A seven-hour standoff ended Sunday after police sent a robot into a north Minneapolis residence to subdue the suspect with a chemical irritant, authorities said.

The 29-year-old man was then arrested by SWAT officers and taken to a hospital for a routine examination. He was booked on false imprisonment and reckless discharges of a firearm.

Police had said they believed the man had a weapon, but they wouldn’t say whether one was found after making the arrest.

The incident began about 4:40 a.m. when a woman flagged down a squad car on the street and told police there was a domestic disturbance involving two men, a woman and a child, said Sgt. Stephen McCarty.

One man, the woman and the child were able to escape from the residence in the 3500 block of Newton Avenue N.

The other man saw officers arriving, and he holed up in the home. Officers tried several times to make contact with the man.

McCarty said nearby residents were told to stay in their homes and away from windows.

Chris Havens and DAVID CHANEN

Source: startribune.com
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When the news broke last summer that charter school entrepreneur Eric Mahmoud had entered a guilty plea to a mortgage fraud charge in Georgia, Mahmoud had a ready comeback for the Minneapolis school district, under whose authorization he was opening another charter school.

“I assure you that this was a personal, residential matter in Georgia and had nothing to do with Seed Daycare, Harvest Prep or any other educational institution,” Mahmoud told Sara Paul, the district’s liaison with charter schools, in an Aug. 16 e-mail.

In that case, Mahmoud has some explaining to do.

According to an investigative file compiled by Georgia authorities, there are at least two connections involving the school with the deal.

First, one participant in the real estate deal that led to the charges against Mahmoud told Gwinnett County police investigators that he met twice with Mahmoud in his office, weeks before the fraudulent deal was to close. The purpose was for the purported buyer to supply financial data for the deal. When that buyer noticed that the loan information on a completed application was misleading, the man told investigators, Mahmoud and his associate assured him that the deal was legal.
   
The second school connection is even more explicit.  Days before the planned closing, a letter was sent on Seed Academy and Harvest Preparatory School  letterhead. The letter presents a demand for payment of $350,000 to Mahmoud from the planned real estate closing.  The letter over the signature of Aretta-Rie Johnson said that she had been retained by Mahmoud to make the payment demand.

Johnson said that she has no specific recollection of the letter but that she worked for Mahmoud’s school during that school year on contract. “When you’re an administrative person, you just do what people tell you to do,” she said. She has also served on Mahmoud's Seed, which provides services for the schools.

Mahmoud said he would not comment on the evidence. There is no evidence that his schools stood to profit from the attempted deal.

The Minnesota Department of Education said through chief of staff Charlene Briner:: “It appears the state cannot prohibit a public school from hiring an individual with a criminal background, nor can the state be considered responsible for criminal activity that may take place in a school, particularly when that criminal conduct is not related to educational matters. “

“That said, the use of school letterhead and the fact that a school employee was involved with, or asked to facilitate a transaction appears to warrant further review.  MDE is assessing the need, if any, for additional action based upon this information.”

Source: startribune.com

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Information about every aspect of life in Minneapolis will soon be combined into a virtual city at the fingertips of city employees, giving them a powerful new tool to do everything from predicting crime to preventing traffic jams.

Departments across City Hall now track everything from licenses, city events and landlords to the locations of bars and police cars. A partnership with IBM will soon allow them to join and visualize that data in new ways to learn more about what’s happening across the city, past and present.

It could eventually alert police to “hot spots” before they become obvious, for example, or predict crime using 311 “suspicious activity” calls. Other potential uses, city officials say, include finding youth at risk to violence, tracking food stamp use, identifying elderly susceptible during heat waves and spotting vacant properties earlier.

“The intention of this program is to help coordinate information between and among the various departments to help make our public services more efficient and more useful to the residents of Minneapolis,” Council Member Betsy Hodges said Tuesday.

Privacy experts warn that such a powerful tool could infringe on people’s rights, however, if patterns mistakenly lead the city to target innocent citizens or employees misuse their access — currently a problem statewide with Minnesota’s driver’s license database.

City officials say they’re taking pains to ensure that names and other identifying information won’t be included. “The intention here is not to play Big Brother,” said Hodges, who chairs the council’s Ways and Means Committee, which approved some of the conditions Tuesday.

