wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle Jan. 16. "We're expecting that it will be much more difficult to raise money this year in this environment," Schoenfeld said. "This downturn is a unique one, and I think every nonprofit organization, including Duke, is going to be recalibrating and resetting expectations about what's realistic in a severely down economy." Indeed, many of Duke's peers are bracing for a decline in donations in the coming year. College fundraising officials predicted an average donation drop of 1.7 percent for the coming calendar year, which would be only the third down year for college fundraisers in the past 20 years, according to a biannual survey of institutions by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Donations to Duke have slumped along with the economy before. The Campaign for Duke, a seven-year fundraising effort started in 1996, stagnated during the 2001 recession, but rebounded to surpass its $2-billion goal in 2003, The Chronicle reported at the time. Building on the momentum generated by the Financial Aid Initiative, gifts to the University soared during fiscal year 2008, besting the previous year's total by 21 percent, according to Fiscal Year 2007/2008 Financial Reports. After such a successful year, a decline in donations was almost to be expected, Vaughn wrote in the e-mail. "Even without taking into account the current economic situation, it would not have been surprising to see our giving decline in the current year," he wrote. "Duke's Financial Aid Initiative was scheduled to conclude on Dec. 31.... Frankly, you just do not go up every year." The last time Duke's donation total dropped was during fiscal year 2004, following the conclusion of the Campaign for Duke, he said. It is likely, but not certain, that Duke will finish behind last year's fundraising total, Vaughn said. The timing of major gifts is unpredictable, and one large donation can significantly alter year-to-year comparisons on any given day, he wrote in the e-mail. "This is a snapshot at a particular moment in time," Schoenfeld said of the University's fundraising total at the six-month mark. "There have been years in the past where Duke has been below the previous year's total at this particular point, but at the end of the fiscal year has finished ahead." Schoenfeld said he could not remember the last time Duke recovered from a drop of this magnitude by year's end. Chelsea Allison contributed reporting. |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 08:12 AM Post #9 |
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http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2009/02/03/News/Bell-Outlines.City.Plan.At.Annual.Speech-3609962.shtml Bell outlines city plan at annual speech Mayor rejects tax hikes despite large shortfall By: Julius Jones Posted: 2/3/09 Durham Mayor Bill Bell struck a pragmatic note Monday night, speaking to a standing-room only audience at City Hall regarding the looming financial difficulties ahead. In his seventh annual State of the City address, Bell remarked both on the success of several development projects in 2008 and the hard times ahead in 2009. "As we begin 2009, I must first tell you that, as a city, there will be some tough decisions ahead of us. We, as a city, will have to decide more than ever before what our priorities are," Bell said. "We will have to learn to do more with less, and our primary focus must be on the more efficient delivery of our core city services." Bell also highlighted public and private improvement projects from the past year, citing the Durham Performing Arts Center and a water connection line with the city of Cary in the wake of the drought as accomplishments. "Happenings last year, good and bad, laid the groundwork for the next 12 months," Bell said. "It will be essential that for 2009, the city maintain a laser-like focus on the economy, jobs, transportation and green building and energy savings." The theme of the speech was "Where do we go from here?", a message derived from a Martin Luther King Jr. sermon to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967 in Atlanta. The path forward will have greater challenges for Durham, said Bell. According to city budget projections, there will be a $24 million to $40 million gap between expected revenue and expenditures in the 2009-2010 city budget, Bell said. Despite the projected deficit, Bell said that the city would not raise either the property or sales taxes, which are the primary sources of revenue for Durham. Instead, Bell emphasized the need to cut spending. "In my opinion, we should look at this period as an opportunity to further right the size of our city administrative structure using innovative actions," Bell said. "In a sense, city government can provide our own economic stimulus for our community if executed properly." Other city employees said they are ready to adapt their habits in order to help through this difficult economic period, including efforts to cut costs. "Well I like to think that we are always mindful of cost, but everything is on the table now," Durham City Council member Diane Catotti said in an interview with The Chronicle following the address. "We're going to reevaluate new projects and closely scrutinize all expenditures." Although Bell stressed the importance of city government staffers becoming more efficient, he added that efforts to close the budget gap may include eliminating some jobs with the city altogether. "Notice I said perform our jobs-implied in that statement is that we continue to have jobs, which are no certainty," Bell said. "I am sure that the administration and the council will work hard to see that we can minimize any layoffs, but nothing is promised, so it behooves all of us to work together to keep the city family together." Some citizens in the audience said they were supportive of the mayor's agenda. "We really don't have a choice. We have these trying times and we should not be so negative. We should be positive," Durham resident Shirley Lassiter said in an interview with The Chronicle. Lassiter said that she is grateful to be living in Durham, pointing to others experiencing greater hardship as a result of the recession. "That could be us," she said. |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 08:13 AM Post #10 |
