In October 2012, Travis County officials promised that bringing video visitation to the local jails wouldn’t affect anything else about jail visits. “We’re not changing anything else from what we’re doing,” Travis County Major Darren Long told the county commissioners before they voted to approve a contract with Securus, the…
After Jason Harrison’s father sued the city, the Dallas Police Department and the two officers who shot and killed his son, Harrison’s mother and brother, David, have filed a lawsuit of their own. They claim Harrison, a schizophrenic, posed no threat when officers John Rogers and Andrew Hutchins, killed him…
Insecam is a super-creepy Moscow-based website that is currently streaming footage from 73,000 unsecured IP cameras. The site says it’s doing it to promote security — it is able to access the cameras because their owners never changed their default password — but clearly has revenue-generating ads. There are feeds…
There’s a long and sordid history of notorious American criminals cashing in on their fame by publishing books, selling prison artwork or hawking their personal effects. Nowadays, the macabre “murderabilia” market has mostly migrated online, where anyone with an Internet connection and an unhealthy obsession with sociopaths can buy memorabilia…
Ahead of his election day disaster, District Attorney Craig Watkins announced the creation of a new division in his office. He’s done this before, most recently with the Civil Rights Division, a team that will investigate, right alongside Internal Affairs, when a police officers shoots someone. The latest is a…
At its peak, Bitcoin Savings and Trust — Trendon Shavers’ Bitcoin business that he purported to be an investment operation — controlled a full 7 percent of all publicly traded Bitcoin. Operating out of his McKinney home, Shavers, known as “pirateat40” in the Bitcoin community, managed as many as 764,000…
How law enforcement threw the book and bookmakers.
When a Dallas cop shoots someone in the line of duty, you can count on Dallas Police Association leader Ron Pinkston to leap to the officer’s defense. The cop who shot a mentally ill man who, as best a surveillance video shows, stood up from a chair? Shouldn’t have been…
Cowboys running back Joseph Randle, he of the post-Seattle Seahawks victory underwear theft and subsequent underwear endorsement, had what can best be described as an amusing experience being booked by Frisco police. See also: Cowboy Joseph Randle Gets an Underwear Endorsement Deal for Stealing Underwear “This is a cool little…
Ronnie Lummus, 71, must not look like the type to carry a gun. But it’s a good thing he was packing last night. He and his wife were shopping at Aldi’s on Forest Lane in Northwest Dallas, close to LBJ Freeway. When the couple finished, they walked through the sliding…
Earlier Tuesday, we told you that we didn’t yet know the identity of the drunk, gay-slurring man who attempted to assault a man at DFW airport before being tackled by a group of good Samaritans. Now we do. His name is McCleish Christmas Benham and he lives in Shelbyville, Tennessee…
The United States’ gun-show loophole is as wide open as it’s ever been. Any private citizen with a cache of firearms can still sell them to any other private citizen without conducting a background check, as licensed dealers are required to do, because freedom. There’s a catch. The loophole, gaping…
To the disappointment of the whole of the Internet, the blurry good Samaritan in the now infamous video of an apparent homophobe getting what was coming to him after attacking a man at DFW Airport is not actor Paul Rudd. Despite now retracted reports from Wonkette and D Magazine the…
Dallas victims of unsolved sexual crimes just got one step closer to potentially seeing justice their abusers. The Dallas Police Department recently announced it had received a portion of federal and state money to be allotted toward DNA testing for rape kits. The testing began earlier this month, and will…
Alan Hruby is a 19-year-old shopaholic. “There is no bigger rush then [sic] getting to the register at a store and swiping your credit card. And in that moment you are waiting for the screen to say, ‘Approved’ you start to get heart palpitations and you get a rush of…
Max Geron, the Dallas Police Department’s media relations officer, smiled and shook his head in disbelief. In the video, a veteran East Coast police officer approached a photojournalist, who was standing across the street from a traffic stop with multiple squad cars present, and told him to leave. The officer…
In the past few months, Dallas activists have been working to raise awareness about the number of black men police have killed over the years. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club has taken to the streets armed with rifles, and Dallas Communities Organizing for Change has analyzed data on police…
According to multiple reports, Dallas Cowboys backup running back Joseph Randle was arrested by Frisco police after being seen attempting to shoplift underwear and a bottle of cologne on an in-house camera at the Stonebriar Centre mall Dillard’s. Randle was detained by Dillard’s loss prevention officers who called Frisco police…
C.J. Spillman, the Cowboys defensive back named in connection with a September 20 sexual assault allegation in Grapevine, was accused of attempted rape in December 2013 while he was a member of the San Francisco 49ers. According to a Santa Clara, California, police report obtained by the New York Daily…
Adiel Fuentes was a cog in a much bigger machine. He started working for Gerardo Cisneros halfway through 2012, according to court documents, and he took quite well to the type of work Cisneros employed him for. He was one of the main collaborators in Cisneros’ burgeoning meth ring that…
With the mountains of tips the Dallas Police Department fields on any given day, and with finite resources forcing the department to prioritize and decide which leads to follow up on and which to put on the back-burner, it’s only reasonable for a concerned citizen to wonder how to make…
Life just got a little bit worse for women in Texas — and particularly for women in Dallas County. The Texas Council on Family Violence released a study on Tuesday that shows Dallas County has the highest number of female domestic violence deaths in the state. More telling, Dallas has…
