By Aara Ramesh A year ago, last October, USA TODAY reported in a bombshell investigation that a foster father in Florida had been arrested in 2019 and had pleaded guilty to charges for rape, molestation, and producing and consuming child sexual abuse...
By a Biometrica staffer With the Covid-19 virus and vaccines having underscored the importance and strategic role played by objective scientific research, many, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, are saying it’s time for us...
By a Biometrica staffer In July, we wrote about how millions of elderly Americans become the victims of some kind of financial fraud or internet scam each year. And those numbers are not inclusive of the kind of abuse and neglect senior citizens...
By Aara Ramesh Lately, it seems like violent crime, missing persons cases, and murder have been dominating the news cycle. For instance, the disappearance and homicide of Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, and the subsequent hunt for her missing fiancé has captured the internet’s...
By a Biometrica staffer The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its Unified Crime Report for 2020 on Sept. 27, and it showed that the number of homicides increased by 30% from the previous year. There were more than 21,500 homicides reported, a height...
By Deepti Govind At Biometrica, one of our key areas of focus is missing persons. We've repeatedly published pieces on this tragic epidemic — from the intersection of internet vigilantism and missing persons of color, to federal government measures, to how the...
By a Biometrica staffer The U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has awarded almost $187 million to support state, local, and tribal public safety and community justice activities through the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), a component of the department’s Office of Justice Programs...
By a Biometrica staffer There's been a large increase in the number of sextortion complaints made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) warned at the start of this month. As of July 31, 2021,...
By a Biometrica staffer The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have observed the increased use of Conti ransomware in more than 400 attacks on U.S. and international organizations. In Conti attacks, malicious cyber actors...
By a Biometrica staffer Law enforcement officers, manufacturers, and sports shooters across the country are expressing worries over recent record gun sales leading to an ammunition shortage, with many saying that such a state of affairs could drag on for at least...
By a Biometrica staffer As of June 30, 2021, 155 federal, state, tribal, and local law enforcement officers (LEOs) died in the line of duty, according to preliminary data compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF). That's roughly a...
By a Biometrica staffer Evidence in the alleged murder of a federal security officer in Oakland was destroyed by four Northern California members affiliated with the far right boogaloo movement, authorities said on Sep. 20. Jessie Rush, Robert Blancas, Simon Ybarra and...
By a Biometrica staffer This year may have been the year of struggling to move past Covid-19, but it is also on track to the deadliest year for gun violence in the United States in decades. According to the Gun Violence Archive,...
By a Biometrica staffer Alex Murdaugh, a prominent South Carolina lawyer, is set to turn himself in to law enforcement today, Sept. 16, according to his lawyers. Murdaugh allegedly arranged for a former client to kill him so that his surviving son...
By a Biometrica staffer At an annual meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) on Sept. 13, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced the results of Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta’s review of the use of monitors in civil...
By a Biometrica staffer In 2018, there were 1.2 million emergency department visits for assault in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says on its website. Over 19,000 people died due to homicides, more than 14,000 of...
By Deepti Govind When one talks of a terror attack, people are most likely to conjure up images of a group of masked assailants, with some kind of weaponry, hijacking a plane. That’s the lasting effect that images and videos of the...
By a Biometrica staffer The latest report in the Cocaine Insights series, published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Europol takes a hard look at the trade in the illegal drug around the world, highlighting some of...
By Deepti Govind In the last two decades since 9/11, terror groups, mostly acting through either lone actors or small groups of around 2-3 people, have staged attacks just about anywhere and everywhere in the United States. Aviation, of course, is the...
By Aara Ramesh In and among the 2,996 people who died at the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001, were 343 firefighters and paramedics, 23 New York City police officers, and 37 Port Authority police officers. They were just a...
By a Biometrica staffer In the course of the Labor Day weekend, five people were killed and dozens wounded in a spate of gun violence, CBS Chicago reported. This takes the total number of shootings in Chicago to more than 2,300 in 2021....
By Deepti Govind "We know that shooters don't just stop after one shooting," ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) Special Agent Fred Milanowski told ABC 13 News in May. The first shooting is hard, the second one is a...
By a Biometrica staffer Healthcare workers in the U. S., hailed as heroes at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, have become — over the last several months — the targets of a disgruntled public. The hostility against workers administering Covid-19 vaccines...
By a Biometrica staffer In March, Biometrica did a round-up of some of the key crime, prison, and law enforcement bills with most support in the House in 2021 up to that point. Today, we pick a few crime-related bills in the...
By a Biometrica staffer Approximately 1,000 assaults occurred on federal officers during the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection, prosecutors recently said. A court filing highlighted that they had uploaded 2,900 videos from bodycams worn by police, with a total length of around 2,300...
By a Biometrica staffer The number of hate crime incidents reported in 2020 were the highest it's been in more than a decade, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) 2020 Hate Crime Statistics data, published on Monday, Aug. 30, showed, CBS News...
