The alleged gang members and their associates came from groups including CCK, the Young Bag Chasers (YBC), and the Parkside Killers (PSK), prosecutors said. Members of all three gangs — and several others — have been charged and convicted in numerous shootings and reprisals over the last decade.
The YBC gang, which originated in West Philly, drew headlines two years ago when 25-year-old rapper Abdul Vicks, aka YBC Dul, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Olney. Three people were later charged in the ambush that killed Vicks, whose drill rap earned him the nickname Mr. Disrespectful.
“(Vicks) stated publicly, over and over, that the way (drill rappers) fuel themselves, the way that they fuel their music, is via violence,” Walters said. “We see that through their music videos in which they discuss victims of homicides, and we see that in retaliatory music videos.”
Detectives and members of the grand jury investigated a pattern of gangs committing homicides that were celebrated online by the rappers in their cliques. Opposing groups would respond to each other with revenge killings and music videos claiming responsibility for them. The popularity of the music helped funnel money to the gangs, prosecutors said, even if the rappers weren’t the ones pulling the trigger.
“If it’s on YouTube, they’re monetizing this,” Fritze said. “Mr. Vicks talked about that as well. We’re not dealing with drug dealers shooting each other. … The corrupt organization is the fact that the citizens of Philadelphia are going on and watching drill music, and then the commercials come on and these gang members are getting paid.”
The DA’s office has reached out to several of the families impacted by the gang-related shootings to inform them of the arrests and charges filed Wednesday.
“Behind every case, there is a person. There is a family and a community member who is forever impacted,” said Mariel Delacruz, director of the DA’s victim services unit.
Fritze said many of the shootings the grand jury investigated were motivated by bragging rights among friends in the same gangs. When gang leaders get arrested or sent to prison, detectives often find that remaining members splinter off into new groups that perpetuate violence.
“Parents in this city, if your children are listening to violent drill music, you are causing part of the problem,” Fritze said. “We need to get these kids off of drill music and get them off of YouTube watching these videos.”
Jeremy Charles, 39, was struck and killed by a train while working on tracks in Lancaster County on Monday. Amtrak suspended Keystone service for the day.
A Colorado medical device company admitted to orchestrating an elaborate health care fraud scheme that resulted in the overbilling of patients and insurers by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Zynex Inc., an Englewood-based firm that manufactures and sells medical devices used for pain management and rehabilitation, entered into an agreement Tuesday with the U.S. Department of Justice to avoid prosecution.
The company, as part of the deal, agreed to pay between $5 million and $12.5 million in penalties — the final tally will depend on its earnings and profit during the settlement period — and will forfeit millions of dollars in unpaid claims.
Zynex admitted to participating in a conspiracy to commit health care fraud, securities fraud, mail fraud and other violations, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Rhode Island announced in a news release.
Zynex, in its deal with the government, also admitted to collecting more than $873 million for its products, including more than $600 million for supplies, “the vast majority of which were the result of fraud,” investigators said.
The company acknowledged that it shipped and billed for medically unnecessary supplies in excess quantities and misled investors who were unaware of the fraudulent billing practices.
Zynex agreed to implement enhanced compliance and corporate governance reforms “designed to prevent future misconduct,” the DOJ said, and will cooperate with the government’s ongoing investigations.
“This resolution addresses the seriousness of the fraud committed by Zynex while recognizing the substantial turnaround in conduct implemented under new management,” U.S. Attorney Charles C. Calenda said in the news release.
The company, in a subsequent news release, said the resolution “represents the fulfillment of the commitments we made as a new management team when we arrived in August 2025: to break from the past, rebuild the company as compliant-by-design and create a new future for the company, its customers and employees.”
Zynex leaders say they have completely overhauled their billing and supply replenishment practices, and enacted new marketing policies to ensure the company remains compliant with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The Diocese of Camden has agreed to pay $180 million in a settlement to resolve claims of clergy sexual abuse by over 300 survivors whose allegations span decades. The diocese covers 62 parishes in six counties in South Jersey.
FBI agents arrested Alexis Flores in Honduras nearly 26 years after 5-year-old Iriana DeJesus was raped and killed in North Philadelphia. Flores had been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for nearly two decades.
There are just 16 Flock Safety cameras in Thornton.
But those electronic eyes, mounted to poles at intersections throughout this city of nearly 150,000, brought out dozens of people to the Thornton Community Center for a discussion on how the controversial license plate-reading cameras are being used — and whether they should be used at all.
Law enforcement agencies cite the automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, as a powerful tool that bolsters their ability to locate and stop suspects who may be on their way to committing their next assault or robbery.
But Meg Moore, a six-year resident of the city who is helping spearhead opposition to Flock cameras, said she worries about how the rapidly spreading surveillance system is impacting residents’ privacy and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Thornton’s Flock camera data can be seen by more than 1,600 other law enforcement agencies across the country.
“We want to make sure this is truly safe and effective,” she said in an interview.
The debate over Atlanta-based Flock Safety’s cameras, which not only can record license plate numbers but can search for the specific characteristics of a vehicle linked to an alleged crime, has been picking up steam in recent years. The discussions have largely played out in metro Denver and Front Range cities in recent months, but this year they reached the state Capitol, where lawmakers are pitching a couple of bills to tighten up rules around surveillance.
In Denver, Mayor Mike Johnston has been butting heads with the City Council over the issue. Johnston is so convinced of Flock’s value in combating crime that in October, he extended the contract with the company against the wishes of much of the council. Denver has 111 Flock cameras.
In Longmont, elected leaders took a different approach. Its City Council voted in December to pause all sharing of Flock Safety data with other municipalities, declined an expansion of its contract with the company and began searching for an alternative.
Louisville beat its Boulder County neighbor to the punch by several months, disabling its Flock cameras at the end of June and removing them by the start of October. City spokesman Derek Cosson said privacy concerns from residents largely drove the city’s decision.
Steve Mathias, a Thornton resident for nearly a decade, would like to see Flock’s cameras gone from his city. Short of that, he said, reliable controls on how the streetside data is collected, stored and shared are paramount.
“In our rush to make our community safe, we’re not getting the full picture of the risks we’re facing,” he said. “We’re making ourselves safe in some ways by making ourselves less safe in others.”
The hot-button debate in Thornton played out at last month’s community meeting and continued at a City Council meeting last week, where the city’s Police Department gave a presentation on the Flock system.
Cmdr. Chad Parker laid out several examples of Flock’s cameras being instrumental in apprehending bad actors — in cases ranging from homicide to sex assault to child exploitation to a $5,700 theft at a Nike store.
As recently as Monday, Thornton police announced on X that investigators had tracked down a man suspected of hitting and killing a 14-year-old boy who was riding a small motorized bike over the weekend. The agency said a Flock camera in Thornton gave officers a “strong lead” in identifying the hit-and-run suspect within 24 hours.
At the Feb. 3 council study session, police Chief Jim Baird described Flock’s camera system as “one of the best tools I’ve seen in 32 years of law enforcement.”
But that doesn’t sway those in Thornton who are wary of the camera network.
“I’m not a fan of building toward a surveillance state,” Mathias said.
The hazards of a system like Flock, he said, lie not just in the pervasive data-collection methods the company uses but also in who eventually might get to see and use that data — be it a rogue law enforcement officer or a hacker who manages to break into Flock’s database.
“A person who wants us to do us harm with this system will have as much capability as the police have to do good,” he said.
A Flock Safety license plate recognition camera is seen on a street light post on Ken Pratt Boulevard near the intersection with U.S. 287 in Longmont on Dec. 10, 2025. (Matthew Jonas/Daily Camera)
Crime-fighting tool or prone to misuse?
In November, a Columbine Valley police officer was disciplined after he accused a Denver woman of theft based in large part on evidence from Flock cameras, according to reporting from Fox31. The officer mistakenly claimed the woman had stolen a $25 package in a nearby town and said he’d used Flock cameras to track her car.
“It’s putting too much trust in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing,” DeFlock’s Will Freeman said of so many police agencies’ adoption of the technology.
