SUMMARY: Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger has died, one day after being transferred to a West Virginia federal prison. A notorious lifelong criminal who ran gambling and drug rackets for decades, he fled Boston in 1994 but was eventually caught. In 2013, Bulger was convicted of involvement in 11 murders in the 1970s and 1980s. WGBH’s Emily Rooney joins Judy Woodruff to discuss his violent legacy.
SUMMARY: A video of a man being shot to death was posted on Facebook Sunday and stayed online for nearly three hours before it was taken down. A man identified as Steve Stephens is said to have recorded himself confronting and killing Robert Godwin Sr. in Cleveland, raising questions about the role of social media sites. John Yang talks to Emily Dreyfuss of Wired magazine.
JOHN YANG (NewsHour): The 57-second video shows a man identified as Steve Stephens driving the streets of Cleveland while talking on the phone. He then steps from the car and confronts Robert Godwin Sr., a 74-year-old retired foundry worker, a father of nine and a grandfather of 14, and shoots Godwin dead.
The online killing reportedly remained on the site for nearly three hours before Facebook removed it.
In a statement late today, the company said that the video has “no place on Facebook and goes against our policies and everything we stand for.” The company said it's reviewing how it operates "to be sure people can report videos that violate our standards as quickly as possible.”
This episode raises fresh questions about the role and responsibility of social media sites like Facebook.
Before the latest statement, I spoke with Emily Dreyfuss, a senior staff writer at Wired magazine.
I began by asking her what Facebook could do.
EMILY DREYFUSS, Wired: First of all, you know, it is true that Facebook is working very hard to keep videos like this off of its site.
It's easy in a moment like this to say, you know, this is absurd that it was on Facebook for even three hours. But the fact is that a large apparatus of content moderation and work went into the effort to be able to even get the video down after three hours. And in order for it to be removed, that means that people on Facebook had to flag it as inappropriate, and then that flag had to be sent to people that Facebook employs all over the world to get rid of content like this.
And they took it down. And, sometimes, this can take up to 48 hours. So, three hours here is not even long in the scheme of things. Now, Facebook could do more. And they are working hard to figure out what they can do.
One of those things would be to use A.I. and allow artificial intelligence to help humans who are having to flag this sort of terrible, gruesome material so that we don't see it.
One of the problems is that A.I. is not really necessarily ready and up to the task of that yet, so Facebook is still trying to figure out how to make this work.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): For two decades, Martha Alvarez has held dance classes year-round seven days a week. For the 350-odd students who cram into her tiny studios, it’s an alternative, she says, in a city that offers few.
MARTHA ALVAREZ, Dance Instructor (through interpreter): I started this is 1992 out of concern for the amount of drug use and prostitution in the neighborhood.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That was back when Medellin had become the world’s murder capital, the cocaine capital, home of the drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was killed by police in 1993.
MARTHA ALVAREZ (through interpreter): It has changed a lot since then in terms of drug use, and the armed conflict has certainly diminished.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Medellin has seen a dramatic drop in violence. The murder rate is down from about 380 per 100,000 people to about 50. Experts credit a general calming trend in the country’s long-running civil war, also the efforts of new political leadership to bring people together in the city, says Alejandro Echeverri.
ALEJANDRO ECHEVERRI, Architect (through interpreter): When we look at the narco-trafficking years of Pablo Escobar, people didn’t trust each other. They built barriers around themselves and they put walls up. So public space in this city takes on a far greater significance than anywhere else, because people didn’t look each other in the eye when they walked down the street.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Echeverri is an architect. He was part of the administration a decade ago that set out to create safe public spaces.
We spoke in front of the Exploratorium he designed, a science museum that’s one of several distinctive new buildings.
A California man is in custody, accused in the death of his wife, who was a young mother and rookie Escondido Police officer.
According to Murrietta Police, Freddy Perez-Rodas told homicide investigators overnight that he killed Officer Laura Perez and burned their home in an attempt to cover up the crime.
