The Weekly Briefing
Curated News for Public Safety
STRENGTH AND RESILENCE – Minneapolis Police Department Chief Brian O'Hara and Mayor Jacob Frey are highlighting a "truly remarkable" drop in gun violence in the city. The pair is spotlighting three metrics directly: Gunshot wound victims, which have dropped to levels lower than pre-pandemic; Homicides, which are on par with the first-quarter numbers from 2019, the pair says, continue a trend after a peak in 2022.; Overall decline in shooting and homicide victims over the first quarter of 2025. "Morale in the police department is higher than it’s been in years, and that says a lot about the strength and resilience of the men and women serving this city," said Chief O'Hara in a statement.
PRACTICALLY UNIMAGINABLE – This is a great time to join the Seattle police force. New recruits receive a $7,500 signing bonus to supplement starting salaries in the six figures. Officers who transfer from other cities do even better, with starting pay at $116,000 and signing bonuses of $50,000. Seattle increased its police budget by 16 percent for the current year. Like a lot of other big cities, Seattle has seen officers head out for smaller, quieter jurisdictions. It’s hoping that the substantial increase in pay will lead more of them to stick around, making the department “a career destination, rather than a stepping stone,” said Sue Rahr, who served as the interim chief until February. Last year, the department received more than twice as many applicants as it did in 2023. For the first time since 2019, it’s now hiring more officers than it’s losing, she told Governing.
MORE: All of this was practically unimaginable just five years ago. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, protests against police brutality and racial discrimination sprung up all across the nation and indeed much of the world. Anti-police feeling ran as strong in Seattle as anywhere, where protesters took to the streets by the tens of thousands. Activists established a six-block police-free zone. Several functions — including emergency management and victim advocacy — were shifted away from the police department. In 2021, the City Council approved a police budget of $355.5 million, a notable drop from the department’s $401.8 million budget two years earlier.
INDIAN COUNTRY CRIME – The FBI is sending extra agents, analysts and other personnel to field offices in 10 states over the next six months to help investigate unsolved violent crimes in Indian Country, marking a continuation of efforts by the federal government to address high rates of violence affecting Native American communities. The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday that the temporary duty assignments began immediately and will rotate every 90 days in field offices that include Albuquerque, Phoenix, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Portland, Oregon, and Jackson, Mississippi. “Crime rates in American Indian and Alaska Native communities are unacceptably high,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “By surging FBI resources and collaborating closely with U.S. attorneys and tribal law enforcement to prosecute cases, the Department of Justice will help deliver the accountability that these communities deserve.”
YAKUZA GANGSTERS – Japan’s yakuza gangsters have long been notorious for their drug dealing, human trafficking, gambling and extortion rackets, full-body tattoos and criminal codes of fealty. However, despite their persistent popularity as mafia-style villains in films and video games, their numbers are dropping due to competition from a more flexible type of 21st-century cybercriminal, the authorities report. Yakuza members and affiliates fell to a record low of 18,800 at the end of last year, police data shows, marking the first time the figure has dropped below 20,000 since records began in 1958. The number of arrests of organized crime group members dropped to 8,249 last year, also a record low.
LOCAL MEDIA COVERAGE OF POLICE – A new study from Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University experts is challenging a widely held belief about the media—that local news outlets have become more critical of the police in recent years. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), used advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to analyze a decade’s worth of local news reporting on policing across the United States. The team applied large language models to a dataset of more than 250,000 news articles from 10 politically diverse cities. The researchers found that criticism of the police in local media has remained largely stable from 2013 to 2023.
MORE: There was also little difference between reporting in conservative and liberal cities—meaning local outlets have not tailored their reporting on the police to the politics of their audience. While spikes in police criticism did occur after high-profile incidents, such as the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the study found that these increases were temporary and did not result in a long-term shift toward more critical reporting. In fact, since 2020, local reporting supporting the idea that police are effective has slightly increased. “The data told a different story than we expected,” said Ashique KhudaBukhsh, an assistant professor in RIT’s Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences and co-author of the study.
IACP POLICY PRIORITIES – Every two years, the IACP sets its policy priorities on issues of importance to the policing profession. The priorities outlined in this document are designed to bring awareness to challenges faced by police and ways in which elected officials can bring forth solutions and change through legislative and/or administrative action. The policy priorities document highlights several critical issues that policymakers will address in the weeks and months ahead, and with an emphasis on IACP’s top policy priority of implementing the recommendations of the 2020 Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice.
BOOSTING POLICE MENTAL HEALTH – A new study from researchers at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences indicates that boosting the mental health of police officers could help to decrease the number of incidents involving police aggression toward people with serious mental illnesses. “About a quarter of police fatalities involve a person who has serious mental illness, like schizophrenia,” said Amy Weisman de Mamani, the lead researcher and a professor in the Department of Psychology. “So, we really wanted to understand why these interactions go wrong.” Something that also caught Weisman de Mamani’s attention in the existing research is that as a group, police officers are psychologically distressed in part because they are exposed to trauma in their line of work. “In theory, when people are not well, they are less able to regulate their emotions, particularly in stressful moments. They are also more likely to displace that onto someone else,” she added.
CHIEF SWORN IN – As Rico Boyce takes the helm of the Raleigh Police Department as their 31st chief of police, he hopes to make changes that will be felt for years to come. He told ABC11 immediately after his swearing in that community engagement is a big priority for him in his new role, saying he hopes every Raleigh citizen will know a police officer personally and that officers won't be strangers to the people they serve. Boyce started the Cops on the Blocks initiative several years back and has already brought it back, hoping to strengthen RPD's relationship with the community. "We're going to engage our community where they are. We're going to be respectful, professional. We're going to continue to use technology to help reduce crime," Chief Boyce told ABC11. "We're going to be accessible. We're going to be very transparent about what we do. Our crime stats, our discipline, all that is going to be very public-facing on social media."
SAFETY CLOUD – By the time you see a Massachusetts State Police cruiser with its lights and sirens on, your car may have already alerted you to the road hazard ahead. The I-Team has learned the department installed new technology in 233 of its cruisers that is designed to prevent collisions. HAAS Alert makes the system called Safety Cloud. It works through transponders installed in the cruisers that are activated when a trooper turns on the lights and sirens. The system then sends out a digital alert to drivers in the area through the car's infotainment system or a navigation app. Brock Aun is with HAAS Alert. He tells the I-Team, "if you are using an app like Waze, you're going to get an alert from HAAS the same way you get other alerts. And that alert pops up 30 seconds before you reach that hazard on the road either on your phone or in the infotainment screen."
FOP SUPPORTS COPS – I am writing on behalf of the members of the Fraternal Order of Police to express our concerns regarding the potential impact of the agency responses to your memo entitled “Soliciting Feedback for Agency Reorganization Plan and RIF.” One of the potential outcomes of this reorganization would be the termination of the independence of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), making this vital component of our national policing strategy into just another grantmaking program under the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).