Law Enforcement Officers

Despite recent criminal allegations against law enforcement officers, most San Diegans still have confidence in police officers and sheriff's deputies--but a sizable number also have serious concerns about police behavior, a Los Angeles Times Poll shows.

NEW YORK - Michael Maloney was just eight days from retiring as police chief of the tiny town of Greenland, N.H. - just eight days from leaving 26 years in law enforcement for the freedom to golf, fish, enjoy his family and maybe find another job. But there was one thing he needed to do. It was a thankless task: helping to serve a warrant on a man with a rap sheet that included assault and drug charges. And it was the kind of job Maloney insisted on doing himself rather than leaving to others, say those who knew the chief, who was killed by a bullet to the head as he carried out his final mission Thursday.

Two U.S. Border Patrol agents were watching the Mexican boundary last year when they stopped a van carrying 743 pounds of marijuana. The driver fled back across the Rio Grande -- with a gunshot wound in his buttocks. Federal prosecutors convinced a jury in March that the agents had shot a defenseless man and schemed to cover it up. Much of the evidence against them came from the drug runner, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, who reported the shooting to a friend at the Border Patrol in Arizona.

Jay, a homeless man sleeping near a Hollywood freeway onramp, awoke to the voices of police Friday morning. Los Angeles Police Department officers Julie Nony and Paula Davidson had rooted out an encampment of nine transients — including Jay — who were sleeping along the Highland Avenue onramp to Highway 101. Nony and Davidson were part of a team of roughly two dozen officers and sheriff's deputies who fanned out across Hollywood, trudging...

From doughnut shops to grocery stores, the talk of Inyo County this week is the former sheriff turned bad guy and the judge who gave him probation for seven felony convictions, including embezzlement of county funds. "People aren't over O.J. [Simpson]," said one man in this small Eastern Sierra community, "and now their own official has gotten off with a slap on the wrist."

For as long as there have been credit cards, there has been credit card fraud. But improved technology has made fraud easier to get away with in recent years, authorities said Tuesday. Los Angeles Police Officer Phillip Clemons Davis, who was arrested last week in Burbank and charged with being part of a credit card fraud ring, operated a scheme known as "mag stripe fraud," Burbank Police Detective John Dilibert said.

Amid an aggressive push to bolster its ranks with thousands of new deputies, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department loosened its hiring practices and gave jobs to recruits who in the past would have been rejected, according to a department watchdog report released Thursday. Among those hired were applicants with criminal records, drug and alcohol problems and financial woes. One recruit, for example, had been released from another police agency after using excessive force.

Border agent Jose Luis Maldonado raises his binoculars and scans the desert horizon, looking for would-be migrants making the perilous crossing into the United States. When he finds them, he doesn't arrest them. Rather, he makes sure that they know what dangers they face and lets them go their way. If they're in trouble, he helps.

Bill Moss is the kind of cop who doesn't walk away from a job well done. Which is why, two years after he and a group of Kodiak Street residents drove a gang away, Moss is on a personal crusade to keep the street safe--even though he's been moved to a police job elsewhere in Anaheim. After work one evening a week, he returns to Kodiak, joining about 20 men, women and children to walk through the area, flashlights on and eyes peeled for signs of trouble.

Law enforcement authorities thought a two-year undercover drug operation in the Antelope Valley would almost certainly lead them to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Jonathan Aujay. They were wrong. As the drug investigation winds down, with several suspected drug dealers awaiting trial or sentencing in federal court, no one is closer to knowing what happened to Aujay. He is the one deputy in the 8,000-officer department who is the subject of a missing-persons case.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca admitted Friday that he broke state law by making a political endorsement while in uniform for an online campaign ad touting Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich for district attorney. Baca's acknowledgment came after inquiries from The Times about a video on Trutanich's campaign website that shows Baca wearing his badge and his department-issued sheriff's uniform. Although state law does allow sheriffs and other law enforcement officers to make political endorsements, they are not allowed to do so while in uniform.

