A side-effect of the war on drugs launched by President Calderon was to involve the army in carrying out police operations against gangs. However, this blurring of lines between both security institutions resulted in an increase in human rights violations.
Ever since President Felipe Calderon started the war on drugs in 2006, there have been a record number of arrests and drug seizures. In some areas, progress seems to have been made, but the violence that affects the country is still on the rise. The population, caught in the middle of the firefight, has been suffering not only from the cartels and organized crime groups, but also by the very authorities supposed to protect them. As the number of drug related murders seems to be decreasing, can it be said the war on drugs has yielded positive results?
According to published
statistics, Mexico’s war on drugs has claimed the lives of
47,515 people since President Calderon launched the war on drugs in 2006. Calderon’s strategy since the beginning was to take organized crime head on, making the war on drugs a real fight. With many of the local, state and federal police suspected of working for the cartels, as evidenced by
numerous arrests and suspension within police forces, and no way to uphold the law, the president had to turn to the military, unleashing the armed forces on its own population. Politicians, desperate to clean up their act, tried purging the police forces, with the military taking up their functions as they made arrests of suspected police officers and took over the precincts.
Mexico’s army is well known for their relief efforts during natural disasters. But ever since they started fighting the war on drugs on the streets of Mexico, human rights violations have tarnished that reputation. As Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch
said, “Instead of reducing violence, Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and other appalling abuses by security forces, which only make the climate of lawlessness and fear worse in many parts of the country,”
Soldiers who commit human rights violations against civilians continue to be investigated and prosecuted under military jurisdiction, which means that victims of the abuses, their families and the population in general never find out about punitive measures taken against the perpetrators, if any.
With the military assuming functions that civilian forces should be carrying out, it comes as no surprise that problems between authorities and the population increase, and with them reports of
human rights violations. The military was not designed to police cities, and when fighting an enemy wearing no uniform and mingled with civilians, casualties of war are bound to multiply; excessive use of force, wrongful arrest and prolonged detention, even cases of torture have also been
reported. Civilian victims also include those who have been caught in the crossfire when the military and the cartels come face to face. Yet despite the increasing number of complaints about human rights violations carried out by the Mexican military, it is still one of the most trusted institutions as far as the people are concerned.
With elections coming up, many are skeptical about whether the situation will improve. Mexico’s public safety secretary, Genaro Garcia Luna,
statesthat violence and crime in Mexico have reached their peak, and will probably decrease in the next years. Waging a war on drugs against an enemy with a larger budget, no uniforms and following no rules is not an easy battle. Especially while the United States remains the world’s largest consumer.
Is there any hope in the near future? All candidates on both sides of the border make a point of saying that they will fight violence and crime if elected, but so far, no one has given any concrete details about how this will be done. Followers of the current president argue for prolonging his current policies; the opposition claims that this strategy is not working, yet offer no alternative. However, some regional leaders, politicians and intellectuals argue that by redefining drug policy, and thus eliminating the exorbitant profits of the criminals, many more deaths can be avoided. The strategy, they say, is not to fight the cartels head on, but to hit them in their pockets. But the debate over whether to legalize certain drugs or not is not likely to take up occupatiopn on the political agenda any time soon, especially with presidential elections coming up in both Mexico and the United States.
When Mal Brough announced the Northern Territory National Emergency Response into remote Aboriginal communities, I experienced an uncanny sliding doors moment.
I remembered working at a rural Victorian sexual assault service, and the claustrophobic sense of gated paedophilia I started to sense about that township. Perpetrators ranged from the ex-police chief to local bikies gang-raping two-year-olds.
Gathering dust in a back room were the victim files. That hideous archive of self-generating social dysfunction went from the floor to the roof and it was jammed with the lifelong suffering of mostly women and girls, but increasingly boys, inflicted by men - most of whom had histories of violent abuse themselves. The thing is they were close to all white offenders.
