Posted on 11/08/2002 2:08:54 AM PST by rambo316
WASHINGTON – Fox News, CNN, the Washington Post. The interviews lionizing Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose keep coming. Time magazine named him "Person of the Week." Book deals are in the offing.
His office door is adorned with a huge thank-you letter from area school kids. Fruit baskets, flowers and other gifts continue to arrive from grateful citizens. One Maryland couple gave him a case of champagne.
Sheets spray-painted with "Moose for President" hang from highway overpasses here. There's even a "Chief Moose Fan Club" website replete with songs and poems praising the "superhero." Its founder calls Moose "brilliant."
Part of me doesn't care who gets credit for capturing the Beltway snipers, however misplaced that credit may be, so long as they're off the streets.
My family, like most in the Beltway area, was terrorized by them for three long weeks. After they shot someone near my neighborhood, I set the pump handle at the gas station and jumped back into my car whenever I filled up the tank. I did most of the shopping, zigzagging in the parking lot and feeling like an idiot. No more walking to school; my wife and I drove our school-aged child right up to the school's side entrance.
We were just as paralyzed and nerve-racked as everyone else around the capital, as the snipers methodically picked off 13 random people. Sounds crazy to live in such fear given the tiny statistical probability of being shot. But unless you were here, you can't fully understand what a nightmare it was – worse even than the D.C. anthrax scare. You can avoid opening your mail, or take drugs if you're exposed to germ spores. But there's no antibiotic for a bullet to the head.
At the same time, another part of me knows that rewarding incompetence validates incompetence, and can even institutionalize it, leading to more mistakes in similar cases down the road.
It's bad enough that we reward incompetence in public education. Doing it in law enforcement, where mistakes can cost lives, should never be tolerated, especially when Islamic terrorism now threatens us in our homes.
Truth is, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, both black Muslims, were caught in spite of Moose, not because of him.
Racial hypersensitivity delayed their capture, costing lives. Moose, a staunch foe of racial profiling, refused to go after suspects of color. (He and his second wife, a white civil-rights lawyer, are pathologically race-conscious, a matter I'll return to later.)
The sniper task force, which Moose led from start to finish, questioned white men right up to the day arrest warrants were issued for Muhammad and Malvo.
Take Tim Carter and his boss, Mark Fanning. On Oct. 22, task-force detectives paid them a visit at their P-Com Network Services offices in Sterling, Va.
"I was yanked out of a staff meeting," Fanning told me.
Carter said the detectives asked "embarrassing" questions, such as whether they'd been in the vicinity of any of the shootings.
It wasn't until the snipers gave themselves away by bragging about another murder in Alabama that police broke the case on Oct. 23.
If not for that boast, Moose might still be profiling white guys.
The whole ordeal could have been over Oct. 3, when D.C. police ran the plates on Muhammad's car just hours before he or Malvo shot their sixth victim, a 72-year-old D.C. man.
But they weren't stopped, because according to D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey, "We were looking for a white van with white people."
Both descriptions turned out to be wrong.
But only the description of the white vehicle was based on eyewitness accounts, not the description of "white people." That was based on stock psychological profiles of mass murderers (pre-Sept. 11) and phone tips from people suspicious of white spouses, boyfriends and neighbors with guns.
Yet one witness to a Maryland shooting on Oct. 3 described two "Hispanic" men in a white vehicle. Other early witnesses ID'd "dark-skinned" men in a white vehicle. At least one woman said she saw a black man.
Those physical descriptions of the suspects were dismissed by Moose, while the physical descriptions of the vehicles were treated as gospel. In fact, Moose issued composite graphics of the mythical white truck and van.
But he refused to release a composite sketch of a suspect based on witness accounts, because he didn't want to "paint some group." Snipers were terrorizing Washington, assassinating people left and right, even a boy, and the top cop on the case was more concerned about offending a minority group than catching the killers. That's incompetence writ large and should be called by its proper name, black official or not.
And it wasn't just white vans that Moose had police look for in those dragnets. They were looking for white drivers.
In fact, police who checked cars on roads and freeways following each shooting were ordered to wave cars by if the drivers were minorities or females, according to one ATF agent. They were told to search only cars with white males behind the wheel.
Even when additional witnesses at a Home Depot shooting, separate from the one witness who lied, described suspects as being dark-skinned, Moose saw only white. In fact, he tossed their statements, implying they were colored by the bad witness. Fairfax County police had to "re-interview" their good witnesses, a spokeswoman told me, who were never heard from again.
