The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) is the office of the U.S. Department of Justice that "advances the practice of community policing in America's state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies." COPS was created in 1994, and since then it has worked to provide technical and practical assistance to thousands of law enforcement partners across the country. First-time...

The FBI this week released their annual report on United States' crime levels (the 1998 report is discussed in the November 5, 1999 Scout Report). Data in the report are compiled from approximately 17,000 law enforcement agencies as part of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. According to this year's report, the Crime Index total, which indicates serious crime volume, decreased 0.2...

The US Environmental Protection Agency has recently launched Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO). ECHO retrieves environmental records for approximately 800,000 regulated facilities nationwide. These data are freely accessible under the Freedom of Information Act, but have not been available online until recently. Searching by location yields a list of facilities and businesses in the...

When President Obama created the Task Force on 21st Century Policing in December of 2014, he gave the law enforcement representatives, criminologists, community leaders, and others working on the report three months to "examine, among other issues, how to strengthen public trust and foster strong relationships between local law enforcement and the communities that they protect, while also...

Published this month by the Department of Justice, this report assesses the results of the "weed and seed" approach to crime prevention, monitored for the last eight years at eight selected area sites in the U.S.. "Weeding" is defined as "concentrated and enhanced law enforcement efforts to identify, arrest, and prosecute" criminals, especially violent offenders and drug traffickers. The cited...

Prepared by Patrick A. Langan and David J. Levin of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this 16-page report examines the rate of recidivism among a cohort of 272,111 former inmates for three years after their release in 1994. This particular cohort represents two-thirds of all prisoners released in the United States that year. The data analyzed in this report reveals that released prisoners with the...

The US Department of Justice released this document in February 2003 about the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in law enforcement. "GIS is an application that links database software to graphics software to create visual images of various types of data in map format." The report outlines the applications of such systems in police cars and at victim assistance facilities, providing...

Last week, the fires of Waco reignited in Washington as the Attorney General, in an extraordinary action, ordered US Marshals to FBI headquarters to seize documents and materials relating to the government's siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993. Recent discoveries have indicated more active, and possibly illegal, involvement on the part of the US Military, and there is clear...