By Deepti Govind In July, the U.S. government reported that drug overdose deaths last year, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, soared nearly 30% to a record number of around 93,000. That's a massive spike from 2019's 72,000 drug overdose deaths,...
By a Biometrica staffer Winning the lottery is normally associated with excitement and happiness. And, let's be honest, it's something many of us have wished would happen to us and make us wealthier overnight. Yet, it's wise to not let that dream...
By a Biometrica staffer In 2019, 9.7 million people misused prescription pain relievers, 4.9 million people misused prescription stimulants, and 5.9 million people misused prescription tranquilizers or sedatives. A majority of those misused prescription drugs were obtained from family and friends, often...
By a Biometrica staffer Two weeks ago, Europol published its third annual report on Online Jihadist Propaganda. One of the key findings of that report was that 2020 was a critical moment in the evolution of Islamic State and Al Qaeda and...
By Deepti Govind In the late 1960s, a New York-based attorney named Bertram Hirsch was sent to North Dakota to assist with a custody dispute case on behalf of the Spirit Lake Tribe. At that point, Hirsch was employed by the Association...
By a Biometrica staffer Earlier this year, the Measures for Justice (MFJ) project released a comprehensive report that looked at data collection — or lack thereof — in the criminal justice system in 20 states across the country. What the organization found...
By a Biometrica staffer The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a warning in May asking the public to be wary of scammers looking to extort family members of missing persons who share details on social media. The goal of these missing...
By Deepti Govind Historically, animal cruelty was considered an isolated issue — one that didn't really harm the human population. As a result, perhaps, the process of recognizing animal cruelty as a serious violent offense in and of itself developed only slowly...
By a Biometrica staffer A move by the greyhound racing industry to have Florida's dog racing ban declared unconstitutional was rejected last week by a federal appeals court, Casino.org reported on Monday, Aug. 16. Once considered "the mecca of dog racing in...
By Deepti Govind Jesse James and his band of outlaws are probably not immediately associated with train heists, given banks were more their area of, er, expertise. Yet one of that outlaw's most infamous burglaries was of a moving train that he...
By a Biometrica staffer Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition, said it received 9,081 reports of hate incidents committed against the Asian Americans and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community since the Covid-19 pandemic began, i.e., between March 2020 and June 30, 2021. The...
By a Biometrica staffer In the first seven months of 2021, there were 44 law enforcement officers (LEOs) who were feloniously killed. That number is just two away from the 46 officers who were reported as being killed feloniously in all of...
By a Biometrica staffer Monthly operator revenue at sportsbooks across the country came in at $318 million in June, the highest nationwide win rate for this year, and only the fourth time that the number has clocked in higher than $300 million...
By Deepti Govind At the end of last month, a drug dealer called Chukwuemeka Okparaeke, whose online darknet avatar is "Fentmaster," was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He imported and trafficked fentanyl analogues and other synthetic opioids through the dark web,...
By Deepti Govind Just three weeks ago, the Department of Justice said a 53-year old Maryland resident, Jeffrey John White, was sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison for possessing thousands of files of child pornography. When the case was...
By a Biometrica staffer In a bid to improve the relationship between law enforcement and the community, and to help officers de-escalate tense but not necessarily criminal situations, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced on Tuesday, August 3, that the Alabama Law Enforcement...
By Deepti Govind It was just last Tuesday, July 28, that the House select committee formed to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol convened its first hearing. At that hearing, the entire nation heard the emotional testimony of four...
By a Biometrica staffer U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced its first Continued Presence (CP) resource guide on Friday, July 30, targeted at assisting federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies nationwide with their human trafficking investigations and prosecutions. The CP...
By a Biometrica staffer Two weeks ago, a Department of Transportation (DOT) Inspector General audit found that states fail too often when it comes to transmitting driver electronic conviction notifications in a timely manner to federal regulators, Transport Topics reported. What does...
By a Biometrica staffer On Wednesday, July 21, a legislator in Wisconsin proposed what's known as "Kayleigh's Law" in the state legislature to help protect certain sexual assault victims from their attackers. The proposed bill would allow those who have been victims...
By a Biometrica staffer In 2019, lower percentages of students aged 12-18 reported any kind of criminal victimization during the previous six months, compared with 2009, and that included theft and non-fatal violent victimization, a report published by the National Center for...
By a Biometrica staffer The Covid-19 pandemic turned the whole world upside down in a manner of speaking, but for some sections of global society, the impact was darker and more pronounced. Last Tuesday, we gave you a brief overview of the...
By a Biometrica staffer On Wednesday, July 14, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Ron Wyden unveiled a draft of their bill to legalize marijuana at the federal level. The proposal seeks to remove the drug from the Controlled...
By Aara Ramesh With the world slowly beginning its journey back to some semblance of normal, after a trying 18 months, climate change is jostling its way back into the limelight. Debates have recently been spurred by the two-front war America was...