That room put a disproportionate part of the local community on skids. I rarely met survivors with life passions that informed their education or professions. Most of them were unemployed, lost and trying to manage a bunch of kids they'd had too young because they had no clue what else to do with their lives. These were brave, inspiring women. But so often they drank or got into drugs, they got into relationships with violent drongos, they struggled everyday with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, isolation, rage and despair.
To my mind that file room defined dystopia. Every day I worked at that juncture of disclosure, between victims wanting justice and support, and the men who actively set about destroying human potential. I wanted someone to send in the army. Not the nice army, with ukuleles and footballs and women soldiers that the community knew, as was said of NORFORCE, but battalions of scary SWAT teams who busted in on offenders in riot gear and carried them off to somewhere akin to Guantanamo Bay, leaving the rest of us, finally, in peace.
You simply could not get angrier than I was at men that bashed and raped women and children. I saw the devastation they wrought and I wanted them dead.
We've been hearing from shell-shocked health professionals working in remote Aboriginal communities, staring glassy-eyed into our living rooms, trying to convey to the rest of us what the inside of that file room looks like when it becomes the outer parameters of an entire community.
Eleven-year-old girls hanging themselves; mothers with head injuries; children needing genital surgery to remain continent. The extent of damage being perpetrated against Aboriginal women and children hasn't been known since the frontier.
Then as now, it beggars belief. Then as now, it's easier for non-Indigenous Australians to think of it, not as something we do, but as something particular to Aboriginal manhood. It's clear men's violence is worse in some remote communities; that is not that same as being exclusive to those communities.
Aboriginal women are wary of white feminists like me talking about Aboriginal men's violence. Some have pointed out white women were part of the cycle, enforcing patriarchal family structures as missionaries that undermined Aboriginal women's traditional autonomy and authority, or employing desperately lonely, vulnerable girls removed from their loving families as domestic indentures. In both scenarios white women were themselves violent to Aboriginal women and girls.
'Demonising' Aboriginal men as wholesale rapists and wife-bashers only alienates Aboriginal communities further. Louis Nowra and others have attempted to characterise Aboriginal men's violence as intrinsic to traditional warrior identity.
I have surveyed large swathes of the colonial archive and extracted over 50,000 words of settler imaginings of Aboriginal women's gender status. There is no question the frontier was one of the most dangerous places for women in the history of human conflict, but the tropes of bride capture, of eating tossed scraps, of routine camp violence, were confected by a handful of settlers and recirculated through the press as credible ethnological data. That's until Bronislaw Malinowski undertook a thorough survey of the available literature in 1913 and found them to be the repetitions of the erroneous views of early settlers.
I have traced the bride capture trope to David Collins (Judge Advocate and Secretary of the Colony , and later to John McClennan's 1865 Primitive Marriage, who sourced his rather florid account from an anonymous newspaper article in the popular London magazine Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature Science and the Arts
.
Why did settlers cling to these speculative tales? Because they wanted to believe that colonialism was an act of gallantry. In the process of disavowing their own violence against Aboriginal women, Aboriginal men's violence became a staple fetish.
Violence isn't a problem of Aboriginality, but of offender masculinity which some Aboriginal men became assimilated to over generations of impoverishment, structural disadvantage, alcohol and more recently violent porn.
With billions of dollars invested in services still missing from remote communities, non-Indigenous communities manage to contain the fallout of male violence, keep it under wraps, keep it nice. In remote communities it has climaxed to this level of cultural visibility because the services to contain the fall out aren't there. This isn't to deny the situation is in crisis in those communities. It is to say men's violence has created a salt and pepper crisis throughout the wider community and we should stop using violence by Aboriginal men as a distraction from the rest.
Offenders need to be singled out as in fact anomalous to the majority of men in their respective communities. They need to be held to account and removed from the families and communities they damage. Not left in their homes and communities reoffending while protracted legal cases telescope into plea bargaining and appeals. And not removed to prisons, but to something like rehabilitation/health /training and education centres. Every city and regional centre in this country needs an offender centre.
