As candidates debate public safety ahead of the midterm elections, a new assessment of the nation’s historic homicide decline suggests there is no single explanation for the drop — and that some widely discussed enforcement strategies may have played little role.

A survey of nearly 50 crime scholars convened by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice found the strongest support that the top contributing factors to the drop in homicide rates have been community violence intervention programs, the easing of pandemic-related disruptions, and focused deterrence strategies that pair law enforcement with social services.

The findings come amid a historic national decline in homicide. In 2025, the estimated U.S. murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate fell 18.1% compared with 2024, which equates to about 4 killings per 100,000 people. It tied the lowest rate recorded since national estimates began. The FBI recorded the same rate in 1955 and 1956. 

But a national decline does not mean every community has experienced the same drop.

The decline has unfolded in cities with different public safety strategies, economic conditions and political leadership, complicating efforts to credit any one approach, according to the council’s report.

The researchers rated 48 potential explanations for the decline between 2022 and 2026. Six factors received support from more than two-thirds of respondents as contributing either substantially or to a limited degree:

• Expanded community violence intervention programs, which work directly with people at highest risk of violence, were rated as either a major or a limited contributor contributing by 91% of researchers. 
• The pandemic recovery was rated as a major or a limited contributor by 83% of respondents. It was the only factor that a majority of respondents, 57%, rated as a major contributor.
• Eighty-three percent of the crime scholars gave credit to the increased use of focused deterrence, an approach that targets high-risk individuals and groups directly with a carrot-and-stick approach through social support and law enforcement.
• Researchers also pointed to increased local government capacity to provide social services, with 75% rating it either a major or limited contributor.
• Greater public safety and support resources relative to demand earned a rating of 68%.
• And more proactive policing was likewise named as a major or limited factor by 68% of the scholars.

Researchers largely dismissed more than half of the potential explanations, including National Guard deployments, increased immigration enforcement and increased pretrial detention. 

Other factors thought to have contributed little included homeless encampment removals, improved housing stability, electronic monitoring, GLP-1 medications, declining cash use, presidential public safety signals, DNA databases, neighborhood crime alerts and increased incarceration.

The findings do not establish that any one strategy caused homicide to fall. The ratings reflect researchers’ professional judgments, not definitive findings, and multiple factors may have overlapped or reinforced one another, according to the council’s report. 

The council also cautioned that a factor judged to have contributed little to the recent decline could still help reduce violence in the future.

But understanding what drove the decline could help policymakers determine how to sustain the progress, according to the council’s report. 

“Theories and claims abound, and sorting among them is essential if we’re going to sustain the progress. This diverse array of researchers took the challenge seriously, testing competing explanations, debating the evidence, and making tough judgments,” Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the council, said in a news release. “Their effort leaves the country with a much clearer picture of what likely contributed, what probably did not, and what we still need to learn.” 

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

A former Cornell University student’s allegations of gang rape in 2024 have renewed attention on a difficult area of sexual assault law.

A person can be awake, responsive and even able to move during a sexual encounter while still being so intoxicated or impaired that they cannot understand what is happening or make an informed decision about sex.

But whether that person is considered legally incapable of consenting can depend on the state and, in some cases, on how the person became intoxicated. 

“There are a lot of very good laws on the books,” said Renée Williams, CEO of the National Center for Victims of Crime. “The problem is that nobody knows how to enforce them, including district attorneys, and enforcement varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, even within the same state.”

In New York, where Cornell is located, criminal law distinguishes between mental incapacitation caused by a substance administered without a person’s consent — such as being “roofied” — and other forms of intoxication. That can leave prosecutors relying on other provisions of the state’s sexual assault laws when someone voluntarily drinks alcohol or uses drugs and later becomes severely impaired.

The legal debate comes amid years of scrutiny over sexual assault and safety on college campuses, particularly around fraternity and sorority life, where alcohol and drugs are often part of the social environment. The Cornell case has brought those broader concerns back into focus while New York state lawmakers consider changes to the state’s sexual assault laws.

Across the country, sexual assault statutes vary in how they define incapacity, what level of impairment can make someone legally unable to consent and what prosecutors must prove about the accused person’s knowledge of the victim’s condition. 

Nineteen states, including New York, currently have statutes that limit the definition of mental incapacity in sexual assault law only to cases of involuntary intoxication, such as when someone is drugged against their will, according to experts. 

More than half of states also set time limits for prosecuting sexual assault. But those statutes of limitations vary by state and offense, and they can make prosecution more difficult when a case is reported years after an alleged assault, according to a review of state laws by NBC News.

Legislation on the issue has been before New York lawmakers for years, but the Cornell case has renewed attention on proposed changes to the state’s sexual assault laws. Two measures that passed the state Senate unanimously earlier this year would broaden how the law addresses intoxication and incapacity, and change the definition of “physically helpless.” 