Last summer, 9News reported that the Loveland Police Department had shared access to its Flock camera system with U.S. Border Patrol. That came two months after the station reported that the department gave the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives access to its account, which ATF agents then used to conduct searches for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Parker, the Thornton police commander, said any searches connected to immigration cases or to women from out of state who are seeking an abortion in Colorado — another scenario that’s been raised — “won’t ever touch our system.” State laws restrict cooperation with federal immigration authorities and with other states’ abortion-related investigations.
“Any situation I feel uncomfortable about or that might be in conflict with our policies or with Colorado law, I will revoke their access — no problem,” he said.
Thornton deputy city attorney Adam Stephens said motorists’ Fourth Amendment rights are not being violated by the city’s Flock camera network. During last week’s meeting, he cited several recent court cases that, in essence, determined that there is no right to privacy while driving down a public roadway.
In an interview, Stephens said Thornton was “in compliance with the law.”
Flock spokesman Paris Lewbel wrote in an email that the company was “proud to partner with the Thornton Police Department to provide technology used to investigate and solve crimes and to help locate missing persons.”
Lewbel provided links to two news stories about minor children who were abducted and then found with the help of Flock’s cameras in Thornton and elsewhere.
At the council’s study session last week, Parker provided more examples of Flock’s role in fighting crime and finding missing people in Thornton. They included police nabbing a suspect who had hit and killed a pedestrian, locating a burglar who was suspected of robbing several dispensaries, and tracking down an 89-year-old man with dementia who had gotten into his car and gotten lost.
“It allows us to find vehicles in a manner we weren’t able to previously,” Parker said of the camera network.
Thornton installed its first 10 Flock cameras in 2022 and then added five more — plus a mobile unit — two years later. The initial deployment was in response to a spike in auto thefts in the city, which peaked at 1,205 in 2022 (amid an overall surge in Colorado). Thornton recorded 536 auto thefts last year.
The city says Flock cameras have been involved in 200 cases that resulted in an arrest or a warrant application in Thornton over the last three years.
Thornton police have access to nearly 2,200 other agencies’ Flock systems across the United States, while nearly 1,650 law enforcement agencies can access Thornton’s Flock data, according to data provided by the city.
For Anaya Robinson, the public policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the networked nature of Flock cameras across wide geographies is a big part of the problem. By linking one police agency’s Flock technology with that of thousands of other police departments, it “creates a surveillance environment that could violate the Fourth Amendment.”
The sweeping nature of Flock’s surveillance is also worrisome, Robinson said.
“You’re not just collecting the data of vehicles that ping (a police department’s) hot list (of suspicious vehicles), you’re collecting the data of every vehicle that is caught on a Flock camera,” he said.
And because the technology is relatively inexpensive — Thornton pays $48,500 to Flock annually for its system — it’s an affordable crime-fighting tool for most communities. But that doesn’t mean it should be deployed, DeFlock’s Freeman said.
Fight remains a largely local one
State lawmakers are crafting bills this session to limit the reach of surveillance technologies like Flock’s.
Senate Bill 70 would put limits on access to databases and the sharing of information. It would prohibit a government from accessing a database that reveals an individual’s or a vehicle’s historical location information, and it would prohibit sharing that information with third parties or with government agencies outside the controlling entity’s jurisdiction. Certain exceptions would apply.
Senate Bill 71 would direct a “law enforcement agency to use surveillance technology only for lawful purposes directly related to public safety or for an active investigation.” It also would forbid the use of facial-recognition technology without a warrant and would place limits on the amount of time data can be retained.
Both bills await their first committee hearings.
Thornton says it doesn’t use facial recognition technology. Its Flock data is retained for 30 days.
Regardless of what passes at the state Capitol, the real fight over license plate readers of any type will likely continue to happen at the local level. Thornton’s council plans further discussions on Flock next month.
For Moore, the resident who is leading the charge against the cameras, potential surveillance of the immigrant community is what troubles her the most.
“We want to make sure we’re operating this so that it’s safe for all of our residents,” she said. “Getting rid of the cameras altogether is a tough sell. But there needs to be a conversation about guardrails.”
Mayor Pro Tem Roberta Ayala, a Thornton native, said she has heard a wide array of opinions from her constituents about the advantages and potential downsides of the technology.
“Could it be misused? Yes. Do we want to stop that? Yes,” she said.
But as a victim of crime herself, Ayala also knows the immense damage and disruption that crime causes victims and their families, be it a stolen vehicle or something much worse. And as a teacher, Ayala is concerned about achieving justice for the families of children who are harmed or abused.
“If it can save even five kids,” she said, “I want the cameras.”
A 15-year-old boy who went missing in Denver on Thursday is described by police as an Alaska Native who was last seen wearing a baggy black and white checkered outfit.
Missing Indigenous Person Alert Activation Michael Davis, described as a 15-year-old Alaskan Native male, last seen at 11:00 AM January 22, 2026 in the 1000 block of North Cherokee Street in Denver, Colorado.
This statement, which the central bank posted on its website, amounted to an unprecedented repudiation of a President by a sitting Fed chair. It caused a political eruption—and not just among Democrats. For once, some elected Republicans spoke up. Remarking that the subpoenas had thrown into doubt the “independence and credibility of the Department of Justice,” Senator Thom Tillis, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, vowed to block any new nominations to the Fed, including a potential replacement for Powell, whose term as chair ends in May. Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican, publicly backed Tillis’s stance and suggested that Congress should investigate the Justice Department. Even John Thune, the Majority Leader in the upper chamber, voiced disquiet, saying that the allegations against Powell had “better be real.”
It soon emerged that Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, also had reservations, if not for the same reasons. After learning of the subpoenas on Friday evening, Bessent reportedly called Trump and told him that they would create difficulties in Congress—an accurate prediction, it turned out—and could also make it more likely that Powell would decide to stay on after May as an ordinary member of the Fed board, an option he can exercise because his term as a regular governor doesn’t expire until January, 2028. If Powell did remain on the board, it would deny Trump the opportunity to appoint another governor more amenable to his wishes.
Not for nothing did the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journaldescribe the criminal investigation of Powell as “lawfare for dummies.” Trump insisted that he didn’t know anything about the subpoenas. So did Bill Pulte, the Florida housebuilder who now serves as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and who was a key instigator of the trumped-up mortgage-fraud charges against another Fed governor, Lisa Cook, which Trump used to issue an order firing her. (The Supreme Court is due to hear that case next week.) The denials from Trump and Pulte would perhaps be a bit more believable absent a Washington Postreport that the two of them recently dined at Mar-a-Lago and that Pulte brought along with him a mocked-up “Wanted” poster featuring an image of Powell. (In a post on X, Pulte denied that the meeting happened.)
Pirro seems to have been assigned the role of fall gal. Someone, presumably at the Justice Department, let it be known that Pirro hadn’t informed the higher-ups there before issuing the subpoenas. An unnamed Administration official toldAxios that Pirro “went rogue.” This, even though she’s known Trump for decades and surely took her cues from his attacks on Powell. Just last week, Trump criticized a group of U.S. Attorneys at the White House for not moving fast enough in prosecuting his favored targets, the Journalreported. Pirro, for her part, blamed the victim, claiming that the Fed hadn’t replied to her office’s requests for information. “None of this would have happened if they had just responded to our outreach,” she said.
A likely story. As President, Trump is free to criticize the Fed’s interest-rate policies—counterproductive as such a step usually proves—and even to argue that the Administration should have more say in the central bank’s policy deliberations, as it did before the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951, which separated debt management (the Treasury’s preserve) from monetary policy (the Fed’s bailiwick). But the Fed is an independent agency that operates under the oversight of Congress and the gaze of the financial markets. To change how it works and impose his will, Trump would need the acquiescence of both, which he surely wouldn’t get, and for good reason. The criminal inquiry into Powell smacked of “how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions, with highly negative consequences for inflation and the functioning of their economies more broadly,” a bipartisan group of former Fed chairs and White House economic advisers pointed out in a statement this week. To put it another way, would you trust Trump to set interest rates?
The authoritarian aspect is glaring. In using cost overruns as a pretext for going after Powell criminally, the Trump Administration demonstrated, yet again, its contempt for the institutions of governance and the legal system. Powell deserves credit for fighting back. On receiving the subpoenas last week, he could theoretically have responded with a bland statement that the Fed would coöperate with any legitimate inquiry, and, meanwhile, get on with its work. With his job up in a few months, that would have amounted to keeping his head down again and relying on the courts to strike down any indictment that might come in the future. Instead, he took the advice that he issued to the Princeton class of 2025 in a baccalaureate address last May: “Throw yourself into the deep end of the pool. . . . Take risks.”