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| abb | Feb 3 2009, 08:15 AM Post #11 |
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http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2009/02/03/Editorial/Safe-On.Campus-3609971.shtml Safe on campus By: Posted: 2/3/09 The last academic year at the University was marked by extreme off-campus violence. But through this frightening time, students were reassured that even though the area surrounding campus may not be safe, the University's campus still was. This year a rash of thefts on West and Central campuses, although not nearly as violent as last year's threats, is forcing students to question this assertion of an on-campus haven. At the very least, the robberies of West dormitories, Central apartments, the Wilson Gym weight room and basketball courts and East common rooms create an uncomfortable environment. University administrators must recognize that real safety concerns have moved onto campus and act on this recognition with permanent, preventative policies. Blast e-mails to the student body from Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta have pointed out that most on-campus robberies could be avoided if students would only lock their doors. We understand that doors should be locked at night, or if students are not in their rooms for a long period of time. But students should not be expected to lock their doors to take a shower, or to go down to the commons room, or to stop by a friend's room down the hall. If they did so, a dormitory's sense of community and trust would be lost, and a hallway would be transformed into a series of isolated rooms. A similar feeling of distrust would arise if students began to suspect and report any individual who seems at all suspicious. Duke is a relatively open campus. It will be hard to define the limit between trying to be safe and cutting off relations with the surrounding community and between students. Of course, students should be more alert to on-campus crime. But security on a university campus is just different from security in a city. A university must maintain a crucial degree of trust and inclusiveness in order to attain its academic and social objectives. A more effective way to reduce burglaries would come from Duke University Police Department officers and security guards. On this score, it has been suggested that officers should do rounds in dormitories to check if doors are locked. But a far better use of resources would be for DUPD to increase its on-campus patrols and visibility. More crimes would be deterred if officers kept watch over the entrances to dormitories than if they walked up and down residential halls. In general, though, the Office of Student Affairs and DUPD have to admit that these recent thefts demonstrate a fundamental weakness in the campus security system and undertake a thorough review of that system. More visible patrols and surveillance cameras would be a good starting point. It does seem plausible that all of the thefts on West could have been committed by the same person, as suggested by Moneta. And it is also true that Central is scheduled to undergo a thorough reconstruction sometime soon. But, in the meantime, the University's campus and the area that immediately surrounds it are gaining the reputation of being unsafe. The University suffers from any perception that it is unsafe, and so, especially in a time of economic crisis, all responsible parties must be more proactive to protect the University community. |
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| Bill Anderson | Feb 3 2009, 09:55 AM Post #12 |
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Gee, I thought the lacrosse players were responsible for the violence on campus. That is what Houston Baker was claiming. And everyone knows that Houston "Duke Made My Sexual Assault Charges Go Away" Baker never is wrong.
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| Baldo | Feb 3 2009, 11:08 AM Post #13 |
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From the Washington Post article The report's author, a civil liberties advocate named Radley Balko, offered a context for the raid. Radley Balko, a Blog Hooligan, from the old Forum! http://www.theagitator.com/ He has written about the rush to judgment in numerous cases! |
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| Baldo | Feb 3 2009, 11:13 AM Post #14 |
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Dear Mayor Bell & President Brodhead, If you think you have money problems now, Yadda Yadda Yadda Love , Baldo |
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| chatham | Feb 3 2009, 12:56 PM Post #15 |
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DASHLE WITHDRAWS NAME Daschle withdraws as nominee for HHS secretary Feb 3 12:54 PM US/Eastern Comments (6) In this Feb. 2, 2009 file photo, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle... WASHINGTON (AP) - Tom Daschle has withdrawn his nomination to be Health and Human Services secretary. That's according to a joint White House statement from President Barack Obama and his former nominee. Obama said Tuesday he accepted the withdrawal "with sadness and regret." Daschle has been battling for his nomination since it was disclosed he failed to pay more than $120,000 in taxes. He said he's withdrawing because he's not a leader who has the full faith of Congress and will be a distraction. Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Edited by chatham, Feb 3 2009, 01:00 PM.
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