Joseph Goldstein

Shortly after the officers arrived, the robber is said to have raised his gun — which turned out to be a fake — and made motions as if he were shooting. Seven officers opened fire. A detective was killed and a sergeant wounded in the crossfire.

The tragic event was in every respect unpredictable, except for one: the location. Over the last decade, cellphone stores have joined banks, bodegas, liquor stores and jewelry shops as common robbery targets.

The high price that top-of-the-line cellphones fetch on the black market, both abroad and in the United States, make the stores attractive to thieves.

“You do the math,” said Dermot Shea, the chief of detectives of the New York Police Department. “You hit a store and steal 75 of those.” Even if robbery crews were able to unload them for only 25 percent of their store price, he said, “It’s a good hit.”

Banks use dye packs to deter robbers. Jewelers and shop owners have on occasion been known to shoot first. But cellphone stores tend to have little security and lots of valuable inventory.

“These businesses are easy targets,” John B. Devito, the special agent in charge of the New York field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said in a statement.

The agency operates a robbery task force with New York City detectives that has seen its case load shift in recent years toward cellphone store robberies.

Last year, there were 71 robberies of cellphone stores in New York City, Shea said. It was not immediately clear how that compared to past years.

The robbers often, though not always, belong to organized crews that in some cases have been known to hit a different location every week or so. Last year investigators determined there were 19 separate patterns, each one typically involving a different crew.

“When we see one, you can almost set the clock because we’re going to start getting others till we catch them,” Shea said.

Christopher Ransom, the 27-year-old man shot inside the T-mobile store on Tuesday, was also being sought for a series of phone store robberies going back to October, police said. The most recent happened on Jan. 19 when, police said, Ransom brandished what appeared to be a gun and stole several cellphones and about $850 from a RSK3 Wireless shop in South Jamaica, Queens.

Ransom had an accomplice in the T-mobile store robbery who arrived with him in a cab and waited outside the store while he went inside. That person was being sought for questioning on Friday, police said.

Ransom is not alone in being suspected of hitting several stores. Late last year prosecutors accused one man, Khalif Watson, of a particularly prolific robbery spree. He was accused of robbing phone stores in Brooklyn and Queens on five days in late March and early April.

In most of those robberies, investigators said, Watson brought along a laundry bag to use to cart off his haul. Watson has since pleaded guilty to racketeering charges that include not only robbery charges, but accusations of murder.

In some cases, investigators believe the phones are sold to fences who ship them overseas for resale. “We know they get shipped — it could be to China, it could be to the Middle East — we see them go to many countries,” Shea said.

But the majority of the phones stay in New York City, according to a Police Department analysis.

Shea characterized the robbers in a typical crew as “stickup guys who know each other, either they served time together or know each other from the neighborhood.”

Court records offer a glimpse of some of the men arrested in recent years for the crime.

One, Ronald Mack, was an EMT for the city Fire Department who had once stolen credit card information from a patient in his ambulance before he was charged with stealing cellphones.

Another, Ayoub Mankouche, who told police he used to smoke nine marijuana cigarettes a day, used a black pellet gun to rob a Brooklyn T-Mobile store in September 2016, according to court records. Mankouche forced employees and customers into a backroom, but a customer managed to disarm him during a struggle.

“The defendant gambled that the store was a soft target,” prosecutors wrote in a brief in Mankouche’s case. “He was wrong.”

There are signs that cellphone companies or retailers are beginning to do more to stop robberies. For example, a box containing a cellphone taken from a Verizon store in Queens during a robbery last April also held a tracking device.

Detective William J. Puskas, who is on the federal robbery task force, said in an affidavit that officers were able to track the stolen phone to a car, which eventually led to an arrest.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/nyregion/cellphone-store-robberies.html" id="6c5e4f29-33e4-36a7-ad23-2d1ae22e8d75">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The detectives and police officers who rushed to a T-Mobile store in Queens on Tuesday night were responding to one of the most fraught scenarios in policing: A robbery inside had turned into a hostage situation.

Banks, Jewelers and Now Cellphone Stores Are 'Easy Target' for Robberies

But even as New York City detectives strove to make the lineup more fair by concealing one identifying feature, they left another clue in plain sight: It was lying on the floor, next to the ankle of the man in the No. 5 position.

A shackle. A dead giveaway that No. 5 is the police suspect.

It was not the only potential problem with the lineup, conducted on June 15, 2017, at the 101st Precinct in Queens. The suspect was the only one with twisted, or braided, hair and whose hat had an adjustable strap.