The seventy-two-year-old Fed chair put to shame the heads of law firms, universities, and public companies who have caved to the White House. He also demonstrated that, at least in the economic arena, there are still some institutional constraints that Trump cannot sweep aside, or not easily. Tragically, these guardrails are being trampled underfoot in other areas, including the streets of some American cities, where Trump’s immigration police are running amok. Compared with that outrage, a U.S. Attorney issuing subpoenas to the Fed may seem like a matter of minor import, but it’s part of the same larger phenomenon: Presidential abuse of power. And, in his own way, Jay Powell is standing up to it. ♦
A 16-year-old boy, identified as Khyon Smith-Tate, was shot and killed inside a Chipotle near Temple University on Monday night. Police are looking for three possible suspects. No arrests have been made.
OAKLAND — In 2020, California led the nation in outlawing transcript-withholding, a debt collection practice that sometimes kept low-income college students from getting jobs or advanced degrees. Five years later, 24 of the state’s 115 community colleges still said on their websites that students with unpaid balances could lose access to their transcripts, according to a recent UC Merced survey.
The communications failure has been misleading, student advocates said, although overall, the state’s students have benefited from the law.
It “raises questions about what actual institutional practices are at colleges and the extent to which colleges know the law and are fully compliant with the law,” said Charlie Eaton, a UC Merced sociology professor who led the research team that conducted the survey in October.
California community colleges say they are following the law, which prohibits them from refusing to release the grades of a student who owes money to the school — anywhere from a $25 library fine to unpaid tuition. The misinformation on some college websites is a clerical problem that campuses have been asked to update, the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office said in an emailed statement.
Without an official transcript, students can’t prove they’ve earned college credits to admissions offices elsewhere or to potential employers. Millions of students nationwide have lost access to their transcripts because of unpaid fees, according to estimates from the higher education consulting firm Ithaka S+R.
Student advocates argued that the practice made little money for colleges, while costing graduates opportunities that could help them pay back their debts.
California lawmakers agreed; in 2019, they passed legislation that took effect on Jan. 1 2020, barring colleges from using transcript holds to collect debts.
At least 12 other states have followed California’s lead, passing laws limiting or banning colleges from withholding transcripts.
A similar but less stringent federal rule approved during the Biden administration took effect last year.
The new rules have raised awareness about colleges’ debt collection practices and inspired some to find ways to help their students avoid falling behind on their payments in the first place or to pay off what they owe — including by forgiving their debts.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
Colleges and universities, however, argued that withholding transcripts was one of the few ways they had to prevent students from bouncing among institutions and leaving unpaid bills in their wake. Some use another tactic, blocking them from registering for new courses until bills are paid.
When colleges choose to withhold transcripts, the burden falls more heavily on low-income students and students of color, according to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Often those students accrue debts when they withdraw partway through a course, leading the college to return part of their financial aid to the federal government and charge the bill to the student.
In states with laws limiting transcript withholding, many colleges have begun communicating earlier and more often with students about their debts and offering flexible payment plans, said Elizabeth Looker, a senior program manager at Ithaka S+R. Some have added financial literacy training or required students with unpaid bills to meet with counselors.
Court documents show Annette Ayala’s legal battle with Professional Medical Careers Institute after they withheld her transcripts over claims of a debt she owed the college. Ayala won in court and is in the process of applying to RN programs near her home in Simi Valley. Credit: Keri Oberly for The Hechinger Report
Eight public colleges and universities in Ohio went further, offering a deal to former students with unpaid balances: Reenroll at any of the eight, and get up to $5,000 of the outstanding debt forgiven. Called the Ohio College Comeback Compact, the program, which began in 2002 and concludes this fall, was open to former students who had at least a 2.0 GPA and had been out of school a year or more.
The program was designed to give a second chance to students whose educations stalled because of events outside their control, such as losing a job in the middle of the semester, said Steve McKellips, vice president for enrollment management at the University of Akron.
Since the Ohio College Compact’s inception, 79 students have returned to the university under the program, at a cost to the state of $54,174 in debt forgiven. The university netted five times that, or $271,924, in additional tuition, McKellips said. More than 700 students have used the compact to reenroll, according to Ithaka S+R, which helped coordinate the program and is studying the results.
“I think sometimes people have this image of somebody walking away from a tuition bill because they just don’t care,” McKellips said. “But sometimes there’s just a boulder in the way and somebody needs to move it. Once the boulder was moved and they could move forward, we’re finding them continuing happily along the way they always intended to.”
The University of California cited expected cuts to federal and state funding as one reason it opposed the bill. “UC believes that maintaining the ability to hold registration is essential for its ability to reasonably secure unpaid student debt,” UC legislative director Jessica Duong wrote to lawmakers.
Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said that Cal State wanted a flexible approach to debt collection and that campuses had started eliminating registration holds for minor debts such as parking tickets and lost library books.
“Students are able to move forward with their enrollment even with institutional debts in the low hundreds to the low thousands of dollars, depending upon the university,” she said.
Supporters of the failed bill — which also would have barred colleges from reporting a student’s institutional debt to credit agencies — said curbing aggressive debt collection doesn’t just help low-income students; it speeds up the training of workers in industries crucial to the state’s economy.
“Schools think about these institutional debts in a way that is very penny-wise and pound-foolish, and it’s preventing people from participating in the economy,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of Protect Borrowers.
Annette Ayala of Simi Valley, hoping to become a registered nurse, took her for-profit college to court to force it to comply with California’s debt collection law.
She had earned her vocational nursing license from the school, the Professional Medical Careers Institute, and wanted to continue her studies to become a registered nurse. But the college refused to release her transcript — citing a $7,500 debt that Ayala argued in court records she did not owe — and without the transcript she could not apply to other colleges.
In her case, California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which regulates for-profit colleges under the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs, cited her former school for violating the state’s transcript-withholding law.
Having earned a vocational nursing license from a for-profit college, Annette Ayala of Simi Valley, California, wanted to continue her studies and become an RN. Her college refused to release her transcript, citing a disputed debt, but Ayala took the school to court and won her case, under a California law that prohibits transcript withholding. Credit: Keri Oberly for The Hechinger Report
The college was fined $1,000 and ordered to update its enrollment agreement. The school forgave the debt it said Ayala owed. It’s the only case in which a school has been cited for withholding a transcript since the bureau started monitoring compliance with the law more closely two years ago, said Monica Vargas, a spokesperson for consumer affairs.
School officials had been unaware of the California law at the time Ayala sued, the school’s controller, Joshua Taylor, said, and have since updated their catalog to comply with it.
With her vocational nursing license, Ayala has been working in home health care. Now that she has her transcript, she’s applying for RN programs, and said her salary would roughly double once she has the new degree, allowing her to save for the future and help her son pay for college.
“You’ve got to give people the chance to get through their program and pay their debts as they’re working,” she said. “You can’t hold them back from being able to make top dollar with their abilities to pay back these loans.”
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Danh C. Vo, the founder of the former VBit Technologies Corp., is accused of defrauding thousands of investors in the bitcoin mining company in a scheme that promised them profits, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says.
In a windowless room at Denver police headquarters on a recent Thursday afternoon, Officer Chris Velarde activated a police drone to investigate a potential car break-in.
Officer Chris Velarde flies a drone and monitors live footage from its camera from Denver Police Department headquarters on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Several floors above, the drone launched from the roof and flew itself — essentially on autopilot — to the site of the call, reported as a man breaking into a car with a crowbar near the Santa Fe Arts District.
The drone whizzed along, 200 feet up, in a straight line across blocks, buildings and streets during the roughly mile-long flight from police headquarters at 1331 Cherokee St. Velarde didn’t pick up the Xbox video-game controller that manually pilots the drone until it reached the area of the call. Then he took control and trolled the block for the supposed break-in, watching live video footage transmitted from the drone on his computer monitor as he flew.
