Penny Dean and Your Rights

In the high days of America's militarized war on drugs, baseless and botched home raids have become a defining feature—with often disastrous consequences. Now we're seeing the same sort of overzealous enforcement efforts in the fight against forced prostitution. This week, Detroit police raided an innocent family's home after receiving a faulty sex-trafficking tip and then seeing two teens enter the house.

One of the teens was the family's 13-year-old daughter, who lived there. She wound up face-down and handcuffed on the floor, along with the rest of her family, after cops cut through a locked gate outside the southwest Detroit home and entered with their guns drawn.

"Everybody's like, 'Don't move, don't move or we'll shoot you,'" Noel Navarete told local 4 News. His brother Isaias, 18, said he was in the bathroom when police kicked down the door.

Police may have reasonable suspicion to track individuals if they are behaving strangely while traveling or using unusual means of travel, even if the behavior or means of travel are legal, Chief Judge David Brooks Smith ruled (pdf) in a case in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals involving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tracking a plane from Los Angeles to Philadelphia because the former was a "source city" for drugs and the latter a "destination city."

Missouri lawmakers heard a bill Monday to make some business owners liable for shootings on their property.

The House General Laws Committee was packed with gun control activists and business leaders for testimony on House BIll 96. Testimony was limited to just two minutes per speaker.

Last year, Missouri became a constitutional carry state, meaning anyone who is legally allowed to have a gun can carry it without a permit.

However, guns are still banned in places like schools and churches, and businesses with signs indicating they do not allow guns on the property.

The small implants use near-field communication technology, or NFC, the same as in contactless credit cards or mobile payments. When activated by a reader a few inches away, a small amount of data flows between the two devices via electromagnetic waves. The implants are “passive,” meaning they contain information that other devices can read, but cannot read information themselves.

Ben Libberton, a microbiologist at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, says hackers could conceivably gain huge swaths of information from embedded microchips. The ethical dilemmas will become bigger the more sophisticated the microchips become.

Just weeks ago in Florida, a father spending spring break on the beach with his family was fined $25 dollars for using metal sand tools on Panama City Beach, a law he had no idea he was breaking.

When this long-time resident of Panama City Beach asked law enforcement if he could see the actual text of the statute he was breaking, the officer on the scene immediately called for backup and threatened the father with jail time.

During a meeting with county sheriffs in February, Donald Trump was puzzled by criticism of civil asset forfeiture, which all the cops in the room viewed as an indispensable and unobjectionable law enforcement tool. "Do you even understand the other side of it?" the president asked. "No," one sheriff said, and that was that.

The U.S. Supreme Court receives thousands of appeals from the nation’s lower courts each year. It declines to hear almost all of them. But for Justice Clarence Thomas, one of those rejected cases earlier this month gave him the chance to challenge a widely criticized police practice: civil forfeiture.

A Wilmington police officer who was filmed lying to an Uber driver about a state law that allows people to film police was demoted after an internal investigation.

Sgt. Kenneth Becker was filmed by Uber driver Jesse Bright, who is also a defense attorney, during a traffic stop in late February. Becker told Bright that he could not film police under a new state law.

There is no such law in North Carolina.

Approximately half of adult Americans’ photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals. About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people.

Thankfully, no, this is not Manchester, New Hampshire.

It would be reasonable to think that if someone would respond to the request to "surrender your knife" then maybe they would also respond to "don't stab people". We are waiting to see how violent criminals would answer that question.