It is from here that men who have been charged need to pursue their legal defence, so their wives and children can stay in their homes and get on with their lives in safety. It is here that offending men need to undergo best practice psychiatric assessment, treatment and particularly rehabilitation from alcohol and other addictions. It is from here they need to heal from both the devastation they have wrought in their own lives and very likely their own histories of learnt abuse. It is from here offenders need to redefine their manhood with the best intervention programs into hyper-macho identity money can buy. It is from here they need to reconnect to their passions and talents and work out how to generate income from them. It is from here offenders need to learn how to consume, as do men who aren't self-destructive, food, grog and porn.
Where cultural factors inform their offending, like intergenerational unemployment and racism, they need to be sensitively addressed, such as by implementing every recommendation of the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report. It is critical that the most brilliant, dedicated and inspiring health professionals and educators in the country staff these offender ventures. I cannot think of more important work any of us could do.
And if it takes years, even the rest of their adult lives before they pose no risk to our communities so be it. Let's be clear. Offenders are our foe. For too long their legal rights have been prioritised over that of women and children's right to safety. What was needed from Mal Brough, what was always needed, then and now, right around the country, is a national emergency response into offender masculinity.
Liz Conor is an academic at the National Centre for Australian Studies. She will present this talk tonight on a panel for International Women's Day convened by Melbourne Free University. View her full profile
here.
Once a juicer, always a juicer?
That may indeed be the case as Jose Canseco's attempt to play in the Mexican Baseball League ended on Wednesday after league officials said the former star admitted to taking a banned substance without a prescription.
League president Plinio Escalante
told ESPN Deportes that the banned substance was testosterone and that Canseco refused to take a drug test.
The 47-year-old former slugger had been trying out with the Quintana Roo Tigers, publicly stating that it was his goal
to again play in the major leagues one day. The Mexican League is Triple-A level ball, but teams do not share any affiliation with MLB franchises.
Still, it was better than the independent league ball that Canseco had been playing in.
As has been his custom, Canseco took to his Twitter account and defended himself with a flurry of stream-of-consciousness tweets:
"How can I test positive when I never took any test don't believe everything the media tells you.the truth always comes out I am not using any illegal substanced,"
he wrote from @josecanseco. "All I am on is prescription medication for low testosterone .legal and very important for my health."
Whether it's explaining why
he sent his twin brother to box for him or
professing his love for Lady Gaga, Canseco's uninhibited tweets have always been a particularly sad piece of theater. He has become the ultimate outsider in a sport that he turned upside down with the revelatory publication of "Juiced" back in 2005.
[Rewind:
Jose Canseco demands $2,000 for blog interview]
That Canseco would be injecting testosterone into his aging body as he continues his delusional "dream" to play big-league baseball would be no surprise if true, of course.
It would also be no surprise if Canseco's claims that years of steroid use have driven his testosterone to low levels that would necessitate these injections.
Either way, it's against baseball's rules to take unauthorized testosterone for any reason if you want to play the game. Canseco made this sad world for himself, but it'll always be impossible for him to acknowledge that.
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It was less than a day after Rupert Murdoch's supposedly triumphant return to the Sunday tabloid market in the UK, with the new Sun on Sunday, when the deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sue Akers dropped a
bombshell on Murdoch's UK newspaper empire.
The Sun, the daily tabloid flagship which had birthed the Sun on Sunday from its inky loins, was found to have engaged in the systematic bribing of high-profile public officials and policemen.
On a scale calibrated by the Milly Dowler phone hacking scandal, this would seem to be a trifle. The rule of thumb is that if you think of the worst thing the Murdoch papers could possibly be doing, and double it, it's only a matter of time before it is matched and surpassed by real life. As a well-known tabloid columnist is apt to say, "you couldn't make it up".