The legislature has already adjourned for the year, but both measures were stalled in the Assembly after they failed to garner enough support for passage. Since the case came to light, the Assembly has formed a 15-member working group to examine the state’s sexual assault laws ahead of the 2027 session.

Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has assigned the state’s attorney general to investigate the case independently, has said lawmakers could consider changes to state law early next year. 

Some possible changes have drawn pushback from some criminal defense attorneys, including the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who have raised concerns about whether the proposed language would provide enough guidance about when someone is too intoxicated to legally consent. 

“Claims that a loophole exists are not supported by the law, and proposals based on that premise risk creating confusion while eroding fundamental due process protections and increasing the risk of wrongful convictions,” the organization said in an emailed statement to Stateline. 

What happened at Cornell

The allegations date to October 2024, when the young woman, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, was a student at Cornell. She alleged that she was sexually assaulted by members of the Chi Phi fraternity, naming seven men in connection with the incident.

She said in her lawsuit that she drank alcohol at a local bar, then felt pressured by two of the defendants to snort ketamine while at a party at the fraternity chapter house, and that it was her first time doing the drug. She also wrote that she was “plied” with marijuana and “Jamaican Liquor.”

All of the men have denied the allegations, according to hundreds of pages of confidential investigative files obtained by The New York Times. Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit in September naming the fraternity members, the fraternity, Cornell University, a local bar and her sorority, Tri Delta, as defendants. A Snapchat screenshot in the lawsuit shows a message to all Chi Phi fraternity members encouraging them to join the encounter.

Jane Doe reported the alleged assault to Cornell police in November 2024. In an interview with police, she described being severely intoxicated and said she was confident she had been raped. The subsequent criminal investigation did not result in charges.

Tompkins County, New York, District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has defended his office’s decision, saying the evidence available to prosecutors did not establish a prosecutable case under New York law, and that his office had not received the full transcript of the woman’s interview with police. The New York Times reported last week that a condensed version of the police statement sent to the DA’s office omitted that she reported being raped.

Under Cornell’s disciplinary process, two of the men were expelled, two suspended, two given lesser sanctions and one, a graduate, barred from campus. The Chi Phi fraternity chapter was closed in 2024.

But university proceedings and criminal prosecutions operate under different standards. For prosecutors, the issue is whether they can establish the elements of a specific sexual offense under New York’s criminal statutes.

That makes the state’s definitions of consent and incapacity central to the case.

Defining incapacity

The details of New York’s penal law offer a window into how seemingly narrow distinctions in legislative language can have significant implications for the outcome of a sexual assault case. 

The state’s criminal code identifies several circumstances in which a person is considered incapable of consenting to sexual activity.

One is physical helplessness. A person is physically helpless when they are unconscious or otherwise physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act.

Another is mental incapacitation, which New York defines as being temporarily incapable of appraising or controlling one’s conduct because of an intoxicating substance administered without the person’s consent.

Those definitions can create challenges in cases involving intoxication. Erin Murphy, an expert on sexual assault laws and a law professor at New York University, said the physical-helplessness standard can be difficult to apply to someone who is severely intoxicated but still conscious.

“The failure to express unwillingness continuously means that they were not physically helpless,” Murphy said, describing current law. “Someone can kind of fall through the cracks.”

New York law also raises questions about what the person accused of the crime knew about the other person’s condition. And a defendant’s own intoxication can also be relevant.

One of the men accused in the Cornell case said he was “a victim of sexual misconduct” because Jane Doe had performed oral sex on him when he was “too incapacitated” to consent, according to the university’s investigative files obtained by The New York Times.

Voluntary intoxication

One of the most significant distinctions in New York’s law is that its definition of mental incapacitation only applies when an intoxicating substance was administered without the person’s consent, such as when someone is unknowingly drugged. 

That does not make sex with a voluntarily intoxicated person automatically legal. Other provisions of New York’s sexual assault laws address forcible compulsion and cases in which a person clearly expresses that they do not consent.

Still, the distinction has fueled what some lawmakers and victim advocates call a “voluntary intoxication loophole.” But others, including the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, deny there is a loophole.

“Proposed legislation that would brand someone a rapist if their partner is voluntarily intoxicated and later claims a crime was committed because they were “incapable of appraising or controlling their conduct” is simply too vague to be fairly enforced,” the association said in an emailed statement.

Murphy said the challenge for lawmakers is drawing a line between someone who is intoxicated but still capable of making consensual decisions and someone whose impairment leaves them unable to consent.

“Any indication they were conscious or unwilling kind of works against them under physical helplessness,” Murphy said, referring to how New York’s laws are currently written.

That line can be particularly difficult to establish when a person has little or no memory of a sexual encounter. Alcohol, marijuana and ketamine — substances Jane Doe said she consumed before and during the alleged assault — can affect memory, judgment and perception. 

Prosecutors will likely have to rely on text messages, photographs, videos, witness accounts and other evidence to establish Jane Doe’s condition, Murphy said.

