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On summer nights a year apart, two women left bars in downtown Austin, Tex., and were raped. One knew her rapist. He was an acquaintance who saw she was intoxicated and offered her a ride on the handlebars of his bicycle before sexually assaulting her as she drifted in and out of consciousness. The other did not. She told police she was attacked by strangers who pinned down her arms and legs while one of them raped her.   Neither investigation led to an arrest.  Years later police received a significant lead: DNA found on one woman’s jeans matched DNA from a swab of the other’s neck. It suggested that the two women had been attacked by the same man – a serial rapist. This is the kind of breakthrough officials hoped for when they pledged to test sexual assault evidence that had been neglected for years in law enforcement storage rooms, USA Today reports. Since 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice has given out nearly $350 million in grants to 90 local and state agencies through the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. Officials promised the money would put rapists behind bars and give victims long-awaited answers. A USA Today investigation found that many cases hit the same roadblocks they did when victims first came forward: kits left untested , haphazard or cursory reviews by police and prosecutors, and a reluctance to inform people about what happened to evidence collected from their own bodies. DOJ says the program has led to 100,000 kits being tested and 1,500 convictions so far – nearly half from two agencies, while others have seen meager results.  In Charlotte, N C., a backlog of about 2,300 kits has netted 14 convictions. In Mobile, Ala., a backlog of about 1,100 kits has led to convictions of eight men.  In Austin, officials faced a backlog of more than 4,400 kits. They have secured just one conviction. Noël Busch-Armendariz, a University of Texas at Austin professor and researcher who has interviewed women with backlogged kits, said it is disheartening that victims – yet again – have been overlooked. “Survivors of sexual assault mostly feel betrayed by the silence around what happened to them,” she said. Angela Williamson, who has led the federal program since its inception, acknowledged that local success will vary based on the level of commitment. Williamson said the program has contributed to a “critical cultural shift” around the importance of testing sexual assault evidence. She said it is too early to gauge the program’s success by the number of rapists who have been convicted because it can take years for cases to move from testing to potential conviction. The program's data tracking is so poor that in some places, the federal government has no idea how many rapists were convicted – and likely never will.

“President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” ABC News’s David Muir told Trump in the recent presidential debate. Whether or not violent crime is “coming down” depends on when you start measuring it. Crime is down from last year, and down significantly from the bad old days of the 1990s, but it is only now returning to pre-pandemic levels . The “coming down” measure also hinges on how crime is reported, and that’s not nearly so scientific a matter as the public might believe, writes the National Review's Jim Geraghty in the Washington Post. During thel debate with Vice President Harris , Trump argued that “the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.” Trump was partially correct; there’s no reason to think the FBI statistics are deliberately fraudulent, but large gaps and inconsistencies in the collection of data mean the numbers aren’t offering a complete picture. In 2021, Miami-Dade, New York City and Los Angeles did not submit their data under a new reporting system. The stumbling transition meant big variations in the number of law enforcement agencies that participate year by year. In 2020, 16,572 of 18,641 participated. (88 percent). The following year, when the new system was required, saw a big drop in participation: just 13,344 of 18,939 (70 percent). The next year, 2022, brought a rebound, with 16,100 of 18,930 participating (85 percent). The FBI counts only crimes that are reported to the police. Quite a few victims of violent crimes never call the cops. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) c ollects a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people in about 150,000 households. Despite widely cited FBI statistics about a surging homicide rate during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the NCVS data also indicates that violent victimizations overall were actually lower than in the following years — 16.4 per 1,000 people age 12 or older in 2020, and 16.5 in 2021. Getting a grip on what’s happening with crime is considerably more difficult than politicians and government officials (and journalists) tend to acknowledge. Has the rate of violent crime declined a little in quite a few corners of the nation? Probably so. That’s good news, but it might prove illusory if an increasing number of Americans don’t see any point in telling the police that they’ve been the victim of a crime, Geraghty says.

Acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe is urging Congress to invest heavily in the agency after two apparent assassination attempts against former president Trump , saying the service must confront its shortcomings and better position itself to handle a dangerous “new reality.” Rowe told the Washington Post said the guardians of presidents, former presidents and other top officials are desperate for more counter-snipers and investigators, upgraded armored limousines for motorcades, and a greater supply of ballistic glass. He said that the agency’s aging Maryland training center lacks studios to train agents for real-world attacks and that agents are working more hours in a state of hypervigilance than anyone should. “We are running our people at levels that we have not seen in our protective operations,” Rowe said. “We are burning everything hot right now.” The agency operates with a $3 billion yearly budget and more than 7,000 employees, including the elite protective details. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Secret Service is asking Congress for a “significant” budget increase for staff, transportation and technology, though he and Rowe declined to provide numbers. The acting director’s ambitions are colliding with skeptical members of Congress who have watched with alarm as solo gunmen appear to have targeted the Republican nominee twice in 10 weeks. Rowe says, “As a result of these failures, what has become clear to me is we need a shift in paradigm in how we conduct our operations. As was demonstrated on Sunday in West Palm Beach, the threat level is evolving and requires this paradigm shift.” Rowe, a 25-year agency veteran who became acting director on July 23, is attempting to expand the service amid multiple investigations into the attempts on Trump’s life and complaints that the agency has failed to implement policy recommendations as far back as the Bush and Obama administrations. The agency has suffered multiple security lapses, including an embarrassing incident in 2014 when a man carrying a knife jumped the fence around the White House and entered through the front door. Rowe said the Secret Service is on schedule to hire 400 agents by the end of this year, but “I can’t work them to death.”

The Justice Department has initiated a civil rights inquiry into a Mississippi sheriff's department after officers were reported to have tortured two Black men in a racially motivated assault, The Associated Press reports . The attack involved beatings, multiple stun gun shocks, and assaults with a sex toy, culminating in one victim being shot in the mouth. The Justice Department will investigate whether the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force and unlawful stops, searches and arrests, and whether it has used racially discriminatory policing practices, said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke. Five Rankin sheriff’s deputies pleaded guilty in 2023 to breaking into a home without a warrant and engaging in an hourslong attack on Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker. A sixth officer, from the Richland Police Department, was also convicted. Some of the officers were part of a group so willing to use excessive force they called themselves the Goon Squad. All six were sentenced in March, receiving terms of 10 to 40 years. The charges followed an Associated Press investigation in March 2023 that linked some of the officers to at least four violent encounters since 2019 that left two Black men dead. The Justice Department has received information about other troubling incidents, including deputies overusing stun guns, entering homes unlawfully, using “shocking racial slurs” and employing “dangerous, cruel tactics to assault people in their custody,” Clarke said. The attacks on Jenkins and Parker began on Jan. 24, 2023, with a racist call for extrajudicial violence, according to prosecutors. A white person phoned Deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that two Black men were staying with a white woman at a house in Braxton. The officers handcuffed Jenkins and Parker and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces while mocking them with racial slurs. They forced them to strip naked and shower together to conceal the mess. They mocked the victims with racial slurs and assaulted them with sex objects.

American gun culture has long been dominated by conservative, white men. In a marked change, a burgeoning number of liberals are buying firearms, according to surveys and fast-growing gun groups drawing minorities and progressives. “It’s a group of people who five years ago would never have considered buying a gun,” says Jennifer Hubbert, an anthropology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., who has researched liberal gun owners, the Wall Street Journal reports. Historically, gun ownership among Democrats was not uncommon, especially in rural areas where hunting was more prevalent. However, from the early 1990s, there was a significant decline in gun ownership among Democrats. This shift occurred as political debates intensified over firearms' place in society, prompting the Democratic Party to champion gun control measures. The Republican Party embraced gun rights. Now there is a growing interest in firearms among Democrats. Researchers, gun merchants and owners attribute the shift to factors including rising concerns about personal safety and a volatile political climate: GOP presidential candidate and former President Trump warning of “potential death and destruction” if he is charged with crimes, Democrats warning of the potential end of democracy, and two assassination plots against Trump. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats or those leaning Democrat said they had a gun at home in 2022, up from a four-decade low of 22% in 2010, according to a long-running survey by NORC at the University of Chicago. In 2022, 55% of Republicans had a gun in their home, up 3 percentage points since 2010. In a nationally representative 2023 survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, about 11% of respondents had purchased a gun since 2020. Among Democratic gun buyers since 2020, more than half were first-time owners, compared with less than a quarter of Republicans, according to researchers who analyzed the data.