Derek Baliles, one of Moose's officers at the Rockville, Md., headquarters, said that even if they still insisted they saw dark-skinned assailants, it would be hard to believe. He said the lights were bad in the parking garage. He even suggested they could have seen white guys in dark "make-up."
"We don't want anyone to give up on the fact that it could be a white guy," Baliles told me.
It was almost as if Moose and his investigators hoped the shootings were the work of a racist white guy – even though it defied logic, as whites were among his victims.
And the patternless shootings appeared designed only to spread terror in the nation's capital, which just a year earlier was attacked by Islamic terrorists.
Yet no one on Moose's task force put two-and-two together.
FBI Special Agent Larry Foust, a task force member borrowed from the bureau's Baltimore field office, criminal division, expressed surprise when I asked him if the task force had canvassed the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., which is nine-tenths of a mile from the Home Depot. Astonishingly, he didn't know that one of the Washington area's largest mosques, one attended by many black Muslims, was so close to the shooting. Nor did he know that the same mosque was attended by two of the al-Qaida hijackers who slammed the jumbo jet into the Pentagon.
More, it took police three weeks to reach out to the immigrant community, even though it was clear the snipers were new to the area, having not left a local imprint with neighbors and co-workers, judging from all the bum leads, as FBI veteran I.C. Smith pointed out to me.
It was as if Sept. 11 never happened. It just had to be Timothy McVeigh's long lost cousin. Had to be.
Such tunnel vision is odd. Investigators usually adjust to facts and abandon early hunches that don't pan out.
Not in this case.
Why? Moose's background offers clues.
Chip on shoulder
Four times as a Portland, Ore., cop, Moose had to be disciplined for losing his temper in dust-ups with average citizens, most of them triggered by what he perceived to be racial slights by whites.
He was ordered to take an anger-management course (ironically, Moose's wife, Sandy, has taught an anger-management course at Montgomery College in Maryland). But he got into more racial confrontations.
Still, he was promoted to chief of the Portland Police Bureau.
Even at that level, he couldn't shake the chip from his shoulder. In another controversy, he had to apologize for making racial slurs against whites. Even the liberal Portland Oregonian lamented his "explosive temper."
Some white Portland cops complain that Moose discriminated against them.
"I tried to be very open-minded and extend myself to him on many occasions while working with him, but he made it very apparent he has some very strong bias against white males, especially ones with blonde hair and blue eyes," said a former Portland officer who served under Moose in the 1990s.
Moose has what some say is an annoying habit, as a public official, of putting his race in your face.
His corner office at police headquarters is a shrine to the black movement. Figurines of wild African elephants line a credenza. There's a plaque about black "pride." Pictures of black leaders line the walls. A poster reads: "Hatred thrives when bigotry is tolerated."
Moose came to Maryland vowing to end black criminal profiling as he had in Portland. Before taking the job in 1999, he met with the local NAACP.
When he arrived, he said he had reservations about moving to the area because he claimed the Ku Klux Klan was active there, and that it might be a "difficult" place for an interracial couple to live.
Huh? Montgomery County is one of the most liberal enclaves in the Beltway.
He quickly ended black profiling there – apparently only to replace it with white profiling.
A big fan of race-sensitive "community policing," Moose made Portland cops working the gang beat – during the crack wars, no less – carry blue pocketbooks filled with information about the city's social-service agencies.
Attorney General Janet Reno liked what she saw, and flew out to recognize him.
As her husband started his new job as Portland police chief in 1993, Sandra Herman Moose began law school in Tacoma, Wash., commuting home on weekends.
Her best pal at law school was a North African man, according to a classmate at University of Puget Sound School of Law.
She and Moose found time a couple of years later to teach a course on "multicultural communications" at Portland Community College.
Sandy Moose's ideas on race issues are downright scary.
She told CNN's Connie Chung the other night that she hit the roof when she heard a female newsie call her husband "hostile" after one of his hostile press conferences.
Sandy explained that whole discrimination law is built around that word, which she claims is racially charged and should never be used to describe a black man.
So, apparently we can't say Muhammad and Malvo are "hostile," either. Will she defend them if they sue?
If Moose's blonde wife considers "hostile" to be a racial epithet, imagine what Moose considers discriminatory.
This isn't a chip, folks. This is a boulder.
Anti-gun bias
Moose also has it in for gun owners.
"We need to stand up as a community and attack the supply of guns," he told the citizens of Portland in 1995.
When Muhammad and Malvo were arrested, Moose said the task force got the "gun" off the street, not the sniper.
And, in an unsettling plea to the public at one press conference, he said, "You need to ask yourself: Who do you know that owns guns, and why?"