After a few moments, Velarde spotted two people jiggering the passenger-side window of a vehicle. He zoomed in on the pair, and on the car’s license plate. He ran the plate to see whether the vehicle was stolen; it was not. The people on the street didn’t look up. They didn’t seem to know a police drone was hovering above them, that they were being recorded and watched a mile away by officers and a reporter.
Two more people joined the pair at the vehicle’s window and Velarde made the call — this didn’t look like a vehicle break-in. More likely, someone had just locked their keys in their car. He cleared the call with 911 dispatchers and told them there was no need to send an officer to the scene. Then he sent the drone back to headquarters; it flew itself to the rooftop dock, landing autonomously on a platform stamped with bright blue-and-yellow QR codes.
The Denver Police Department began testing drones as first responders — that is, sending them out on 911 calls — in mid-October after signing up for two free pilot programs from rival drone companies Skydio and Flock Safety. The effort has raised concerns among privacy advocates, Denver politicians and the city’s police oversight group, particularly regarding the department’s contract with Flock, the company behind the city’s controversial network of automated license-plate readers.
Police see the drones as a way to speed up call-response times and provide more information to officers as they arrive on scene, improving, they say, both public safety and officer safety. If a drone arrives at a scene before officers, and the drone pilot can tell police on the ground that the man with the knife actually put down the weapon before the officers arrived, that helps everyone, police said.
“The more knowledge, information and intelligence that we can provide our officers on the ground, the better methods that they can use to respond to certain situations, which may cause them to not escalate unnecessarily,” said Cmdr. Clifford Barnes, who heads the department’s Cyber Bureau.
Critics say the eyes in the sky raise serious privacy concerns both with how the drones and the data they collect are used now, and with how they might be used in the future as the technology rapidly changes. They worry that the drones could create a citywide surveillance network with few legal guardrails, that the footage they collect will be used to train private companies’ AI algorithms or that police will misuse emerging AI capabilities, like facial recognition.
“When it comes to the decision of, are we going to use this thing that could potentially increase public safety, that will erode privacy rights — no one should get to decide the public is willing to give away our constitutional rights, except the people,” said Anaya Robinson, public policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “And when law enforcement makes that decision for us, it becomes extremely problematic.”
Almost 300 drone flights in 55 days
So far, only Skydio drones have flown as first responders over Denver.
Denver police signed a zero-dollar contract with Flock — without public announcement — in August for a year-long pilot of drones as first responders, but the company has yet to set up its autonomous aircraft. Skydio, on the other hand, moved quickly to get drones in the air after Denver police in October signed a contract to test up to four of the company’s drones during a free six-month pilot.
Skydio’s drones can reach about a 2-mile radius around the Denver police headquarters. The company advertises a top speed of 45 mph with 40 minutes of flight time; Denver pilots have found the drones average around 28 mph and around 25 minutes of battery life per flight.
From the first flight on Oct. 15 through Tuesday, two Skydio drones flew 297 times, according to data provided by Denver police in response to an open records request. Most of those flights — 199 — were to answer calls for service; another 82 were training flights, according to the data.
Skydio drones also surveilled events — a function police call “event overwatch” — seven times, the police data shows. Overwatch might include flying over a protest to track where the demonstrators are headed and alert officers on the ground for traffic control, Barnes said. (The police data showed that all seven overwatch flights occurred on Oct. 18, the day of Denver’s “No Kings” rally.)
The drones flew to 29 calls about a person with a weapon, 21 disturbances, 20 assaults in progress, a dozen suspicious occurrences and 11 hold-up alarms, according to data from Denver’s 911 dispatch records. The drones also flew to 39 other types of calls, including reports of prowlers, fights, burglaries, domestic violence and suicidal people.
The most common outcome for a call was that the officers were unable to locate an incident or the suspect was gone by the time the drone or police officers arrived, the records show. Across about 200 calls for service that included drone responses, police made 22 arrests and issued one citation, the dispatch data shows.
When responding to calls for service, the drones reached the scene before patrol officers 88% of the time, the police data shows. A drone was the sole police response in 80 of 199 calls for service, or about 40% of the time.
Barnes said answering calls with solely a drone improves police efficiency.
“If an officer on the ground doesn’t need to respond, and the drone pilot is comfortable with cancelling the other officers coming, we can assign those officers to more important, more pressing matters, so call-response times come down,” he said.
That approach raises questions about what the drones (which are equipped with three different cameras and a thermal imager) can and can’t see, and how officers are making decisions about call responses without actually speaking to anyone at the scene, the ACLU’s Robinson said.
“Humans have bias,” he said. Drone pilots might be more inclined to send officers to a potential car break-in in a low-income neighborhood and more likely not to in a higher-income neighborhood, he said. Or they might miss something from above that they could have seen at street level.
Officer Chris Velarde flies a drone and monitors live footage from its camera from Denver Police Department headquarters on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
But minimizing in-person police interactions with residents, particularly in over-policed neighborhoods, can also be a positive, said Julia Richman, chair of Denver’s Citizen Oversight Board, which provides civilian oversight of the police department.
“Where my head goes is the other outcome, where they roll up on those people who are trying to get keys out of the car and then they shoot them,” she said. “Actually, (the drone-only response) seems like a really good outcome.”
The oversight group has talked with Denver police over the last two years about developing its drone program, she said. The department created a seven-page policy to guide their use; the policy aims to ensure “civil rights and reasonable expectations of privacy are a key component of any decision made to deploy” a drone.
But Richman said she was surprised by aspects of the police department’s pilot programs despite the ongoing conversations with department leadership.
“What was never discussed, not once, was the idea of a third party running those drones or those drones being autonomous,” she said, referring to the drone companies. “What has changed with this latest pilot is the key features and key aspects that would create public concern had never been discussed with us.”
Both Flock and Skydio advertise autonomous features powered by artificial intelligence. Skydio uses AI for its autonomous flight paths, obstacle avoidance and tracking people and cars.
Flock, which also offers autonomous flight, advertises its drones as integrating with its automated license-plate readers. The license-plate readers — there are more than 100 around Denver — automatically photograph every car that passes by them. If a license plate is stolen or involved in a crime, the license-plate readers alert police within seconds.
Police Chief Ron Thomas and Mayor Mike Johnston defended the surveillance network as an invaluable crime-solving tool this year against mounting public discontent around how much data the machines collected and how that data was used — particularly around sharing information with the federal government for the purposes of immigration enforcement.
That privacy debate around Flock’s license plate readers unfolded in communities across Colorado and nationwide this year. In Loveland, the police department for a time allowed U.S. Border Patrol agents to access its Flock cameras before blocking that access. In Longmont, councilmembers voted Wednesday to look for alternatives to replace the 20 Flock license plate readers in that city.
When Denver City Council members, some driven by privacy concerns, voted against continuing Flock’s license-plate readers in May, Johnston extended the surveillance anyway through a free five-month contract extension with Flock in October that did not require approval from the council. Against that backdrop, Denver police quietly signed on for Flock’s drone pilot in August.
Barnes said the police department will not use any license-plate reader capabilities available on Flock drones. Such a feature would constitute “random surveillance,” which is prohibited under the department’s drone policy. The drones never fly without an officer’s direct involvement, he added.
The blue 2-mile-radius line seen on a computer screen shows the range of Denver police Skydio drones flown from Denver Police headquarters. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
The policy also prohibits drones from filming anywhere a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy unless police have a warrant, and says officers should take “reasonable precautions … to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Denver police do receive search warrants to fly drones for particular operations outside of the drones-as-first-responder program. In October, a Denver police detective sought and received a warrant to fly a drone over a shooting suspect’s home in Cherry Hills Village to check whether a truck involved in the shooting was parked at the wooded property.
The warrant noted that when driving home from anywhere outside Cherry Hills Village, the suspect could not reach his house without passing by Flock license-plate readers, and that photos from those license-plate readers suggested the truck was at the property.
Denver Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and Councilman Kevin Flynn both told The Post they were not aware of the police department’s Skydio drone pilot before hearing about it from the newspaper, even though they are both on the city’s Surveillance Technology Task Force. The new group began meeting in August largely to consider Flock license-plate readers, as well as other types of surveillance technology, Gonzales-Gutierrez said.
“We haven’t talked about it in the task force, and the charge of our work in the task force is to come up with those guardrails that need to be put in place for these types of technology being utilized by law enforcement,” she said. “I feel like they just keep moving on without us being able to complete our work.”
