Washington, DC
CNN Business
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An audit of the Los Angeles police department is raising questions about new technologies law enforcement is using nationwide with little oversight.

Last week, the department’s internal auditors, prompted by a community backlash, published online a review of the LAPD’s data-driven policing strategies and recommended more transparency, consistency and oversight of the programs. Los Angeles has been a leader in using new technologies such as artificial intelligence, social networks and big data to aid police work.

However, those new approaches have been controversial, and criticized for violating civil rights and discriminating against minority groups. Experts have also questioned whether they deliver enough value given their financial costs, which can exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars…

In Philly, Most Armed Robbers Remain Beyond the Long Arm of the Law…

Project Green Light, a controversial 3-year-old surveillance program that has been touted as a major crime stopper by the Detroit Police Department, will make its entry into the city’s public housing program by year’s end.

The program, which installs cameras at participating locations that feed into the city’s Real Time Crime Center, has raised questions about privacy and lacks a comparative study showing that it actually stops crime.

The Detroit Housing Commission and police are ironing out an agreement that will bring 26 “real time” cameras to Sheridan Place I and II, two high-rise towers on Jefferson Avenue just south of Belle Isle that cater to an “elderly and near-elderly community.”

In the 73rd precinct in Brownsville, reporting a crime goes like this: you step through a brick entryway into a cramped, dimly-lit room and you wait there, staring at a wall.

A set of double doors and a window break up the metal barrier, but red-lettered signs remind you that you aren’t allowed to go through. On the other side of the plexiglass, police dash around the station’s spacious interior. They pay little mind to the lobby, where the four plastic seats are often taken, leaving everyone else to stand on the stained linoleum.

An officer comes to help, eventually. He opens the door halfway to ask people what they need, one by one. But therein lies another problem: the tiny, triangular waiting room has no privacy. So, everyone can hear every fearful crack in an old man’s voice as he tells how he’s lost $2,700 to an online scam. And they can see every tear on a woman’s face when she rushes into the precinct after learning that her child is in trouble…