As a number of major American cities are reporting more homicides this year than last year, the overall number of killings in the country’s biggest cities has increased in 2016 — with just one city accounting for nearly half of the total spike, according to an analysis released Monday.

Chicago has experienced almost half of the overall increase in homicides reported by major cities, a year after it was one of three cities — along with Washington and Baltimore — that accounted for more than half of the total increase in such areas, according to the analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice.

As it did last year, the Brennan Center, a law and policy institute, expressed notes of caution regarding reading too much into the increase in homicides, which have drawn national media attention and cropped up as an issue in the presidential campaign.

“Nationally, crime remains at an all-time low,” wrote the authors of the Brennan Center’s new report, which collected numbers through the first half of the year from police departments. The Washington Post reviewed a copy of the report before it was released Monday morning.

America is safer than it was decades ago. But homicides are up again in Chicago and cities across the country.

The report’s authors said their findings undercut suggestions of “a new nationwide crime wave” and instead suggest that the individual increases stem from “as-of-yet unidentified local factors” rather than any national cause.

Ultimately, they conclude that “there is not a nationwide crime wave, or rising violence across American cities,” adding: “Warnings of a coming crime wave may be provocative, but they are not supported by the evidence.”

http://inhomelandsecurity.com/homicides-are-spiking-again-in-some-big-u-s-cities-chicago-has-seen-nearly-half-the-increase/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=IHS_Chicago_91916&utm_campaign=Blog+-+In+Homeland+Security+-+ST+-+AMU

When Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Chile last October to attend an international conference on ocean preservation, he carried something that had nothing to do with environmental collaboration. The computer disk he brought contained 282 newly-declassified records on Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s role in a brazen act of international terrorism in Washington D.C. The car bombing in Sheridan Circle that occurred 40 years ago this week, took the lives of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year old colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Kerry personally handed the disk of documents to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

Last month, when Kerry flew to Buenos Aires for trade talks, he carried another disk, this one loaded with 1,078 pages of records on the Argentine “dirty war” of repression during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Kerry personally gave those documents to President Mauricio Macri and promised “more to come in the future.” http://inhomelandsecurity.com/why-the-obama-administration-is-giving-old-state-secrets-to-latin-american-allies/

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Officers spent hours calling for a homeless man gripped by a range of delusions to drop his knives, abandon his campsite and walk down the rocky slope with them. But James Boyd stayed put, shouting about a made-up “matter of national security” and a mission for the Department of Defense.

In short bursts of outrage, he yelled threats at officers. At another point, he offered them gum.

Nineteen Albuquerque and state police officers, including tactical officers and K-9 units, responded to the scene of Boyd’s illegal campsite, many surrounding him with weapons drawn before it appeared, according to a police video, that he might surrender.

“I’ll put my hands on my head; I’m not a criminal” said the 38-year-old Boyd, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

Moments later, he was fatally shot after police deployed a smoke bomb and authorities say he brandished his knives.

On Monday, the two officers whose bullets struck Boyd — now-retired Detective Keith Sandy and former SWAT Officer Dominique Perez — will stand trial on second-degree murder charges in Boyd’s March 2014 death, which emerged as the most high-profile case in a string of controversial Albuquerque police shootings at the time.

Defense attorneys say their clients shot Boyd to protect other officers on the scene.

“There’s this huge scrutiny of police that we see all over the country now with people watching a 10-second video and thinking they know all the factors that are involved,” said Shawn Willoughby, president of the Albuquerque police union, which supports the officers. “You have to look at why these officers did what they did.”

http://inhomelandsecurity.com/police-officer-trial-spotlights-conflicts-with-mentally-ill/