• Will rising temperatures lead to rising crime rates?

    General Strain Theory has become one of the leading explanations for crime, and Emory University’s Professor Robert Agnew, has become its chief architect; he argues that rising temperatures will lead to more strains — increased temperatures, heat waves, natural disasters, serious threats to livelihood (farming, herding, fishing), forced migrations on a massive scale, and social conflicts arising as nations and groups compete for increasingly scarce food, fresh water, and fuel – and more strains invariably lead to rising crime rates

  • Study finds stray-bullet shootings frequently harm women and children

    Most people killed or wounded in stray-bullet shootings were unaware of events leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries, and nearly one-third of the victims were children and nearly half were female, according to a new nationwide study

  • Many criminals who used guns in a crime were not legally barred from possessing firearms

    Sixty percent of persons incarcerated for gun crimes in the thirteen U.S. states with the most lax standards for legal firearm ownership were not legally prohibited from possessing firearms when they committed the crime that led to their incarceration

  • ACLU-sponsored app keeps police accountable

    A new app from the ACLU of New Jersey allows people securely and discreetly to record and store interactions with police, as well as provide legal information about citizens’ rights when interacting with the police

  • Fort Hood incident report calls for sweeping changes in FBI’s approach

    A report of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting will recommend eighteen specific changes which will make the FBI more likely to detect such insider threats earlier; the report, written by William Webster, the former director of the FBI, will be on the desk of Robert Mueller, the current FBI director, next week; the report’s authors focused on the FBI and the agency’s more than a hundred Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) and how they handled and acted on counterterrorism intelligence before and after the shootings … and the FBI’s remedial measures in the aftermath of Fort Hood

  • The U.K. August 2011 riots could have been predicted

    Researchers studying urban violence have developed a new method which can help city authorities to assess the conditions where conflict could potentially tip into violence; Participatory Violence Appraisal (PVA), used in Kenya and Chile, could have helped to anticipate the tipping points that led to last summer’s riots in cities across the United Kingdom, the researchers say

  • NYPD AW119 fleet achieves 20,000 hour milestone

    The NYPD has four AW119 helicopters in service; the department’s first AW119 entered service in 2004; the NYPD has become the worldwide law enforcement fleet leader, having achieved more than 20,000 flying hours on the fleet

  • Supreme Court deals near-fatal blow to Arizona SB 1070; states’ immigration efforts now in question

    In a major victory for the Obama administration, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday struck down three of the four main provisions in Arizona’s tough SB 1070 immigration law, saying these provisions were pre-empted by federal law; the Court left in place the fourth provision – the one requiring Arizona local law enforcement during routine stops to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally – but in reading the provision very narrowly, the Court left its implementation open to legal challenges on grounds that it violates racial profiling prohibition and other laws; in any event, the administration moved quickly to make that remaining provision meaningless by pulling back on a program known as 287(g), which allows the federal government to deputize local officials to make immigration-based arrests; the move means that even if local police step up immigration checks, they will have to rely on federal officials to make the arrests

  • Turf wars: math model shows crimes cluster on borders between rival gangs

    A mathematical model that has been used for more than eighty years to determine the hunting range of animals in the wild holds promise for mapping the territories of street gangs; among other things, the research demonstrates that the most dangerous place to be in a neighborhood packed with gangs is not deep within the territory of a specific gang, as one might suppose, but on the border between two rival gangs

  • Immigration growth in Spain has not caused more crime

    Society tends to perceive an increase in the immigrant population with an increase in crime; according to a new study, however, it is not possible to infer this cause-effect relationship in the case of Spain

  • Gun shop which sold gun to Virginia Tech killer closes its doors

    Madison, Wisconsin-based online weapon dealer TGSCO, which gained notoriety after it was disclosed that it had sold guns to three individuals – including the Virginia Tech killer — who then went on to commit mass killings, closed its doors last month

  • News: Man bites dog

    A 22-year old man name Keith Glaspie, running away from police officers in Wilmington, North Carolina was chased and caught by well-trained, 2-year old police dog named Maxx; when Maxx would not let go of the Glaspie’s pants, preventing him from moving, Glaspie tore into Maxx’s ear with his teeth, severing the dog’s ear in two

  • Belief in hell associated with reduced crime

    A broad study, study following143,197 people in sixty-seven countries over twenty-six years, found that criminal activity is higher in societies in which people’s religious beliefs contain a strong punitive component than in places where religious beliefs are more benevolent; a country where many more people believe in heaven than in hell is likely to have a much higher crime rate than one where these beliefs are about equal

  • Robbing banks doesn’t pay: econometrics study

    The average takings per person per successful bank raid are a modest £12,706.60, equivalent to less than six months’ average wage in the United Kingdom; in the United States the average raid yields considerably less – just $4,330 per person per successful raid; if a robber carries out multiple raids to boost his sub-average income, probability says that after four raids he will be inside for some time and unable to earn at all

  • Why the perception persists that undocumented immigrants cause more crime

    Undocumented immigrants in the United States do not commit more crimes than native-born Americans, yet the perception persists that they do; researchers found that the belief that undocumented immigrants cause crime was due in part to the perceived population size of the immigrant community overall: if individuals perceive undocumented immigrants to be a larger proportion in the population, they are going to perceive undocumented immigrants as posing a higher level of criminal threat