It’s the last news roundup of 2015! The blog will be on its annual holiday hiatus for the next two weeks, resuming on Monday, January 4, 2016. It was certainly a full news week. A Baltimore jury hung on manslaughter charges against an officer in connection with the death of Freddie Gray (Baltimore Sun), Disney World added metal detectors after a Florida lawyer was arrested last week trying to smuggle a handgun into the Magic Kingdom (Orlando Sentinel), and California proposed new rules “that could hobble the development of autonomous cars and even ban ‘driverless’ ones outright” (Jalopnik). Quite a bit happened here in North Carolina as well. Durham to become latest city to equip police with body cameras. As WRAL reports here, Durham has released a draft of its policy for police use of body cameras, and officers will begin using them “soon.” Departments across the state have been adopting cameras this year, bringing new attention to the discovery and evidentiary issues that accompany the use of such cameras. Statewide traffic stop data now available online. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice has just launched opendatapolicingnc.com, a website that “aggregates, visualizes, and publishes public records related to all known traffic stops to have occurred in North Carolina since January 1, 2002.” Users may “[e]nter an agency name . . . to review data on the racial and ethnic demographics of people stopped, searched, and subjected to force in the course of traffic stops in a given jurisdiction.” A News and [...]
Faculty Coordinators
