Justice and Public Safety

A Texas school district is tapping federal funds to invest in newer technology to expedite the process of moving thousands of students through metal detectors each morning. They will still detect weapons or vape pens.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ National Integrated Ballistic Information Network stores millions of pieces of ballistics intelligence to help law enforcement generate investigative leads in gun crimes.

Appellate courts have barred elected officials from blocking abusive users on social media, but absent better site moderation, this leaves local school board members no practical way to deal with excessive harassment.

Frequent fights have prompted Georgia’s largest school district to invest in security vestibules, alert badges that contact authorities, and possibly an artificial intelligence-based weapons detection system.

Several eastern Pennsylvania schools have locked down their campuses recently after malicious actors used the state-run anonymous reporting tip line created in 2019, Safe2Say, to issue threats of violence.

A petition filed with the South Carolina Supreme Court alleges that automatic license plate readers are part of a growing system of “unlawful and unaccountable surveillance” overseen by the state’s Law Enforcement Division.

Sacramento County, Calif., officials announced that the medical data of as many as 5,372 inmates was exposed on the Internet for several months. The breach was related to unsecured folders held by a vendor, officials said.

Public agencies have come to rely on Twitter as a vital communication tool, particularly in emergencies. Given the platform's turmoil, experts weigh in on the path forward for government social media.

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has launched a pilot program using virtual reality technology to improve engagement and relationships between incarcerated parents and their children.

Ohio and 39 other states have reached a $391.5 million settlement with Google over the company's deceptive location-tracking practices — the largest multistate privacy settlement in U.S. history.

Automatic license plate readers are alleged to be part of a vast and growing system of unlawful and unaccountable surveillance overseen by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, according to a recent court petition.

In the wake of a school shooting in Uvalde, the popularity of the state's own iWatchTexas system lags behind other online or app-based reporting tools such as the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System and STOPit.

Joe Swanson — the vice president of CTRL, the new privacy and cybersecurity compliance consultancy at Tampa-based law firm Carlton Fields — weighs in on the changing nature of digital threats.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based tech company has agreed to a settlement with 40 states to resolve allegations that it misled consumers about how it tracked, recorded and shared their device location data.

The Virginia Department of Education is distributing funds especially to schools with frequent problems, to be used for mass notification systems, security card access systems and surveillance for schools and buses.

New technology being used by the San Luis Obispo Police Department now allows residents to track crime reports and also to provide feedback in real time, the agency has announced in a news release.

The Washington city first began talks of implementing body cameras and in-car dashboard cameras back in 2015, but funding to make it happen wasn’t approved until last year. Officers began wearing the devices Oct. 31.

The California Department of Justice recently launched a new online portal that gives survivors of sexual assault a way to track the status of the DNA evidence kits associated with their cases.