National Institute of Justice Adds Webpage on Microbial Forensics

At http://nij.gov/topics/forensics/evidence/pages/microbiome.aspx, you can learn about how NIJ has expanded its funding of research into the forensic applications of microbiomes over the past five years. In a forensic science research and development context, the portfolio focuses on the necrobiome (the community of organisms found on or around decomposing remains), the microbiome (found in different soils) and the trace human microbiome (microbes on our skin and the surfaces and objects with which we interact).

Criminal Justice Technology in the News

Law Enforcement News
New York's Top Cop Embraces Smartphone Revolution
FirstFT.com, (06/05/2016), Gary Silverman
The New York Police Department has implemented a $160 million mobility initiative that equips all 36,000 officers with a smartphone and every patrol car with a tablet computer. Further plans call for use of body-worn cameras, gunshot sensors and surveillance cameras. Commissioner Bill Bratton has stated that officers are able to respond more quickly, and he has offered to share the city's software and statistical models with interested departments.
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Atlanta Police Officer Saved by Bulletproof Vest
AJC.com, (06/06/2016), Ellen Eldridge
Thanks to his ballistic-resistant vest, an Atlanta police officer survived being shot by a suspect following a home invasion/burglary call on June 4. The officer, the first responding to the scene of an apartment break-in, returned fire and wounded the suspect, who was captured shortly thereafter by pursuing officers.
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Ames Police Department Mixing Mystery With Community Outreach
WHOTV.com, (06/05/2016), Jodi Whitworth
In "picture gAmes," part of a social media campaign conducted by the Ames (Iowa) Police Department, the department posts a picture on Facebook, with a clue, and asks local residents to find and identify the location. The department will close out the clue by posting a fact or safety tip related to the image; it's all part of an effort to connect the department and the community. A new picture will be posted each week.
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City Of Houston to Add Radiation Detection to Crime Fighting Tools
Houston Public Media, (06/07/2016), Florian Martin
The City of Houston has received a five-year, $30 million grant for equipment to detect radioactive material, including 5,000 to 6,000 radiation detectors to be issued to first responders and equipment for 15 to 20 vehicles, including cars, boats and aircraft. Houston is the fourth city to receive grant money under the Securing the Cities initiative. Other participants are New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

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Corrections News
Scanners That Could Catch Weapons Can't Be Used at Rikers
ABC News, (06/04/2016), Michael Balsamo for the Associated Press
At New York City's Rikers Island jail, airport-style X-ray body scanners have sat unused for a number of years due to concerns about the devices' emission of low-dose radiation. Instead, the city relies on less sophisticated metal detectors that can be defeated by a wrapping of duct tape around an object. A state law prohibits the use of non-medical devices that emit low-dose radiation; the city is lobbying for a legislative change.
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Pima County Gives Inmates Tablets While Behind Bars
KGUN9, (06/03/2016), Whitney Clark
Devices made specifically for correctional facilities by Global Tel Link will be given to almost all of the 2,000 inmates in the Pima County (Ariz.) Jail. Inmates can use the tablets to play free games, read books, and pay for phone calls. They cannot be use to take photos or to access the Internet.
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Indiana, FCC at Odds Over Prison Cell Phone Use
WBAA, (06/01/2016)
Indiana Governor Mike Pence has joined with nine other Republican governors to ask the Federal Communications Commission to allow their states to jam cell phone signals in correctional facilities, a practice that currently is prohibited. Although correctional staff confiscate numerous contraband cell phones each year, some still get through, and prisoners can use them to orchestrate crimes on the outside.
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5 Ways Law Enforcement Will Use Tattoo Recognition Technology
Electronic Frontier Foundation, (06/02/2016), Dave Maass, Aaron Mackey and Soraya Okudai
Under Tatt-C (Tattoo Recognition Technology Challenge), a joint project of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the FBI, a group of biometric companies, research institutions and universities was asked to run five experiments to show how well their algorithms could match tattoos from a specific dataset under various circumstances. This article presents the results of those five tests.
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States Bedeviled by Contraband Cellphones in Prisons
PBS NewsHouse, (06/07/2016), Teresa Wiltz
The use of contraband cellphones to carry out scams and arrange for other crimes from inside correctional facilities has led 10 governors, led by Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, to request permission to jam cell phone signals from inside prisons from the Federal Communications Commission. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai has stated that in the hands of an inmate, a cell phone is a weapon, indicating he may favor the proposal.
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Reliability of Drug Scanners Called Into Question
Kingston Whig-Standard, (06/06/2016), Ian MacAlpine
In Ontario, the leader of an advocacy group for family members of inmates in federal institutions is conducting a campaign to correct what the group says are high rates of false positive results for drug residue generated by ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) devices, also known as ion scanners. A positive result can cause these family members to lose visiting privileges altogether or have them changed to a higher security setting. In an effort to avoid false positive readings, family members often undertake such pre-visit activities as washing coins, avoiding purchasing gas the day of a trip, showering and putting on clothes straight from the dryer, and avoiding any stops after leaving their homes.
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Inspector General's Report on Dannemora Prison Break: Lack of Searches Pervasive at Clinton Jail
Time Warner Cable News, (06/06/2016), Katie Eastman
One year exactly after Richard Matt and David Sweat broke out of New York State's Clinton Correctional Facility, the New York State Inspector General's office has released a 150-page report detailing the subsequent investigation. The report reviews systemic failures that led to the escape, which ended only after a three-week search by law enforcement.
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The Amazing iPhone-sniffing Prison Dogs
The Marshall Project, (06/07/2016), Maurice Chamah
This article features an in-depth interview with Capt. Scott VanGorder, director of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Drug Interdiction Unit, on the use of dogs to sniff out contraband cell phones in prison. Questions probe how dogs are selected, how they are trained to locate cell phones and some of the strange places that inmates hide this contraband.
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Criminal Justice Technology

