Inmate Secretly Adds Pig to Vermont Police Cars

(NEWSER) - In June, Ford brought the heads of the nation’s top police fleets to its Dearborn headquarters and had them test drive its latest Taurus. The goal: to convince them that there would be life after the Crown Victoria. The Crown Vic is the unrivaled king of cop cars, making up 85% of American police fleets. But Ford is pulling the plug on the lumbering vehicle in 2011, the Detroit News reports. More»

Michael Meehan says other theft victims get same treatment

(NEWSER) - Berkeley's police chief is in hot water for sending 10 officers to find his son's stolen phone—with four of them spending two hours each of overtime on the case. But Michael Meehan says anyone else would have received the same assistance, and anyway, it's the field supervisors who decide how to assign cases. The chief tells the Oakland Tribune that 11 officers investigated two other iPhone thefts and six officers took on the case of a stolen iPad. More»

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel finds hundreds of cases wrongly downgraded

(NEWSER) - Milwaukee police Chief Edward Flynn had great news for the city in February: Violent crime had fallen for the fourth straight year. Except it hadn't, reports the Journal Sentinel . Its investigation found that the police department misreported at least 500 incidents since 2009. In many cases, aggravated assaults—which count toward the "violent crime" stat—got downgraded to simple assaults in the record books, even though they clearly met the more serious criteria. The newspaper had FBI crime experts review the cases. More»

They took only one picture, didn't secure vehicle, and more

(NEWSER) - The Trayvon Martin case wasn't just a story of racial bias, it was also apparently a story of police incompetence. The Sanford Police Department doesn't even have a homicide department, and usually tackles only three to four murders a year—and it showed. The New York Times talked with witnesses, elected officials, and law enforcement to compile a laundry list of mistakes made the night of Martin's death: More»

...Not that there was any fracking going on

(NEWSER) - Vermont became the first state in the union to ban fracking yesterday, in what would be a landmark moment if any fracking were actually going on there. There was no drilling taking place in Vermont, no plans to drill, and no indication that there was even gas to drill for, the Burlington Free Press reports, but activists and progressives celebrated anyway. "This is a big deal," Gov. Peter Shumlin said after signing the ban. "We don't know that we don't have natural gas in Vermont." More»