The 2016 homicide spike of 8.6 percent reported by the FBI on Monday is one of the sharpest one-year upticks since the American crime decline in the 1990s. But a deeper dive into the stats doesn’t suggest that the country is backsliding to the high-crime years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, says the Atlantic. Instead, data in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report points to sharp geographic disparities in violent crimes in American society, with a few major cities accounting for large portions of 2016’s growth in murders and other serious offenses. The UCR includes self-reported stats on an assortment of major offenses from almost every law-enforcement agency in the U.S. Rural, urban, and suburban communities all saw increases in violent crimes in 2016. But they were of varying degrees. Some places, like Houston and Washington, D.C., saw the number of murders either stay roughly the same or slightly decline. Other communities fared worse. Chicago ended 2016 with 762 murders, a whopping 58 percent jump over 2015’s total. Baltimore experienced its second-deadliest year on record with 358 murders, surpassing the previous record set in 2015. That disparity could be felt in the national stats. John Pfaff, a Fordham University law professor who studies crime statistics, noted on Twitter that 22 percent of the nationwide increase in murders came from Chicago alone. But inside Chicago, 50 percent of the homicide rise came from just five neighborhoods, which account for only 9 percent of the city’s overall population. Those neighborhoods, in effect, account for 10 percent of the national increase in murders. To the dismay of some in Miami’s elite legal circles, a divorce court judge with zero federal law enforcement experience is emerging as the front runner for the U.S. attorney’s position in South Florida, reports the Miami Herald. Thanks to the influence of Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Ariana Fajardo Orshan has surfaced as the top candidate after months of dithering by President Trump and the Justice Department over filling the coveted position. Fajardo, a 46-year-old Cuban American who attended Florida International University, worked for the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office after graduating from Nova Southeastern law school, but she has devoted most of her career to family legal matters. She currently serves as administrative judge for the county’s family law division, after Gov. Rick Scott appointed her in 2012 and she won election to the bench without opposition two years later. Like Rubio, Scott is a major supporter of her nomination to become U.S. attorney of the 250-lawyer office. But her lack of stature in federal law enforcement concerns many in the office, one of the busiest in the country. Fajardo has been active in many professional organizations, but one stands out above the rest: the Federalist Society, an organization of conservatives who tout reforms of the legal system that hew to the original intent of the U.S. Constitution. The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is regarded as the group’s champion. Fajardo declined to comment about her candidacy. She was already interviewed by Justice Department officials and is expected in Washington for another round of interviews this week. When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on NYPD crime statistics. The findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, put a crack in the “broken windows” theory of policing that has become a mainstay of many urban police departments, says the Los Angeles Times. The authors are Christopher M. Sullivan of Louisiana State University and Zachary P. O’Keeffe of the University of Michigan. “A serious concern is that proactive policing diverts finite resources and attention away from investigative units, including detectives working to track down serial offenders and break up criminal networks,” they wrote. “Proactive policing also disrupts communal life, which can drain social control of group-level violence. Citizens are arrested, unauthorized markets are disrupted, and people lose their jobs, all of which create more localized stress on individuals already living on the edge. Such strains are imposed directly through proactive policing, and thus are independent from subsequent judgments of guilt or innocence.” “Police officers target their efforts at areas where crime is anticipated and/or where they expect enforcement will be most effective,” the authors wrote. “Simultaneously, citizens decide to comply with the law or commit crime partly on the basis of police deployment and enforcement strategies. In other words, policing and crime are endogenous to unobservable strategic interaction, which frustrates causal analysis.” The scientists based their research on data culled from FOIA requests for a large set of NYPD statistical reports from 2013 to 2016. That period included an NYPD work slowdown related to the controversial 2014 death of Eric Garner, who died after being placed in an officer’s chokehold. The chairman and chief executive of Equifax, Richard F. Smith, retired on Tuesday in the aftermath of a major data breach that exposed the personal information of as many as 143 million people, says the New York Times. Two other top Equifax executives — the chief information officer and the chief security officer — stepped down on Sept. 14. Equifax, based in Atlanta, said this month that hackers had exploited an unpatched flaw in its website software to extract names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and other information about millions of people. The company faced a blistering outcry from lawmakers and the public for failing to protect the sensitive data and for a response that many found lackluster. Smith, 57, had been the chairman and chief executive of Equifax Inc. since 2005. He joined the company after a 22-year career at General Electric that included top executive positions in the conglomerate’s insurance, leasing and asset-management divisions. Before the data breach at Equifax, Smith was widely admired on Wall Street for developing new products and increasing sales. The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into the cyberattack on Equifax. More than 30 state attorneys general have begun investigations into the breach, and federal lawmakers have called for hearings on what went wrong. New York City is building a vast, unregulated DNA database that police are already using to connect suspects to evidence from crime scenes across the five boroughs, reports The Trace and WNYC. In the last five years, the number of DNA profiles in New York’s local database has grown dramatically, driven in part by a push to collect DNA in every gun case. As of July, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner was storing about 64,000 genetic profiles. Details about the size of the database and its rapid growth have not been previously reported. The DNA in the database comes largely from crime scenes and suspects. Lawyers say there are people in it who have never been convicted of a crime, and have no idea that their genetic profiles are routinely checked against evidence collected in criminal investigations. New York police say database hits generate thousands of solid investigative leads a year, and are a major way they nab dangerous criminals. “DNA is probably the most powerful scientific tool available to us,” said Emauel Katranakis, commander of the NYPD’s forensic investigations division. Forensic and legal experts agree that DNA evidence is a powerful crime-solving tool. But some have voiced alarm at the way New York City has built its database — with no oversight or scrutiny. State and federal DNA databases, by contrast, are subject to legislative oversight and strictly limit whose DNA can be stored, in most cases, to people who have been convicted of crimes. Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, called the “rogue” database “extremely troubling.” WyoFile looks behind the legislative veil in Wyoming in an analysis headlined, “Who Killed Criminal Justice Reform?” The story focuses on the political machinations involved in House Bill 94, a complex piece of legislation designed to curb Wyoming’s rising prison population (and costs). In the end, HB 94, which once seemed to have broad-based support, was allowed to die without a vote in the desk drawer of the senate president. The story of House Bill 94’s life and death is a story of the push and pull between different elements of the justice system. It’s a story of prosecuting attorneys and Department of Corrections officials whose goals conflict in stark ways, and of a member of the Board of Parole whose beliefs were so strong he worked against his own colleagues. It’s also the story of how Wyoming’s citizen legislature can struggle to pass complex legislation, particularly when it comes with powerful skeptics and without influential “rabbis” — as legislators sometimes call a bill’s chief proponent. Giving the “benefit of doubt” to film writer and director Mahmood Farooqui, the Delhi high court in India on Monday set aside his conviction in a rape case, observing that there were doubts over the claim of the U.S.-based complainant that he had oral sex with her without her consent, reports the Times of India. “No” may not always mean no, Justice Ashutosh Kumar said in his ruling, adding that there were examples of “woman’s behavior (where)… a feeble ‘no’ may mean a ‘yes'” when it comes to intimacy. The 35-year-old woman had alleged that Farooqui had raped her at his Delhi home in 2015. A court last year had sentenced Farooqui to a seven-year prison term. The new court’s order revolved around the question of consent. It found the claim of rape unreliable, noting the woman had faked an orgasm during the alleged crime, justifying it on the grounds that she feared violence if she resisted. “In an act of passion, actuated by libido, there could be myriad circumstances which can surround a consent, and it may not necessarily always mean yes in case of yes or no in case of no,” the judge held. The high court also took into account factors such as past intimacy between Farooqui and the woman, noting that they had kissed twice in the past. It remains in doubt, the court said, “as to whether such an incident (the rape)… took place, and if at all it had taken place, (whether) it was without her consent, and if it was without her consent, whether the appellant could discern/understand the same.” The Nashville community and law enforcement are still grappling with the mass shooting Sunday at a small church there, which left one woman dead and another seven people injured by the attacker, reports the Tennessean. Metro Nashville police Chief Steve Anderson said Monday he could only speculate as to the motive for the suspected attacker, identified as 25-year-old Emanuel Kidega Samson. But a former U.S. attorney said discovering the motivation for the attack will be key to the ongoing federal civil rights investigation. “First you solve the crime and figure out exactly what happened. Then you delve into the background of the attack and you need to determine what attitudes (the suspect) had in terms of race and religion in the years leading up to the attack,” said Jonathan Skrmetti, a Memphis private attorney who worked as a trial attorney at the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Police charged Samson Monday night with one count of homicide but additional charges are coming as the investigation continues. “He’s acknowledged that he was there. He’s acknowledged that he fired, quote, ‘at the church.’ That’s the extent of our information that we’ve obtained from him at this point,” Anderson said. Police said Samson, who emigrated to the U.S. from Sudan as a child about 20 years ago, fired 12 rounds from a .40-caliber handgun during the attack, stopping to reload the gun at least once. Police in Murfreesboro, Tenn., said Samson had a suicidal incident in June reportedly involving a gun. Samson also had two domestic disputes with a woman that resulted in calls to police, but no arrests, police records show. The reports do not immediately point to obvious racial or religious animosity by Samson, who is black. Mexico is one of the biggest buyers of next-generation surveillance technology. And now data leaked to Forbes indicates it’s taken an unprecedented step in becoming the first-known buyer of surveillance technology that silently spies on calls, text messages phone-user locations via a long-vulnerable portion of global telecoms networks known as Signalling System No. 7 (SS7). The revelation was contained in what an anonymous source claimed was internal sales information from Israeli provider Ability Inc., which appeared to have sold its Unlimited Interception System (ULIN) to Mexico. With prices ranging between $5 and $20 million, ULIN enables silent snooping on cellphones. The development comes as Mexico is wrapped up in a spyware scandal. Researchers this year found that activists, journalists, murder victims’ attorneys, and investigators into a mass student disappearance have been targeted by the Pegasus spyware, a creation of $1 billion-valued Israeli firm NSO Group. So far no Mexican agency has been accused of running the software. But news reports about the spying were swiftly followed by public protests in June. President Enrique Peña Nieto called for an inquiry–while at the same time denying his government was responsible. In August, an NSO Group spokesperson said the company was “deeply disturbed by any alleged misuse of our product,” but didn’t address any of the specific allegations. Across the country, Black women are stepping up to lead the fight to end the predominant cash bail system, Arisha Hatch of Color of Change writes for Essence. She cites Sen. Kamala Harris, the California Democrat who recently introduced legislation that encourages alternatives to money bail. The cost of money bail falls disproportionately on Black women. Nearly 80 percent of women in jails are mothers, and most of them have only been accused—not found guilty—of minor drug or “public order” offenses. When mothers languish in jail because of money bail, the costs can be devastating. Women often lose their jobs, housing, or children. In Houston, Tasha Jackson of the Texas Organizing Project has collaborated with Color of Change to organize communities for bail reform, including removing the former pro-bail district attorney and pressuring the current D.A. and sheriff to commit to bail reform. In California, the Essie Justice Group—led by Gina Clayton—is organizing women with incarcerated loved ones for statewide reform of the bail and criminal justice system. Earlier this year, Mary Hooks of Southerners on New Ground led an effort to bail our Black women for Mother’s Day. In August, that effort continued when 100 mothers were bailed out during Color of Change’s Black August Bail Out. |
