Tag: crime

Goodbye Jury Trials, Hello Digital ID: 10 “recommendations” from the Crime and Justice Commission

The Times Crime and Justice Commission was established last year, with its mission statement being to…

consider the future of policing and the criminal justice system, in the light of the knife crime crisis, a shoplifting epidemic, the growing threat of cybercrime, concerns about the culture of the police, court backlogs, problems with legal aid and overflowing prisons.

And today is that long-promised glorious golden day where they reveal their findings. The white smoke has gone up and we get to witness the result of their long hours of toil.

How are we going to fix everything?

Let’s take a look at the complete list, with some helpful annotations:

1. Introduce a universal digital ID system to drive down fraud, tackle illegal immigration and reduce identity theft;

Digital ID for everybody! It’s going to solve every problem! We’ve talked this to death, it was always going to be in here.

2. Target persistent offenders and crime hotspots using data to clamp down on shoplifting, robbery and antisocial behaviour;

That’s about surveillance. “Data” means your private data which they will get from social media companies.

3. Roll out live facial recognition and other artificial intelligence tools to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of the police;

Again, FRT was always going to feature. I’m not sure what “other artificial intelligence tools” means, but the vagueness is likely the point. “Efficiency” is the word doing the heavy-lifting in that sentence, intended to capture the pro-MAGA, pro-Musk UK crowd.

4. Create a licence to practise for the police, with revalidation every five years to improve culture and enhance professionalism;

That’s just throwing something out for the “other side”. So far it’s all just more powers for the police and courts, this adds some faux accountability framework into the mix to make it look fair.

5. Set up victim care hubs backed by a unified digital case file to create a seamless source of information and advice;

Same as above, with some extra seasoning for the digital identity sales pitch thrown in.

6. Introduce a new intermediate court with a judge and two magistrates to speed up justice and reduce court delays;

This is about replacing trial by jury, and that’s all it’s about. It’s something they’ve been wanting to do for years and keep making excuses to try.

7. Move to a “common sense” approach to sentencing with greater transparency about jail time, incentives for rehabilitation and expanded use of house arrest;

Not sure what this means in real terms, but any use “common sense” in this kind of document should always raise an eyebrow. As should the idea of “expanded use of house arrest”.

8. Give more autonomy and accountability to prison governors with a greater focus on rehabilitation and create a College of Prison and Probation Officers;

No idea what this means yet. Could be about more prison-based work programs (a la private prisons in the US), could just be fluff between important parts.

9. Restrict social media for under-16s to protect children from criminals and extreme violent or sexual content;

Again, very predictable. And, again, very dishonest. As we’ve said a thousand times, “restricting social media to under-16s” – in practical terms – means everyone on social media has to verify their age. So bye-bye online anonymity.

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Canadian pastor arrested for refusing to write apology to librarian who hosted ‘drag queen story hour’

A Canadian pastor has been arrested for refusing to apologize to a librarian who hosted a “drag queen story hour” for children.

In the afternoon of December 3, Calgary police arrested Christian pastor Derek Reimer for refusing to comply with a court order mandating that he pen a formal apology to a Calgary Public Library manager who he criticized for promoting a children’s “drag queen story hour” in 2023.

“Do you know why you’re arresting him? He won’t say sorry for his beliefs,” an independent Canadian journalist under the handle Dacey Media asked police during the arrest.

Present at the arrest was pro-freedom pastor Artur Pawlowski and Reimer’s son. Videos of the arrest quickly circulated on social media, with many Canadian activists condemning it as targeting Christian and pro-family values.

“Canadian pastor arrested for refusing COURT ORDERED LGBTQ APOLOGY,” former Ontario teacher turned pro-family advocate Matt Alexander wrote on X.

“Derek Reimer is taken away,” he continued. “He protested a drag queen story hour and has faced legal repercussions for years. Religious freedom is gone.”

“Welcome to Canada, where freedom of religion and expression are no more,” another Canadian wrote. “A pastor who would not apologize for opposing drag queen story hour has been arrested and could receive up to 2 years in prison. Pray for pastor Derek Reimer.”

At the time of his arrest, Reimer was serving a one-year house arrest, which he had previously appealed, as reported by LifeSiteNews. Last Wednesday, he was in court to go over his sentence conditions.

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Twin Brothers Charged with Plotting to Delete Government Databases and Steal Private Info

Two Virginia twin brothers were arrested for their alleged roles in destroying government databases hosted by a federal government contractor, the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, both 34 years old, were indicted in November for allegedly plotting to destroy databases used to store government information.