Law Enforcement News

Police Departments in Smaller Cities Getting Real-time Street Surveillance Centers
Digital Trends, (05/24/2016), Bruce Brown
The new Real-Time Crime and Data Intelligence Center in Hartford, Conn., has a wall of high-resolution flat screens with live video feeds from the streets, license plate scanning and automatic gunshot detection. Sgt. Johnmichael O'Hare says in just a few months the center has already provided information that has assisted in hundreds of cases. Such centers once were the province of larger agencies only, but an increasing number of small cities have opened their own.
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DHS Navigates the World of Vehicular Digital Forensics
Signal, (05/25/2016), George I. Seffers
Under Project iVe (eye-vee), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate's (S&T's) Cyber Security Division has partnered with Berla Corporation of Annapolis, Md., to develop a motor vehicle digital forensics toolkit. Modern vehicles have an average of 70 computers that can reveal a wide variety of data from systems such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, navigation aids and various apps. Vehicles also store recent destinations, favorite locations, call logs, contact lists, text messages, emails, pictures, videos, social media feeds and navigation history, and some may record when and where vehicle lights are turned on; locations where doors are opened and closed; and where Bluetooth devices connected.
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Law Enforcement Groups Train by Looking at Works of Art
KSAT 12, (05/24/2016), Stephanie Serna
Art of Perception and founder Amy Herman helps law enforcement officers around the country learn more about thinking outside the box through the study of works of art. Herman asks officers participating in her workshops to look at paintings as though they were looking at crime scenes.
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Police App in Indiana Lets Residents Report Non-911 Incidents to Cops
eWeek, (05/27/2016), Todd R. Weiss
In Fishers, Ind., residents can download a new free mobile app called CrimeWatch that allows them to report suspicious incidents, erratic driving and other non-911 information via text message. The app, developed by a local resident, lets users submit photos, check off a box reporting specific types of concerns and submit reports that go directly to officers in the field. All users later receive a follow-up report from the department.
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DC Police to Resume Tweeting Breaking News
WUSA, (05/31/2016), Garrett Haake
The 97,000 followers of @DCPoliceDept will once again receive breaking crime news via tweets, a spokesman for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department has announced. MPD had originally stated its intention to move away from tweeting crime news to making the information available via the DC Alerts system on online Yahoo message boards. The decision had been criticized as causing the appearance that the department wanted to hide crime reports.
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Corrections News
Babies Behind Bars: Should Newborns Do Time With Mom?
CTV.com, (05/25/2016), Collen Long for the Associated Press
The maximum-security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State is one of only eight facilities in the country that provide nurseries where inmates and their babies to live together. An estimated 1 in 25 women are pregnant when they enter prison, and many other countries mandate that mothers and newborns live together. Reaction to nursery programs in this country has been mixed.
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Experts Question Validity of Tests Predicting Opioid Addiction Risk
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, (05/29/2016), Kristina Fiore
Bringing the nation's opioid addiction epidemic under control is a top priority for U.S. public health officials, as nearly 19,000 deaths related to prescription opioid painkillers and more than 10,000 deaths related to heroin occurred in 2014. Several companies are marketing tests that claim to test for a genetic bias toward addiction, but there are many concerns about the accuracy of the tests and their relative value.
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Dutch Firm Trains Eagles to Take Down High-Tech Prey: Drones
Alaska Dispatch-News, (05/29/2016), Stephen Castle for the New York Times
In the Netherlands, eagles and other birds of prey are being trained to intercept and take down small, off-the-shelf unmanned aerial vehicles. Such small UAVs are being used to drop contraband into correctional facilities and conduct unwarranted surveillance; they also pose a danger to aircraft. The birds are trained to bring UAVs to the ground, eliminating risks of falling debris that occur with other, more destructive methods.
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State Prison K-9 Officer First To Be Cellphone Detection Certified In U.S.
NewsOn6.com, (05/28/2016), Russell Hulstine
