Word: sheriffs
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Kolakowski, an investigator for the Wayne County sheriff's department in Detroit, went online with the screen name Melissa83 about a year ago as bait for pedophiles who, in Detroit as elsewhere, tend to prey on naive, rebellious kids from broken homes. But Melissa is only one of the alter egos Kolakowski has invented. Some days he masquerades online as a teenage boy looking for an assault rifle, or a sports junkie betting on the Wolverines, or an old dude with erectile dysfunction shopping for a quick Viagra...
...fellow deputies, also Gen Xers adept at navigating the Internet, often spend months probing chat rooms and websites. And even after the deputies pull off a successful sting and arrest, antiquated state laws can make it difficult to win a conviction. The situation frustrates Wayne County Sheriff Robert Ficano. "It's like being on the side of the freeway where everybody's speeding," he says. "You get some, but so many just blow right...
Even in Wayne County, whose cyberpolice work is regarded as pioneering, the results are mixed. The department's efforts began shortly after Sheriff Ficano looked in on an AOL chat that his 16-year-old daughter was having one night in 1998. "Someone started asking things about her appearance that made her very uncomfortable," he recalls. "It just made me think about how the Internet has given pedophiles an excellent vehicle to get in touch with children." The fbi's struggle to handle its growing Internet caseload, coupled with a mountain of complaints from local parents and kids, prompted Ficano...
...helped set up an independent black political organization that chose a black panther as its symbol. (He later became minister of justice for Huey Newton's Black Panther Party, a totally separate organization.) The charge: murder and aggravated assault in connection with the shooting of two sheriff's deputies in Atlanta who had tried to arrest Al-Amin for failing to appear in court to face relatively minor charges. It seemed like something the rabble rouser H. Rap Brown would do, not the gray-bearded cleric, now 56, whom I had watched leading his flock in prayer...
...generation ago, Al-Amin made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list by preaching the violent overthrow of the all-white power structure in places like Lowndes County. But by last week, when he was arrested by a deputy who is black--as are the sheriff of Lowndes County, the mayor and police chief of Atlanta and the two deputies he allegedly shot--that old system had been swept away, not by force but through patient protest and voting. How ironic that the heirs of the nonviolent revolution he walked away from now hold his fate in their hands...