The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/)
Many protesters are being more disruptive, whether they’re blocking access to highways, chaining themselves to pipelines, damaging businesses or being physically violent toward other people or property. In response, state lawmakers—mostly Republicans—are seeking new ways to regulate or criminalize protests.
Officers have fatally shot eight people this year, the highest number in the past decade, with more than three months left in the year. Criminologist David Klinger of the University of Missouri-St. Louis said, “As crime rates go up and down, so do police shootings.”
The suit accuses GEO of violating state minimum-wage law by paying detainees $1 a day — or sometimes just chips and candy — to work at the nation’s fourth-largest detention center. The company calls what it is doing a “voluntary work program.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to avoid creating a new protected class of undocumented immigrants, given how politically difficult it has been for the administration to unwind the DACA program.
Murkiness surrounding national immigration policy is causing local violations of imprisoned immigrants’ Fourth Amendment rights, say advocates and attorneys. Immigrants–even those who entered the country illegally–are protected against illegal search and seizure, meaning they can’t be held beyond the time they are entitled to release.
Gov. Rick Scott and relatives of those who died want criminal charges. Under Florida law, a conviction may be hard to obtain, former prosecutors say.
The Environmental Protection Agency moves agents from investigating environmental crimes to protecting agency administrator Scott Pruitt, who has needed three times as many on his personal security detail than the number who served under his predecessor in the Obama administration.
The agency highlighted the record as Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited San Diego. The amount of cocaine on the high seas has exploded since the Colombian government halted aerial eradication of coca plants through spraying in 2015, and rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) encouraged farmers to grow more in anticipation of government aid granted in a peace deal.
Eighty-seven children died of opioid intoxication in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up from just 16 in 1999. “There are no pill parties happening in preschools,” said Dr. Jennifer Plumb, an emergency doctor who recently treated four opioid-sick toddlers in a night. “These kids aren’t making a choice because they are trying to get high on a substance. It’s that the pills are everywhere.”
Homicide information is released swiftly, but not so with data on overdose deaths. “One problem with how people view people taking drugs is they think it doesn’t happen in their neighborhoods,” says City Councilman Brandon Scott.
Since 2005, 22 states have passed laws authorizing residents to use lethal means to protect themselves in certain situations. The trend had stalled until Republicans became the majority in more legislatures. Florida is poised to strengthen its law in favor of shooters.
Oklahoma, which for 25 years has led the nation in locking up women, imprisons 151 out of every 100,000 women, more than double the national rate. In Tulsa County, women’s sentences for some drug crimes decreased over the past seven years. An intensive program funded by oil billionaire George Kaiser’s foundation works to provide alternatives to prison for women facing long sentences.
Gov. Mary Fallin touts two measures approved by Oklahoma voters last year. One made certain low-level crimes misdemeanors rather than felonies, including simple drug possession and theft of items valued at less than $1,000. The other aims to use money saved by incarcerating fewer people to help fund drug treatment and mental health programs.
St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson said comments by interim Police Chief Lawrence OToole after a third night of protesting the acquittal of a police officer in a shooting were “inflammatory,” but she is standing by him. The city is seeking a new chief to replace Sam Dotson.
Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) will reintroduce the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. The two-year-old proposal failed to make it through Congress last year, and the Trump administration may oppose it.