Special Proceedings Bureau

In March 2003, the Civil Enforcement Bureau was renamed the Special Proceedings Bureau. District Attorney Richard A. Brown, in announcing the change, noted that the former name no longer accurately reflected the wide-ranging scope of the bureau’s operations.

During the District Attorney’s twelve year tenure, the bureau has grown beyond its initial mission of being the office’s civil arm. Its members are a group of professionals who respond to special problems in our neighborhoods, using innovative tactics and remedies to solve these problems. For example, the Queens Plaza area had been long seen as a place where prostitution had to be tolerated. Rather than be satisfied with the traditional “revolving door” of prostitute arrests, the bureau, with the assistance of both the NYPD’s Criminal Intelligence Team as well as the 108th Precinct, launched a long-term operation that resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of the pimps -- many of whom were exploiting underage girls. As a result, Queens Plaza is no longer subject to this blight.

Similarly, the bureau has attacked the dangerous and sometimes deadly problem of drag racing. The successful efforts resulting in criminal convictions as well as forfeiture of these “souped-up” vehicles have proven to be an effective deterrent. Moreover, in fulfilling the mandate of assisting the police in the investigation and prosecution of quality of life offenses, assistant district attorneys assigned to the Special Proceedings Bureau have prepared hundreds of search warrants including commercial retail establishments which were buying stolen property for resale to the public.

These initiatives in no way diminish the bureau’s traditional responsibilities. Civil remedies, used in conjunction with criminal proceedings, have proven to be extremely effective in the fight against crime. In the District Attorney’s Office the Special Proceedings Bureau has been given the responsibility of working with and providing support to other bureaus by using a variety of civil enforcement tools, including forfeiture and eviction proceedings to eliminate criminal activity. The bureau also processes court-ordered bail forfeitures, sending out the word that failure to appear in court has consequences.

In conjunction with criminal proceedings, the bureau has successfully completed in excess of one thousand evictions for drug dealing in both public and private housing complexes over the last several years. The bureau works closely with the District Attorney’s Office of Special Prosecutions in the prosecution of narcotic violations, prostitution and other quality of life offenses in Astoria, Jackson Heights and Jamaica.

Further, the bureau has successfully prosecuted over a thousand asset forfeiture cases, resulting in the seizure of several million dollars and various cars during the last several years, while processing millions of dollars in thousands of bail forfeiture cases.

New technologies constantly help us. At the same time, these advances raise new challenges. In combating the novel issues of the new millennium, the Special Proceedings Bureau has a Computer Crimes Unit.

The growth of the computer as a tool in the home and in the work place has had incredible impact on how we work, play and educate ourselves. People are able to obtain, store and transmit vast amounts of information quickly to large numbers of recipients in far away places at the click of a button. Wireless technologies are developing at an equally astonishing rate, and the "plain old telephone" now can send e-mail, track stocks and locate your position by satellite.

Unfortunately, these advanced technologies are also being used to aid criminals in the commission of crimes in ways that are increasingly difficult for law enforcement to address without developing significant expertise to combat these assaults on our persons, our privacy and our pocketbooks.

Pedophiles who once skulked in school yards, now lurk on the Internet, seeking to lure children from the safety of their homes, or to trade in pornographic materials in relative anonymity. Thieves who stole identities by breaking into mailboxes in front of people’s houses, now surf and sniff electronic communications and web pages for data that they can use to obtain credit cards in the name of an unsuspecting victim. Scam artists become cyber-chameleons, assuming new personas to gull vendors to send them thousands of dollars in goods without payment, or to sell non-existent goods to a purchaser who now can’t even describe the bad guy to the cops, let alone find an address for him or her. Hackers can, and have, shut down systems so as to cost major corporations and individual investors millions of dollars by Denial of Service Attacks. Stalkers who used to simply dial a phone and hang up now send e-mail containing hate messages or defamatory innuendo or threats of violence to the objects of their anger, or to their family, friends or associates. Purchasers of illegal drugs are making their connections via modems rather than on the street corner.

The Computer Crimes Unit of the Special Proceedings Bureau successfully targets these new high-tech crimes. The unit has successfully investigated and arrested:

Pedophiles who were purchasing and selling child pornography;
Scam artists who stole thousands of dollars of property in E-bay frauds;
A thief who stole approximately $60,000 in computer equipment from companies in New Hampshire and Nevada while posing as the agent of a non-existent Queens public school.

In addition, the unit has been addressing the needs of the entire District Attorney’s Office by gaining skills that are used in all types of prosecutions:

Two detectives have been trained at the National White Collar Crime Center in West Virginia in techniques to examine and recover electronic evidence from computers;

The unit has formed a partnership with the New York State Internet Crimes Against Children Working Group which, from a core group of five prosecutors’ offices from Queens to Buffalo, along with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services and the New York Prosecutors Training Institute are dedicated to spreading techniques and tools for fighting crime on the Internet to their colleagues throughout the State;

The unit has b ecome a part of the New York State Electronic Crimes Task Force, a unique collection of local, state, and federal law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies coupled with partners from the private sector, who lend their expertise to dealing with criminals in the advanced technology environment.

It has also sponsored a lecture by the head of the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team Laboratory to prosecutors and police from the metropolitan area on the use of electronic evidence.