The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/crime-and-justice-news/page/2/)
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Most state legislatures have gone on recess for the rest of the year. That puts the state-reform scorecard for police critics at five states with new laws and 18 still ostensibly working on the issue.
False theft charges against a suspect based solely on a database hit in a facial-recognition system helped cast doubt on Detroit’s contract with a software vendor. Claims that such systems are racially biased are coming to a head in a city that is majority-Black.
Rumblings of a boycott over Nextdoor moderators’ censorship of posts helped prompt the hyperlocal social media company to take several steps to try to discourage racist posts and racial profiling. And now, conversations about Black Lives Matter protests will be allowed.
Cuts in overtime pay will help fund a $150 million reduction in Los Angeles Police Department’s $3 billion annual budget as part of a broader police-reform debate. Uniformed officers will drop below 10,000, a longtime benchmark the city sought to maintain.
The contest between incumbent Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey and her challenger, George Gascón, was a battle over progressive prosecution ideas even before the nation exploded in protest. Now the stakes are even higher.
A 2015 audit found that Boston police had done too little to control overtime costs and abuses. Since then, the department has made no significant policy changes, costs keep rising, and hundreds of cops earn over $200,000 a year.
The district attorneys of Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco teamed up to announce South African-style truth and reconciliation commissions to hear testimony from people complaining of unjust policing and prosecution.
San Francisco Police Department will no longer routinely release suspects’ mug shots in order to avoid fueling the perception that people of color are disproportionately involved in crime.
As protests raged and the pandemic regained momentum, June gun backgound checks surged nearly three-quarters higher than the same month last year in a new all-time record of 3.9 million checks. One consultant estimates that translates to about 2.4 million gun sales.
Even though criminal cases took priority during the pandemic-induced shutdown of Connecticut courts, the state’s habit of starving its courts of needed technology budgets has left a growing backlog and bottlenecks over the use of paper records.