The Sun's leading journalists, led by the weathered drudge Trevor Kavanagh, had recently been in rebellion against company managers who ordered the staff to fully comply with the police investigation.
Kavanagh had written a tired, emotional and belligerent tirade positioning the paper, never normally known for its concern with civil liberties, as a sort of Solidarnosc, labouring under a Stalinist boot.
"Who polices the police?" he lamented.
The answer as suggested by recent disclosures is, until recently, The Sun. But he went further, implicitly attacking Newscorp bosses for capitulating to the police investigation. Murdoch's response followed shortly afterwards. He promised to lift the suspension of all journalists who had not yet been found guilty of an offence, and announced that the tabloid's new Sunday newspaper would be launched soon. This would be, he vouched, "the best answer to our critics".
In short, the Sun on Sunday was to represent the assertion of Murdoch's continuing power in the UK newspaper market, amid what would seem to be his unravelling. His Twitter account lauded the new paper's supposedly staggering sales and success in attracting advertisers.
A day later, The Sun brand was toxic again. But Akers' revelation, only the beginning of a bad week for Murdoch, was more than a comeback spoiler. If borne out, not only will many Sun journalists face trial, but the scale of the offences would seem to implicate the highest levels of management. The investigation has not only identified bribery, but also its widespread acceptance in The Sun, as well as "a recognition by the journalists that this behaviour is illegal". No journalist can claim, as they have tried to do, that these payments were merely low-key disbursements designed to lubricate already willing informants. They were knowingly corrupt inducements.
Yet, there was more, and this is where the investigation into corruption has borne sinister fruit. In March 1987, a young man named Daniel Morgan was found deceased beside his car. Morgan, who worked in a private investigators firm called Southern Investigations, had been on the brink of alleging serious, high-level police corruption. Before he had the opportunity to speak to this, he was bludgeoned and mutilated with an axe. Initially, three detectives were arrested along with Morgan's partner in Southern Investigations, Jonathan Rees, charged with involvement in his murder. One of the detectives, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, had worked for Southern Investigations, and had initially been assigned the case. As the Metropolitan Police commissioner acknowledged in 2005, the investigation was 'compromised'. The charges were dropped, and Fillery later left the police to take up a full-time job in Southern Investigations, which seems to have continued in a similar pattern of behaviour. Rees was eventually discovered in the act of plotting to frame a woman for drugs possession.
It was known that News of the World, the recently closed Sunday tabloid which the Sun on Sunday is intended to replace, had close relations with Southern Investigations. The company had sold News of the World confidential information, and Rees was a direct recipient of payments from the paper. During the fifth, secret police inquiry into the murder of Morgan, which began in 2005, police presented Rebekah Brooks, who then edited the News of the World, with
evidence that the tabloid's resources had been used on behalf of two of the murder suspects, Rees and Fillery, to spy on those investigating the murder. The paper's executive editor,
Alex Marunchak, was the link between Southern Investigations and the News of the World. But for most of the 25 years that he worked at the paper, he also worked for the Metropolitan Police on a freelance basis, as an interpreter. Marunchak claims that nothing he saw or heard while working for the Met would have been of interest to the paper, and that he was paid a mere 40 pounds per shift. Well… he would say that, wouldn't he?
The news last week was that after five failed inquiries, one conducted entirely in secret, and the collapse of a recent prosecution after the trial judge dismissed a number of key 'supergrasses', the police would carry out a
forensic review of the evidence surrounding Morgan's death. This seems to have resulted in part from pressure by Tom Watson MP, now among a cluster of Labour politicians using his position to assail the fortresses of Murdoch's media power. It is unlikely that the full truth will emerge. The modus operandi of the Metropolitan Police in dealing with corruption has been to manage it internally, conceal information and mislead the public. This was the approach of the so-called 'Ghost Squad' set up by the Met to look at corruption, and of its successor, the
'Untouchables'.