Police don’t need permission from the City Council to carry out the pilot programs, Gonzales-Gutierrez said, but she was disappointed by the lack of communication and collaboration from the department.
Flynn sees the potential of police drones, particularly in speeding up officer response times, which can sometimes be dismal in the far-flung areas of his southwestern district.
“If a drone can get there to a 911 call and it can help an officer at headquarters assess the scene before a staffed car could get there, I would love that,” he said.
But he wants to be sure they are used in a way that respects residents’ rights. He would not support using the drones for general patrolling or surveillance, he said.
“This pilot is an excellent opportunity to test all of those boundaries and see if there are ways to operate a system that can be very useful for public safety without crossing boundaries,” he said.”…And maybe we don’t keep using them. That is the point of a pilot.”
‘These are flying cops’
The Skydio drones film from the moment they are launched until they drop in to land.
When the drone is on its way to a call — flying at the 200-foot altitude limit set by the Federal Aviation Administration — its cameras remain pointed at the horizon. In Denver’s denser neighborhoods, the Skydio drones at that height flew among buildings, sometimes at eye-level with balconies, offices and apartment windows, according to video of four flights obtained by The Post through an open records request.
“What if someone is in their apartment unit in one of these giant buildings and they’re changing, and they have their window open because they’re way up high and they don’t think anyone is watching them?” Gonzales-Gutierrez said. “That is crazy.”
The drones buzzed over rooftop decks, balconies and elevated apartment complex pools, the videos show. On one trip, a drone flew past the Colorado State Capitol Building, recording three people on a balcony on the tower under the building’s golden dome. Another time, the drone pilot zoomed in on a license plate so tightly that the car’s small, decorative “LOVE” decal was clearly visible.
Flynn noted that a 200-foot altitude would put the drones well above most of the homes in his less-dense district, and that people on their porches or balconies aren’t somewhere private.
“If someone is out on a balcony, sitting there reading a book… generally speaking, if you are out in public there’s no expectation of privacy,” he said.
The Skydio drones recorded about 54 hours of footage in the first eight weeks of their operation, according to data provided by the police department. Police leadership opted to have the drones’ cameras on and recording whenever the drone is in flight to boost transparency about how the drones are being used, Barnes said.
“It makes sense to keep the camera rolling,” Barnes said. “Then, if there’s an allegation, we just make sure that footage is recorded and treated like digital evidence, uploaded to the evidence management platform so it could be reviewed as necessary. We’re just trying to make sure we establish that balance, being as transparent as possible.”
Drone footage unrelated to criminal investigations is automatically deleted after 60 days, he said. While it’s retained, it’s stored in an evidence system that keeps a record of anyone who looks at it. The drone unit’s sergeant, Brent Kohls, also audits the flight reports monthly. (Footage used in criminal investigations will be on the same retention schedule as body-worn camera footage, police said.)
Kohls noted it would be unusual for the drone footage to be viewed only by the pilot. The feed is often displayed on the wall of the police department’s Real-Time Crime Center as it comes in.
ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the organization’s speech, privacy and technology project, would rather see police keep the recording off while flying a drone to a call, even if the camera is still livestreaming to police headquarters. In that scenario, a drone pilot might still see a woman tanning topless on her rooftop pool deck, he said, but the government wouldn’t then keep a recording of that privacy violation, amplifying it further.
“The thing we are really worried about is police start deploying drones as first responders for the majority of their calls for service and suddenly you have this crisscrossing network of surveillance all over the city,” Freed Wessler said. “You have the potential for a pervasive record of what everyone is doing all the time.”
Kohls said an officer flying a drone who spotted a different crime occurring while en route to another call would stop to report and respond to that secondary crime, just like an officer would on the ground.
“Absolutely, if an officer sees a crime happening, they’re going to get on the radio, alert dispatch to what they’re observing,” Kohls said. “Hopefully, if they have a few minutes of battery time left still, they can extend their time and circle or overwatch on that scene to provide hopefully life-saving radio traffic, whatever information they need to relay to dispatch to get other officers heading, or the fire department heading that way.”
State and federal laws have not yet caught up to how police are using drones, Freed Wessler said. The Fourth Amendment has what’s known as the plain-view exception, which allows police officers who are lawfully in a place to take action if they see evidence of a crime happening in plain sight.
“The problem here is we are not talking about police doing a thing we would normally expect them to do,” Freed Wessler said. “We are talking about police taking advantage of a new technology that gives them a totally new power to fly at virtually no expense over any part of the city at any time of day and see a whole bunch of stuff happening.”
A Denver police drone lands on its docking station on the roof of Denver Police headquarters in Denver, on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Police have broad leeway to watch suspects without first getting a search warrant — like by peering through a fence or climbing the steps of a nearby building to look into a yard. But that’s different from using a subtle video camera to record a person 24/7 for months, the justices concluded.
So far, that’s the closest ruling in Colorado on the issue of drone surveillance, Freed Wessler said. Robinson, the policy director at the ACLU of Colorado, said lawmakers should act to regulate police drone use — either at the state or local level.
“These are flying cops,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy. “That is another one of those slippery slopes.”
Aside from the legality of surveillance, another question is how the drone footage and flight data is used by the drone companies, Lipton said.
“We live in a time where all these AI-fueled companies have a real drive to integrate AI into everything, and they’re really hungry for new data,” she said. “And we have law enforcement helping to feed these companies in a way they don’t really understand.”
Under its current agreement with Denver police, Skydio doesn’t use drone footage to train its algorithm or improve its product. Flock spells out in its contract that the company can “collect, analyze and anonymize” drone footage, then use that anonymized footage to train its “machine learning algorithms,” and enhance its services.
Lipton added that technology is moving fast — Axon, a company that powers many police departments’ body-worn cameras — this month started testing facial recognition on its cameras to automatically alert a police officer if a person they’re encountering has a warrant out for their arrest.
Prisons are experimenting with “movement analysis” to automatically flag a person’s movements as potentially aggressive before the person perpetrates violence, she said.
“We are technologically at a place where it would not be hard for a drone to fly over an area and basically serve as a license-plate reader for humans,” Lipton said. “… Some of this analysis is just not being done because it is not publicly palatable yet. But it is not like it is technologically difficult for some of these companies.”
The Trump administration has disbanded its federal cultural property investigations team and reassigned the agents to immigration enforcement, delivering a blow to one of the world’s leaders in heritage protection and calling into question the future of America’s role in repatriating looted relics, according to multiple people familiar with the changes.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security established the Cultural Property, Art and Antiquities program in 2017 to “conduct training on the preservation, protection and investigation of cultural heritage and property; to coordinate and support investigations involving the illicit trafficking of cultural property around the world; and to facilitate the repatriation of illicit cultural items seized as a result of (federal) investigations to the objects and artifacts’ lawful and rightful owners.”
Homeland Security Investigations, the department’s investigative arm, once had as many as eight agents in its New York office investigating cultural property cases. A select number of additional agents around the country also worked these cases, including a nationwide investigation into looted Thai objects.
The Denver Art Museum has previously acknowledged that two relics from Thailand in its collection are part of that federal investigation.
Since 2007, HSI says it has repatriated over 20,000 items to more than 40 countries.
But the Trump administration, as part of its unprecedented mass-deportation agenda, earlier this year dissolved the cultural property program and moved the agents to immigration enforcement, multiple people with knowledge of the change told The Denver Post.
Homeland Security officials did not respond to requests for comment.
A few months after Trump took office, a Homeland Security staffer with knowledge of the antiquities field told The Post that they received an email from their bosses. The message, according to their recollection: “The way of the world is immigration. Bring your cases to a reasonable conclusion and understand that the priority is immigration operations.”
This individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said they were given no time frame for the new assignment. Leadership, though, was clear that there would be no new cultural property cases.
Instead of conducting these investigations, this individual said they have been driving detainees between detention facilities and the airport for their deportation.
“I just spent almost a month cuffing guys up, throwing them in a van from one jail to another,” this person said, adding that the work doesn’t take advantage of their specialized training.
It’s frustrating, the individual said, because cultural property cases don’t require a lot of agents or resources. They don’t need all types of fancy electronic equipment.
