crime

The number of juvenile arrests in Northeast Florida has dropped by more than a quarter over the past five years.  A new report from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice shows the lowest number of juvenile arrests in 40 years, statewide.

A judge in Wisconsin has ordered that Brendan Dassey, whose trial for murder was the plot of the Netflix documentary series Making A Murderer, must be released from prison.

In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif. Both cars were left without license plates and parked with their hoods up.

Newly released FBI data show the number of murders in the U.S. rose nearly 11 percent last year and violent crime increased by nearly 4 percent, but crime researchers said homicides and other violence still remain at low rates compared with a crime wave from 20 years ago.

Update: The Tallahassee police department has issued a warrant for Tavon Q. Jackson. He's the man suspected in the stabbing death of Javona Glover.

A Florida comics dealer says books worth $85,000 were stolen at a Tampa convention, including two rare editions that marked the first appearance of Spider-Man.

The horrific attack at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., has captured the nation's attention, but the great majority of homicides are not due to mass shootings.

And in the last year or so, the murder rate has jumped in America's big cities.

"We are in the midst of a very abrupt, precipitous and large crime increase," says Richard Rosenfeld, a respected criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of a study released Wednesday by the Justice Department examining reasons for the increase.

The powerful chairman of a Senate committee that oversees the criminal-justice budget said Wednesday that Florida's backlog of thousands of untested rape kits is one of his top priorities.

University of South Florida researchers next week will present a final report to Gov. Rick Scott and the state Cabinet about work at the shuttered Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna.