Chief Moose Cost Lives

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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

Moose didn't do the profiling. The FBI did. In fact, they have a number of profilers on staff and train other profilers. They even made a movie about it ("Silence of the Lambs," remember?). They got it wrong. The "racial" profiling is actually the profilers playing the percentages--there are more white serial killers than black serial killers. But it's simpler and easier to blame Moose for the inaccurate profiling than on the FBI, because he was out front and the FBI was in the background.

Leaving out other law enforcement agencies I would blame Moosie 67% and the FBI 33%.

Dennis, this is where you and I disagree. From early on, Moose was scripted by the FBI. They--along with the ATF and other federal agencies--not Moose, were running the show. Unless you can show me that the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department had a profiler on staff, the actual profiling was done by the FBI.

>>>Even if the suit did get tossed, it probably wouldn't happen, would it, till after some pretty darn interesting discovery was had..?<<<

That's an interesting point. But if it's ultimately likely to get tossed, the plaintiffs should have deep pockets OR the attorneys should be able to profit from the notoriety. Judicial Watch comes to mind. His lawsuit against Dick Cheney (practically his only high profile one against a conservative) will get him less political and monetary capital now. He needs a new way to vent his energies. Why not a case like this?

>>>The "racial" profiling is actually the profilers playing the percentages--there are more white serial killers than black serial killers. But it's simpler and easier to blame Moose for the inaccurate profiling than on the FBI<<<

A main point of the article seems to be, though, that Moose didn't adequately consider new leads and modify the profiling accordingly. His documented (and reprimanded) racial hostilities may have been the cause.

It was not all FBI. Montgomery County has a real hot dog liberal prosecutor, Doug Gensler. Moosie, Gensler and other MC Democrat apparatchiks heartily approved of the FBI profile. MC is Democrat controlled of course

If you were in Moosie's shoes would you have gone along with this bogus profile? You have to remember that people will identify you with it because you're on TV so much. Not the FBI. It's unfortunate that Moosie is getting accolade's when he really need to get his walking papers.

>>>MC is Democrat controlled of course<<<

That's starting to change, on the STATEWIDE level that is. Lt. Governor Kennedy Townsend just lost to Ehrlich, a Republican, interestingly enough.

Hmmm.... does anyone know how to include this thread in the state of Maryland category so that conservative Marylanders will see it? I've never been able to add a thread to a state after the thread's already created, just to specific topics.

Did Moose have a choice? Do you actually think he was running the show and not the FBI, ATF, US Secret Service, Postal Inspectors, and who knows what other fed alphabet agencies? If he made an objection to the profiling of the FBI, just what would he do with it? Moose was the face out front and nothing more.

If Moose was/is running the show and not the feds, why aren't Mohammed and Malvo being prosecuted in his county of Montgomery County, Maryland? It wasn't his choice. It was AG John Ashcroft's choice as to where they were prosecuted. The President got daily updates from FBI Director Mueller. The President was not getting daily updates from Chief Moose.

Moose is handy target and nothing more. I would like to place responsibility where it belongs, and the responsibility for the failure to profile the perps was with the FBI.

Can you tell me which former FBI profiling talking head said that the perps were black? I don't remember a one. There was debate about whether there was one or two, perhaps that it was a woman (the Aileen Wournos factor), but none of them--and they trained the current FBI profilers (I'm thinking Cliff Van Zandt here)--said the perps were black. They were consistent in saying it was the "angry white male" profile, Wayne Williams and Colin Ferguson (although Ferguson was a spree killer) notwithstanding. They also didn't say the perp/perps was/were Hispanic, although the railroad killer was Hispanic (Rensendiz Ramirez, I do believe).

But what I'm getting from you is that because Moose is black, he was the one who refused to allow that the perp/perps were black. Am I correct in understanding you?

Did Moose have a choice?

We all do. He could have threatened to go public with his distaste for such a profile. The FBI would have caved to this Black police chief in two minutes. Or he could have resigned.

Do you actually think he was running the show and not the FBI, ATF, US Secret Service, Postal Inspectors, and who knows what other fed alphabet agencies?

In the beginning YES!

If he made an objection to the profiling of the FBI, just what would he do with it? Moose was the face out front and nothing more.

You take the credit (which Moosie is) then you must handle the blame. Moosie is getting plenty of credit and no blame. An unbalanced situation. Paul Sperry is assigning blame where blame belongs. So blame the FBI too which this article doesn't get into much.

The fact that Moose was Black may have something to do with his insistence that the only people to be investigated were White males.

The fact that he was an obvious Black racist almost certainly colored his view of how the investigation should be conducted.

If you think Moose does not deserve the blame because he was not really in charge, then you should be leading the charge for those who say Moose should not be getting all the credit.

I have known plenty of smart people who use bad English/grammar, but none of them have a PHD.

Moose was such a rabid racist that no one could reasonably doubt that if he were White with the same attitude towards Blacks then he would have been summarily fired if not put in jail, charged with various hate crimes.

I live within the Beltway, about five miles from two of the shootings, and I think that Chief Moose did OK.

He was dealing with an unknown quantity but the best minds in the FBI and other Law Enforcement authorities (mostly white) said that, statistically, there was probably only one perp, a white male. I do not fault Chief Moose for taking instructions from the FBI and other big shots.

I should like to point out that there were several false leads, including the business about white vans, and, as with several other famous killers, the case was solved primarily because of a lucky break.

Choosing Virginia is the best choice and definitely done over the strenuous objections of Doug Gensler. Notice how Virginia got it the day after the Republicans did so well in the elections.

But Mr. Moose said that he "respects" the sniper as a person.

After the perps were caught, there were several authoritative opinions that, while the shootings were going on, public statements by various political types calling the unknown sniper a coward and similarl insults probably provoked him (them) to do even more killing.

You are deficient, evidently, in knowledge of idol-making. (Perhaps a good thing that you are so unaware of it, too.)

It's also likely Moose was more in charge than you'd admit. Look -- the Feds under Ashcroft just recently dropped the Fed charges so as to allow STATE prosecution first. D'ya think that mayhaps the Ashcroftian FBI also let the locals -- that is, Chief "Black Em-Power" Moose -- run the sniper hunt show? If nay, well then pony up the goods that back up your assertion of Fed honchoing up, for in present and demonstrated condition your assertion is the less likely one.

But to get back to Idol Making 101 ... First rule is that Idols are made, not born. Moose is being made into an idol. I don't know about y'all but, personally, I don't cotton to idols. That the Idol of Moose is being crafted right in front of your face, for the purpose of future venerational acts to be forced upon you and I -- that is more important, long-trend-wise, than who pulled the leashes during the sniper hunt.

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