Case Closed? Charges Dismissed

Today's Gazette brought news that murder charges have been dropped against Detric Lewarren Thompson, 28, in the beating death of Aureliano Evelio Miranda-Fuentes.

I mentioned this in my posting at this entry. Evidently, in some sort of "rush to justice", a police charging document accusing Thompson of murder made allegations of purported racial animosities against "Hispanics" as the motive. Apparently he is alleged to have said he targeted a particular apartment where he was arrested for burglary because Hispanics were "taking all our jobs". The murder in question took place in the same apartment complex some weeks earlier.

Today's Gazette article points out that while the investigation of the murder continues, Thompson is not being charged with that, though he still faces a trial for the alleged burglary.

This case was so incendiary because to some parties it appeared that the police and law-enforcement community were willing to sacrifice a citizen from one "ethnic community" (or at least what remained of their reputation) to placate certain element of another "ethnic community" that tends to accuse the law-enforcement community of looking the other way while they are victimized.

There's enough victimization going around without the police needing to throw anyone to the wolves. And with the dismissal of murder charges, the investigation moves on, ideally to identify and bring to justice the actual perpetrators.

Neighborhood Initiatives, Citizen Activists, Government Assistance

This is Ms Barbara Latta, one of my fellow neighborhood activists from the Aspen Hill neighborhood. She lived for a long time in the Fairways Community, where there has been an ongoing set of problems, problems she has worked to resolve for many long years. I feel privileged to be working with her for the betterment of the community.

In the image above, she's addressing a little get-together back in 2006, when then-governor Bob Ehrlich was rolling out the new and improved SOCEM program which tracks convicted sexual offenders. Ms Latta's presentation was, among other things, thanking the Governor for the many contributions to the so-called "Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative/CSAFE" program.

"CSAFE" originated under the auspices of former Lt Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend as the "Hot Spots" program. They identified areas which had not merely high levels of street crime, but also high levels of such crimes as spouse abuse, school truancies, and a high dropout rate from school. The idea was, if you can apply a wide range of programs from increased funding for law-enforcement -- especially "community based policing" -- along with gang-prevention and drug-prevention efforts in the schools and youth community, with a focus on prevention rather than dealing with existing problems, several years down the road you would see disproportional improvements in community well-being and crime reduction as well.

Under Governor Ehrlich, the focus shifted more to law-enforcement, hiring and training more officers, but particularly the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention dedicated extra funding to "collaborative supervision and focused enforcement" ("CSAFE") to prevent recidivism, funding overtime hours for parole and probation officers, especially tasked with supervision of at-rick offenders. Under Governor O'Malley, and faced with immense budgetary shortfalls, we are bit unsure about how the program may be funded in the future.

We in Aspen Hill and the surrounding communities benefited not only from this program, but from comparable funding from Montgomery County's programs for Children, Youth and Families. All of this was coordinated through the "Collaboration Council", an unfortunately named organization which coordinates grants from State and County to make sure there's no "double-dipping" or failure to fund needed programs. I have to extend my compliments to, among others, Rob Musser and Gabi Liquorie for their exceptional efforts, deep diligence, and year-after-year perseverance in getting us ongoing, if scant, funding.

The fact is, all of the above combined with a concerted effort of what you might call "in-kind contributions of good-will". Someone somewhere gave us the green-light, and MNCPPC worked with us. Parks Police worked with us. Recreation sort of worked with us. The County Schools provided meeting space, and we try to promote their after-school and summertime programs. Graffiti Abatement Partners (GRAB) works with us. Lots more people including too many very decent and concerned citizens work with us and above and beyond it all, we work with them, we work with each other.

We cleaned up -- and will continue to clean up -- North Gate Park. We got them a new basketball court, and volunteers from the Pre-Release Center, various students looking for community-service hours, exceptionally hard working and kind volunteers from Marriott Corporation, and many others as well, have contributed a great many hours to clean up trash and clear out underbrush. People now use the soccer field, and mothers feel safe enough to bring their tiny babies and toddlers to use the new playground equipment. But we CAN do better... and we SHALL do better.

Communities coming together to combat their common problems can indeed engage local government to work with and work for each other, singly and as groups.

We've been doing it for years. And we'll keep doing it.



This is part of what your Community Services programs of the Montgomery County Department of Police are doing, along with a lot of other agencies.

This is a worthy project that leverages minimal cash investment -- all 12 Community Services Division units altogether cost a mere $675,000 for the year, and that includes much much more than just helping provide safety at one local park and the immediate surrounding neighborhood.

