Month: August 2023

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – Charleston Police kicked off its leadership summit with the first lecture of a six-month-long education and training regime for leaders in local law enforcement.

The Leadership Summit program was a vision from former Chief Luther Reynolds to provide continued education and discussions for law enforcement in leadership roles.

Over the course of six months, captains and sergeants from across the state will attend lectures, do skills training, and each will do a capstone research project to graduate from the leadership summit. In total, they will spend 96 hours and dedicate two days a month to participating in the program…

Full story: Charleston Police launch leadership summit, talk community policing

New units designed to avoid violent and often deadly encounters lack both funding and institutional support…

Full story: ‘No Hose, No Gun’: Police Alternatives for Mental-Health Crises Fall Short – WSJ

Gun violence prevention research has experienced a small boom in the wake of mounting shooting deaths, expanded funding and burgeoning advocacy…

Full story: As research grows into how to stop gun violence, one city looks to science for help

It’s a fundamental principle of American life: People accused of wrongdoing have a chance to defend themselves. They’re innocent until proven guilty.

That is, unless they’re a child attending a public school.

An NBC News investigation into student discipline policies found that children’s ability to fend off deeply damaging punishments depends on where they live or where their parents send them to school…

Full story: School suspensions can destroy lives. Not all students are able to object.

Tennessee’s Republican-led Legislature is meeting in special session this week to consider a package of public safety proposals, including some stemming from a deadly shooting at a Nashville elementary school earlier this year.

Though the session is not expected to result in any new firearms restrictions, it nonetheless highlights the widely divergent response among states to a spate of mass shootings across the U.S.

More than half the states have enacted substantive new laws this year regarding gun policies or school safety measures — most often tightening firearm restrictions in Democratic-led states and loosening them in Republican-led ones. Some states also have pumped money into efforts to secure schools or to train teachers and staff how to respond in shootings…

Full story: Mass shootings spur divergent laws as states split between gun rights and control – ABC News

Still dominated by white males, New Jersey law enforcement agencies have made a little progress in diversifying their ranks to better mirror the racial and ethnic makeup of the communities they serve, according to new data from the state attorney general’s office.

At the end of 2022, non-Hispanic white people remained the vast majority among police officers — about 68% of all in agencies across the state, compared with 52% of New Jerseyans who are white.

The percentage of Black, Asian and Hispanic people in the ranks of law enforcement is smaller than their share of the state’s population. The greatest increase from 2021, according to an NJ Spotlight News analysis of the state’s police data recruitment dashboard, was in the ranks of Hispanic officers, whose number rose by almost 6%.

Many departments appeared to not be following several laws designed to increase diversity in state law enforcement and provide transparency about the race, ethnicity and gender of officers. The laws, signed in 2021, were enacted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer the year before.

Even greater disparity exists by gender…

Full story: New Jersey police departments remain dominated by white males | NJ Spotlight News

After nearly a decade of sometimes contentious discussions and negotiations, the Portland Police Bureau ends its tenure Monday as the nation’s largest municipal police agency without body-worn cameras.

About 150 officers will don the devices for a 60-day pilot program starting this week.

“This is huge and it’s long overdue,” said police spokesperson Lt. Nathan Sheppard. “It’s going to make it safer for officers. It’s going to make it safer for the public, because everybody’s going to know there is going to be an irrefutable account of what happened.”

Full story: A Pennsylvania court says state police can’t hide how it monitors social media | AP News

Sexual assault often goes unpunished when victims fail to fight back. But investigators, psychologists, and biologists all describe freezing as an involuntary response to trauma.

What is tonic immobility? It’s an extreme response to a threat that leaves victims literally paralyzed. They can’t move or speak. Tonic immobility is a survival strategy that has been identified across many classes of animals — insects, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals — and draws its evolutionary power from the fact that many predators seem hard-wired to lose interest in dead prey. It is usually triggered by the perception of inescapability or restraint, like the moment a prey finds itself in a predator’s jaws.

Humans have been shown to experience tonic immobility in the context of war and torture, natural disasters and life-threatening accidents, and studies suggest that it is common in sexual abuse. In the early 1970s, the American researchers Ann Burgess and Lynda Lyttle Holmstrom observed this behavior, what was soon termed “rape-induced paralysis,” in people at Boston City Hospital.

Full story: What People Misunderstand About Rape – The New York Times