Sure enough, the ATF and other task force agencies went around confiscating guns.
Gun-rights groups in Maryland were flooded with calls from worried law-abiding residents.
"We got very interested when folks started reporting attempts to confiscate rifles for ballistic testing," said Robert D. Culver, co-chairman of Montgomery Citizens for a Safer Maryland.
"I have several reports from men who have had contacts with law-enforcement officers, some of whom rolled over and submitted their firearms," Culver told me.
Carter of Vienna, Va., says task-force detectives also came to his house on the previous Saturday morning asking to see his firearms.
"They not only wanted to see my rifles, they copied the serial numbers down, as well," he said. "And then they told me that the ATF may want to test one of my rifles for ballistics."
Carter, who complied, added: "I now wonder who retains the records of my firearms and for what purpose."
This was pure insanity.
As Moose and his task force futilely chased "gun-crazed" white ghosts instead of the dark-skinned real killers, they deprived residents of Maryland and Virginia of firearms to possibly protect themselves from those killers.
"How much quicker and how many lives would have been spared in the recent sniper case if Moose had not allowed his prejudices to rule?" asked one law-enforcement veteran in the Washington area.
It's painfully obvious that Moose – a big fan of Head Start, which is fond of quoting Hillary Clinton's pal Marian Wright Edelman – is no hero. In fact, his personal prejudices may have cost several lives.
Even so, don't be surprised if his star rises. Hillary is no doubt eying Moose right now for FBI director in her administration
All I know is what I have heard from the cops and the media. And the parameters are simple - the cops had reason to enter the tag into the database multiple times, for whatever reason. Do a query, and run down the top 200-500 plates by total entries. The investigation then goes from a needle in a haystack to a manageable list - that is exactly how they got started in catching the Center City (Phila.)/Fort Collins rapist - they entered in just about anyone who was in both Philly and subsequently Fort Collins and vicinity during the two timeframes (I could possibly have been considered, as I fit that intital geographic parameter), and then winnowed down that list to about 200 suspects - and the eventual perp was on that list. That is why they create a database in the first place, but apparently the FBI was too busy looking up ten-year-old gun purchase records and harassing law-abiding citizens to bother using the tools at hand.
With all due respect, I don't believe it does anything of the sort. The cops were already maintaining the database. The records for the tag were in there. This was not a problem with GATHERING information, it was a problem with USING information - and it happened at many levels, not just with the database but also with the preconceptions of the investigators.
"No, that's not unusual," she said. "You have to understand we don't have the same computer system" that police in Maryland have. She said she had tried to run the tag the night of the shooting, but "the computer was down." This didn't make complete sense to me.
Even if the sniper database system was down for a day, query it the next. This investigation straddled weeks.
With only the tag number, she said, "We don't have probable cause" to arrest the owner. The tags could have been stolen; maybe someone else was driving the car that night. "The U.S. attorney won't issue a warrant for the arrest of the owner just based on a tag ID," she said. "We need an individual and someone to identify them, and you didn't see him."
Cripes, the cops were randomly pulling over white vans and searching them. Forget the tag, a resemblence to the suspect vehicle was sufficient. Also, the FBI was going to lawful owners of .223s and asking to test them. Probable cause had been tossed out the window for the sniper investigation.
She raised other problems. "Even if we find out the owner of the car," she said, "we're going to have to go up there and talk to him and get him to tell us who was driving the car that night, and then find them." If the assailant was Hispanic, she said, that would further hamper the case because the 4th District has only two Spanish-speaking detectives.
Turns out these perps were English speakers.
In the end, she summed up, an arrest would be difficult.On Tuesday, a man was shot and killed at Roosevelt High School in Northwest Washington. Police suspect the same Salvadoran gang, the Vatos Locos, that Lozado had told me might be responsible for my Sunday night shootings. Lozado said he would expedite the analysis of my shell casings -- but as of Friday morning, no detective had yet been assigned to my case.
Manpower was no issue on the sniper case.
The only bigotry I have seen here is the history of bigotry of Chief Moose. No one has said anything derogatory about him because of his race. The statements have been made because of his bigotry toward whites - it seems he has a long history of it.
But of course, maybe I am forgetting the rule ' Black people can't be bigots - only white people'. I have heard that statment many times - well that's not true either.
But once again, let's throw out the word 'bigot' and it will intimidate and silence the truth - sorry it doesn't work. It is just laughable at this point in time. I do hope everyone will point out that fact everytime it is used - then maybe we can get around to speaking the truth in this society and start to fix some of the real problems we have - like a botched criminal investigation that allowed innocent people to be killed!