“The juice from the squeeze on these cases is a lot more than people wanna give it credit,” this person said.
Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post
The Bunker Gallery section of the Denver Art Museum’s Southeast Asian art galleries at the Martin Building is pictured on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. Emma C. Bunker’s name was removed from the gallery in the wake of an investigation by The Denver Post. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Thai objects in Denver under investigation
For years, HSI has been investigating two Thai relics in the Denver Art Museum’s collection after officials in Thailand raised issues with their provenance, or ownership history.
The pieces — part of the so-called “Prakhon Chai hoard” — were looted in the 1960s from a secret vault at a temple near the Cambodian border, The Post found in a three-part investigation in 2022. Villagers told the newspaper that they recall dredging the vault for these prized objects and selling them to a British collector named Douglas Latchford.
A federal grand jury decades later indicted Latchford for conspiring to sell plundered Southeast Asian antiquities around the world. He died before he could stand trial.
But the DA’s office relies heavily on its partnership with HSI, which has federal jurisdiction and can serve warrants and issue summonses across the country. The Manhattan DA’s office only has authority over New York.
“The future for the DA’s office and the (antiquities trafficking) unit is in jeopardy,” said an individual familiar with the Manhattan unit’s dealings, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s unclear who’s going to be swearing out warrants going forward.”
A spokesperson for the Manhattan DA declined to comment for this story.
Department of Homeland Security Investigations agents join Washington Metropolitan Police Department officers as they conduct traffic checks at a checkpoint along 14th Street in northwest Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
‘Doing the right thing still has power’
These changes in enforcement priorities mean countries seeking the repatriation of their cultural items have fewer partners in the U.S. who can help them deal with museums and private collectors.
“A few years ago, the United States led the world in restoring stolen history — and it mattered,” said Bradley Gordon, an American attorney who for years has represented the Cambodian government in its quest to reclaim its pillaged history from art museums, including Denver’s.
It’s a shame, he said, that federal agencies have stepped back, even as the Manhattan DA continues its work.
“This work isn’t just about art; it’s about security, diplomacy and restoring dignity,” Gordon said. “These looted objects were never meant to be hidden in mansions or displayed in museum glass cases far from their origins. When they are returned, entire communities celebrate with sincere happiness. It’s a reminder that doing the right thing still has power in the world.”
Representatives from Thailand’s government, meanwhile, said they haven’t gotten an update on the Prakhon Chai investigation since Trump returned to office this year.
Cultural heritage experts say these investigations can serve as an important diplomatic tool and use of soft power — a way for the U.S. to strengthen connections to allies or thaw fraught relations with longtime adversaries.
In 2013, for example, President Barack Obama’s administration returned a ceremonial drinking vessel from the seventh century B.C. to Iran. For years, American officials said they couldn’t return the million-dollar relic until relations between the two countries normalized. The move — which NBC News titled “archaeo-diplomacy” — represented a small but important gesture as the U.S. sought a nuclear deal with the Middle Eastern power.
“The return of the artifact reflects the strong respect the United States has for cultural heritage property — in this case, cultural heritage property that was likely looted from Iran and is important to the patrimony of the Iranian people,” the U.S. State Department said at the time. “It also reflects the strong respect the United States has for the Iranian people.”
A lack of law enforcement activity in this space could also mean that museums and private collectors will be less inclined to return stolen pieces, said Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Museums, instead, will maintain the status quo.
“Without the power of subpoenas, knowing what records people have, most of these returns are impossible,” she said. “Without the official stick to back up the carrot of negotiations, it wouldn’t happen. Government presence in these negotiations is absolutely crucial.”
Others wonder what the Trump administration’s realignment would mean for the illicit antiquities market.
Mongolia has spent years fighting for the return of dinosaur fossils from around the globe. HSI has worked on numerous investigations on this front, repatriating a host of looted items that are considered some of the best relics of life on Earth from millions of years ago.
Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, the country’s former minister of culture, tourism and sports, said she always held up the United States as an example of what can be done to crack down on the black market for cultural goods. Before collaborating with the U.S., Mongolia was considered “the weakest country” for losing its own heritage to illegal sellers, she said.
“If ICE is too focused on immigration and less on cultural heritage, it would, of course, be a sad thing,” she said in an interview, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees HSI. “By discouraging the black market of dinosaur fossils, the international market was shattered. If ICE weakens, the black market might surge back. The American (antiquities) market and American collaboration is essential for stopping the black market of illegal cultural property sales.”
Hundreds of unregulated smoke shops that sell hemp products in the Philadelphia suburbs use fraudulent lab reports that leave their customers “dangerously uninformed” about the potency of the drugs they’re taking, according to a Montgomery County grand jury report released Thursday.
The 10-month investigation led by the district attorneys of Montgomery, Bucks and Chester counties examined a patchwork of businesses launched in recent years to take advantage of federal laws that allow hemp products to be sold legally with low levels of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said an “unintended consequence” of the 2018 Farm Bill is that unregulated smoke shops now sell a wide range of products that they claim meet legal standards but are actually much stronger than advertised.
“What we found in a lot of them is they’re selling straight-up marijuana,” Steele said at a news conference Thursday.
Narcotics detectives from all three counties went undercover to purchase products from smoke shops and have them lab-tested for potency. More than 90% of the edibles, THC vapes and loose flower products that were analyzed exceeded federal standards, the grand jury found, and many were mislabeled or backed by dubious certificates from suppliers.
“This deception means that adults and children alike are exposed to substances whose potency and risks are hidden from view,” the report says.
Steele said the most troubling facet of the smoke shop industry is that the products are often marketed toward children and can be sold to anyone who walks through the door. Some shops also carry other intoxicating products, including kratom and tianeptine, that have been associated with hospitalizations and substance abuse issues.
The grand jury report details nine times in the past year children were sickened after ingesting THC products commonly sold at smoke shops.
“They’re selling illegal products without oversight, and without concern for the health of Pennsylvanians, especially without regard for the health of our children,” Steele said.
The 107-page report calls on state lawmakers to impose standards for product safety and testing at accredited labs, establish an age limit of 21 for THC products, and regulate the marketing of THC products with the same rigor applied to tobacco and nicotine. The report also urges lawmakers to create clear definitions of marijuana derivatives — such as Delta-8, Delta-10 and THCA — to prevent them from being sold under the banner of “legal hemp.”
Steele said Montgomery County’s 240 smoke shops now outnumber schools and have turned fuzzy federal hemp laws into big business.
“People are hiding behind that, saying this is Farm Bill compliant,” he said.
Steele was joined Thursday by Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn and Chester County District Attorney Chris de Barrena-Sarobe, who said the deceptive practices of smoke shops are “flagrant” and “unsustainable.”
In Chester County, De Barrena-Sarobe said he’s already issued 16 search warrants at smoke shops, arrested some lawbreakers and seized more than half a million dollars in cash and other proceeds. Steele said his office has taken similar actions when illegal activities are found.
“People that are selling drugs out of their stores — selling marijuana, that’s a felony,” Steele said. “If you continue on in this way, plan on getting arrested.”
The grand jury report comes against the backdrop of Pennsylvania’s halting efforts to legalize recreational marijuana, a move that would create clear standards and a licensing process for sales of the drug, amid a monthslong budget standoff in Harrisburg. Some lawmakers hope to first establish a cannabis control board to lay the groundwork that would address the sale of marijuana derivatives.
Steele said the problems found at smoke shops are separate from the state’s licensed medical marijuana dispensaries, noting that their business has been impacted by unregulated stores that circumvent taxes and other restrictions on cannabis.
Last week, Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday joined colleagues across the country in a joint letter calling on Congress to close the loophole that has allowed “intoxicating hemp-derived THC products” to flourish at businesses that “pursue profits at the expense of public safety and health.”
Steele said smoke shops in the region are getting away with selling products that don’t even hide their appeal to kids and teens. He displayed a photo from the grand jury report showing packages of edible THC products found at shops in the area.
“You’ve got Cheetos with marijuana leaves on it,” he said.
The man who raped and killed 9-year-old Carol Ann Dougherty at a Bristol Township church in 1962 was finally identified Wednesday as William Schrader, a serial child abuser and longtime suspect in the cold case that shook the girl’s Bucks County community, prosecutors said.