Some lineups do what they are supposed to — engage a witness’ memory and test whether the police have the right person. But others contain clues that could steer the witness toward the suspect whom the police already have in their sights. A judge threw out a witness identification based on the Queens lineup; the robbery charges are still pending.

To be sure, the quality of New York lineups appears to have improved over the years. For a point of reference, consider a 1998 lineup, from a Manhattan manslaughter case. No. 5 seemed to be offering a hint as to the suspect: It was the man in the No. 6 slot, the one to whom No. 5, a police officer, appeared to be pointing.

During the past two decades, the policing profession has become more attuned to the risks of mistaken identifications. Witnesses are wrong with considerable frequency when they claim to recognize a culprit. And detectives have come to understand that suggestive police procedures, such as unfair lineups, raise the risk that an innocent person is prosecuted.

Like many other departments across the country, the New York Police Department has taken steps to improve fairness.

“It is absolutely not in our best interest to do something that is going to be suppressed,” said Dermot Shea, the city’s chief of detectives.

To minimize differences between the suspect and fillers, detectives will cover up tattoos and use hats to obscure differences in hair styles, Shea said. “Fairness is driving everything that we do to make sure that we get the best prosecutable case, and that includes having a fair lineup,” he said.

But suggestive lineups are not yet a thing of the past, as the shackle on the floor in the Queens lineup would seem to indicate.

Detectives, for instance, sometimes still place teenage suspects in lineups alongside grown men, The New York Times found. A year ago, a 17-year-old robbery suspect in Brooklyn was the only teenager in the lineup. Three of the five fillers next to him were in their 30s.

Lineups, say experts who study witness memory, can be thought of as an experiment administered by the police. Detectives have a suspect. Now they want to use the memory of a witness to test whether their suspect committed the crime.

“In the witness’ mind is a recollection, an image,” said William Brooks, the police chief of Norwood, Massachusetts, a town of 30,000, and a longtime advocate for improving lineups. “You can’t see it or touch it, so how do you use it? You give it a stimulus, and you see the reaction, and see if there is a match.”

A confident and quick identification — “That’s him!” or “I’ll never forget that face” — upon first viewing the suspect can be a strong indicator of an accurate identification. But only if the lineup has been administered in a neutral manner, without the police steering the witness toward the suspect.

There are many ways for the police to steer a witness toward a particular suspect. Consider, for instance, the photo lineup — an array of six mug shots — which detectives showed a robbery victim in Queens in 2009. The victim had already told the police her assailant was a goateed man wearing a hooded sweatshirt.

Of the six mug shots, only one — the police’s suspect, on the bottom left — had a goatee and wore a hooded sweatshirt.

In this case, the suspect stood out because he alone fit the description. (The suspect was convicted, but an appellate court ultimately overturned it.) But in other cases, the suspect is more likely to get picked not because there is anything exceptionally obvious about him, but because some of the fillers seem implausible.

By using fillers who bear little resemblance to how witnesses described the perpetrator, detectives increase the odds their suspect is selected, research shows. But not because the suspect is more likely to be guilty. Rather, because he may appear to be the best choice.

That is why, experts say, it is problematic for detectives to place teenage suspects alongside grown men in lineups, as happened in February 2018. The 17-year-old Brooklyn robbery suspect was the only teenager in the lineup. Two of the fillers were in their 20s. Three were in their 30s. Some fillers weighed 200 pounds or more; the suspect weighed 145 pounds.

The Times found three cases from the past decade in which a teenage suspect had a filler in his lineup who was at least twice his age. Because lineup paperwork is not ordinarily made public, there is little data for how frequently such age mismatches occur.

Nancy Ginsburg, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who supervises cases involving adolescent defendants, said it is not unusual for fillers to be noticeably older than the suspect.

In 2012, a 14-year-old suspect who weighed 110 pounds was put alongside fillers who ranged in age from 21 to 31 and were at least 50 pounds heavier. In a 2013 lineup, a 16-year-old suspect appeared alongside three fillers who were twice his age or older.

Shea, the chief of detectives, declined to comment on specific cases.

One 2010 lineup photo that was part of an appeal demonstrated how a mismatch in age can reduce a lineup’s fairness. Robbery victims in Brooklyn described one perpetrator as between 16 and 20 years old. The police arrested an 18-year-old. The fillers alongside him included a couple of men who looked older.

The suspect was No. 4. The filler in the No. 5 position was a 35-year-old police officer. No. 1, another filler, was 29.

A victim who remembers being robbed by a teenager is likely to exclude the older individuals as implausible choices, focusing on the few remaining faces.

“They’re looking for the best match, as opposed to the person who matches their memory,” Karen Newirth, a lawyer with the Innocence Project, said.

