Justice and Public Safety

A civil grand jury found that without more officers, the Oakland Police Department needs to focus on building a long-term strategy for boosting its effectiveness through the use of crime-fighting technology.

The devices came online Monday in the city’s Central Precinct. Plans are for all patrol officers to be wearing them by the end of July. They will turn on automatically when cars’ emergency lights come on, or when guns or stun guns are drawn.

Allentown has recently installed and activated dozens of devices across the city designed to help police respond to crime quickly by detecting gunshots as well as by reading and identifying license plates.

Nearly a year after the plug was pulled on a multimillion-dollar New Orleans Police Department technology boondoggle, the City Council has approved a new contract with a different vendor for a second try.

The city of Oneonta Common Council voted unanimously to accept a $142,777 grant for new in-car video and license plate readers systems for the city police department at its meeting Tuesday, June 18.

City officials said Tuesday they had deployed the first 100 cameras; the other 300 are expected to be on the street by July. The devices, paid for by a $17 million state grant, are intended to take on organized retail theft.

911 services were down across Massachusetts for two hours on Tuesday. The cause of the outage is still unknown.

In a new lawsuit, two U.S. government agencies have accused Adobe of making it very hard for users to cancel Adobe subscriptions, which also contained hidden or obscured fees.

Ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects a person’s right to privacy, a Norfolk Circuit Court has granted a defendant’s motion to suppress evidence obtained by city-owned license plate reader cameras, but without a search warrant.

Alarmed by the reach and rapid expansion of license plate cameras, privacy advocates have filed suit in Illinois, saying the cameras violate the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search.

The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council approved a record-setting $532.9 million spending plan with funds for 25 new positions. The budget also includes money for 25 license plate cameras.

The Peach State joins Nevada and California in hewing to a 2025 deadline — in this case, May 7 — for residents to get their Real IDs. In Georgia, it is referred to as a Secure ID.

The company Veritone is set to release a new tool to help law enforcement track vehicles, part of a broader offering designed to safeguard against facial recognition bans. A company executive explains the thinking.

Officials in Fremont County, Colo., believe that a software/hardware issue contributed directly to a recent prisoner escape, and they are awaiting a response from the jail's current vendor.

Watch Duty, a wildfire-tracking app manned by volunteers monitoring fire scanners, provides emergency information to the public. As the app expands, so does debate about fire department scanner traffic encryption.

Thanks to Apple, rich communication services are in the news, and now a new partnership could help spread those tools deeper into the public safety space. RapidSOS is coming off a major funding round.

One bill will prohibit social media companies from providing "addictive" content feeds to minors without parent consent, and the other will prohibit websites from processing a minor's personal data without consent.

State Attorney General Anthony Brown this week unveiled the site for residents to let authorities know about hate crimes and hate bias incidents. Reports can be filed anonymously.