Tag: crime

Nearly Half of Murders Now Go Unsolved in America, The Lowest Clearance Rate on Record

Welcome to the New America™.

From CBS News, “A ‘coin flip’: Nearly half of U.S. murders go unsolved as cases rise”:

Across a nation that is already in the grips of a rise in violent crime, murders are going unsolved at a historic pace, a CBS News investigation has found. A review of FBI statistics shows that the murder clearance rate — the share of cases each year that are solved, meaning police make an arrest or close the case due to other reasons — has fallen to its lowest point in more than half a century.

“It’s a 50-50 coin flip,” says Thomas Hargrove, who runs the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved murders nationwide. “It’s never been this bad. During the last seven months of 2020, most murders went unsolved. That’s never happened before in America.”

Police are far less likely to solve a murder when the victim is Black or Hispanic, according to CBS News’ analysis. In 2020, the murders of White victims were about 30% more likely to be solved than in cases with Hispanic victims, and about 50% more than when the victims were Black, the data show.

In dozens of interviews across the country, police and criminal justice experts have offered a range of explanations for these trends.

They’ve got to find some way to blame white people.

Check out the roundabout way they addressed the real issue: snitches get stitches.

Some factors are evident when visiting communities such as Jackson, Mississippi, which has suffered from one of the nation’s highest murder rates.

In that city of about 160,000 people, the police department responded to 153 murders in the past year but has just eight homicide detectives to work that caseload. FBI guidelines suggest homicide detectives should be covering no more than five cases at a time.

Police Chief James Davis said his department needs more of everything to keep up with the violence.

“The whole system is backlogged,” Davis said. “I could use more police officers. I could use more homicide detectives, but if the state is backed up, the court is backed up, we will still have the same problem by developing these cases that we’re already doing.”

Police are also contending with a breakdown in trust between their officers and the communities they serve, a result of decades of tensions that spilled over during high-profile cases of police misconduct in recent years.

That has made it harder for police to receive tips or obtain help from witnesses, said Danielle Outlaw, the commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department. Outlaw told CBS News there is a history of “systemic inequities that contribute to the mistrust” in many communities most affected by crime.

Gee, I wonder what could have caused this breakdown in trust?

Was there some sort of “Movement” in 2020 that came to a head which said police are all evil white racists who are oppressing black people for no reason whatsoever other than the color of their skin?

Did police and the FBI decide to take a knee and blame white people for all of society’s ills rather than address our serious “inner city” crime problem?

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Is THIS where NYPD’s subway resources are going, Mayor Eric? Outrage as beloved busker with his dancing toy cats is taken down by six cops while serious crime soars and terrified commuters REFUSE to take train

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he was stunned by how bad Big Apple subway riders had it until he rode the subway himself last week and realized how poorly cops were being used to crack down on crime underground.

As subway crime continues to spike – rising nearly 40 percent from the first half of last year – Adams, in an exclusive interview with the New York Post, said he patrolled the transit system himself late at night for three hours and didn’t care for what he saw. 

‘Let me tell you something: When I started looking into this, I was shocked at how bad this place is,’ Adams told the Post.

Days before the mayor touted his awakening on the hazards of subway travel, a video emerged of at least six NYPD officers arresting busker John Ajilo, a saxophone player with the catch phrase ‘Dancing is Happiness.’

‘I was shut down, handcuffed and taken to the police station for performing in the same spot 34th Herald Square I have been performing [in] on and off for about five years,’ he said on his GoFundMe page, which has already collected over $30,000. 

Mayor Adams said he first knew he had to do something about subway crime about three weeks in office.

‘It was probably, the third — third or fourth week in January. I spent a lot of time in the office,’ he said.  ‘And I started peeling back layers and what it started to unveil to me is how we just had this good shell, but underneath — it’s bad.’

The New York City subway is run by the New York City Transit Authority, which falls under the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority, controlled by the chairman, Janno Lieber, who was appointed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and confirmed by the state Senate in January.

The mayor appoints several members of the MTA board, but has little control over the operation and maintenance of the system.

Ridership on the subway is just under 60 percent of what it was pre-pandemic, with roughly 3.4 million daily commuters using the system.

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Woman committed over Slender Man stabbing seeks her release

The second of two Wisconsin women who were sent to a state mental health facility after a 2014 stabbing attack on a sixth-grade classmate that they claimed was to appease the horror character Slender Man is petitioning for her release.

Morgan Geyser, 20, asked Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren on June 14 to order her release as he did last year for her co-defendant, Anissa Weier, who spent nearly four years at a mental health facility in Oshkosh.

During a hearing Thursday, Bohren appointed three doctors to evaluate Geyser’s mental state and to submit their reports by Aug. 26. Prosecutors and defense attorneys will return to court on Sept. 12 to schedule another hearing to review the reports.

According to prosecutors, Geyser and Weier lured Payton Leutner to a Waukesha park following a sleepover in May 2014, and Geyser repeatedly stabbed Leutner while Weier urged her on. All three girls were 12 at the time.

Geyser and Weier left Leutner for dead, but she managed to crawl out of the woods in the park and was discovered by a passing bicyclist.

She suffered 19 stab wounds and barely survived, according to medical staff who treated her. Police found Weier and Geyser later that day walking on Interstate 94 in Waukesha. They said they were traveling to Slender Man’s mansion in northern Wisconsin and attacked Leutner because they thought it would make them Slender Man’s servants and prevent him from killing their families.