Authorities identified Schrader — who died while in prison for other crimes in 2002 — at a news conference in Doylestown to share the findings of a grand jury investigation into Dougherty’s death. Pennsylvania State Police and Bucks County prosecutors kept the case alive by tracking down eyewitnesses, reviewing forensic evidence and obtaining a confession that Schrader made to his stepson years after Dougherty’s death, investigators said.
Dougherty, a fifth-grade student at the school at St. Mark’s Roman Catholic Church, went missing on the afternoon of Oct. 22, 1962. She was last seen riding her bike to stop for a snack and meet friends at the Bristol Borough Free Library. Doughtery never made it there and didn’t return home for dinner, prompting her family to search the community.
That Monday night, Dougherty’s father found Carol Ann dead inside St. Mark’s. She had been raped and strangled with the use of a ligature, investigators determined, and male pubic hairs were clutched in her hand at the scene.
Police knew she had ridden her bike down Lincoln Avenue, which runs adjacent to St. Mark’s, not long before she was killed.
“Living on Lincoln Avenue was an absolute predator, and a predator whose prey was little girls — and that was William Schrader,” Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn said Wednesday.
Schrader, who grew up in Luzerne County, had a violent past that traced back to his childhood. He was in and out reform school and later joined the Army, but he was dishonorably discharged a year later. He was convicted of attempted murder in the shooting of another man in Luzerne County and served time at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. After his release from prison, Schrader settled with family members in Bristol. He was 22 at the time of Dougherty’s death.
Investigators initially focused on three other suspects, but ruled each one out after they provided legitimate alibis.
About two months after the murder, police questioned Schrader after a witness reported having seeing him cut through his lawn nearby the church the day Dougherty was killed. Schrader’s alibi that he had been working that day was proven false when investigators obtained timecards from his employer. Schrader agreed to give police a pubic hair sample, but then fled to Florida to evade further investigation. He ultimately settled down and got married in Louisiana.
Provided Image/Bucks County DA’s Office
William Schrader, the man suspected of raping and killing 9-year-old Carol Ann Dougherty in 1962, is shown above in a mugshot taken by Bristol Township police during his initial questioning in the case.
Schorn detailed an insidious pattern of sexual abuse committed by Schrader against his stepdaughters, his biological children and his grandchildren over the ensuing years.
“The generational sexual abuse that this man inflicted upon every female child and woman in his life, he didn’t stop until the day he died,” Schorn said.
During a domestic dispute with his wife in 1985, Schrader intentionally set fire to the family’s home. A 12-year-old girl the couple had been fostering died in the blaze, resulting in Schrader’s conviction and imprisonment.
In 1993, after Pennsylvania State Police analyzed 141 pubic hair samples in the Doughtery investigation, they determined Schrader was the only person who could not be eliminated as the source of the hair found in the girl’s hand. He was extradited to Bucks County, where he again denied responsibility for Dougherty’s death, and was then sent back to prison in Louisiana. Charges could not be filed against Schrader in the Dougherty case because the hair fiber analysis was not sufficient evidence to move forward and DNA testing proved inconclusive.
In more recent years, Schorn said Schrader’s surviving family members shared their “deepest, darkest secrets” to help detectives bring closure to the case. In November, Schrader’s stepson, Robert Leblanc, told police that Schrader had twice confessed to killing a little girl at a Pennsylvania church. LeBlanc said Schrader had told him he lured the girl into the church to rape her and that he “had to kill the girl in Bristol to keep her from talking.”
Years after Dougherty’s death, another witness came forward to Bristol police to report that he had seen Schrader outside the church the day of the murder.
The Dougherty investigation gained renewed attention last year because of a 14-episode podcast series produced by longtime sports radio host Mike Missanelli, whose uncle was the police chief in Bristol in 1962.
Kay Dougherty, Carol Ann’s sister and the lone surviving member of her immediate family, praised Missanelli and others for their dedication to the case at Wednesday’s news conference.
“After so many decades of unknowing, this finding finally brings closure and a truth to a wound that never healed,” Dougherty said.
The FBI is looking for suspects involved in the attempted robbery of an armored truck in Holmesburg.
According to the bureau’s Philadelphia office, two masked men approached a Loomis truck parked in front of the Wawa at 7715 Frankford Ave. around 8 a.m. Friday morning. Both wore dark clothing and blue gloves, and one carried a rifle.
When they attempted to rob the vehicle, the driver fired five rounds at the suspects. They retreated down an alley behind the Wawa, jumping into a stolen red Honda Accord waiting for them.
The pair and a getaway driver later abandoned that car and fled on foot. The suspects also left a stolen Acura RDX at the scene of the attempted robbery.
The FBI said the men should be considered armed and dangerous. Anyone with information about the crime can contact the Philly field office at 215-418-4000 or submit a tip online.
Allegations of cheating during a New Jersey police sergeant exam in March have led to law enforcement associations calling for an investigation.
The state Civil Service Commission, which oversees the hiring and promotions of government-funded employees, has been requested by officials representing officers and police chiefs to withhold the results of the test, which are typically released by mid-October, until more information is made available.
Andrew Caggiano, president of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, said in a statement that the group originally reported the cheating allegations to the CSC and is calling on the three-member independent administrative state agency to lead a thorough investigation “to ensure this exam remains a credible method to assess law enforcement and the potential for promotion.”
On Monday morning, the president of the New Jersey State Police Benevolent Association released a statement saying allegations of “cheating and dishonest test taking practices” were also brought to them and were reported to the CSC, but they have yet to receive any updates about an investigation.
“There hasn’t been much transparency or communication regarding the allegations or how the CSC would address them,” Peter Andreyev, president of NJSPBA, said in a statement. “While we understand the importance of the timely scoring of examinations and releasing of results, we believe it is equally important to ensure that the fairest results are provided.”
A release date for the test results has not been announced, and further delays could impact promotions and hirings, Andreyev said.
The CSC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Vice-President, it must be noted, graduated from Yale Law School, where presumably he learned something about what it takes to “violate a crime”—and how behavior that does not rise to the level of criminality can nonetheless be suspicious and blameworthy. The incoming Trump Administration was reportedly alerted to the investigation. It must have realized that a story this odiferous had a high likelihood of being leaked, yet it gave Homan a prominent role. It is hard to imagine another Administration in the post-Watergate era making that judgment—even if officials didn’t find Homan’s actions morally repugnant, they would avoid him out of self-preservation. But for the Trump team, with its high tolerance for embarrassment and supreme confidence in its impunity, there isn’t much that is off the table. So the Administration can brazen its way through self-serving deals that would have made its predecessors blanch: the gift of a luxury jet from Qatar; the various ventures into cryptocurrency, including a gala dinner for the biggest investors in the $TRUMP meme coin. A bag of cash pales by comparison.
The Stephanopoulos-Vance encounter was not the Administration’s first effort to shut down the Homan story. Shortly after MSNBC broke the news of the cash transfer, in late September, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told a reporter, “Well, Mr. Homan never took the fifty thousand dollars that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts straight.” The investigation, Leavitt asserted, had represented “another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a Presidential campaign. You had F.B.I. agents going undercover to try and entrap one of the President’s top allies and supporters, someone who they knew very well would be taking a government position months later.” Homan, she said, “did absolutely nothing wrong.”
On October 7th, at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing for Attorney General Pam Bondi, four Democratic senators—Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island; Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii; Alex Padilla, of California; and Peter Welch, of Vermont—also raised the matter of the missing fifty thousand. Bondi’s response was characteristically bristling and evasive; Whitehouse asked about the money seven times, to no avail. “You’re very concerned about money and people taking money and you rail against dark money yet you work with dark-money groups all the time,” Bondi told him. When Whitehouse asked Bondi if investigators had examined whether Homan reported the fifty thousand as taxable income, Bondi retorted, “Senator, I would be more concerned, if I were you when you talk about corruption and money, that . . . you pushed for legislation that would subsidize your wife’s company.” (Sandra Whitehouse, a marine biologist, has worked for an ocean-conservation group that receives federal funds for which her husband voted. The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed two complaints on this subject.) The investigation into Homan “was resolved prior to my confirmation as Attorney General,” Bondi told Welch. “It’s not resolved. There’s fifty thousand dollars,” Welch responded. “Homan has it, or somebody has it. Do you have no interest in knowing where it is?” Bondi replied, “You’re not going to sit here and slander Tom Homan.”