Gun policy has been a topic of debate for decades, and its prominence has increased as gun-related deaths and mass shootings have risen nearly every year since 2014, according to the Gun Violence Archive . Many Americans despair of taming the epidemic, but a new report says certain laws can make a difference. The report from Rand found that minimum age requirements for purchasing firearms appear to reduce suicides among young people. Additionally, it indicated that laws aimed at reducing children’s access to stored guns may also lower rates of firearm suicides, unintentional shootings and firearm homicides among youth, Stateline reports . This is the fourth time Rand has released “The Science of Gun Policy” since 2018. Earlier editions examined the effectiveness of other gun regulations, such as background checks and concealed carry laws, and their impact on outcomes such as crime and suicide. The “Science of Gun Policy” report examines laws individually. The new version explores the combined effects of multiple state-level gun laws, including background checks, minimum age requirements, waiting periods, child access restrictions, concealed carry and stand-your-ground laws. The study found that states with the most restrictive gun policies had a 20% lower firearm mortality rate compared with states with the most permissive laws, suggesting that comprehensive policy approaches may be more effective than individual policies in curbing gun violence. “There should be some hope that there is a policy combination that could drive the firearm death rate down,” said Rand's Terry Schell. This year, more than a dozen states enacted a variety of new gun laws, including measures related to storage requirements, gun-free zones, bans on firearm purchase tracking and permitless carry. After a deadly shooting at Apalachee High School, Georgia lawmakers from both parties are pushing measures to reduce gun violence. House Speaker Jon Burns said new policies will be considered in 2025 to promote student mental health, detect guns, and encourage safe storage.

The federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was enacted 30 years ago this month. It is aimed at tackling domestic violence and sexual assault while providing supportive services to survivors. On the anniversary, the Department of Justice announced more than $690 million in grants for programs and services addressing gender-based violence. This week, the National Institute of Justice’s national research conference in Pittsburgh commemorated VAWA’s anniversary with a discussion exploring research NIJ has pursued over three decades in an effort to understand and end gender-based violence. The number of reported violent incidents aimed at women has dropped sharply since the law was passed, from more than 4.4 million in 1994 to 1.9 million in 2023, estimates the National Crime Victimization Survey. The rate of what is classified as intimate partner violence also has dropped, from 9.8 per 1,000 population in 1994 to 2.2 per 1,000 population in 2023. However, most crime categories have declined at similar rates, and it is not clear how much influence the federal law may have had on the trend. Since VAWA was enacted, NIJ has invested more than $155 million in research on violence against women. Roughly 41% of the funding concerned domestic violence research, while the rest has been aimed at issues such as sexual assault, human trafficking, teen violence, and elder abuse. Much of the research has been conducted in collaboration with DOJ's Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) and the Office of Victims of Crime (OVC). At this week's conference, OVC Director Kris Rose described a study of jurisdictions with high numbers of untested rape kits. Once tested, some kits helped identify serial rapists. Rose said the fact that kits hadn’t been sent to labs before cases went cold was “a national disgrace” and that research showed the need to develop best practices aimed at ensuring important evidence is tested so there is no delay in processing sexual violence cases. Senior NIJ science advisor Angela Moore said that, “when you address one issue, you realize who is still being left out.” Indeed, people of color are more likely to be victims of gender-based violence. Panelists said that is why partnerships between the federal government and community organizations can provide new insights that reflect how marginalized people are experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, or other forms of gender-based violence. It's important that work is “culturally specific” to communities, said Karma Cottman, CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Ujima: The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community. Ujima has received NIJ funding for its work providing training and technical assistance to organizations serving gender-based violence survivors in marginalized communities, particularly communities of color. OVW published a report detailing the impact of billions of dollars of VAWA grant funds over the past 30 years in supporting survivors, ensuring offenders face justice, and ultimately preventing gender-based violence altogether.

A sniper wounds five motorists on a Kentucky highway. In Colorado, a teenager kills a woman after hurling a rock through her windshield . A family drive through the Navajo Nation near New Mexico turns into a nightmare when a motorist inexplicably pursues the car, guns blazing. The lure of the open road is a quintessential draw, but a drive can easily take a turn for the worse and outbursts of violence on the highway leave indelible images of slain motorists and destruction - and also undermine the feeling of safety on the 48,500 miles of interstate highways where U.S. motorists drive the most, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics and state crime reports. A review of data and news stories from around the nation shows that attacks on freeway drivers are not only on the rise in some heavy commuting areas, but that highway assaults are causing increased fear during everyday driving, USA Today reports . Federal data show that in some states - including Washington and Texas - shootings on highways are up over 50% in the last five years. In a few communities, police are frustrated over trying to thwart the crimes, which are difficult to trace because shooters often are unseen and flee well before police arrive. The numbers for road rage alone, just one segment of the highway violence problem, have also risen exponentially. Using Gun Violence Archive’s database to analyze road rage incidents, Everytown Research & Policy found that the number of road rage injuries and deaths involving guns has increased every year since 2018. In that year, at least 70 road rage shooting deaths occurred in the U.S.; in 2022, the number doubled to 141. Highways along with alleys, streets and sidewalks are the second most likely place for violent crime to happen, after residences, says the FBI's Crime Data Explorer. The number of violent crimes reported on highways, streets, sidewalks and in alleys nearly doubled from 105,000 in 2019 and 135,000 in 2020 to 203,000 in 2022.