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Disney World employee among 12 alleged sexual predators busted in undercover operation

A Disney World employee was among 12 men nabbed by Florida law enforcement for allegedly soliciting children for sex online, officials said.

The suspects, between the ages of 20 and 67, are facing a total of 49 felony charges following a two-week-long undercover investigation dubbed “Operation Child Protector II,” the Polk County Sheriff’s Office announced Friday. 

Among those arrested is 30-year-old Zachary Hudson, who was employed as a bus driver at Disney World, cops said.

Between June 4 and 5, Hudson allegedly exchanged online messages with an undercover detective posing as a 15-year-old girl.

The detective asked Hudson if he had a problem with her only being 15, to which he replied as long as “my being older doesn’t bother you,” according to authorities. He later reportedly told her “age is just a number.”

The conversation moved to text messaging, where police say Hudson described the sexual acts he desired to do to her. He also sent a nude photo to the girl, cops said. 

“What would an operation be — either a pornography investigation or predator operation or human trafficking operation — without a Disney employee? We always have a Disney employee,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told WKMG-TV.

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Wickr, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, has a child sex abuse problem — and little is being done to stop it

Wickr Me, an encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, has become a go-to destination for people to exchange images of child sexual abuse, according to court documents, online communities, law enforcement and anti-exploitation activists.

It’s not the only tech platform that needs to crack down on such illegal content, according to data gathered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. But Amazon is doing comparatively little to proactively address the problem, experts and law enforcement officials say, attracting people who want to trade such material because there is less risk of detection than in the brighter corners of the internet.

NBC News reviewed court documents from 72 state and federal child sexual abuse or child pornography prosecutions where the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it’s commonly known) from the last five years in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, using a combination of private and public legal and news databases and search engines. Nearly every prosecution reviewed has resulted in a conviction aside from those still being adjudicated. Almost none of the criminal complaints reviewed note cooperation from Wickr itself at the time of filing, aside from limited instances where Wickr was legally compelled to provide information via a search warrant. Over 25 percent of the prosecutions stemmed from undercover operations conducted by law enforcement on Wickr and other tech platforms. 

These court cases only represent a small fraction of the problem, according to two law enforcement officers involved in investigating child exploitation cases, two experts studying child exploitation and two people who have seen firsthand how individuals frequently use Wickr and other platforms for criminal transactions on the dark web. They point to direct knowledge of child exploitation investigations and sting operations, interviews with victims and perpetrators of abuse, and interactions with individuals soliciting child sexual abuse material as evidence that Wickr is being used by many people who exploit children.  

Posts linking Wickr and child sexual abuse material are also littered across the internet. On social media platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter, NBC News found dozens of forums, accounts and blogs where hundreds of posts have been made soliciting minors, those who have access to them, or those interested in trading child sexual abuse material alongside Wickr screen names. No child sexual abuse imagery was viewed in the course of reporting this article.

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Soros Prosecutors Run Half of America’s Largest Jurisdictions

George Soros spent more than $40 million in the past decade to elect scores of liberal prosecutors in half of America’s largest jurisdictions, many of which are now roiled by crime.

The Democratic megadonor has backed 75 so-called justice reform prosecutors through direct contributions, PACs, and other third-party entities, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund revealed in a June report. Though many had little prosecutorial experience when elected, they represent 72 million Americans in some of the nation’s most populous municipalities. Ten Soros prosecutors, including Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.) and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon (D.), received $13 million in just the last four years, going on to win races where they had vastly outraised their competition—sometimes by as much as 90 percent. In each race, Soros was the single greatest donor to the campaign.

“Our study shows for the first time, Soros’s funding and installation of these district attorneys is fundamentally dismantling the criminal justice system as we know it,” Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund president Jason Johnson told the Washington Free Beacon.

The report discloses the power progressive criminal prosecutors wield in the American justice system—and the potential effects of that influence on crime. The FBI in 2020 reported its highest single-year increase in homicides—a 30 percent jump from the previous year. A year later, 12 cities, including Krasner’s Philadelphia and Soros-backed district attorney José Garza’s Austin, Texas, broke their all-time homicide records. According to the report, more than 40 percent of homicides and a third of all violent and property crimes in 2021 occurred in jurisdictions run by Soros prosecutors.

From cities like Seattle and Los Angeles, to wealthy suburbs near Washington, D.C., to provincial counties in Mississippi and Wisconsin, the prosecutors have radically overhauled bail laws and pursued lightened sentencing in an effort to reduce incarceration. Soros began his quiet effort to remake America’s criminal justice system in 2014, donating $50 million to the ACLU for justice reform activism. He followed up in 2016 by funneling more than $3 million into seven local campaigns, including to Cook County district attorney Kim Foxx (D.), the controversial Chicago prosecutor known for dropping charges against Jussie Smollett, who committed a hate crime hoax.

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Florida human remains from 1974 ID’d as missing teen, linked to serial killer

Human remains of a teen girl discovered in Florida almost 50 years ago were finally identified — and possibly linked to a serial killer, according to authorities.

Susan Poole, 15, who was reported missing in 1972, was connected to skeletal remains found in 1974, but not matched to DNA until recently, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Detective William Springer said during a press conference Thursday.

“She was tied up in the mangroves with wire to a tree,” Springer said. “She was skeletal remains, totally nothing left of her except bones.”

The case turned cold after authorities couldn’t identify the body found in north Palm Beach and still turned up nothing in 2015 when her DNA was submitted to a national missing persons database, he said.

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