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| NEWS > 23 August 2007 |
Other related articles:
Excluding evidence doesn't mak
What should the courts do when police officers violate a suspect's rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- keep the resulting evidence out of court and risk letting a criminal walk free? Or admit the evidence and risk signalling to police that it's perfectly OK to trample suspects' rights in future?
The Charter itself says such evidence must be excluded if admitting it "would bring the administration of justice into disrepute."
This seems to me like a reasonable rule, and in many cases its outcome would be obvious. A confession obtained by torture, for instance, wo... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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The Daily Yomiuri - Osaka,Japa
23 August 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Japan: Police overlooked offic
An apparent murder-suicide involving a police officer on Tuesday has raised concerns that the police failed to notice problematic signs in the officer's behavior.
Senior Police Officer Hidekazu Tomono, 40, of the Metropolitan Police Department's Tachikawa Police Station, disappeared while on duty Monday night and apparently shot a woman to death with his police-issued weapon that night.
It also took hours for the police to track down the location where Tomono's body was found.
A series of suicides by police officers using their sidearms have been reported across the nation. But there has yet to be any solution to prevent such incidents.
Police authorities need to come up with measures to make those in supervisory positions better able to detect signs of unusual behavioral changes in officers on patrol duties and prevent similar incidents from occurring.
"Why did other police officers not try to search for him immediately?" A senior official of the MPD asked after hearing of the police station's slow response to the incident. The official expressed shock at hearing Tuesday morning that Tomono had been out of communication. "Weren't they concerned about any possible misuse of the gun he was carrying?"
It was 9:30 p.m. Monday when Tomono left a koban police box in Kunitachi, Tokyo, on a motorcycle to handle a complaint. But it was nearly eight hours later, at about 5 a.m. Tuesday, when his colleague reported to Tachikawa Police Station that there had been no response from Tomono's cell phone.
The MPD dispatched investigators from headquarters to search for Tomono, but could not find him.
The police then asked Tomono's cell phone provider to give the location of his phone. They traced Tomono to the Higashi-Motomachi area of the neighboring city of Kokubunji.
The police, meanwhile, found in the pocket of Tomono's civilian clothes kept in his police box locker the name card of Yoko Sato, 32, who worked at a pub. The police located Sato's apartment in the city shortly after 10 a.m., and found the police motorcycle in front.
In the apartment they discovered Tomono dead with Sato's body next to him.
What shook the MPD was that it was only then that they were informed that Tomono had failed numerous times to return to his police box after going out on calls.
The MPD also found after talking to Tomono's colleagues and subordinates that
he was known to have often gone to Kokubunji, which was out of his patrol area, during working hours and seemed to be fretting over a woman.
MPD police boxes each have rosters for patrols and standing guard duties. Supervisors at police stations regularly inspect police boxes under their command to make sure police officers are following the rosters.
If a supervisor discovers that a police box officer has physical or mental problems that hinder the officer from carrying out duties, the officer will be reassigned. This measure is to prevent any potential misconduct that could result in the misuse of police weapons, which all police box officers are issued to carry at all times while on duty to deal with potentially dangerous situations.
The latest incident shows that supervising officers likely overlooked Tomono's strange behavior as they kept him on duty. A senior official of the MPD's police administration bureau in charge of personnel management said, "It's necessary to check weather they [supervisors] saw problems with his private life and had provided adequate supervision of working situations."
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