Author: Christopher Marier

San Francisco voters showed strong support for a pair of controversial public safety ballot measure that expand police powers and compel treatment for adult welfare recipients who use illegal drugs, two efforts Mayor London Breed said would crack down on crime and the city’s drug crisis. Proposition E grants police greater leeway to pursue suspects…

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced plans Wednesday to send the National Guard to the New York City subway system to help police search passengers’ bags for weapons, following a series of high-profile crimes on city trains. Hochul, a Democrat, said she will deploy 750 members of the National Guard to the subways to assist…

Legislators in a handful of states are offering bills to address the rise in the misuse of xylazine, a cheap animal sedative not intended for human consumption. Xylazine, or “tranq,” can induce blackouts and cause lesions that sometimes result in severe infections or amputations, and it can even lead to death. The opioid overdose-reversal drug…

An initiative amending Washington state’s controversial police pursuit law passed on Monday. Initiative 2113 will amend the state’s controversial police pursuit law by restoring the authority of a police officer to engage in a pursuit when there is reasonable suspicion a person has violated the law. In 2021, state lawmakers passed legislation that increased the…

Last September California became the first state to levy an excise tax on firearms and ammunition, in the amount of 11 percent, when Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. Since then, lawmakers in more than a half-dozen other states have introduced similar bills to tax the gun industry to support hospitals, violence intervention…

Amid a nationwide spike in killings, a new initiative to tackle cold cases is taking off in Florida. State Attorney General Ashley Moody on Thursday announced a new statewide investigative unit that is tasked with solving cold cases. They are the most “difficult-to-solve” cases, which take “the most time intensive and investigative efforts,” Moody said…

Medical responders across the U.S. are rethinking how they treat people in police custody after a jury last December handed down a rare decision: It convicted two Colorado paramedics for their roles in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain following an overdose of a powerful sedative. McClain, a 23-year-old Black massage therapist, was forcibly detained…

The breakthrough relied on a little-known quirk of push alerts, a basic staple of modern phones: Those tokens can be used to identify users and are stored on servers run by Apple and Google, which can hand them over at law enforcement’s request. But the investigative technique has raised alarms from privacy advocates, who worry…

When every second counts, you rely on the police to be there. However, staffing shortages and burnout at agencies could put that help in jeopardy. Action News Jax Investigates asked each of our local departments how many positions they’re budgeted for and how many are open. About half have a vacancy rate of around 5%,…

Thanks to a growing network of license plate reader cameras in the metro area, investigators were able to gather evidence against a suspected bank robber accused of using a stolen getaway vehicle that didn’t have a license plate. The advancing license plate reader technology, which uses artificial intelligence, is proving helpful for local law enforcement…