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As New Orleans officials deployed to protect thousands of revelers flocking to the French Quarter on New Year’s Eve, they parked a police SUV to block the entrance to Bourbon Street, a packed pedestrian thoroughfare long seen as vulnerable to a vehicular-ramming attack. The SUV left a large gap, allowing the driver of a pickup truck to turn onto Bourbon Street hours after midnight. It was not a momentary security lapse: At various times earlier that evening, the gap between the police SUV and the nearest structural obstacle was more than twice the width of the attacker’s truck, a Washington Post examination of visual evidence found. A short distance down the block, the truck drove over a hydraulic metal barrier that officials had planned to raise that night to prevent unauthorized vehicles from driving down Bourbon Street, according to a New Year’s Eve road-closure plan. The barrier was left down. Beyond that point, there were no anti-vehicle barricades or police vehicles blocking the path of the truck that night. The driver sped virtually unimpeded for almost 1,000 feet, plowing through a crowd of people until he struck a piece of construction equipment that happened to be there for a project unrelated to security. Fourteen people were killed and dozens injured. Police have acknowledged that the driver managed to bypass security safeguards, with one official saying they had a plan and yet “the terrorist defeated it.” The Post ’s block-by-block accounting of events on New Year’s Eve and into the next morning found major security lapses and shortcomings in the street-closure plan. Among the findings: The hydraulic metal barricade that was not raised was the only anti-vehicle barrier planned on Bourbon Street itself. “There were a number of ways to successfully protect this street from a ramming attack, and it appears that none of them were used,” security expert Don Aviv said. Aviv is chief executive of Interfor International, a company commissioned by the French Quarter Management District to study security measures in 2019. The FBI had warned New Orleans officials years earlier that Bourbon Street was vulnerable. The mayor at the time pushed to bolster public safety infrastructure after a deadly 2016 vehicle-ramming attack in Nice, France, that helped prompt cities around the world to rethink security. That year, officials announced a $40 million public safety project that included the installation of metal posts known as bollards that could slide on tracks into the middle of Bourbon Street to temporarily block vehicles at critical points near each cross street. Mardi Gras beads and other debris jammed the mechanisms, rendering the system unusable, officials said.

After two men brutally assaulted a security guard on a desolate train platform in a St. Louis suburb, transit police detective Matthew Shute struggled to identify the culprits. He studied grainy surveillance videos, canvassed homeless shelters and repeatedly called the victim of the attack, who said he remembered almost nothing because of a brain injury from the beating. Months later, Shute uploaded a still image from the blurry video of the incident to a facial recognition program, which uses artificial intelligence to scour mug shots of hundreds of thousands of people arrested in the St. Louis area. Despite the poor quality of the image, the software provided the names and photos of several people deemed to resemble one of the attackers, whose face was hooded by a winter coat and partially obscured by a surgical mask. Though the city’s facial recognition policy warns that the results of the technology are “nonscientific” and “should not be used as the sole basis for any decision,” Shute proceeded to build a case against one of the AI-generated results: Christopher Gatlin, a 29-year-old father of four who had no apparent ties to the crime scene nor a history of violent offenses. Arrested and jailed for a crime he says he didn’t commit, it would take Gatlin more than two years to clear his name. A Washington Post investigation into police use of facial recognition software found that law enforcement agencies across the nation are using the artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: to find and arrest suspects without other evidence. Most police departments are not required to report that they use facial recognition. The Post reviewed documents from 23 police departments where detailed records about facial recognition use are available and found that 15 departments spanning 12 states arrested suspects identified through AI matches without any independent evidence connecting them to the crime — in most cases contradicting internal policies requiring officers to corroborate all leads found through AI. Some law enforcement officers using the technology appeared to abandon traditional policing standards and treat software suggestions as facts. One police report referred to an uncorroborated AI result as a “100% match.” Another said police used the software to “immediately and unquestionably” identify a suspected thief. Gatlin is one of at least eight people wrongfully arrested in the U.S. after being identified through facial recognition. Six cases were previously reported in media outlets. Two wrongful arrests — Gatlin and Jason Vernau, a Miami resident — have not been previously reported. All of the cases were eventually dismissed. Police probably could have eliminated most of the people as suspects before their arrest through basic police work, such as checking alibis, comparing tattoos, or, in one case, following DNA and fingerprint evidence left at the scene. Researchers have found that people using AI tools can succumb to “automation bias,” a tendency to blindly trust decisions made by powerful software, ignorant to its risks and limitations. One 2012 study by a University College London neuroscientist found fingerprint examiners were influenced by the order in which a computer system showed them a list of potentially matching fingerprints.