Muneeb was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records, two counts of computer fraud, theft of government records, and two counts of aggravated identity theft, while Sohaib was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, destroying records, and computer fraud.

Bloomberg News reported in May how the two former federal contractors had compromised data across many government agencies, which includes the Internet Revenue Service (IRS) and the General Services Administration (GSA).

The Akhter brothers also pled guilty in 2016 to federal charges of conspiracy regarding data breaches at the State Department and a cosmetics company. The two worked at Opexus, a federal contractor that helped process government records.

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Gavin Newsom Accused of Protecting Illegal Alien Charged with Killing 11-Year-Old Boy After California Refuses ICE Detainer

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), a proponent of California’s sanctuary state policy, is being accused of protecting an illegal alien accused of killing 11-year-old Aiden Antonio Torres De Paz the day before Thanksgiving.

As Breitbart News reported, illegal alien Hector Balderas-Aheelor of Mexico has been arrested by the Escondido Police Department and charged with felony hit-and-run causing death or injury.

Police allege that while Aiden Antonio Torres De Paz was playing in his front yard and went to retrieve his soccer ball after it rolled into the street, Balderas-Aheelor hit him and left him to die.

Aiden ultimately died from his injuries on Thanksgiving Day.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials are pleading with Newsom’s office to allow Escondido law enforcement to cooperate with ICE so that if Balderas-Aheelor is released from jail before he is convicted, he can be turned over to federal agents rather than going back into the community.

Newsom’s office denied refusing the ICE detainer on Balderas-Aheelor, claiming “California honors federal criminal warrants.”

“This is a complete lie,” Newsom’s office wrote in response to a clip that stated California had refused the ICE detainer. “As we have repeatedly said: The state coordinates with ICE on the deportation of convicted criminals. California honors federal criminal warrants. Nothing prohibits the federal government from doing its job in this case.”

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N.Y.: ‘Level 2’ sex offender with 16 prior arrests charged with assaulting 20-year-old NYU student

A 45-year-old homeless man with a lengthy history of sex crimes and violence against women was arrested on Tuesday after a brazen daylight assault on a 20-year-old New York University student just steps from the school’s Manhattan campus.

James Rizzo, 45, obtained his 17th arrest on Tuesday after attacking NYU sophomore student Amelia Lewis, 20.

According to the report, Rizzo quickly approached the NYU sophomore as she walked to class, slapped her forcefully on the buttocks, then struck her head, knocking her to the ground.

“I just really want to emphasize how not OK this is. I am a student at NYU. I should not be scared to be walking the street to go to my 9:30 a.m. class. These people are disgusting, and they should not be able to be walking around the street freely targeting girls and doing this. Cause I heard that this guy did this a month ago,” Lewis said on a TikTok video, where she further discussed the incident with her friends, family, and online followers.

Police say Rizzo is listed on New York’s Sex Offender Registry as a Level 2 offender, with two publicly accessible mugshots. According to the registry, he was convicted in March 2023 for forcing himself onto another person’s intimate parts during an assault that occurred the month before.

“The University is pleased that a suspect has been apprehended in the attack on one of its students that took place Monday morning on a Broadway sidewalk,” NYU spokesperson John Beckman exclaimed. “We take this incident very seriously. We are continuing to offer support to the student, and our Campus Safety Department assisted the victim and worked with the police investigating the incident.”

Following the most recent incident, Rizzo was later arrested and charged with persistent sexual abuse, forcible touching, and assault. 16 prior arrests of his similarly involved sex offenses or sexual misconduct, a law enforcement source reported.

Just days before the attack on the NYU student, Rizzo also purportedly shoved a 68-year-old woman as she walked along Fifth Avenue at around 8:45 p.m. on Thanksgiving. In what investigators described as an unprovoked assault, he reportedly struck her with his elbow so forcefully that she fell to the ground and suffered a deep cut.

He was also charged with burglary in connection with a separate incident in a nearby building, with some reports indicating multiple counts. New York authorities stated that they found Rizzo “in the act” as he was burglarizing an apartment near Washing Square Park on Tuesday. Police connected Rizzo to four other burglaries committed at the same location, all around 1 a.m. on Tuesday.

Victims of the theft include a 28-year-old man who woke up to find his suitcase and backpack gone. Another unnamed man, 29, had three laptops, headphones, and his backpack stolen. Lastly, a 58-year-old woman had $3,150 in items taken, police added.