Years from now, Southern California's new marine sanctuaries might be as popular with fishermen as they are with environmentalists. Once populations of fish have a chance to recover from years of depletion, these protected areas off the coast are expected to become incubators of sea life that will then expand into unprotected zones as well, meaning not only an enhanced environment but better fishing. All that will take time, though — a study of a similar preserve off the coast of Baja California found that sea life there quintupled over the course of a decade — and for now these Marine Protected Areas, where restrictions took effect this month, are seen by fishing groups as intrusive and downright confusing.

Reporting from San Diego Jeremy Henwood, who survived three combat tours as a Marine but was mortally wounded during a routine patrol as a San Diego police officer, was remembered Friday as a "true warrior who stood in harm's way. " Police Capt. Lawrence McKinney, commander of the mid-city division where Henwood served, told 3,500 people assembled at the Rock Church that Henwood "went boldly into harm's way, knowing full well that he might not come back someday. " McKinney urged the crowd to remember Henwood's courage and dedication to public service as a Marine and a police officer, rather than "the cowardly act of one lost soul," a reference to Dejon Marquee White, 23, Henwood's assailant.

Robbers broke through the roof of a South El Monte company, slipped down a rope, blindfolded and tied up employees and stole perhaps more than $1 million that had been destined for ATMs throughout the Los Angeles region, investigators said Friday. "This is one of the biggest robberies we've seen this year, even compared to the jewelry heists," said Lt. Kent Wegener of the County Sheriff's Major Crimes Bureau. "It appears it has all the hallmarks of a well-planned robbery at this point," he said.

Californians who talk or text on hand-held phones while driving would face steeper penalties — more than $500 in some cases — under a measure approved Monday by state senators. The lawmakers voted to raise the base fine from $20 to $50 for a first offense and from $50 to $100 for subsequent violations. Including fees and surcharges imposed by local governments and courts, the total cost of a first offense could be $309, depending on the city where the ticket was issued.

This week's news that Los Angeles is likely to finish the year with the fewest homicides in nearly half a century should be both a source of satisfaction and a challenge to city and county policymakers. Barring some dreadful event between now and New Year's, as The Times' Joel Rubin and Robert Faturechi reported Monday, the city will record fewer than 300 homicides in 2010, the first time that number has fallen below that mark since 1967, when the city's population was less than three-quarters of what it is today.

It's a law enforcement truism. Any time you get two cops together over a cigarette you're going to hear complaints about the honchos who run things downtown. But the exchange on a recent afternoon carried more than the standard bitterness when a plug of a Fresno cop asked senior U.S. Border Patrol Agent John Crockford how many illegal immigrant lawbreakers he takes off the streets every month. Crockford, a white-haired man of 48, guessed it was between 70 and 80. "What do we do when you're gone?"

An off-duty Pasadena police officer shot himself to death Wednesday as he sat in his vehicle in the parking lot of Las Encinas Hospital, authorities said. Alfredo Lozano, 32, an eight-year veteran who was assigned to the department's anti-gang unit, was pronounced dead outside the Pasadena psychiatric and chemical dependence facility, Police Chief Bernard K. Melekian said at a news conference. Lozano was discovered about 1:34 p.m.

In a significant blow against the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexican troops on Thursday killed one of the group's top figures during an arrest raid in western Mexico. The raid came as troops in Tijuana rounded up dozens of police officers in a separate operation targeting organized crime. Ignacio Coronel Villarreal is described as one of the three most important bosses in the cartel, which is based in Sinaloa state and run by the country's most-wanted drug suspect, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman.

Federal authorities announced a wide-ranging criminal case Friday against top leaders of a Tijuana-based drug cartel that ran much of its operations from the San Diego area, allegedly ordering murders, kidnappings and torture of rival traffickers in Mexico. The racketeering conspiracy case charges 43 cartel lieutenants, enforcers and drug traffickers, among them half a dozen current or former Mexican law enforcement officers, including a top official in the Baja California attorney general's office who allegedly passed along information obtained from U.S. law enforcement to cartel leaders.