Public Safety and Justice Update: 9/6/24

On Wednesday, 9/4, a 14-year-old used an AR-15-style semi automatic rifle to kill two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Georgia…

In the aftermath of America’s latest deadly school shooting, President Joe Biden renewed calls for stronger gun laws…

The 14-year-old arrested after the mass shooting at Apalachee High School had been “begging for months” for mental health help before he allegedly carried out the deadly attack Wednesday, according to his aunt…

America’s high rate of fatal fentanyl overdoses could be halved if users were treated with another opioid, Biden administration officials and a bipartisan group of senators believe…

Youth vaping in the U.S. hit its lowest level in a decade this year, the FDA and CDC said…

A federal appellate court has rejected qualified immunity for a San Jose police officer who infamously shot an activist with a projectile during George Floyd-related protests four years ago, allowing an excessive force lawsuit to resume…

Community backlash over a Santa Clara County proposal to purchase a San Jose-owned interim housing site for a jail diversion program has left officials looking for options to assuage residents’ mounting public safety concerns…

Public Safety and Justice Update: 8/23/24

The final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 8/22, included a lineup of lawmakers and others who have long advocated for gun safety and have dealt with the aftermath of gun violence in their communities…

On August 15, 2024, the Justice Department announced that it issued a letter to state and local police departments and governments about programs that may violate federal housing protections…

Despite the growth and evolution of data in policing over the past several decades, calls for better data continue to grow. RAND and the Police Executive Research Forum…

The California Department of Justice (DOJ) releases its latest crime data every year at the beginning of July…

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law last week a package of bills intended to crack down on retail, property, and auto thefts, legislation he requested in January in a city whose mayor publicly backs a November ballot measure the governor opposes to further crackdown on the crimes (Prop 36)…

California Assemblymember Chris Holden dropped his second attempt in recent years to restrict the state’s use of solitary confinement in prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities…

Weekly Update 7/29/24

Appropriations

Senate appropriators are scheduled to mark up their remaining fiscal 2025 bills this week, taking up the Energy-Water, Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, Homeland Security and Financial Services measures on Thursday (9/1) before the upper chamber adjourns for recess…

President and Administration

In 2022, most U.S. smokers wanted to quit, but only half tried and few were actually successful, according to a CDC report out Thursday (7/25)…

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released new projections on the effects of the U.S. immigration surge on the federal budget and economy…

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she had secured enough verbal commitments from delegates to the Democratic National Convention to clinch the party’s presidential nomination…

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned last week after a contentious hearing with lawmakers, in which members on both sides of the aisle ripped into her for her agency’s failure to prevent the shooting of Donald Trump…

Congress

House easily passed its 2024 Water Resources Development Act last week as lawmakers push to enact the biennial infrastructure legislation before election-year politics grind legislative work to a halt…

House Ways and Means Committee member Adrian Smith (R-NE) and Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) introduced a bill last week that would block the IRS from continuing its Direct File program…

This week, the Senate is expected to pass a combined bill on children's privacy and safety online…

California

In an executive order issued Thursday (7/25), Gov. Newsom ordered state agencies to begin sweeping homeless encampments on public property that pose a risk to “life, health and safety…”

The California Supreme Court on Thursday (7/25) upheld Proposition 22, the voter initiative that allows Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies to classify drivers for their ride-hailing and delivery services as independent contractors…

The organizers of California Forever, a tech billionaire-backed plan to build a new city near San Francisco…

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is making a second run for California governor, a 2026 comeback bid in which the Democrat is staking out a pragmatic lane, contending the state needs someone willing to make difficult…

Education

About two-thirds of K-12 schools were hit by ransomware in the last year, according to a new report by the cybersecurity company Sophos…

Eighth graders remain a full school year behind pre-pandemic levels in math and reading…

Weekly Update 7/22/24

President and Administration

After weeks of mounting pressure from members of his own party, President Joe Biden has ended his reelection bid, throwing the 2024 cycle into unprecedented territory…

President Biden is “finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code…

On Tuesday (7/16), President Biden announced new actions to lower housing costs, including…

An ambitious Republican agenda to transform the federal bureaucracy under a second Trump presidency would have considerable fallout in the world of education…

Congress

Senate appropriators are plowing forward with fiscal 2025 markups, hoping to advance a dozen spending bills out of committee largely along bipartisan lines as they did last summer…

California

California’s public-private hydrogen hub, known as ARCHES, just became the first hub in the country to be awarded its initial tranche of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy…

Now that the Supreme Court has granted cities more power to ban sleeping outside, homeless Californians face a crucial decision…

Education

On Monday (7/15), Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill to protect transgender and gay students from being outed to their parents…

The botched rollout of a revamped process to apply for federal financial aid could have long-lasting effects…

When they voted earlier this year to let police officers use a dangerous form of restraint on students in schools, Minnesota Democratic lawmakers said they did so because they had brokered a compromise…

Oklahoma’s Supreme Court is still entangled in a skirmish between church and state this month, weeks after a majority of its justices ordered officials to scrap a pending state contract with a public religious charter school…

A federal judge on Friday (7/19) suggested the Education Department should postpone implementing its rule that bolsters discrimination protections for transgender students…

Public Safety and Justice Update: 7/19/24

Firearm deaths have risen sharply over the past decade — a 35 percent increase from 2012 to 2022, the most recent year CDC data is available, according to an analysis by health policy research group KFF…

Throughout the first three days of the Republican National Convention, officials have highlighted a surge in what they call “migrant crime…”

Authorities have identified the gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump last weekend, but are still racing to understand what the shooter’s motives were and how he was able to get so close to Trump…

The U.S. Secret Service is facing harsh public scrutiny and investigations as the assassination attempt of former President Trump thrusts an agency with a checkered past into the center of a political firestorm…

President Biden has renewed a call for Congress to ban assault rifles, including the model that was used in the failed assassination attempt on former President Trump…

Out of 45 individuals who have served as U.S. president, 11 have been shot at (one twice, four fatally)…

The federal judge overseeing former President Trump’s classified documents case threw out all of the charges against him, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been given his job in violation of the Constitution…

The Supreme Court has granted mayors broad powers to combat the homelessness crisis, including by jailing people for sleeping outside…

Less than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court gave cities broader authority to police homelessness, a federal judge halted Oakland’s plan to clear a small encampment near the Bay Bridge, a win for homeless advocates in an early test of local officials’ power to carry out sweeps…

About five dozen law enforcement officers from California were on hand to help keep order in hand at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin this week…