The LAPD's John Miller says he forgot about the weapon. Bratton calls incident embarrassing.
The city's top antiterrorism official was detained at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday after screeners found a loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun in his carry-on bag, a violation of federal rules that prohibit civilians from carrying weapons aboard aircraft.
John Miller was questioned by the federal Transportation Security Administration after a screener at a security checkpoint in Terminal 1 saw the gun in his black computer bag via an X-ray machine. Miller was traveling to New York with his wife and daughter.
John Miller is, and always has been what we in the East refer to as a "dick," and upon personal knowledge, an arrogant one to boot.
In Law Enforcement circles, they have another name for him, and I believe it is known as a "buff."
When he was a crime beat reporter on the local (NYC) NBC station, he rode around in his personal white Range Rover which was outfitted with a siren, strictly prohibited under New York State law.
He also had a full NYC carry license, a v-e-r-y hard to come by document which he routinely abused by bringing his
bimbo de nuit to our local range Sundays and letting her blast away with his Glock or D-frame snubbie. (He had a weekend get-a-way in my old neighborhood 1½ miles from our range.) In New York State it is a Class D felony to allow an unlicensed individual to handle a handgun.
He left his reporter's job at WNBC for a period of time to serve as deputy police commissioner for public affairs for the NYPD, under Bratton, I believe. After a high profile dust-up, his second year into that job, he returned to his reporters job at WNBC, and then jumped ship to ABC network news.
His sole claim to anything seems to have been that the late NYC mob boss John Gotti took a liking to him and Miller enjoyed greater "access" to the mobster than any of the other local reporters. This crime coverage "made" him as a reporter.
But he's always been "a dick," an assessment shared by one of my crew who recalls:
As an alumnus, I attended a panel discussion at my old law school where Miller was a speaker. This was when he was with NYPD. Miller's S&W J-frame in an ankle holster was clearly visible under the table (which was on an elevated stage from the audience). I thought he was a dick before then, and I thought so that day too. His qualifications as a counterterrorism official are highly suspect.
It seems that his #1 qualification for anything to do with Law Enforcement is his willingness to be Bratton's "butt boy."