Fewer than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults, and child sex abuse allegations in some cities result in a sex crime conviction. An NBC News investigation based on a review of thousands of documents from police departments, prosecutors and courts underscore what many advocates, experts and some law enforcement authorities have long said: The system routinely fails to get justice for victims. NBC News and 10 local NBC stations spent more than a year tracing offenses from crime to conviction and found that v iolent sex crimes have a lower arrest rate than most violent crimes, Black victims of sex crimes in Chicago are the least likely to see a conviction, and those accused of violent sex crimes were often able to secure plea deals that would keep them off the sex offender list. This happens even in California, which usually prohibits the practice. Tracing convictions is “really hard because it’s a combination of several different databases that are not available directly to the public,” said University of Kansas School of Law research Prof. Corey Yung. “Our system, from arrest for conviction to crimes, is not transparent. There’s no overarching data source like there are in other countries. It makes it incredibly difficult, in criminal law, to know what’s going on, from reported crimes all the way to convictions.” Law enforcement agencies use different metrics to track crime resolutions. The FBI uses a “clearance rate,” which counts cases resolved by conviction or closed due to other factors. Prosecutors track the number of people presented to them with enough evidence to put a case together. Police departments measure the percentage of people arrested for a particular crime. NBC News focused on the total number of violent sex crimes reported to an agency and the number of people found guilty of those specific crimes. Looking at how police departments measure it — by arrest rate — shows that resolutions to violent sex crimes trail other types of crime. Experts say the number of sex crimes reported to officials is an undercount of the crimes that occur. “A fraction of cases that get reported to police, a tiny fraction, end up resulting in any kind of sentence for the person accused,” said Northwestern University law Prof. Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan,

Special counsel Jack Smith, who indicted President-elect Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a report released that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial, had his 2024 election victory not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue. The Justice Department "view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Smith wrote. DOJ delivered the report, with the separate volume about the case accusing Trump of mishandling classified documents still confidential, to Congress just after midnight on Tuesday. The New York Times called it "an extraordinary rebuke of a president-elect, capping a legal saga that saw Trump "charged with crimes that struck at the heart of American democracy." Smith resigned as special counsel last week. In the report, Smith took Trump to task not only for his efforts to reverse the results of a fair election, but also for consistently encouraging “violence against his perceived opponents” throughout the chaotic weeks between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers. Smith blamed Trump for the attack on the Capitol, quoting from the evidence in several criminal cases of people charged with taking part in the riot who believed they were acting on Trump’s behalf. Smith discussed the trauma experienced by Capitol Police officers who were attacked during the riot, including “shell-shock” and the inability to move. One officer recalled rioters trying to beat up the police “with such ferocity” and wondering: “What are they going to do to somebody else that’s in here, that’s maybe a staff or a congressman or somebody with the press? How are — what are they going to do to them?.” Trump has vowed to pardon many Jan. 6 defendants, possibly including ones who assaulted police officers. Smith's team interviewed more than 250 people and obtained grand jury testimony from more than 55 witnesses. Smith cited Trump’s “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts and department employees, which required the office to engage in time-consuming litigation to protect witnesses from threats and harassment.”

