Thursday, November 06, 2014

Odds and ends: Forensics, budgets and cell-phone location data

A few odds and ends, just to clear my browser tabs:

New Harris County forensic facility under construction
Harris County is breaking ground on a new forensics facility. Too bad they couldn't figure out how to do something jointly with the city.

Dispatch from the Body Farm
How maggots help solve crime, from National Geographic.

'Texas criminal justice spending driven largely by elderly inmates'
This will be even more true every year for the foreseeable future.

Book 'em
How the feds took down Texas' biggest illegal sports book run out of Dallas.

Tackling high prison phone costs
The feds have floated a plan to aggressively limit prison phone calls. They should include video visitation when they make the rules.

Smart phone location data leakage
News Flash: Your smart phone leaks location data everywhere, to everyone, so says Ars Technica.

3 comments:

Jason Truitt said...

Too bad they couldn't figure out how to do something jointly with the city.

I agree, to an extent. But when the city was demanding to have a disproportionate share of control and the police chief in charge at the time of some of the worst crime lab scandals has turned up like a bad penny on Houston's city council, you can't really blame the county for wanting to keep control. Houston couldn't get its act together before, and has shown no real inclination to change since.

Anonymous said...

And so I will pay for both a county and a city facility. Feuding pols picking pockets in perpetuity.

Anonymous said...

"The feds have floated a plan to aggressively limit prison phone calls."

Uh, you meant the phone *costs*.

Phone calls are already limited by budget!

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LAVA
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