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| Changing sides
From president of the patrolman’s union to police commissioner may be a different side of the fence, but it is still the same fence, maintains Charles Cola, the Yonkers, N.Y., detective who was chosen last month to succeed retiring Commissioner Joseph P. Cassino.
Cola, 45, spent seven years as head of the 400-member Yonkers Police Officers’ Association. During that time, he had ample opportunity to study the job of police commissioner, having worked closely with four who held that post. “To know my job as union president, I pretty much had to stay on top of what the commissioner’s job was,” he told Law Enforcement News. “It was like a game of chess. To make my move, I had to anticipate his move.”..
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| The next challenge
If history is any indication, it would appear that Charles Gruber is the type of police chief whose innovations are appreciated — and missed — by cities only after they have lost him to the next challenge.
The 52-year-old Gruber took early retirement from the Elgin, Ill., Police Department after eight years in January 1999 and was appointed chief of the Chicago suburb of South Barrington in April. He had served as the village’s interim chief since last November following the death of Chief Timothy Lonergan in October...
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Still searching for clues
Henry Lee leaves CSP to return to high-profile forensic science
After just two years as public safety commissioner, the Connecticut State Police will be losing Dr. Henry C. Lee, the renowned forensic scientist whose investigation of blood spatters on a sock helped free O.J. Simpson and who garnered world recognition in 1986 when he determined with less than an ounce of human remains that a man had disposed of his wife’s body with a wood chipper.
Lee, 61, said that although he would still do consulting work for the agency, he was leaving to concentrate on investigating high-profile crimes. A native of Taiwan, where he was a police captain, Lee attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice on a scholarship after emigrating to the United States, and in 1975 earned a doctorate in biochemistry from New York University. He worked his way through college teaching kung fu...
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Breath of life
In the spirit of it being better to give than to receive, St. Paul, Minn., Police Chief William Finney considers himself the lucky one in an incident last month in which he was able to ease the suffering of a sick child.
As Finney was driving to work one morning on Interstate 94, he noticed a woman on the side of the road talking into a cell phone while holding a little girl steady as the child vomited. She was having a violent asthma attack and her mother was so busy trying to take care of her that she could not give the 911 dispatcher her precise location...
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