A federal judge on Monday expressed skepticism about the Justice Department’s proposed consent decree requiring Louisville to make broad changes to its police force after findings of excessive force and civil rights abuses. At a hearing, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton repeatedly suggested that DOJ and city officials could reach an agreement without the court’s involvement that would be less time-consuming and financially onerous than one run under federal court supervision, reports the Washington Post. Beaton asked attorneys why the proposed consent agreement was submitted to the court last month. The timing could appear to be a rushed attempt to lock in the agreement ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, he said. Trump has pledged to reverse the Biden administration’s intervention into local and state police departments. Experts have said a legally binding consent decree could make it more difficult for Trump to change course. “You’re going to have a new boss in seven days. Why are we racing to do this?” Beaton asked Paul Killebrew of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “I’m really concerned about … racing to rubber-stamp a 240-page consent decree. We’re really in a difficult position now.” Beaton, whose approval would be required for the consent order to take effect, concluded the five-hour hearing without issuing a ruling, and it is unclear whether he will make a decision before Trump is sworn in. Trump appointed Beaton in 2020. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has conducted sweeping civil investigations into 12 local and state law enforcement agencies and released findings in nine of them, with three probes ongoing. Federal authorities have reached proposed consent agreements in Louisville and Minneapolis, but neither has been approved by a judge. DOJ and Louisville filed their proposed agreement with the court on Dec. 12 after a two-year federal investigation concluded in 2023 that the city’s police force had engaged in systemic civil rights abuses and excessive-force misconduct in the years leading up to the 2020 police killing of Breonna Taylor. The proposed agreement would mandate that the police pursue changes to use-of-force policies, officer training and supervision, the handling of search warrants, and officer wellness initiatives under the supervision of a federal monitor. Such arrangements in other cities have lasted 10 years and cost local jurisdictions millions of dollars annually, although the Louisville agreement stipulates a goal of reaching compliance within five years. The conservative Heritage Foundation filed an amicus brief opposing the consent order, arguing that the Trump administration is likely to oppose such federal intervention.

A Pennsylvania prison is testing a new approach that gives inmates more autonomy and encourages corrections staff to converse with those they oversee. The goals: make conditions in prison safer and better prepare incarcerated people to return to society. The project is inspired by Scandinavian prisons’ focus on rehabilitation. There are practical and cultural challenges to bringing a Scandinavian-inspired approach to the U.S. The model appears to have brought down violence at the Pennsylvania unit, Governing.com reports . Prisons are dangerous places, causing risks not only for prisoners but correctional staff. A few years ago, officials from a state prison in Chester, Pa., visited prisons and training academies in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In Norway, recidivism has fallen significantly since the 1980s, when the country shifted its approach from punishment to rehabilitation and reintegration. Three years ago, the State Correctional Institution in Chester opened a “ Little Scandinavia ” housing unit. The unit gives people incarcerated there more freedoms and responsibilities, a physical space redesigned to feel more like normal life and an environment that encourages respectful relationship-building among inmates and between prisoners and staff. Changes aimed to make the unit stop feeling like a highly institutionalized setting and more like a group house. Residents would get more freedoms and handle more of the tasks they’d need to do in daily life on the outside. sidents got a cell to themselves, rather than sharing. The unit was given a full kitchen where residents could cook their own meals and a washer-dryer for doing their own laundry. The team swapped out metal and plastic furniture for furniture made with wood and fabric and added sound-dampening panels, planters and other features to encourage incarcerated people to spend time in the public space and socialize. The goal was to prepare incarcerated people for life outside, reduce stress on everyone and create security through personal connections rather than tight containment. Staff are less likely to be attacked by incarcerated people who see them as a person, rather than as just an instrument of the larger carceral machine, says Jordan Hyatt, a criminologist at Drexel University who co-leads research studying the reform efforts at the Little Scandinavia unit.

