Law Enforcement

  • FIFA warns South Africa that stampede must not be repeated

    Sepp Blatter, FIFA president, believes that the crowd stampede during last Sunday’s Nigeria-North Korea warm-up game, in which 16 people were trampled, came close to giving the World Cup finals a tragedy before they had started — but may serve as a wake-up call to South Africa’s security services to take security at the games more seriously

  • Law enforcement questions reporting jailed illegal immigrants to feds

    Secure Communities, a U.S. program to check the immigration status of everyone booked into jail, runs into local rules against such actions; critics of the program say that turning illegal immigrants over to federal authorities would undermine the efforts of local law enforcement to win cooperation from immigrant communities; they worry about providing immigration authorities with the fingerprints of those arrested on petty charges

  • To reduce Mexico violence, U.S. needs to stem flow of guns into that country

    Border security expert says the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico has militarized the conflict occurring between the government of President Felipe Calderon and rival drug trafficking organizations; since the Calderon administration has taken office, you have around 20,000 homicides that have occurred, many of those from U.S. weapons

  • Australia looks at facial recognition for law enforcement

    Police in Victoria, a southeast state in Australia, want to use facial recognition biometrics to assist its law enforcement personnel in apprehending wanted people; experts warn that the technology is not yet advanced enough to be used as evidence in court

  • Animetrics provides facial recognition systems to Massachusetts law enforcement

    BI2 Technologies awarded contract to implement statewide facial recognition system in Massachusetts to identify inmates, suspects and gang members; the facial recognition technology will come from new New Hampshire-based Animetrics; BI2 Technologies’ own iris biometric technologies are already being used by state and local law enforcement agencies in forty-seven states

  • Tougher requirements for Ontario private security guards

    The Ontario government has toughened the requirements for becoming a private security guard in the province; mere months ago, all it took was “a pulse and a pen” to qualify as a security guard in Ontario, as one expert put it; the criteria are more arduous now; changes were made in part to ensure the quality of guards in the end-of-June G8 and G20 summits to be held Huntsville and Toronto

  • New method manipulates particles for sensors, crime scene testing

    Researchers develop a new tool for medical diagnostics, testing food and water for contamination, and crime-scene forensics; the technique uses a combination of light and electric fields to position droplets and tiny particles, such as bacteria, viruses, and DNA, which are contained inside the drops

  • Agency wants data on enterprise cyber forensics system products

    TSA solicits information about commercially available computer security forensics technologies it could use for information technology security; TSA is interested in products that would give the agency the ability to scan, capture, identify, report, and resolve IT forensics matters

  • South African World Cup preparations called into question after 15 injured in stampede

    Worries about personal safety deterred soccer fans from going to South Africa, and only 223,000 of them have decided to brave the trip (the organizers of the 2010 World Cup hoped that about 1.2 to 1.5 million would come); stuck with hundreds of thousands of unsold tickets, FIFA distributed them for free to local fans to avoid the embarrassment of teams playing in empty stadiums; to save money on printing the free tickets, FIFA distributed Xerox copies of tickets — somehow missing the fact that this made it easy for fans to photocopy their own extra tickets; the first result was a stampede in a friendly, pre-tournament game; organizers are now worried about what will happen when the tournament begins this Friday

  • Handgun defense against a wall

    One of the most dangerous tasks law enforcement personnel faces is disarming a suspect armed with a handgun; officers must remember that action is faster than reaction, and should thus take the initiative — and maintain it; the first part of any handgun defense is a redirection of the muzzle; typically, this is accomplished by one of two ways: redirecting the handgun itself, or physically moving out of the line of fire while controlling the muzzle direction; Israeli Combat System (ICS) stipulates a combination of muzzle redirection and a body defense done simultaneously

  • South Africa says visitors to World Cup will be safe

    The World Cup tournament will not give South Africa the economic bounce it was hoping for; the organizers were hoping for between 1.2 and 1.5 million visitors, but only 250,000 foreign soccer fans decided to make the trip; at least, the organizers say, the visitors will be safe; South Africa leads the world in all categories of violent crime (the murder rate in the country is eight times higher than that of the United States), but South Africa has poured $180 million into World Cup security preparations, including $89 million on equipment such as helicopters, water cannons, patrol vehicles, and body armor

  • Chinese government forbids schools from charging security fees

    China has been witnessing an alarming — and painful — trend of deadly attacks on schools and kindergartens across the country; in five such attacks in the last two months, 17 children were killed and more than 50 wounded; schools began to install CCTVs and intrusion detectors and hire guards — but many told parents that they would have to pay for this additional security; the Chinese government has now banned the practice, and told schools to refund monies already paid

  • Carbon Motors’ revolutionary E7 police car already has 14,000 reservations

    Carbon Motors offers law enforcement what it describes as the first purpose-built police interceptor; the company says that it already has 14,000 orders for the new cruiser — even though the price for the car has not yet been set; the company says that with the help of more than 3,500 U.S. law enforcement professionals from all fifty States representing the local, state, and federal levels, it wrote the groundbreaking specifications for such a vehicle

  • Hi-tech, wireless policing works

    There are 640,000 people living in Baltimore, and the Baltimore Police Department has 3,000 officers to protect them; to make the officers more mobile and flexible, the department equipped them with BlackBerry smartphones; the department toughened the smartphones, added an extra battery, and built clever software that lets officers use the phones for everything they once could do only with a laptop or via a dispatcher

  • Visiting Colombian, Egyptian national soccer teams robbed in South Africa

    Criminals in South Africa do not wait for the World Cup tournament to begin to rob visiting soccer teams: last Monday, two hotel employees stole $3,000 from members of the Colombian national team; the Colombian team was staying at the five-star Hyde Park Southern Sun Hotel, in northern Johannesburg, ahead of a friendly game against the South African national team; the incident is reminiscent of a robbery last June: during the Confederations Cup, $2,400 was stolen from several players from the Egyptian soccer team at Johannesburg’s Wanderers Protea Hotel