Accountability gap. Crime rates. Targeting protesters.

By Sherman Smith | editor-in-chief

By Max McCoy

Not long ago every newsroom had a police scanner.

I’m not talking about the days when ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts and a bottle of scotch was kept in a desk drawer to toast special occasions. Like Thursday. But sometime between the pandemic and now, everything changed.

Reporters used to work with the damned thing squawking in the background because they knew that all of the important breaking news stories would come across that box. Every murder, every fire, every chemical spill. So would the routine calls, the domestic disturbances and the petty larcenies, but after a while you learned to tune out the background noise and listen only for the 10-codes that mattered.

A 10-40 was a fatality. A 10-32 was a chase. A 10-99 was a jailbreak.

You used the radio traffic, which was sometimes inaccurate because of misunderstandings or stress, as an alert to start asking questions. You didn’t report the scanner traffic, you verified it. There was no substitute to being on the scene, and some of my best reporting was based on my observation.

Crime rates continued falling across a sample of large U.S. cities in the first half of 2026, with homicide rates dropping enough to put the nation on track for another historic low in killings.

A new analysis from the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice found that nine of 13 crime categories tracked in 36 cities declined compared with the first six months of 2025. Homicides fell 18% in the first half of the year, with 215 fewer killings among the 30 cities that reported data for the offense.

Three people who observed federal immigration enforcement during the Trump administration’s sometimes-violent surge said in a federal lawsuit filed Friday the Department of Homeland Security illegally recorded them and revoked their status in the department’s trusted traveler programs.

The suit, filed in the Southern District of California, says the administration violated a federal privacy law, administrative law and the First Amendment by targeting people who observed and protested aggressive immigration enforcement, including during the deadly operation in Minneapolis in January.

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