“I just feel very lucky,” the unidentified woman attacked on Thanksgiving said on Wednesday. “[I’m] very lucky that he didn’t have a weapon or that it didn’t happen in the subway station and throw me on the tracks.”

In addition to the burglary charges, police have since announced that he faces assault counts for both attacks, as well as sexual abuse and forcible touching stemming from the assault on Lewis.

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Minnesota Immigrant Rapist Who Walked Free on “Sweetheart” Plea Deals Strikes Again — Rapes Third Victim After Dodging Jail for Kidnapping and Raping a Woman He Met Online

In a horrifying testament to the utter collapse of law and order under radical left-wing policies, a vicious repeat sex offender named Abdimahat Bille Mohamed, 28, of Minneapolis, has been charged with the brutal kidnapping and repeated rape of yet another terrified woman, just months after dodging real prison time for two prior rape convictions.

Prosecutors allege that Mohamed met the victim via Snapchat at her home in Mankato in September 2025, then drove her to a hotel in Bloomington.

Once the victim got in the vehicle, Mohamed reportedly told her, “You’re not going home,” according to Fox News.

The woman told investigators that Mohamed confiscated her phone and indicated she would not be allowed to leave while she was held captive and sexually assaulted over several days.

Nearly a week after the kidnapping, she escaped, jumping out of Mohamed’s car near Aldrich Avenue South in Minneapolis, at which point a resident called the police.

Authorities have charged Mohamed with kidnapping, felony third-degree criminal sexual conduct, and other related offenses. He is currently held in the county jail on a $300,000 bond.

Mohamed was previously convicted in two separate sexual-assault cases, but under plea deals, he avoided traditional prison time.

In a 2017 case, he was linked via DNA and other evidence to the kidnapping and rape of a 15-year-old girl who had communicated with him on Snapchat.

The court accepted a plea agreement: a 36-month prison sentence was stayed, he was given 364 days in a workhouse (credit for time served) and placed on probation for five years.

In a separate 2024 case, prosecutors said he had threatened a woman and her sister with a gun if she refused sex in his Minneapolis apartment.

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University of Delaware Student Arrested with Guns and Manifesto Referencing ‘Martyrdom’

On November 24, 2025, Wilmington, Delaware, resident and University of Delaware student Luqmaan Khan, 25,  was stopped by police during an after-hours property check in Canby Park West. Khan is a legal immigrant from Pakistan.

Court documents reveal that Khan was asked, and subsequently refused, to exit the vehicle. He was taken into custody and, during a search of his vehicle, officers found a .357 caliber Glock handgun loaded with 27 rounds.

The United States District Attorney’s Office, District of Delaware shares, “The handgun had been inserted into a microplastic conversion firearm brace kit.  Within the vehicle, officers also found all the following: (i) three more loaded, 27-round magazines (one in the storage slot of the conversion kit); (ii) a loaded Glock 9mm magazine; (iii) an armored ballistic plate; and (iv) a marble composition notebook.”

“In the handwritten notebook, Khan discussed additional weapons and firearms, how they could be used in an attack, and how law enforcement detection could be avoided once an attack was carried out. The notebook referenced a member of the University of Delaware’s Police Department by name, and included a layout of a building with entry and exit points under which the words ‘UD Police Station’ were printed.”

According to The Daily News, in addition to mentioning  a UDPD officer by name, investigators shared that the notebook included writings about “martyrdom.”

The following day, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and NCCPD executed a search warrant at Khan’s Wilmington residence and discovered a Glock 19 9mm handgun equipped with an illegal machinegun conversion device.

A .556 rifle with a scope and a red dot sight, eleven more extended magazines, hollow point rounds of ammunition, and a two-plate tactical vest equipped with a single ballistic plate were also recovered.

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Bombshell Report Reveals Shocking New Motive for DC National Guard Shooter

The shooting of two National Guard members in Washington last week has taken a jarring new turn, and the emerging theory about the gunman’s motive points to a far deeper national security threat.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghan national accused of killing Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and critically wounding Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, had served alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan before Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal. If you’ve been wondering why someone who once helped American troops would suddenly target National Guardsmen, you’re not the only one asking that question. Federal investigators now believe the Taliban may have blackmailed Lakanwal into carrying out the attack.

“U.S. intelligence is investigating information that a Taliban hit squad threatened to murder Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s family in Afghanistan unless he opened fire on American troops in the nation’s capital,” reports the Daily Beast. “But investigators are asking themselves why a man who was vetted by two administrations, and with no criminal record and no history of extremism, should drive across the country on an apparent suicide mission to shoot at heavily armed U.S. military personnel with a revolver.”