Hours earlier, firefighters arrived at the couple’s home on Grand Oaks Court for a house fire. It was just before 6:30 p.m. and fire crews found no victims inside the home. When they responded to the fire, they did find Rodas, who reported that his wife was inside.
Fire investigators responded and "it was determined to be an arson immediately," said Murrietta Police Lt. Tony Conrad.
In addition to determining it was an arson, investigators discovered it was the same address connected to a missing person, 25-year-old Laura Perez.
Less than two hours later, homicide investigators arrested Perez-Rodas who had reported the house fire.
It was during questioning overnight that investigators learned the slain Escondido officer had been shot in the chest three times, her body moved to a storage locker in Moreno Valley.
Investigators were at All-Size Storage in Moreno Valley early Thursday morning and had closed off the business until 3 p.m.
Officials said that after Perez-Rodas led investigators to his wife’s body, he was booked on charges of murder, arson and child endangerment.
The couple has a 4-year-old child who was not injured, officials said.
Investigators also said they had recovered the weapon used in the alleged crime.
Laura Perez joined the Escondido Police Department in October 2013. The department had a flag-lowering ceremony in her honor Thursday evening, and Escondido's police chief addressed the media.
Escondido Police Chief Craig Carter described Perez as "a wonderful officer who had a bright future."
"It's never an easy thing. We're going to be one day at a time, " Carter said. "I'm encouraging officers to remember we're here for the victim, which in this case is Laura. For every Laura, there's hundreds out there and we need to continue to do our job."
Escondido police also will be having a press conference at 1:30 p.m. Friday at the Escondido Police Fire and Headquarters in the community room.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Next, Outside of a war zone, this is the most dangerous place on earth, San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, at the crossroads of drug shipments from South America to the United States.
More than 1,200 people were killed in the city last year, more than 7,000 in the country. Thanks to those ongoing drug wars, it has the highest per capita murder rate in the world.
Our story comes from filmmaker Guillermo Galdos, who spent a week in Honduras on assignment for Britain's Channel 4 News.
A warning: The images and the details in this report are disturbing.
GUILLERMO GALDOS, filmmaker: Friday night at the main hospital in San Pedro Sula, the casualties would in, this man barely alive shot twice in the head. The hospital is so busy that even a dying man has to wait 24 hours for an operation.
More than two decades after the body of a young girl was found inside a cooler, the New York Police Department is seeking help identifying the victim dubbed "Baby Hope."
On Tuesday, the 22nd anniversary of the discovery, police offered a $12,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest and conviction in the unsolved crime.
Baby Hope.JPEG
Officers put up posters and handed out fliers with sketches of how the victim might have looked.
The cooler was found in Washington Heights, on an embankment off the Henry Hudson Parkway.
The girl was believed to be between 3 and 5 years old. Tests showed she was malnourished and had been sexually abused.
DNA testing has yielded no matches with databases of convicted felons or active missing person cases.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): We update the story of Texas officials shot to death recently, as law enforcement investigates possible ties between the murders and a white supremacy group.
Mourners fill the First Baptist Church of Sunnyvale, outside Dallas, Texas this afternoon to remember Kaufman County district attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia. The couple was found shot to death inside their home over the weekend. Their murders came two months after the county's assistant district attorney, Mark Hasse, was shot and killed.
Before today's memorial service, Texas Governor Rick Perry announced he had doubled the reward to $200,000 dollars for information leading to arrests in both cases.
GOV. RICK PERRY, R-Texas: We cannot react with fear. We got to react with resolve. And our local, state and federal authorities are pursuing every lead, exhausting every line of inquiry in a relentless pursuit of those who are responsible for these crimes.
JUDY WOODRUFF: No suspects have been identified, but some attention has turned to a state prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. On Tuesday, the assistant U.S. attorney in Houston who was to head the prosecution in a 2012 case involving 34 members of the white supremacist group stepped aside from that role. He cited security concerns, according to an attorney for one of the defendants.
