Category: News

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…

Monday night, Charlotte City Council agreed to appropriate $1,271,000 to a new Civilian Crash Investigation Program. The funds are coming from the Municipal Debt Service Fund, and will be moved to the Capital Equipment Fund to purchase vehicles for the program. The idea behind the program is to have civilians addressing car crashes to ease…

The Drug Enforcement Administration, as part of its efforts to combat the fentanyl crisis, has identified a way to hit drug traffickers in a practical way: by going after high speed pill press machines. DEA Deputy Assistant Administrator Scott Oulton said these machines are capable of pumping out thousands of illegal pills an hour. Hundreds…

It sounds like a fanciful script for a Hollywood thriller: foreign government agents plotting assassinations in the United States. To be sure, there have been suspected state-sponsored killings in the past 20 years that have grabbed international headlines. Former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning with a radioactive isotope in London in 2006 is one example;…