In this robbery case, the judge excused the age disparities. “We know it’s difficult for the police to get teenagers into a lineup,” said the judge, Joel Goldberg, who has since retired, according to a transcript. That decision was later overturned by an appellate court.

“The age disparity was sufficiently apparent as to orient the viewer toward the defendant,” the appellate panel wrote.

It is true that detectives struggle to find teenagers willing to act as fillers. In the late 1990s, some parents reported that the police had forced their teenage children into serving as lineup fillers, prompting an apology from the police commissioner.

The challenge of finding suitable fillers is one reason that most police departments around the country have abandoned live lineups. When arranging a photo lineup, detectives can easily find suitable fillers by searching through a mug shot database.

New York law until 2017 prevented photo lineups from being admitted as evidence in a trial, all but requiring detectives to conduct live lineups. The law has since changed.

The New York Police Department conducted 1,353 lineups last year, about half as many as it did even two years ago. Shea attributed the drop to the increasing availability of video evidence, which has lowered the reliance on witness identifications.

In much of the city, detectives find fillers in homeless shelters or by enlisting other police officers to act as fillers, although detectives in the Bronx have their own system.

Based on a review of court files and interviews with numerous detectives, it is clear that some detectives put considerable thought into selecting fillers. Others can be less discerning.

In September 2014, it fell to a Bronx detective, Franco Johnson, to administer a lineup in an attempted murder case. He was hoping for five fillers who were male, black and between 30 and 35 years of age, just like the suspect, he testified.

But in the end he settled for fillers who were significantly younger: ages 18, 19, 21, 22 and 24. It was not clear all were black. Still they all went in the lineup.

He was asked in court whether one of the fillers — No. 6 — had a similar complexion to the suspect, who was in the No. 3 position.

“It’s close enough,” Johnson said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/nyregion/police-lineups-fair-unfair.html" id="d74cd477-08a3-3e30-a4c4-d61dc211deea">The New York Times</a>.

The robbery suspect had a birthmark on his face. So when detectives placed him in a lineup, they made sure to cover it up with a bandage. Then they put matching bandages on the faces of the five decoys — or “fillers” — who sat alongside him, so as not to single out the suspect.

Are Police Lineups Always Fair?

Investigators did not believe him. The motive behind the shooting was a mystery, but the victim had combed through pictures of people with past arrests and identified Steward, a father of eight, as the assailant.

To the detectives involved, the shooting in January 2018 was just the latest in a long line of crimes solved by asking a victim to search through mug shots, an investigative technique used in New York for more than 150 years. Detectives enter a description of the perpetrator into a database, which then spits out dozens or even hundreds of matching photos. The witness scrolls through, in hopes of recognizing the culprit.

But these open-ended photo searches also increase the likelihood of ensnaring an innocent person, according to studies and experts in eyewitness identification. The method has few safeguards to protect against a false identification and can lead police to focus on the wrong person from the outset of an investigation.

Many of the nation’s other large police departments — including Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, Dallas and Miami-Dade — said they do not rely on the technique, a New York Times survey shows.

Detective bureaus in many other jurisdictions do not show booking photos to witnesses until they have a suspect in mind. Investigators then conduct a photo lineup, placing the suspect’s among photos of at least five “fillers” — people who fit the description but are known to be innocent.

That approach offers some shield against a false identification: If the witness chooses a filler, police understand the witness is wrong and know not to arrest that person.

In a mug shot search, everyone is a potential suspect, and the actual culprit might not be among the group. But whoever the witness selects becomes the focus of the investigation.

“I think it taints the investigation,” said Deputy Chief Thomas Castro, who oversees detectives for the Dallas Police Department.

Dermot F. Shea, New York City’s chief of detectives, defended his department’s use of the searches, saying they were just one of many investigative tools. The police can also, he said, get leads from surveillance cameras, DNA evidence and tracking technology, such as in cellphones.

“Mug shots are still a piece of the puzzle,” Shea said. “But to me, they are a much smaller piece.”

Still, interviews with current and former detectives, as well as court testimony, show that investigators in precincts throughout the city routinely ask witnesses to search through the photos.

One New York detective testified in February 2018 that he had directed witnesses to look through the database more than 50 times. “We usually put the description of what the victim tells us, or a location, in the system, and random pictures will come up,'” said Paolo Ruiz, who at the time had been a detective at the 40th Precinct for three years.

In Steward’s case, in the borough of Queens, detectives entered broad search parameters into the database: black men, aged 35 to 45 and between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet 1 inch tall, with past arrests in three nearby precincts. The victim chose Steward, whose photo was the 31st to appear, said a law enforcement official who asked to remain anonymous because the official was not authorized to discuss the case.