Homan, for his part, has tried a couple of different defenses. “Look, I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal,” he told Laura Ingraham, of Fox News, in September. Ingraham didn’t press Homan about whether he’d taken the money, and he didn’t deny it. Appearing Wednesday evening on NewsNation, Homan was more definitive. “I didn’t take fifty thousand dollars from anybody,” he declared, and added a helping of self-pity. “There’s been hit pieces on me since I came back to this Administration,” he said. “What people don’t talk about is I took a significant, huge pay cut to come back and serve my nation, and I’m not enriching myself doing this job.”
The beauty of the Homan story is that its elements are so easily grasped: the undercover agents, the alleged dangling of contracts, the Cava bag, the missing cash. You don’t have to plow through the intricacies of international law or the economics of meme coins to understand that there is every indication that something very wrong happened, whether or not it amounted to a crime. To ask about this, again and again, is not slander, it is an obligation—of reporters, lawmakers, and the public. Because to let this episode slide—to allow it to be overtaken by the next outrage and the one to follow—would be to accept that no accountability is ever imposed on anyone in Trump’s orbit. Where’s the fifty thousand? ♦
In New Jersey, fewer than half of 6- and 7-year-olds in special education spend the vast majority of their day with their classmates without disabilities. That might change, though, because a state special education advisory group has pledged to examine the issue.
Earlier this year, a Hechinger Report investigation revealed New Jersey is the worst in the nation when it comes to what’s known as inclusion — measured by how often students of all abilities are learning alongside one another in the classroom for at least 80 percent of the day. For young students, specifically, the rate is especially low.
In September, the council that advises New Jersey state education officials on special education issues announced plans to focus on the placement of young children with disabilities this year. It will examine how the state trains educators and administrators and study whether there’s a link between a child’s disability and their placement.
Nationwide, 68 percent of students with disabilities spend at least 80 percent of the school day learning alongside peers without disabilities, according to The Hechinger Report’s analysis of federal data. New Jersey has the lowest rate at 45 percent.
And just 48.5 percent of 6- and 7-year-olds with disabilities in New Jersey spend the vast majority of their day in a general education classroom, compared with nearly three-quarters nationally. Researchers say including those young students is often easier and more beneficial — while observers say the data shows New Jersey isn’t doing enough to protect children’s rights to try learning in inclusive classrooms in their first years of schooling.
Vin Gopal, a New Jersey senator and chair of the state Senate Education Committee, called the statistics “extremely disconcerting” and said they demonstrate that New Jersey must make “fundamental changes.”
“Evidence clearly indicates that students with disabilities, and often general education students as well, benefit profoundly from inclusive educational settings, and understanding that, New Jersey needs to do better,” Gopal, a Democrat who also serves as Senate majority conference leader, said in an email.
Under federal law, students have the right to learn alongside their peers without disabilities as much as possible. Special education experts say most students, especially young ones, can learn in a general education classroom with proper support and accommodations.
New Jersey state Sen. Vin Gopal, a Democrat, is chair of the state Senate Education committee. He’s calling for the state to improve the inclusion of students with disabilities in the general education classroom. Credit: Julio Cortez/AP Photo
Although there are some promising signs of change in New Jersey, advocates and parents say there are still many obstacles at both the state level and at the federal level as the Trump administration continues to target the Department of Education.
One potential factor behind New Jersey’s low inclusion rates: how exactly districts write and enforce individualized education programs, or IEPs. These agreements lay out what kinds of services students are required to receive, and where.
Between 2016 and 2023, state officials determined at least 50 school districts — nearly a third of those monitored — at times failed to justify where they placed students with disabilities, according to a Hechinger Report review of state records. All school districts undergo monitoring every six years in New Jersey, according to state policy.
That’s a violation of New Jersey law, which requires IEP teams — whose members include school officials and educators — to annually review and provide a written explanation for student placements. For example, if a student is assigned to be in a separate classroom, their IEP should spell out why they can’t be taught in an inclusive classroom with additional support. And IEP teams are required to come up with plans to return students to classrooms with peers without disabilities, if possible.
Districts are cited even if there is insufficient documentation in only one student’s IEP, according to Michael Yaple, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Education. In a statement, Yaple said the department is focused on making sure all decisions about a child’s placement “are individualized, federally compliant, and regularly reviewed to promote inclusive opportunities.”
To Gopal, problems with IEPs point to a need for more parental involvement in these decisions and better procedures to help parents object if they disagree about their child’s placement.
“Failure to justify these placements should not be acceptable,” Gopal said. He has long focused on addressing problems with special education in the state, including sponsoring a bill last year to improve communication between schools and parents.
The bill, which was signed into law in the summer, will require districts to provide parents with details about their student’s academic progress ahead of IEP meetings, and it will also require that the state launch a working group to monitor parental involvement.
Efforts to train teachers in how to teach in inclusive classrooms are growing too.
The New Jersey-based nonprofit All in For Inclusive Education received interest from three times as many school districts as it could serve in this year’s round of applications for its New Jersey Inclusion Project program, which provides support to districts looking to improve inclusion rates. About a dozen districts were chosen to receive the training.
Advocates hope rising interest means New Jersey is on the cusp of taking the steps that school leaders in other states have taken to improve inclusion and reduce reliance on separate classrooms.
For example: Hawaii, which once had the nation’s lowest percentage of students with disabilities learning in the general education classroom at least 80 percent of the time, set a goal to improve its inclusion rate to 51 percent by 2020. Over the past decade, Hawaii increased the proportion of students who spend most of their time in general education classes by 10 percentage points to 55.6 percent.
Even if New Jersey does improve its inclusion rates, advocates say it’s important to follow what happens next. For example, federal data has never captured whether students with disabilities are receiving the services and aids they need to thrive in a general education classroom.
State efforts could be even more crucial than before as the White House works to dismantle the federal Department of Education.
In March, the Trump administration laid off half the staff of its civil rights enforcement arm, which in the past typically investigated thousands of complaints annually from students with disabilities. Last week, the Trump administration laid off nearly all employees of the U.S. Department of Education office that makes sure states are providing special education services required under federal law.
The administration has also canceled more than $30 million for 25 special education programs in 14 states, according to Education Week. The letters to those programs cited references to diversity, equity, inclusion and racism in their application materials.
The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Overall, advocates — including Lindsay Kubatzky, director of policy and advocacy at the National Center for Learning Disabilities — worry Trump’s anti-DEI push will worsen efforts to integrate the nation’s 7.5 million students with disabilities in general classrooms.
“We are the ‘I’ in DEI,” Kubatzky said. “If you start attacking diversity, equity and inclusion, you’re, of course, looking at students with disabilities.”
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Homicide detectives are now assisting in the search for Kada Scott, the Mount Airy woman who went missing earlier this month, Philadelphia police said Tuesday.
Scott, 23, was last seen leaving her home near Rodney Street and East Mount Airy Avenue around 9:45 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 4. She was on her way to work her overnight shift at The Terrace, an assisted living facility in Chestnut Hill. Though her car was found in the parking lot, Scott did not show up for work.
Investigators initially had been treating Scott’s disappearance as a missing person’s case. Police were expected to provide an update on the case Tuesday afternoon, but canceled the press conference. They did not give a reason for the cancellation.
Police said Scott was typically a frequent social media user, but her cell phone and social media accounts have not shown any activity since she went missing. Her phone is no longer in operation. Last week, a co-worker reportedly revealed that someone had been harassing Scott in the time leading up to her disappearance, but police said they were unsure who the harasser was.
On Friday, police searched a section of Awbury Arboretum in Germantown, north of Washington Lane, after “some evidence” led them to the area. Police deployed K-9 units and cadets from the Police Academy to aid the search, but they only found a few clothing items. Investigators were unsure if the clothes were related to the case.
Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said Friday that detectives saw some signs that Scott might not have been missing voluntarily, including her lack of phone activity.
“It’s concerning, many young people today, they can’t live without having a phone in their hand,” Vanore said in a press update. “So that’s a concern. She left her car behind, it’s certainly something that’s not usual of someone who’s missing voluntarily.”
