Justice and Public Safety

The King County Council is postponing a vote on whether to ban facial recognition technology, citing the need for more research on the controversial topic. The council plans to revisit the issue May 19.

Pittsburg County Sheriff Chris Morris said the unmanned aircraft system will be useful when it comes to searching for missing children, hunters and elderly people and other law enforcement activities.

The company behind FirstNet is now offering its faster 5G+ option to public safety users in 38 cities. It’s also adding encryption from “tower to core” and creating a new coalition focused on health and wellness.

Courts across the country have struggled to process traffic tickets safely and efficiently during the pandemic. A new portal is offering jurisdictions a free and virtual means of handling tickets.

A bill unanimously passed by the Florida Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee aims to expand the use of drones by law enforcement and government agencies, spurring concern among privacy and civil rights advocates.

A small number of criminal cases in Albany, N.Y., were affected by a 2019 ransomware attack against the city’s servers, causing the police department to lose digital copies of its 2018 internal affairs files.

Over the four years of the Trump presidency, social media platforms generally took a soft line in enforcing their policies against threats and misinformation, allowing most borderline speech to stand.

The search for pro-Trump rioters that stormed and defaced the U.S. Capitol building last week has intensified and federal law enforcement is using every means at its disposal to investigate the incident.

Federal officials have announced new rules that will allow operators of small drones to fly over people and at night, a move that is expected to turbo-boost commercial use of the flying machines.

A $92-million, five-year agreement is the largest commitment to FirstNet by a law enforcement agency to date, and the latest development in the competition between two first-responder networks.

Drones are finding their stride in the county, having already been used to find a missing kayaker. They are also being considered by the Flagler Beach Fire Department to deliver life preservers to swimmers.

Not every 911 call will be answered with a drone, but Brookhaven, Ga., police say the project will give its officers more flexibility, availability and information, while limiting in-person contact amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Sajed Naseem, CISO of the New Jersey court system, discusses how going remote impacted state courts, what COVID has taught him about cyber and what equity issues might arise in virtual justice proceedings.

Hackers claim they stole data from the Cooke County Sheriff’s Office and are threatening to publish it online if their demands are not met. Attacks of this kind are trending across the country.

System administrators discovered Friday that hackers had taken over a portion of the statewide court network and were demanding ransom before control of the system was restored. This is not the first such attack.

Also, FirstNet applications like the e-Bridge app are being used to help first responders and medical professionals respond to the coronavirus pandemic by providing situational awareness and telemedicine capabilities.

As officials in Ohio continue to promote the idea of creating a centralized criminal-sentencing database for the state, stakeholders are now suggesting that new blockchain technology could be the answer.

Although more than 9,800 U.S. agencies are on board with the nationwide public safety communications platform FirstNet, a debate persists about the very issue that FirstNet is designed to solve: interoperability.