Public Safety
Covering topics such as corrections, criminal justice, emergency management, gun control and police/fire/EMS.
It’s about governance and whether these systems can avoid reinforcing existing inequities. States, local governments and agencies need to move to embed fairness, transparency and accountability into every stage of AI use.
Congress should rewrite the ground rules to minimize nuisance lawsuits that can cost local taxpayers millions, while focusing civil courts on bad cops and blind-eye departments.
The city’s Department of Violence Prevention will receive $17 million across the next two years in an effort to combat steeply rising rates of homicides and violent crimes. But making significant changes will take time.
The good conduct system California recently implemented is mistakenly adding time to inmate firefighters’ sentences. Officials have fixed the malfunction and are working to recalculate the sentences.
Ridership on trains and buses has plunged, yet crime is on the rise. Transit advocates say now is the time to change how to handle fare evaders and illegal behavior. But will the riding population feel safer?
Officials recently announced a statewide program to provide municipal police departments with money for body cameras, but some cities already have purchased and maintained the technology for years.
Florida has one of nation’s most stringent building codes, and county rules require owners of older buildings to submit reports from licensed engineers or architects certifying a building’s safety after 40 years.
Amazon warehouse workers in Pennsylvania are twice as likely to have serious injuries than at other warehouses in the region. Last year, the state’s Amazon warehouses reported 7.2 serious incidents per every 200,000 hours worked.
Limestone County Sheriff Mike Blakely, who has been serving since 1983, will stand trial on five felony charges of using his position for personal gain, five felony counts of theft and one misdemeanor theft charge.
There are high-tech tools that allow inspectors to better analyze a building’s structural integrity, but neither Miami-Dade County nor Florida requires them. Some experts believe they should.
The South Carolina police department has been using the facial recognition software, Clearview AI, for more than a year. Law enforcement officials said that the department has ultimately decided not to use the service.
The gunshot detection technology, ShotSpotter, identified gunfire more than 15,000 times last year in St. Louis and St. Louis County. However, for the large majority of those instances, there were no shootings to investigate.
With 90 percent of the state’s law enforcement agencies using body cameras, the state patrol troopers remain outliers. The department cites cost as an impediment, while advocates say the state should mandate the tech.
The city has approved a two-year budget that will cut millions from the police department budget and reallocate the money to fund violence prevention programs and other social services.
The Board of Aldermen has introduced a bill that would require board approval of any new or expanded police and city surveillance programs. Police claim surveillance technology has helped combat crime.
While California has one of the highest vaccination rates in the nation, the rates for firefighters and police are often much lower. Are unvaccinated safety workers a public health risk?
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