The ambitious project is made possible by a three-year, $2.8 million agreement with IBM that city officials are preparing to sign next month.

“We’re interested to see exactly how [employees] use this,” said Otto Doll, the city’s chief information officer. “And we’ve got a feeling they’re going to find value in ways that we don’t even imagine today.”

Crime-fighting tool

Cities across the globe have coupled with IBM to solve problems under the company’s “Smarter Cities” banner, but Minneapolis’ project will be unique. The core goals will be to spot anomalies, determine causes and effects, find hot spots and discover patterns among many data sets.

What makes most of it possible is a tool called the Intelligent Operations Platform, an interface that allows data to be shared, mapped and mined across city departments.

Lt. Jeff Rugel, who is testing the tool for the police department, said it will give precinct lieutenants an easy method to visualize — geographically and temporally — crime that has occurred on the previous shift, beyond just reviewing police reports. That task now often requires the help of crime analysts. They can go back weeks or months, isolate certain times of day, map things relative to bars in an area, or observe the nearby permits. That means officers can “very quickly follow up on a hunch,” Rugel said.

In the future, it could be configured to catch certain crime patterns, such as two burglaries happening near each other within a certain time frame. “You don’t want to spot the pattern when it’s obvious,” Rugel said. “What makes it obvious is more victims.”

Doll imagines it could also be used to provide staff with daily updates documenting the status of the city’s 13 wards, pulling information on violent crime, businesses statistics, infrastructure activities and residents’ complaints.

He envisioned it could show whether the presence of a police car on a city street reduces criminal activity, using GPS data on squad cars and police reports. Or, using a combination of variables, they could determine which at-risk youths are in need of intervention or mentoring, Doll said in a September speech.

Privacy concerns

But the consolidation of all that data also worries local privacy advocates, who say the system needs public accountability to protect against profiling and invasions of privacy.

Among the “potential uses” departments identified in the December presentation were “chronic offenders geographic restrictions,” “identify households prone to domestic violence,” “monitor problem landlords” and “track homelessness movement.”

Doll said they made a decision not to allow personally identifiable information into the system, a line he acknowledges is “murky.” Named data and Social Security numbers are off limits, he says, but addresses are generally not. They may strip identifiable features out of data sets using a key only some people could decipher. His office will review all requests to add data.

“Information is power,” said Rich Neumeister, an open government expert. “And the public needs to know when their public resources are being used to make the government even more powerful ... with the use of analytics, intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis.”

Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the Minnesota branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said being able to drill down information allows governments to see and act on things that were not otherwise apparent. “But when they’re wrong, they’re spectacularly wrong,” Samuelson said. “People go to jail when they shouldn’t be in jail. Or people get investigated when they shouldn’t be investigated.”

Doll said the system will initially rely on existing city data sets, but may eventually include county, state or federal data.

Just how that will play out in the police department remains to be seen. Rugel said, “Someday I want 6,000 more data fields in there. Because you can never have too much to search.”

Later, he added, “I think someday that would be a benefit if you could say, ‘Well, we’ve had some burglaries. Who in this area has a history of burglary arrests?’ ”

Source: startribune.com
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We usually use press release distribution services when youlaunch a new product or a website, make major updates or have any othernewsworthy event.  So, writing Press release is a common and veryeffective method of marketing your website on the Internet. As you alreadyknow, this also provides one-way inbound links and helps to generatesubstantial traffic to your site. Press releases are targeted for a specialaudience or client and mainly distribute news to news-people. Therefore, let meshare with you some useful tip for writing effective Press Release.

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Besides, below are some importantpoints you must pay attention:

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Write your press release like a news story. Learn to writein inverted pyramid style. Answer  “W”questions (Like who, what, why, when, where, and how ) in the first paragraphor two. Read the first two paragraphs of the press release you’re working on.If that’s all you had, would you know what the story is about? Practice writingone-paragraph press releases as a first draft. Then add any necessarysupporting information. Your headline and first paragraph are the mostimportant components.

 Add a date andcontacts. Make sure you date the release at the start so that everybody can seehow old or new the story is. It is also conventional to include yourlocation/town and county by the date. Also include your contact information (incase an interview or more detail is requested), either at the top of therelease or near the end with the boilerplate. This should consist of your fullname, telephone (landline and mobile), email and maybe a postal address too.

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