Now that is just too easy - the old 'let's call them racist or bigot that will win the argument - we have gotten past that - we now recognize those statement for what they are - lack of facts or reasons.
I don't care if the man is black, white, or pea-green with purple spots - apparently he was the talking head and I doubt anyone forced him out there to take that job. Just a guess on my part. But he was also the chief of police and people were being murdered. If he had evidence that pointed otherwise, I don't care how many FBI, ATF, or whatever other alphabet organization said otherwise, he should have said something. PEOPLE WERE BEING KILLED!! I don't care who made what mistake - mistakes were made and he shares as much of the blame as anyone else and, myself, what is so disgusting is that he is apparently accepting all the accolades rather than admitting he was part of an investigation that allowed other innocents to be killed. Screaming 'bigot' at the people who are pointing that out will not change the facts - now in the past it might have silenced them - but not anymore - just won't work.
From what I read he is being condemned for being a anti-white. It seems there is plenty of documentation to prove that. This would naturally lead a thinking person to question just how much of the 'non-investigation' of what would seem to be credible leads and we now know were credible were not followed because of his hatred of whites. If he was just a pawn of the FBI, it seems he was a very willing pawn.
Well, I don't know the poster and I am not a Republican - so I can say I could never agree with anyone who still uses the old 'bigot', 'racist' threats. That kind of rhetoric has contributed mightily to the problems we have today. We need to be able to speak the truth about anyone no matter what their color. In the past the fear of being called a racist has given a pass to many, many incompetent and dangerous people.
As I said, I don't know the poster - I don't recall any past posts - just responding to the old, tired charge of 'racism' that has been used in the past to silence speech. Just not my cup of tea. I could n ever agree with anyone on that tactic.
The sheeple baah their approval.
Document your assertion that Chief Moose has a "hatred of whites." I want specific statements made by Chief Moose and links to those statements.
Actually, this is part of a much broader problem - once the FBI gets involved, common sense and standard investigative procedure seem to get tossed out the window. Fix the FBI and underlying attitudes, and you address a lot of these issues.
Do you live in the NY-VA I 95 area? One of the major continuing newstories for the past few years in these states has been the accusation of police profiling of drivers based on color.
I do, I work a few blocks away from I-95, and I agree that there is a siginficant profiling problem. Profiling is wrong and stupid in most cases, because, above and beyond any Constitutional issues, it is a significant waste of law enforcement resources - cops should stick to probable cause.
Are you saying that there already exists one database that documents every police stop in all of these states? Or even one per state?
I think they created a database specifically for this investigation, and entered all contact data they had.
If that is true there should not have been the frustration of many police jurisdictions who had to refute the charges of stops based on race. The data would have been accessible.
It's hard to surmise the internal reactions, as cops tend to stick together.
I was using the statements of people who lived in the city and state where he was previously. Now in that I took their word, I cannot document - but I will take their word until I am proven wrong. That is really all we can every do - read what we can and make judgements - unless we actually see it ourselves. Perhaps I should have used the old tried and true 'alledged' hatred of whites. Does that make it any better. Evidently, this man does have a history (alledgedly so) of some racial slant in his previous job. Is that more to your liking. If you accept that those people's postings are true, then it would lead to thinking that perhaps Chief Moose was not as interested in catching a black person. Think about it, if you had a white person in the job who had an 'alleged' history of racial slant and that person seemed to deny the possibility of a white person doing the crime (even though witnesses said differently) and it was proven the killers were white - wouldn't you wonder? Any thinking person would.
I will confess to being a little agitated at the time of posting, but the use of 'racism' and 'bigotry' anytime 'someone of color' or OTW are criticized is wearing thin. It has allowed and sometimes caused so many negative things in this country. This country has some very serious problems that need addressing, but if we cannot discuss them honestly and openly, nothing will change. I personally have never met a 'person of color' who was such a shrinking violet that a little criticism caused them irreparable harm, have you?
Thank goodness it is changing, but there was a time being a racist was the worse thing a person could be. You could be any low form of humanity - but being a racist was worse. That is changing, but evidently it is not gone completely.
Is that supposed to make me feel better?
I will confess that the charges of 'racism' and 'bigotry' do get my blood boiling. They are thrown out there for every situation and are so destruction and deceiving.
Since I didn't see the deleted, I can't comment. There are, however, many posts on here that are offensive to me (calling someone is racist is very offensive to me). But somehow that is OK.
And yes, mocking a man because of the color of his skin is bigoted. Sorry.
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