Moreover, the police have their own public mess to clean up, regarding recent reports that they have been involved in passing information to construction firms to help them form
blacklists of workers deemed too noisome and militant. There is also the
report that a senior investigating officer in the case of the murdered Stephen Lawrence was part of a network of crooked officers who acted as a crime syndicate, and had a corrupt relationship with the gangster and father of one of the murder suspects, Clifford Norris. Even so, when there is blame to be distributed, it is not beyond the wit of police to disclose just enough to incriminate a complicit partner in crime without doing too much damage to their own standing.
The impact of these revelations was swift. James Murdoch
resigned from running Newscorp's British newspaper business, News International, in order to spend more time on his father's television networks. And a senior figure on Newscorp's board, Chase Carey, indicated that the UK newspapers may be sold off or separated from the parent company. Murdoch's stock in the UK has never been this low.
Running through all of these stories, with striking consistency, are
networks of class power. None of this criminality would have been possible were it not for the relationships between the Murdoch press, politicians, the police, judiciary and sections of the business establishment. And those relationships themselves were predicated on the power accumulated by Murdoch's awesome media dominion. Yet, something about the nature of these relations lent itself to illicit practices. The history of News International's involvement in criminal conspiracies is not one of aberrant crookedness, defying the integrity and professional standards of the industry. Somehow it is inscribed in the very network of relationships that makes media power what it is today. It is in the structures of news production itself.
News is not a given set of facts, but rather a carefully sorted and selected presentation of pieces of information that, in their total effect, produce a common stock of ideas and knowledges about the societies in which media institutions operate.
Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Cultural Studies in Birmingham identified some of the mechanisms by which the 'newsworthy' is identified and produced for mass consumption. The media is overwhelmingly reliant upon 'accredited' and 'authoritative' sources of information. This is embedded in the ideology of 'objectivity', a rigorous distinction between fact and opinion, which underpins the journalist's professional code.
Since most journalists are not well-placed to determine independently what is fact and what is not, they become dependent on sources which have already established legitimacy: politicians, courts, police, intelligence agencies, academic and technical experts and, in certain contexts, the representatives of business and high finance. In deciding whom to report on as an objective source of information, the media create a hierarchy of credibility, which tends to validate existing hierarchies and already dominant ideologies. In addition, because they rely on predictable sources of information, journalists tend to gravitate toward powerful institutions that produce constant supplies of the material from which their livelihood is made. This gives already powerful institutions, as well as the PR agencies they work through, the opportunity to be the 'primary definers' of what is news.
However, they also then become dependent on how the information is present. Journalists work on the information in various ways to make it saleable to two kinds of audience: the consumer market it is targeted at, and the advertising market that seeks access to this consumer market. Where there is a powerful and interventionist proprietor, the information is also tailored in light of his or her business strategy, politics and preference regarding the paper's tone. But the flack from sources, and threat of the withdrawal of future access, is another factor in determining what eventually is produced as news.
The result is a lattice of mutual dependencies, networks of power in which the dominant currency is information - or, more accurately, ideological signification. The dependency is, in effect, one between different sectors of power which monopolise and strategically disburse different kinds of information. The journalistic dependency on the aforementioned sources is only reinforced by the existence of a competitive newspaper market, where a number of papers vie for access to the same streams of information. And in a context of declining profitability and reduced readership such as has been the case in the UK market for some time, there is a premium on the novel, dramatic, and thus far occluded. At the same time, the institutions they depend upon have a definable interest in creating illicit flows of disavowable information, whether to create issues around which they can mobilise opinion and organise existing projects, or to vilify and disorient opponents.
