This 2023-2024 DOJ report finds that , “through a combination of poor leadership, retaliation, and a complete lack of internal accountability, LPD has created a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law.” Further, the DOJ states it has “reasonable cause to believe that the City of Lexington and the Lexington Police Department engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law” through its use of modern-day debtors prisons.

Every day, law enforcement agencies across the country search thousands of cellphones, typically incident to arrest. To search phones, law enforcement agencies use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), a powerful technology that allows police to extract a full copy of data from a cellphone — all emails, texts, photos, location, app data, and more — which can then be programmatically searched. As one expert puts it, with the amount of sensitive information stored on smartphones today, the tools provide a “window into the soul.”

This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United States. Based on 110 public records requests to state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, our research documents more than 2,000 agencies that have purchased these tools, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such records have been widely disclosed.

Every American is at risk of having their phone forensically searched by law enforcement.

The use of lying and deception by police in their daily activities has been acknowledged, justified and approved by the Courts, police departments and society. The distinction between tolerated lying and reprehensible perjury in New York State is described in Penal Law. Despite this clear definition of perjury, the Mollen Commission Report (1994) on corruption in the NYPD rarely used the term “perjury.” It did recognize that police practices of falsification were so common that it spawned its own word “testilying.” Testilying and fasifications are simply euphemisms for perjury. This study aims to determine underlying conditions and circumstances that an officer would take into account in making a decision to commit perjury.

Over the past decade, large urban counties have implemented ShotSpotter, a gun fire detection technology, across the USA. It uses acoustic listening devices to identify discharged firearms’ locations. We examined the effect of ShotSpotter within the 68 large metropolitan counties in the USA from 1999 to 2016. We identified ShotSpotter implementation years through publicly available media. ShotSpotter did not display protective effects for all outcomes. Counties in states with permit-to-purchase firearm laws saw a 15% reduction in firearm homicide incidence rates; counties in states with right-to-carry laws saw a 21% increase in firearm homicide incidence rates. Results suggest that implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes. Policy solutions may represent a more cost-effective measure to reduce urban firearm violence.

An extensive investigation by Cerise Castle into more than five decades of abuse, terror, and murder carried out by gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

In the aftermath of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders by the police, we know now it is not the time to ask for meaningless reforms. If we learned anything from the deaths of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and countless others, it’s that our nation’s racist and predatory policing system simply absorbs reforms and recalibrates to keep producing the same results.