“They told me, ‘The person looked at your mug shot and said it was you,'” Steward, 43, said in a recent interview.

Police then put Steward in a lineup alongside several other men. Again, the victim chose Steward. He was charged with attempted murder and jailed.

He stayed in jail for more than two months until a DNA sample from the crime scene was finally tested. The sample, believed to have come from the culprit, did not match Steward, throwing the case into doubt. Prosecutors quietly dismissed the charges in September.

‘I Have Nothing’

The reliability of eyewitness identifications began to face serious scrutiny within the criminal justice system in the 1990s, as DNA testing began to exonerate people who had been convicted of rape and other crimes on the basis of mistaken eyewitnesses.

To some extent, false identifications are unavoidable. Memory is spotty and malleable and erodes quickly. Cross-racial identifications are especially prone to error. One study of robbery investigations in Houston found that eyewitnesses who claimed to recognize their assailant in a police lineup had actually selected a person known to be innocent about 47 percent of the time. An aggregate of similar studies found an error rate of closer to 37 percent.

But the frailty of memory is not the only problem.

Poorly designed or suggestive police procedures can heighten the risk of a mistaken identification, and critics say open-ended mug shot searches are especially vulnerable.

Victims can become worn down when viewing a large number of photos and choose someone who reminds them of the culprit, said Castro of the Dallas Police Department.

As the number of photos shown increases, “the more likely you are to encounter someone who looks like the person who committed the crime, but didn’t,” said John Wixted, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, who researches eyewitness memory.

Across the country, some police commanders have concluded that leaving a crime unsolved is sometimes a better alternative to relying on a procedure that elevates the risk of jailing an innocent person.

“You just have to be willing to say — it’s not pleasant — ‘I have nothing,'” said Maj. Mike Smathers of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, North Carolina’s largest municipal police force. “And I’m not going to let someone look through all these pictures when I have nothing.”

There is little data available on how many police departments across the country conduct open-ended mug shot searches and how frequently they are used.

A 2011-12 survey of police and sheriff’s departments showed that 56 percent of responding departments with more than 500 officers did not let witnesses pore over photos, while the other 44 percent did. But it was unclear whether the departments that use the technique turn to it often.

Philadelphia’s municipal police force, the nation’s fourth-largest, told The Times it permitted the searches.

In Los Angeles, which has the third-largest police department, detectives do not generally ask witnesses to hunt through photos on the basis of a physical description, a Police Department spokeswoman said. However, in cases where there is a suspected gang connection, detectives will sometimes direct victims to look through mug shots of people believed to belong to a gang. Those searches have also faced criticism because the alleged gang connections can be tenuous.

An Early Investigative Method

Mug shots have been an investigative tool in New York City since 1857, when a Sgt. Lefferts started collecting daguerreotype portraits of pickpockets, burglars and other criminals. Soon, he had the beginnings of a rogues’ gallery. By the next year, his collection of a few hundred images had turned into a local attraction.

The gallery eventually gave way to books of booking photos, which were largely replaced by an ever-expanding computerized database. Along the way, mug shot searches became one of the Detective Bureau’s main methods for trying to identify suspects.

They are often used in robberies and other difficult-to-solve crimes involving brief and frightening encounters when the victim and culprit are strangers and other evidence is scarce.

Nationally, police departments in cities larger than a million people reported solving less than a third of robberies in 2017, the last year for which numbers were available. The New York Police Department says it solves robberies close to half the time.

Because robbers frequently are repeat offenders with previous arrests, many New York detectives believe mug shots are a sensible place to turn. “Detectives encourage victims to view photos to breathe some life into the investigation,” said Michael J. Palladino, the president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, which represents the city’s detectives.

In New York, the procedure is endorsed by the official Detective Guide, which lays out the Police Department’s basic investigative procedures.

Several current and former New York detectives said that while they use mug shot searches, they are hardly a slam-dunk tool. Some estimated that searches led to an identification about 20 percent of the time, while others thought much lower. Other investigative techniques can help weed out misfires, they said.

Shea said he did not know how often a search ended in an identification, although he believed it was less than half the time. He conceded there have been instances of a witness choosing the wrong person, but he said those occurrences were rare.

“It’s in no one’s best interest to get a false identification,” Shea said. “I can think of nothing we want to do less than put the wrong person in a situation where they’re in jail and facing charges.”

Derrick Penn, 37, said being jailed in 2014 on charges of committing three armed robberies was “like being in hell.” He missed his daughter’s kindergarten graduation, was slashed on the face while on Rikers Island and was told he might go to prison for up to 50 years.