Riley, a stray dog originally donated to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, and his handler recently became the first team in the nation certified in cellphone detection. According to the Oklahoma DOC, during the certification process Riley found 100 percent of cellphones hidden as part of the test, along with another phone that officials did not know was present.
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GOP Governors Ask FCC to Address Illegal Prison Cellphones
ABC News, (05/24/2016), Meg Kinnard for the Associated Press
A group of 10 Republican governors has sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking permission for states to apply technology to stop the use of contraband cell phones in correctional facilities. Implicit in the letter is a desire to jam cellphone signals originating from within the facilities. A 1934 law says the FCC can grant permission to jam public airwaves only to federal agencies, and the cellular industry opposes allowing the use of localized jamming technology.
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Machine Bias
Pro Publica, (05/23/2016), Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner
This article presents an in-depth look at Pro Publica's study of the reliability of tools that predict the likelihood of an arrestee's reoffending. Their research found the tools to be extremely inaccurate. Such tools, based on algorithms, are increasingly used in a number of states in determining sentencing and rehabilitation needs.
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NIAAA Selects Winners of its Wearable Alcohol Biosensor Challenge
National Institutes of Health News Release, (05/19/2016)
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has announced the winners of its Wearable Alcohol Biosensor Challenge, a competition to design a discreet device capable of measuring blood alcohol levels in near real-time. The winning prototype and recipient of the $200,000 first prize was submitted by BACtrack, a company known nationally for designing and selling portable breath alcohol testers for consumer use and professional use. Their entry, the BACtrack Skyn, is worn on the wrist and offers continuous and non-invasive monitoring of a user's BAC.
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Having a Parent Behind Bars Costs Children, States
Government Technology, (05/24/2016), Teresa Wiltz
Research continues to show that having a parent who is incarcerated can have a destabilizing effect on the estimated 1.7 million children in this country who are so affected. This effect can have consequences that include trauma and trouble in schools, homelessness and reliance on welfare and foster care.  Some states are attempting to counter this effect with increased use of televisits or by placing the parent in a nearby correctional facility. Other potential remedies include providing emotional support and home services while the parent is incarcerated and developing better ways to reconnect parents and children after a sentence ends.
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County Commissioners Agree to Support New Adult Probation Assessment Tool
The Sentinel, (05/18/2016), Jake Austin
In Cumberland County, Ohio, the Board of Commissioners recently voted to implement the use of the Ohio Risk Assessment System (ORAS), a proposed actuarial tool to be used for adult probation assessments. The results of this 35-question tool would provide an assessment of an individual's risk of re-offending in the future.
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North Carolina Prisons Moving Away From Solitary Confinement
The News & Observer, (05/26/2016), Taylor Knopf
North Carolina has decreased the number of offenders kept in solitary confinement by nearly 50 percent as the state moves away from broad use of the practice. State Prison Commissioner David Guice said staff members are assaulted more often in locked-down units, and other states that have decreased the practice have seen a corresponding decline in assaults.
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Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections to Discard Terms 'Offender,' 'Felon' in Describing Ex-prisoners
The Washington Post, (05/25/2016), John E. Wetzel
Secretary John E. Wetzel of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has announced the commonwealth will follow the federal government's lead and no longer use the terms "offender" and "felon" to describe individuals who have completed serving their sentences. In this letter to the Washington Post, he discusses why Pennsylvania is moving toward a similar policy.
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Alleged Serial Rapist on GPS Monitoring Faces New Rape Charge
Braintree Patch, (05/25/2016), Daniel Libon
Steven Lent of Quincy, Mass., was recently indicted by a grand jury on rape charges that allegedly occurred while he was wearing a GPS monitoring device. Lent was free on bond while awaiting trial on charges that he raped five women in 2015. He allegedly forced an escort to perform a sex act while he held a knife to her throat, then told her he had no money.
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