Even as a landmark California bill meant to prevent police shootings passed its first committee Tuesday, the fault lines among Democrats began to emerge, suggesting the measure will likely change as it moves through the Legislature. How much, though, was not yet clear. After emotional, standing-room-only testimony from Californians whose...
Slaying Puts Focus on Ride-Hailing Safety, Fake Drivers
CHICAGO — Whenever Rachel Orden calls for an Uber, the 20-year-old Michigan State University sophomore immediately walks to the back of the vehicle to check the license plate number, then opens the door and waits for the driver to say her name before getting in. Even then, she devises a...
Becerra Won’t Release Misconduct Records Despite Court Ruling
SACRAMENTO — California's attorney general said Thursday that he won't release older records on state law enforcement agents' misconduct despite a recently released appeals court ruling that they are public documents. That's prompting criticism from the Democratic state senator who authored last year's police transparency law. It requires law enforcement...
California Court: Old Police Misconduct Records Are Public
SACRAMENTO — Law enforcement agencies in California must release police misconduct records even if the behavior occurred before a new transparency law took effect, a state court of appeals has ruled. The 1st District Court of Appeal's decision released Friday settles for now a debate over whether records created before...
Cash From NY, Feds Tests 100K Rape Kits, Leads to 1K Arrests
NEW YORK — Languishing evidence in over 100,000 sexual assault cases around the country has been sent for DNA testing with money from a New York prosecutor and federal authorities, spurring over 1,000 arrests and hundreds of convictions in three years, officials said Tuesday. It's estimated that another 155,000 or...
California AG Becerra Wants to Keep Police Crimes Hidden
SACRAMENTO — California's attorney general is demanding that a university journalism program return a state list that includes law enforcement officers convicted of crimes in the past decade, saying the information wasn't meant to be public and shouldn't have been given out by another agency. Attorney General Xavier Becerra's office...
Can Progressives Trust Xavier Becerra to Police the Police?
In his two years on the job, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has crafted an image as a progressive warrior, suing the Trump Administration dozens of times and delivering the Democrats’ Spanish-language rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union speech. But there’s one major area where the Democrat isn’t allied with...
Walters: Long Alliance of Democrats and Police Union Erodes
California’s crime rates soared in the 1970s and became a potent political issue that Republicans used, with great effect, against Democrats by accusing them of being soft on crime. More or less simultaneously, a Democratic Legislature and governor, Jerry Brown, enacted collective bargaining for California’s public employees. Those two seemingly...
Nationwide Wave of Bomb Threats Includes Fresno. 'Not Credible,' Police Say.
Authorities across the country said they were responding Thursday to bomb threats made to several locations, though some law enforcement officials were quick to say that these messages were not believed to be credible. Similar threats appeared to stretch from coast to coast, prompting investigations on colleges campuses in Washington...
Law Enforcement Faces Dilemma in Assessing Online Threats
BOISE, Idaho — Their anger is all over social media for the whole world to see, with rants about minorities, relationships gone bad or paranoid delusions about perceived slights. The perpetrators of mass shootings often provide a treasure trove of insight into their violent tendencies, but the information is not...