Last summer, Carthage, Miss., police officer Blaine Musgrove approached Vivian Burks as she sat in her car reading the Bible. Musgrove smelled marijuana and a second officer demanded to search the vehicle. When Burks, a 65-year-old great-grandmother with no criminal record, tried to get back into her car, the officers grabbed her and ordered her to place her hands behind her back, body camera footage shows. When she did not immediately comply, Musgrove pressed his Taser into her back and shocked her, sending her to the ground in a heap. He then shocked her three more times as she twisted her hands to avoid being handcuffed and begged the officers to stop, repeatedly shouting, “I’m sick!” The officers called an ambulance and then left her moaning for help until the paramedics arrived, the New York Times and Mississippi Today report. In many places, the repeated shocking of Burks — who was not acting aggressively and was largely under the officers’ control — would be considered an improper and dangerous use of a Taser. In Mississippi, police agencies have their own rules about Taser use, and many departments have vague, outdated policies that allow officers to shock virtually anyone, for any behavior they see as threatening, with little fear of repercussions. Cases like Burks’s have occurred all over the state without raising alarms. Under national standards, officers are told to use Tasers only against people who are an imminent threat. To reduce the chance of causing injury or death, they are advised to avoid shocking people who are elderly or who have heart conditions and to avoid shocking anyone for more than 15 seconds. Tasers are designed to make it easy for departments to monitor when officers violate rules. Each device electronically logs when it is triggered and for how long, creating a digital trail that can be used to flag excessive use. Dozens of departments across Mississippi do not know if their officers use the weapons properly because they do not examine Taser logs, Several Mississippi agencies said they did not know they had access to the logs; at least six did not have the cable needed to extract data from a Taser, until The Times purchased a cable so departments could provide reporters with copies of the logs. Reporters analyzed 100,000 Taser log entries from 36 departments.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a 2013 Maryland law that requires a state license for anyone seeking to buy a handgun. Gun-rights groups challenged the law, claiming that it infringed on their Second Amendment rights to bear arms. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that the gun advocates were confusing a delay in getting guns that may result from the state license requirement with an infringement of constitutional rights, Maryland Matters reports. The Supreme Court let that ruling stand. Attorney General Anthony Brown called Monday’s decision “great news” for the state and “common-sense gun laws.” “This law helps prevent tragedies and keeps families safe, by keeping guns away from those who want to harm our communities,” Brown said. “Thoughts and prayers are not enough — Maryland’s Handgun Qualification Licensing Law is a key tool in our fight to end gun violence.” Mark Pennak of Maryland Shall Issue, one of the gun-rights groups that challenged the law, said there are other appeals of Second Amendment cases still pending before the high court, including one from Maryland . “We wait,” Pennak said. The state’s handgun qualification license law, known as HQL, was part of the Firearm Safety Act that state lawmakers passed in 2013 in response to a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were killed. The law requires a person who wishes to buy a handgun to apply for a license. The applicant must be a state resident and at least 21 years old, must submit fingerprints, undergo a background check, satisfy training requirements and pay a $50 application fee. A license should be issued within 30 days. The appeals court said it typically takes half that time and some licenses can be issued within days. In the majority opinion for the full court, which ruled 14-2 in favor of the law, Judge Barbara Milano Keenan wrote that “requirements such as background checks and training instruction, which necessarily occasion some delay, ordinarily will pass constitutional muster without requiring the government to justify the regulation.” Judge Julius Richardson wrote in dissent that the majority’s reading of the Second Amendment was “contrived” and that the majority could offer no support for its reasoning. Richardson wrote the majority should follow the Supreme Court’s framework in its 2022 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen case which required modern gun laws to be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

For three years, Jamariel Hobbs was confined to Georgia, unable to travel freely. A probation officer showed up at random times of night to test him for drugs. Hobbs, 29, was among almost 176,000 Georgia residents on probation, the nation's largest per capita population Under a new law, a court slashed what was supposed to be nine years of probation to three, the Associated Press reports. “Probation feels like a leash,” he said. “I have my future back.” Defendants often are put on probation for low-level crimes such as drug possession or nonviolent theft. Georgia refuses to cap sentences, as many other jurisdictions do. The practice of long sentences persisted for years despite research suggesting that the likelihood of people reoffending drops after three years on probation. Longer probation may do little to improve public safety. “You’re talking about folks who have often been through a lot of trauma and feel like they are constantly walking around with a weight on their shoulders, a cloud over their head, where the smallest little thing could completely derail all the work they’ve put in,” said Wade Askew of the Georgia Justice Project. People on probation must pay fees to help offset the cost of monitoring them, a particular burden for low-income people. In 2017, Georgia lawmakers passed a bill designed to reduce the number of people on probation by letting some off early. According to a study by the Urban Institute, the measure could have translated into roughly one-third of the men and women on felony probation being offered sentences with the opportunity for time off their probation after three years at most, providing they stayed out of trouble. Instead, just 213 sentences that included the possibility of an early end to probation actually finished ahead of schedule. , according to Georgia’s Department of Community Supervision. In 2021, the legislature passed another law outlining stricter guidelines to make the process more automatic. By last January, Georgia’s probationary population had fallen about 8% from 190,475 in 2021, echoing nationwide trends. At least 26,523 sentences have ended early since the bill passed, though many of those terminations could have been granted for other reasons.

