A 71-year-old church volunteer was caught on surveillance camera stealing thousands of dollars from St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Pontiac Michigan was charged Monday in the crime.
71 year old Salley Crake entered not guilty pleas in a Pontiac courtroom Tuesday to felony charges of embezzlement and larceny. The 71 year old women was caught on camera stuffing money down her pants. When she was arrested Monday she had $800 on her.
Police said the women had been stealing hundreds of dollars once a week from the church .They don't know how long she has been stealing money from the church but suspects it was long before she was caught.
They might almost be men selling ice cream.
They ride around on tricycles, a big fridge-like box perched on the rear wheels, a brightly colored logo on its side.
And yet that 10-foot-tall mast between the rider and the box tells you that this isn't pistachio peddling. No, this is surveillance, Google-style.
Those nice people at Google Street View became frustrated that their cars couldn't access every single corner of the world. Indeed, earlier this year the company removed footage of one of its cars after it transgressed traffic regulations. Then there are those pesky pedestrian areas and fine places of historical interest that don't allow cars within their boundaries.
Read more here.As with so much encouraging news these days, the success of the surveillance cameras at Pioneer Park comes with a caveat of concern.
To begin with, the cameras have done exactly what they were supposed to do. They have reduced crime. Calls to police about drug-related problems have been cut almost in half. And because the cameras at the corners of the park are so visible, only two dealers have braved them. Both were arrested.
All that is a plus.
The concern comes later — when dealers begin to disperse and do their business in surrounding neighborhoods instead of congregating at the park.
In short, criminals don't go away. They just go elsewhere.
Read the rest of the article here.
The Bush White House pulled in a great quantity of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, the IGs reported. They questioned the legal basis for the effort but shielded almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
Read more here.
For weeks, Pierce County sheriff’s deputies watched the small house in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood, making sure their man was there.
He was a sex offender, convicted of second-degree rape in King County in the 1990s. Under state law, as a Level 3 offender – considered likely to offend again – he had to register with the county and state where he lived so his neighbors could be alerted.
Read more here.
The US' National Security Agency is facing scrutiny over the breadth of its domestic surveillance program. According to critics in Congress, its recent penetrations of private telephone calls and emails are broader than previously stated, The New York Times reports.
A new law, enacted by Congress in 2008, gave the NSA greater freedom to collect American's private messages as long as such collections were an incidental byproduct of investigating people "reasonably believed" to be overseas. But it is difficult to distinguish between email being sent by ordinary Americans and being sent from foreign countries — a gray area that's driven some lawmakers to question whether the privacy of Americans in general is being adequately protected.
Read more here.A decision last week to buy and install surveillance cameras at key Lake Elsinore locations has marked a new stage in the city’s graffiti-fighting efforts.
“It’s a big piece,” said Mark Dennis, the city’s communications manager. “I think it’s a unique approach that Lake Elsinore has taken.”
To date, a city graffiti task force has spent about a year studying the problem and evaluating various responses.
Since a newcomer’s reaction to a community is often based on first impressions, the task force gave the city’s graffiti problem a high priority, Dennis said.
During their study work, task force members frequently ran across media reports and government accounts that favored the use of surveillance systems.
Read more here.
The long-awaited study by the UC Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society found the program is hurt by lack of training and oversight, a failure to integrate footage with other police efforts, poor quality cameras, and what may be a fundamental weakness of cameras as anti-crime devices.