We have seen that this is particularly so of the police, whose role in dispensing law also gives them a privileged position in defining a wide range of social situations. The information upon which criminality is determined, court action proceeds and wider social and political issues are identified, to a large extent flows upward from officers involved in routine 'enforcement'. It is a logical entailment of this role that police will seek to directly define issues pertinent to their role via the media. Importantly, there are no clear boundaries between licit and illicit conduct in this regard. A
witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry from Jacqueline Hames, a Metropolitan Police officer and former presenter of the BBC program Crimewatch, suggests that this indeterminacy could be settled by better training and a wider awareness of guidelines. But this is a 'technological' solution to a non-technical problem: the same professional autonomy that allows police to define the situations they work in - to 'work up' charges where they are so motivated, to stop and search, to detain without charge, to deploy strategic violence and then write up the reports which rationalise their approach in the language of bureaucracy – empowers the police to define their relations with reporters.
This brings the media into the field of 'parapolitics', an area in which the exercise of political and ideological power is conducted in forms and according to hierarchies not formally recognised in the 'public' sphere. 'Parapolitics' is a term that is usually associated with researchers into 'conspiracy theory', a field that is blighted with kookiness, silliness and 'infotainment' posing as revelation. But when theory becomes scandalous fact, there is no reason to be coy. The networks of mutual dependency that I have described are effectively a 'conspiracy machine', an ensemble of mechanisms that are apt to produce constant flows of illicitly obtained information, and the constant maintenance of relations which keep the flows going. The staggering range and depth of the Murdoch empire's involvement in criminal enterprise at various levels over many years, of which it is prudent to assume we know only a fraction, would have been impossible to sustain otherwise.
And this enjoins us to re-phrase familiar questions in a different light. It is common, for example, to despairingly ask how we can root out the culture of corruption and sleaze in journalism. Or, one might ask, how far up the chain does the corruption go? As if, were we to identify Rupert Murdoch as conspirator-in-chief, a knowing agent of political corruption, the problem would be resolved. In reality, despite Murdoch's hands-on approach to running his tabloids, and without wishing to foreclose future investigation, it is highly improbable that the Dirty Digger personally would have dug in the dirt. The real question, for those who do not want this situation to be endlessly repeated, is: what sort of media would behave differently? And, as a corollary: what sort of society would give rise to a better media?
Richard Seymour is a London-based writer and PhD student. View his full profile
here.
Continue reading "Colorado DEA Chief Dismisses Medical Value Of Marijuana" >
reported earlier this week that it found the unsafe levels of the chemical 4-methylimidazole (4-MI -- used to make caramel color -- in cans of Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and Whole Foods’ 365 Cola. Coca-Cola confirmed that changes were being made at its facilities to keep within the law but argued that the CSPI’s allegations on the dangers the ingredient posed on humans were false. “The company has made the decision to ask its caramel suppliers to make the necessary manufacturing process modification, to meet the specific Californian legislation,” A spokesperson for Coca-Cola told
Daily Mail Online. “Those modifications will not change our product.” California added 4-MI to its list of carcinogens, after studies showed high levels of the chemical led to tumors in lab animals. However, the studies were inconclusive on whether the chemical was dangerous to humans or not. “Caramel is a perfectly safe ingredient and this has been recognized by all European food safety authorities,” the spokesperson added. “The 4-MEI levels in our products pose no health or safety risks. Outside of California, no regulatory agency concerned with protecting the public’s health has stated that 4-MEI is a human carcinogen.” “The caramel color in all of our ingredients has been, is and always will be safe. That is a fact,” the spokesperson said. This had been the CSPI’s second go-around with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA over the dangers of 4-MI in soft drinks. It first petitioned the regulator last year, but the FDA has continually maintained that the claims were exaggerated. “It is important to understand that a consumer would have to consume well over a thousand cans of soda a day to reach the doses administered in the studies that have shown links to cancer in rodents,” said FDA spokesman, Doug Karas to the Daily Mail's Laura Pullman. CSPI maintains that the regulator is allowing soft drink companies to needlessly expose millions of Americans to a chemical that is known to cause cancer. “If companies can make brown food coloring that is carcinogen-free, the industry should use it,” CSPI’s executive director Michael Jacobson told