A small but growing number of teenagers are taking jobs inside of Texas’ prisons and jails, which face persistent staffing shortages, The Texas Tribune reports . To shore up the shortages, state and local leaders are launching new recruitment efforts that allow students to begin corrections training while still in high school, though they must be at least 18 to begin working inside lock-ups. In 2023, 68 18-year-olds obtained their jailers licenses, 17 times the number who obtained their license a decade earlier, said the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, the agency that administers the jailer’s license exam and certifies trainers. Naomi DeAnda, chair of Odessa College's criminal justice department, and instructor William Misczak started a program with Ector County and the local school district, allowing high school students to get certified as jailers. The program launched this fall with six students, who DeAnda said are lured in by the prospect of earning $65,000 a year as a jailer as soon as they graduate high school. In Smith County, Chief Deputy Jimmy Jackson launched a similar program through a partnership with Tyler Independent School District. Jackson, who was facing a severe staffing shortage in the sheriff’s department that runs the county jail, worked with the school district to create a program that would let students earn a jailer’s license as soon as they graduate. Ten students were enrolled last year, and 13 are signed up for this coming spring. Teenagers do not have to complete any additional training, beyond the state-required basic jailer course, to start working inside county jails. Gretchen Grigsby of the state law enforcement agency, said that so far, only Smith County and Randall County have piloted a program for high school students. The agency is asking the legislature to allocate $3.46 million over the next two years to fund new staff who would support school districts that want to create a jailer certification program.

Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia he plans to retire from law enforcement and take a new position with the city of Austin, WFAA TV reports. Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said Garcia has been appointed to an Assistant City Manager role overseeing the city's public safety departments, including police, fire and emergency services. The move means Garcia would join Broadnax, Dallas' former city manager who took the same role in Austin this year. Garcia told Dallas police employees, "After much reflection and consideration, I have made the difficult decision to retire from my career in law enforcement." Garcia's departure from Dallas comes just months after he and the city reached an agreement for him to stay on as police chief. Garcia said Dallas was the "right place to complete my service." After his Austin appointment was announced, Mayor Eric Johnson and Interim City Manager Kimberly Tolbert said, "Chief Garcia was the right leader at the right time for the Dallas Police Department ... Our city has achieved three consecutive years of violent crime reduction that bucked national trends. We have built greater trust between our communities and our police department. We have improved morale among our hardworking men and women in blue...While we are sorry to see him go, we also know that big city police chiefs never stick around forever." Garcia has led the Dallas Police Department for more than three years. Born in Puerto Rico, Garcia was Dallas' first Latino police chief. He was previously the police chief in San Jose, Calif., where he had spent nearly 30 years with the department. In Dallas, Garcia replaced Chief U. Renee Hall, who resigned in 2020.

Starting Friday, five states are planning to carry out executions within one week, including one man who is likely innocent. It is rare to have so many executions scheduled so closely together these days, but it is a reminder that the death penalty is not gone, reports LawDork. Missouri is scheduled to kill Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday despite the fact that multiple officials, of both parties, have worked to stop his execution because of serious concerns about Williams’s conviction for a 1998 murder that he says he didn’t commit. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey — a Republican who was appointed to the post after being the governor’s general counsel (and having been the general counsel for the Missouri Department of Corrections before that) — is forcing the execution forward. He is doing so over the objection of St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell — a Democrat who unsuccessfully asked the trial court to convert Williams’s sentence to life in prison. The last time Williams was set to be executed, in 2017, then-Gov. Eric Greitens — a Republican — halted the execution over DNA-related questions, prompting an independent review. Greitens' his successor, Republican Gov. Mike Parson, shut down the review in 2023 — a move that eventually allowed another execution date to be set. A clemency request is pending before Parson, and legal appeals are pending before the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. On Friday, South Carolina plans to carry out its first execution in more than a dozen years. Freddie Owens is scheduled to die by lethal injection for a 1997 murder. He has asked Gov. Henry McMaster to grant him clemency. Texas plans to execute Travis Mullis on Tuesday for the murder of his infant son in 2011. Mullis maintains that insufficient evidence was presented at his trial about the extensive abuse he faced as a child. There are also two executions scheduled for next Thursday.