One line of inquiry they are seriously pursuing, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation, is that Lakanwal was made an offer he could not refuse. Either he accepted the mission, or his family in Afghanistan would be beaten, murdered, and possibly beheaded.

Lakanwal was a member of the Afghan Scorpion Forces working closely with the CIA as a GPS tracking specialist. He helped the U.S. military escape from Kabul in the shambolic retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021. Between August 14 and 30, more than 123,000 people were airlifted from Kabul Airport. The Afghan fighter joined one of the last flights because he served the United States and due to the danger he would be in if he were left behind.

About 700 Scorpion Forces members are understood to be detained in Afghanistan because they worked with America and its allies.

According to the report, the fallout from Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is still unfolding. In the five years since the pullout, a Taliban military unit known as Yarmouk 60 has been hunting down—and in many cases killing—Afghans who worked with the United States and its allies. Earlier this year, a member of the “Afghan Triples,” an elite special forces unit created and backed by the U.K. to fight the Taliban, escaped to Germany in hopes of bringing his family to safety. Yarmouk 60 responded by murdering his wife and father, along with four of his children, including two young girls who were beheaded.

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 Trans-Identified Male Who Strangled His Mother to Death Serving Sentence in Women’s Prison with Mother-Baby Unit

A trans-identified male serving a 22-year sentence for the violent murder of his own mother was quietly transferred into a minimum-security Illinois women’s prison with a mother-baby unit. John Wesley Finnegan began calling himself “Hannah Dagny” in 2014, approximately five years into his prison term, and was transferred to Decatur Correctional Center within the past five years.

Finnegan pleaded guilty but mentally ill to strangling his mother in 2008. After entering his plea to first-degree murder, the then 20-year-old Finnegan was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Prosecutors said 43-year-old Mary Finnegan was found dead at her home on Friday, July 24, 2008. Her other son, David, found her body, which had been stripped naked and wrapped in bed sheets. The murder had occurred sometime the day before when John Finnegan entered his mother’s room, found her sleeping, and “swiftly killed her emotionlessly,” according to Peoria County State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons. Lyons told the court he was quoting from a statement Finnegan gave to law enforcement.

Lyons noted that Finnegan claimed to have been in a “peculiar” incestuous sexual relationship with his mother that had been ongoing for about four years, and that Finnegan told investigators he had had intercourse with his mother the day before he killed her.

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ACLU Files Motion to Have Even More Male Convicts Moved to Women’s Prison After Securing Transfer of 4 Trans-Identified Male Killers and Sex Offenders

At least four trans-identified male convicts were transferred into an Illinois women’s prison after being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Now, the ACLU is requesting that the court issue an order prohibiting those men from being transferred to Menard Correctional Center, the state’s largest maximum security male facility, and demanding that an additional group of men in Menard be offered a transfer to a women’s prison.

For nearly a decade, the Illinois ACLU has acted as legal counsel on behalf of a group of male criminals who claim to be transgender, of whom at least four have been confirmed by Reduxx to be currently housed at Logan Correctional Center – a women’s facility.

In January 2018, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against Department of Corrections (DOC) officials on behalf of six male inmates requesting a transfer to a women’s prison. In legal documents, all of the men were identified by a feminine alias: Andre C. Patterson, or “Janiah Monroe”; Eric D. Padilla, or “Lydia Helena Vision”; Diego R. Melendez, or “Marilyn”; Jordan Kuykendall, or “Sora”; Fadell Reed, or “Sasha”; and Gregory Stamps, or “Ebony.”

The initial suit, Monroe v. Rauner, accused then-mayor Bruce Rauner and DOC Director John Baldwin of “cruel and unusual punishment,” an eighth amendment violation, for not providing the convicted criminals with feminizing hormones.

The complaint argues that “the IDOC systematically fails to provide necessary medical treatment for gender dysphoria… Among other common and medically necessary treatments, IDOC routinely fails to provide adequate hormone therapy and to accommodate social transition so that a prisoner can live consistently with his or her gender identity.”

It continues: “And while gender affirming [genital] surgery also is medically necessary for some patients with gender dysphoria, IDOC has adopted a policy that such surgery can be approved only in ‘extraordinary circumstances,’ which in practice means that IDOC never has approved any prisoner for surgical gender dysphoria treatment.”

The suit has been ongoing for the past eight years. Earlier this year, the ACLU filed a preliminary injunction seeking to prevent the DOC from ever transferring Padilla, Patterson, Kuykendall, Melendez, or Reed from being transferred to male prison Menard.

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