Video footage of New York state corrections officers brutally beating an inmate last month was captured by a “fail-safe” feature on their body cameras that records even if an officer doesn’t activate the camera. Four of the officers involved in the beating of inmate Robert Brooks had their Axon Body 3 cameras powered on, but had not double-pushed a button to start recording. The cameras were rolling anyway. The cameras have a “video recall” function that continuously captures 30-minute clips of silent video. It appears likely the guards didn’t know the cameras had the function, reports Syracuse.com. An expert said he didn’t think the feature was well known among rank-and-file users of body cameras. “I think a lot of officers are going to be surprised, I think a lot of members of the public are going to be surprised that the cameras can do this,” said Ian Adams, a former police officer now on the University of South Carolina faculty. The video recall function can record up to 18 hours of video on a rolling basis — the oldest half-hour clip is deleted as a new one is saved. It is not clear whether prosecutors have been able to recover what could be up to 18 hours of video on each camera. New York Attorney General Letitia James released all the footage her office had obtained — 30 minutes from each of the four officers’ body cameras. The videos show multiple corrections officers repeatedly punching and kicking Brooks in the groin, abdomen, face and back on Dec. 9 in the infirmary at Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County. Brooks was left bloodied and died the next day at a hospital. Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, special prosecutor in the case, will not comment until a grand jury has acted on possible charges. The video recall function is a relatively new addition to Axon body cameras, Adams said . He isn’t aware of another high-profile case that has depended on footage obtained through the recall function. “It was intended that if there is a critical incident and the recording wasn’t captured, we still have a sort of fail-safe backup that investigators can get to that footage,” he said. The function is off by default, and must be manually turned by camera administrators. Spokesman Thomas Mailey of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said the department is also working with Axon to modify the current fleet of 9,000 body cameras to record both audio and video through the video recall function.

After a judge found Maine guilty of failing to provide defense lawyers to people who can’t afford it, them, American Civil Liberties Union of Maine is arguing that people should be released from jail while they wait for their state-appointed attorney. The Kennebec County Superior Court ruled that Maine had violated people’s Sixth Amendment rights by failing to provide indigent legal representation. In a follow up hearing this month, the court will hear from the state and the ACLU on how best to remedy the constitutional violation, reports the Maine Morning Star. The ACLU’s proposed solutions include release from jail for those whose right to an attorney can’t be met, and a court mandate that the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services, which oversees public defenders, ensure they provide continuous representation starting at the defendant’s initial appearance and throughout the criminal process. “We’re hoping that the court will craft a remedy that recognizes that people are innocent until proven guilty, and should not be locked up until the government can provide them with a lawyer,” said the ACLU's Zach Heiden. The ACLU sued the state over lack of indigent counsel in 2022. Since then, the lawsuit was granted class action status, and the number of people charged with a crime waiting for state-appointed attorneys has steadily increased from 106 in November 2023 to 930 this month. Of those at least 115 are being held in custody while they wait for state-appointed legal representation. After 45 days if no state-appointed attorney is provided, the ACLU asked the court to consider dismissing all charges, with the understanding that they could be filed again once an attorney is assigned.  While releasing people charged with a crime could be a public safety concern, Heiden said there are ways courts can put conditions on release. “The government has not shown that the release of non-convicted indigent defendants would threaten community safety so drastically as to justify continuing to deny petitioners their constitutional rights,” the ACLU said. “To the extent that public safety clashes with federal constitutional rights, the latter must prevail.”