Bad Economy = More Domestic Violence … But Less Crime?
Strange tidings from the world of law enforcement. A recent survey of 700 American police agencies found that most – 56 percent – believe that the still-grinding recession is spurring an increase in...
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DIY Police Scanner of 1935
Portion of the cover of the October 1935 issue of Short Wave Craft magazine Yesterday I had the rather strange experience of reading a tweet about a grass fire burning not far from my apartment. Not...
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Electric Glove Helps Police Quell Rioters
Electric glove in the Sept 1935 issue of Popular Science With protests ramping up this week at the Republican National Convention, Tampa police have been out on city streets in full riot gear. Police...
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Red Flags: Early Warnings of Wrongful Convictions
While the law enforcement community widely views American jurisprudence as rich with built-in safeguards, from the right to counsel to the right not to be physically abused by police officers,...
View ArticleHuman Lie Detectors: The Death of the Dead Giveaway
We’ve all been lied to, and most of us have a high opinion of our ability to tell a lie from the truth. Yet research repeatedly shows that confidence to be misplaced and that judges, customs...
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How to Conjure a Ghost to Get a Murderer to Confess
The proliferation of projection technology and electrical gadgets in the 1920s allowed people to conjure spirits. Well, spirits of a mechanical variety anyway. These ghoulish Jazz Age illusions...
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DNA Collection Is the New Fingerprinting
On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the OK to the controversial practice of cops collecting DNA samples from crime suspects under arrest. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices decided that swabbing a person’s...
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The Flaws of Familial DNA Matching
It’s always been true that a family member’s guilty conscience could be a criminal’s ultimate downfall. Now, thanks to familial DNA matching, a brother or sister can be a snitch without ever saying a...
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Crime-Stopping Cars of the Future
Google’s self-driving robot cars are pretty exciting; so are the predictions that cars could someday be powered by hydrogen, or made out of fiberglass, or water-repellant glass, or whatever else. But...
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Mapping (and Potentially Preventing) Crime With Math
Mathematicians have long tried to bring order to chaos—to develop complex models to understand seemingly random events. One particularly versatile model has been the “Lévy flight,” a pattern of...
View ArticleThere’s No Magic Bullet
The question about how to, or whether to, regulate the access of people with mental illness to guns has always been a heated debate—and several high-profile events over the past year have added a...
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What We Actually Know About the Connections Between Mental Illness, Mass...
After mass shootings, like the ones these past weeks in Las Vegas, Seattle, and Santa Barbara, the national conversation often focuses on mental illness. So what do we actually know about the...
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A Major Victory for Privacy Rights in a High-Tech Ruling From a Low-Tech Court
The Supreme Court delivered a surprisingly forward-looking tech decision Wednesday morning. The question before the Justices was whether law enforcement officers must get a warrant after arresting...
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The Nazi Interrogator Who Revealed the Value of Kindness
The downed World War II fighter pilot had little reason to be wary. Thus far, his German interrogator had seemed uninterested in extracting military intelligence, and had acted with genuine kindness....
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When Your Stalker Is a Cop
About a year ago, a routine review of an Ohio Highway Patrol officer’s dashboard camera videotapes found something odd. On one tape, officer Bryan Lee could be seen pulling over a drunk driver, but...
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