Community Services, as an evolving outreach program that quickly adapts to bring the community and the local-government agencies together to speedily solve problems, is something that (if elected) I would not cut.

It has benefited me, it has benefited Aspen Hill, it's probably benefiting your community.

Please support it!

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You might also want to take a look at the AspenHillNet archive of Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative/CSAFE activities and publications.

Illegal Aliens? I Don't Support Them.

My name is Thomas Hardman, and I ran in the last elections for MD District 19 Delegate. I lost. A major part of my platform was "no driver's licenses for illegal aliens". I am running again, this time for Montgomery County Council District 4's seat, vacated by the recent untimely demise of Marilyn Praisner, a lifelong and dedicated civil servant who was the longest-serving council member ever.

There's a lot of competition for her seat, but I believe that I am the only person who will come right out and say "I will not vote a cent for CASA of Maryland".

I have been traveling to Annapolis to testify on this and related issues since 2002. The attacks of September 11 2001 made it absolutely clear that documentation security is an essential prerequisite of national security. Yet Maryland continues to give driver's permits and state ID to persons who are illegally present in the US. Furthermore, the county policies in places like Montgomery blatantly put out the welcome mat for illegal aliens, and embolden the unscrupulous employers who intentionally pass over legitimate potential employees so that they can pad their own pockets with ill-gotten gains while foisting the social costs of onto the taxpayer and society.

I live in Aspen Hill. I have attended a variety of CEO "Ike" Leggett's Town Hall Meetings and have asked him directly about these day-laborer centers, especially after he slapped one into place in Gaithersburg under slipshod and questionable process which skirted the law.

When we questioned him about what he would do about the crowd of a hundred or so day-laborers pestering people in the parking lot of Aspen Hill's Home Depot, he said (I paraphrase) "that's the best argument for CASA's centers, it provides orderliness and regularity". But it took a full year, and repeated complaints from both Home Depot and their customers -- victims of aggressive panhandling etc -- before Mr Leggett evidently comprehended his own words enough to order the County's finest to start acceding to public (and Home Depot's) opinion and enforcing the law against criminal violations by day-laborers such as public urination and public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, and criminal trespass on Home Depot's property.

In the course of this sustained police action -- for which I have agitated many years in the course of my involvement in the civic and community affairs of Aspen Hill -- actual progress has been made. The crowd of a hundred morning meanderers has at last been dispersed.

Part of the progress is that the police themselves have come to understand the nature of the problem.

I have been informed off of the record that when the police started checking the credentials of various persons driving vehicles seeking to pick up day-laborers, a very significant percentage of those drivers did not have valid permits. I was not informed about the percentage of such persons whose names were run against the NCIC wants-and-warrants database and came out positive as fugitives, but I also suspect that it was also high.

At long last, from having to deal with this as a syndrome, rather than dealing with it as individual criminal violations scattered across their districts, the police seem to have actually understood the problem. At Home Depot, at least, over the course of 18 months, they watched an actual invasion, one that took over the parking lots of a 7-11 and then a Home Depot across the street from the 7-11.

This is already a dangerous intersection and traffic is restricted from turning, and often in the morning you would see a line of police officers ticketing people who had made illegal turns to enter the parking lot to pick up "day laborers" who were likely illegal aliens. And so the police officers were there to watch the numbers grow and grow and grow, because the word had gone out that the police would do nothing because their orders from the top down were to do nothing to interfere with the day-laborers, so long as they didn't personally witness gross violations of non-immigration law.

Here are photos from the very early days of "the migration":





Astute observers and quick wits will note that my long involvement with and interest in this area included agitating for that fence and keeping it clear. Illegal aliens, thanks to my efforts and those of PEPCO and some elements of the County, will not be sleeping in those woods. Mostly I think they rent rooms in the houses nearby... in my neighborhood.

One officer mentioned ("off the record") that one illegal said "run us off, we will just rob people". And there is a robbery problem here in Aspen Hill. It was here before the gathering at Home Depot and perhaps it will remain. Worrisomely, last summer there was a string of muggings in the area, which weren't widely publicized. Yet in a mere 25 days there were some 70 robberies, mostly of Latin-American men believed to have just cashed checks. This was the so-called "amigo shopping" string of robberies. I do not in any way support violence against anyone, and think that there are much better ways to deal with the fact that for every foreign "day laborer", there's a poor black local citizen who won't be getting that work. Unemployment is practically pandemic in certain local sub-communities and that both contributes to temptations to crime and violence, and outrages me... and many others, as well.

If Elected, I will always vote for order, against crime, and will have only the bare humanitarian tolerance of illegal aliens, and will vigorously oppose those who profit from them.