Shooting in Annapolis, MD

[cstone]

Small, local paper. My parents sent me copies of the Maryland Gazette while I was in the Army so I could keep up with local home town events and high school sports stories. The area where the shootings took place was just west of Annapolis in a neighborhood known as Parole, MD. It will be interesting to hear the motivation for the crimes. The rest of the politics associated with responses is all too predictable.

Best response from a witness, “I don’t know why. I don’t know why he stopped.” My guess is lack of ammunition but that is just me being cynical.

Evil exists and We are called upon to oppose it.

Be safe.

[Gman]

No worries, Doc.

“I don’t know why. I don’t know why he stopped.”

"...but I'm not complaining about it."

That's how I figured that comment should go.

[Gman]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fi...say/ar-AAzj5x5

Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Jarrod W. Ramos, a 38-year-old Laurel man with a longstanding grudge against the paper.

Gerald Fischman, The Capital’s editorial page editor, was also identified as a victim.

“This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette,” said Anne Arundel County Deputy Police Chief William Krampf. “This person was prepared today to come in. He was prepared to shoot people.”

On Thursday evening, federal and local law enforcement officials blocked off with crime-scene tape the Laurel apartment complex listed as the address for Ramos, whose dispute with the Capital began in July 2011 when a columnist at the paper covered a criminal harassment case against him. In 2012, Ramos brought a defamation suit against the columnist and the paper’s former editor and publisher, but Maryland’s second-highest court upheld in 2015 a ruling in favor of the Capital and a former reporter who were accused by Ramos of defamation.

Kinda' high profile to think that messing up your fingers would keep them from identifying you, but the cops don't catch the smart ones.

[Gman]

Damaged his fingertips, no i.d. on him to make identification difficult to say the least. Undoubtedly they’ll figure out who he is probably through facial recognition technologies.

Nailed it.

Police used facial-recognition software to identify suspect in newspaper shooting

When the suspect in the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis was taken into custody Tuesday, he had no identification and said little, so police turned to a sophisticated facial-recognition system, officials said.

Police fed the man’s photo into the Maryland Image Repository System (MRIS), which matched it against tens of millions of photos from state drivers’ licenses, offender photos and an FBI mug shot database.

It apparently returned a hit: Jarrod Ramos.

The case is the most high-profile use to date of MRIS, a cutting-edge and controversial tool that has been used by the Maryland State Police and other law enforcement agencies across the state since it launched in 2011.

The system uses algorithms to compare a suspect’s distinctive facial features against at least 7 million Maryland driver’s license photos, 3 million state offender images and nearly 25 million FBI mug shots, according to a 2016 report by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology. The report found 16 states allow the FBI to compare faces of suspects against driver’s license photos.

MRIS initially drew little attention but became a focus for privacy and civil liberties advocates after documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed it was used to monitor protesters in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.

“With Maryland, we see one of the more aggressive deployments of facial recognition technology,” Clare Garvie, an associate at the Georgetown center, told the Baltimore Sun in 2016.

The Georgetown report found the use of the system had never been audited as of 2016. The report said it was unclear if Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) scrubs the database to eliminate people who were never charged, had charges dropped or dismissed, or were found innocent.

A DPSCS official did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but an official told the Baltimore Sun in 2016 that authorities were “using it aggressively because we pursue criminals aggressively.”

Officials acknowledge in materials about the system that it can make mistakes in identifying people.

Civil liberties advocates are particularly concerned about the impact on minorities, given that research has shown some facial-recognition software has a harder time identifying the faces of African Americans. They are also concerned the system might eventually be used in conjunction with surveillance cameras to provide real-time scanning of streets.

The use of facial-recognition software by law enforcement has been a hot topic in recent months. In May, a coalition of groups called on Amazon.com to stop selling low-cost facial-recognition software called Rekognition to police because of concerns about surveillance of vulnerable communities. Amazon founder and CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.

[Zundfolge]

I bet they could listen to him ramble a bit and figure it out too ... he had a hard on for this paper.

[Gman]

Suspect swore 'oath' to kill Capital staff years ago, had restraining orders -- but bought gun legally

Jarrod Warren Ramos swore a "legal oath" in court documents to kill a writer for The Capital newspaper, whose staff had long endured his violent rants. A lawyer warned a judge of Ramos' "violent fetishes." And he was convicted of harassing a woman who successfully placed three restraining orders against him.

Yet the 38-year-old Laurel man accused of gunning down five employees of the Annapolis newspaper Thursday - after barricading the exit door as part of a pre-planned attack - legally purchased the pump-action shotgun he allegedly used in the rampage, authorities said Friday.