Police solve just 2% of all major crimes
As Americans across the nation protest police violence, people have begun to call for cuts or changes in public spending on police. But neither these nor other proposed reforms address a key problem with solving crimes. My recent review of 50 years of national crime data confirms that, as police report, they don’t solve most serious crimes in America. But the real statistics are worse than police data show. In the U.S. it’s rare that a crime report leads to police arresting a suspect who is then convicted of the crime. The data show that consistently over the decades, fewer than half of serious crimes are reported to police. Few, if any arrests are made in those cases.
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Texas court tosses death sentence in police killing due to intellectual disability
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday again ordered an inmate removed from death row and sentenced him to life in prison without parole after he was found to be intellectually disabled. The judges previously rejected 43-year-old Juan Lizcano’s intellectual disability claim, but reconsidered it after the U.S. Supreme Court forced the Texas court in 2017 to change its method to determine if death penalty inmates were intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. At least five other Texas death row inmates have had their sentences reduced since the high court’s ruling, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
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UCLA Law Secures Record-Breaking Gift From Native American Tribe
The University of California at Los Angeles has secured the single largest donation on record from a Native American tribe to a law school—$15 million that will fund full-ride scholarships for students who aspire to careers in tribal law. That gift comes from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a federally-recognized based in Marin and Sonoma Counties in Northern California. In addition to breaking the record among law schools, it is among the biggest gifts made by a tribe to any university, according to UCLA.
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