Reuters. The FDA said it will review the watchdog’s petition, but that the soft drinks in question were still safe. CSPI took cans from stores in the Washington DC area, where they found some had levels of 4-MI near 140 micrograms per 12-ounce can. California has a legal limit of 29 micrograms of 4-MI per 12 ounces, it noted. The FDA’s limit for 4-MI in caramel coloring is 250 parts per million (ppm . Once the caramel is mixed in with the soda it becomes diluted. According to calculations by Reuters, the highest levels of 4-MI found in the soft drinks were about 0.4 ppm, significantly within the safe zone. “This is nothing more than CSPI scare tactics,” the American Beverage Association (ABA told Reuters in a statement. “In fact, findings of regulatory agencies worldwide ... consider caramel coloring safe for use in foods and beverages.” ABA said its member companies will continue to caramel coloring in certain products but that adjustments were being made to meet California requirements. “Consumers will notice no difference in our products and have no reason at all for any health concerns,” the ABA said. Diana Garza-Ciarlante, a representative for Coca-Cola, said its suppliers would modify the manufacturing process used to reduce the levels of 4-MI, which is formed during the cooking process and as a result may be found in trace amounts in many foods. “While we believe that there is no public health risk that justifies any such change, we did ask our caramel suppliers to take this step so that our products would not be subject to the requirement of a scientifically unfounded warning,” she said in an email to
The Telegraph. --- On the Net:
There were at least six assault weapons in the bags, and more than a dozen firearms stolen from Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, and Michigan
Newark Police seized 22 firearms and arrested 15 people Tuesday night when they intercepted a shipment of high-powered weapons.
NEWARK — Newark Police seized 22 firearms and arrested 15 people Tuesday night when they intercepted a shipment of high-powered weapons headed from South Carolina to the state’s largest city, authorities said.
Acting on an anonymous tip, officers from the Fifth Precinct surrounded a South 20th Street residence shortly after midnight, where they found South Carolina men Cedric Reddick, 19, and Bevan Holston, 40, meeting with 22-year-old Newark resident James Terrell, city police spokesman Todd McClendon said.
Officers saw Reddick and Holston carrying two duffel bags they believed to be filled with weapons, and police immediately converged on the building, McClendon said. Police arrested thirteen suspects, including Terrell and a 17-year-old Irvington girl, as they seized the weapons stock pile.
McClendon said there were at least six assault weapons in the bags, and more than a dozen firearms stolen from Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, and Michigan.
While officers were arresting the other suspects, the Reddick and Holston ducked out of a window and tried to run across several adjacent buildings, McClendon said. The alleged gun traffickers began "jumping from roof to roof," according to McClendon, but Holston missed a landing and fell several yards to the ground.
Reddick surrendered seconds later and had to be removed from a rooftop by Newark firefighters, according to police. Holston suffered serious, but non-life threatening, injuries, McClendon said.
All 15 suspects face a minimum of 50 weapons charges each, according to McClendon.
Newark Police Director Samuel DeMaio praised the Quality of Life Unit for its repeated successes year, saying officers have recorded 250 arrests and seized more than $27,000 in drug money over the past two months.
"I applaud this unit for another job well done and commend them on their repeated success in making significant arrests and seizures of weapons and illegal narcotics," he said.
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The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS , Jose Miguel Insulza, inaugurated today the twelfth annual meeting of the Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism (CICTE , to discuss and adopt a declaration on "Strengthening Cyber ??Security in the Americas."
The Secretary General stressed the power of rapid technological advances to provide new and valuable services to citizens, but noted that it also offers criminals new ways to attack. In this sense, he warned that "Cybercrime incidents can adopt a multitude of forms and lead to the gravest consequences," also mentioning their connection with a variety of illegal activities, from arms trafficking and drugs to terrorism itself...
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