Penn, who works at a New York hospital manning an entrance gate, had been identified as the culprit during a mug shot search in which more than 300 photographs were shown to one of the victims. Later, three victims, including the one who chose him from among the photos, identified him in a live lineup, Penn’s lawyers said.

He insisted he was innocent, and location data indicated that his cellphone was miles away from the robbery locations, according to his lawyers, Scott Hechinger and Dara Hebert of Brooklyn Defender Services.

Prosecutors dropped the case against Penn and sealed it. “The judge never gave me an apology — they just said, ‘Stay out of trouble,'” Penn recalled. He had been arrested numerous times, mainly for marijuana and driving-related offenses, but his lawyers said he had no felony record. “How’d they get it so wrong?” Penn said.

Eyewitness identification experts said mug shot searches may be a reasonable approach in some situations.

“If someone was abducted and spent two days with the kidnapper, who was unmasked, show them pictures,” said Gary Wells, a psychologist at Iowa State University and a pioneer in the field of eyewitness identification. But for general use, he said, “I think it is a huge problem.”

The Plumber From Brooklyn

Far from being phased out, mug shot searches are being taught to a new generation of New York detectives. When Wendelyn Dua, a Bronx police officer, joined the 52nd Precinct’s detective squad in 2017, she quickly learned that the searches were an important method for conducting eyewitness identifications.

“We’ll put the complainant in front of a system called PhotoManager,” she testified in March 2018 when asked about some of the ways the police conducted identifications.

She was testifying in a case about an argument over a parking spot that had taken a terrifying turn.

A Bronx man, Fazal Ahmad, and his two sons had emerged from their Bronx mosque one night and found their car had been boxed in by another vehicle. A note on the windshield directed them to call “Benny” to move the car.

That phone call turned heated. Several people arrived in the parking lot and began screaming at Ahmad’s family. One of them pressed a gun into his neck before fleeing.

The note on the car seemed a promising avenue of investigation. But within 80 minutes of the crime, detectives began showing Ahmad mug shots.

Ahmad picked the 850th photo shown to him: a plumber from Brooklyn, who was then arrested.

The plumber told his lawyer he was not too worried. “My guy was convinced that he would come to court and they would realize it’s not him,” his lawyer, Sungso Lee of the Legal Aid Society, said. “I tell him, ‘That’s never what happens. Once they’ve picked you, they’ll keep picking you.'”

When Ahmad saw the plumber in court, he confirmed he was the man who threatened him, Lee said. The case file is sealed, but Lee provided The Times with a description of the court proceedings and partial transcripts. In a brief interview recently, Ahmad said he was “100 percent” certain he had chosen the right person.

In the middle of the plumber’s trial, the Bronx prosecutors dropped the case. Cellphone location data, while not definitive, supported the plumber’s claims of innocence, Lee said. A spokeswoman for the Bronx district attorney’s office said it “found evidence that suggested the defendant was innocent.”

The authorities have not said whether investigators further pursued the question of who held Ahmad at gunpoint. But Lee passed along a tip to the district attorney’s office.

While working to clear the plumber, she found that a man with the last name of Benny lived within two blocks of the mosque. His family, she said, included a younger man who broadly fit the description of the culprit.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/nyregion/nypd-mug-shots-false-identification.html" id="90f70f68-7008-3f52-afe4-a2527268d5c8">The New York Times</a>.

Jailing the Wrong Man: Mug Shot Searches Persist in New York, Despite Serious Risks

Inside a police station house in New York City about a year ago, St. Clair Steward insisted he had not been involved in a recent shooting. Steward told the police he had been resting at home.

A 2011-12 survey of police and sheriff’s departments showed that 56 percent of responding departments with more than 500 officers did not let witnesses pore over photos, while the other 44 percent did. But it was unclear whether the departments that used the technique turned to it often.

Nationally, police departments in cities larger than a million people reported solving fewer than a third of robberies in 2017, the last year for which numbers were available. The New York Police Department says it solves robberies close to half the time.

Several current and former New York detectives said that while they use mug shot searches, they are hardly a slam-dunk tool. Some estimated that searches led to an identification about 20 percent of the time, while others thought much less often. Other investigative techniques can help weed out misfires, they said.

Mug Shot Search: A Police Tool Long Tried but Frequently Untrue

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Joseph Goldstein

Articles written by the author

Banks, Jewelers and Now Cellphone Stores Are 'Easy Target' for Robberies

Are Police Lineups Always Fair?

Jailing the Wrong Man: Mug Shot Searches Persist in New York, Despite Serious Risks

Mug Shot Search: A Police Tool Long Tried but Frequently Untrue