Dr. Chinmoy Gulrajani, a psychiatry professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied intoxication and consent laws across the U.S., said a person’s effort to reconstruct an incident afterward can also introduce another complication. Talking with friends or other witnesses about what happened may help fill gaps in memory, but those conversations can also influence how a person remembers or interprets the encounter, and, in turn, how they report it to authorities.

“To actually figure out what actually went down and what the exact facts were can be a challenge for the legal system,” Gulrajani said.

Because a person’s condition can change during an encounter, prosecutors and juries may have to assess the evidence moment by moment, including what the accused person knew about the other person’s condition.

Varied approaches across the states

New York is also not the only state wrestling with this issue.

A national comparison is complicated because states define consent, incapacity, intoxication and sexual offenses differently. Some statutes focus on whether the victim was “mentally incapacitated.” Others use terms such as “incapable,” “impaired” or “unable to resist.” Some expressly address intoxication, while others rely on broader definitions or case law.

A 2022 research article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law found significant variation among state statutes and cautioned that courts can interpret similarly worded laws differently.

In 2021, when the review of state statutes was conducted, 21 states appeared to limit mental incapacity to involuntary intoxication only — though two states, Michigan and Texas, have since changed their laws. 

Another 25 states now recognize incapacity from either voluntary or involuntary intoxication. And six states address the issue through case law rather than statutory language, according to the research article.

“Lawmakers need to understand that a person who is mentally incapacitated due to intoxication is a vulnerable person,” said Gulrajani, the Minnesota psychiatry professor and an author of the research article. “It does not matter whether they ingested the chemical of their own volition, or it was forced on them, or they were deceived into taking it.”

Minnesota changed its law in 2021 after its Supreme Court overturned a sexual misconduct conviction involving a victim who had voluntarily become intoxicated. 

The state legislature amended the law so that the victim’s intoxication could establish incapacity regardless of whether the alcohol or drugs had been voluntarily consumed. 

Michigan adopted similar language in 2023, following years of pressure to pursue other major legislative changes to better support survivors of sexual violence.

In Texas, lawmakers added a provision in 2025 that expressly defines as sexual assault a situation in which a person knows someone is so intoxicated or impaired by a substance that they are incapable of consenting.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

For more than 35 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has surveyed American high school students every two years about their health and behavior.

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, established in 1991, draws a nationally representative sample of students in grades 9 through 12 at public and private schools. Over the years, it has tracked a broad range of issues affecting teenagers, from substance use and sexual behavior to violence, mental health and other health risks.

But the CDC’s latest national report, a full-color publication with photos, graphics and high school success stories, offers a markedly different portrait of adolescent health than the one it published two years ago.

The 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey report focuses on five areas — diet, physical activity, sleep, digital behavior, and mental health and suicide risk — while largely leaving out national findings on substance use, sexual behavior, violence and disparities among student groups that were prominent in previous reports. 

The underlying survey data on the CDC’s website still contains many of those measures, including trends in alcohol and drug use, and sexual activity, but they are not part of the national report’s key findings.

The shift comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration have made preventing childhood chronic disease and promoting nutrition, physical activity and other health behaviors central to their “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, agenda. Kennedy also chairs the presidential MAHA Commission, which has focused on the root causes of childhood chronic disease.

The 2025 report is also substantially shorter than the CDC’s previous national Youth Risk Behavior Survey report. It runs 36 pages, including the title page, table of contents and references, compared with 88 pages for the 2023 report, which also included some technical notes, references and appendices.

Dr. Jennifer Shuford, CDC’s deputy director and chief medical officer, touted changes in student attitudes toward nutrition, physical activity and mental health. 

“These are meaningful improvements, and they show that progress is possible when schools, families, and communities work together to support young people,” she said in a news release. 

“At the same time, too many students are still struggling with daily health behaviors that can negatively affect their long-term health,” Shuford said.

A focus on health and wellness

The 2025 report provides a snapshot of high school students’ health in 2025 and compares changes over the previous two and 10 years. Its five focus areas reflect behaviors and experiences the CDC says affect adolescent health now and into adulthood.

Some of the findings are encouraging. Thirty-nine percent of high school students said they ate fruit daily in 2025, up from 33% in 2023 and 34% in 2015. Sixty-three percent ate vegetables daily, compared with 58% in 2023 and 61% in 2015.

The share who said they drank plain water at least three times a day rose to 58% in 2025, up from 56% in 2021 and 49% in 2015, while daily soda consumption fell to 17% from 20% in 2015.

The share of students who played on a sports team also increased, reaching 58% in 2025 compared with 52% in 2023 and 49% in 2021.

Several measures of mental health and suicide risk improved as well. The share of students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness fell to 33% in 2025, from 40% in 2023 and 42% in 2021. It was 30% in 2015.

The share who seriously considered attempting suicide fell from 22% in 2021 to 14% in 2025, while the share who made a suicide plan fell from a high of 18% in 2021 to 12% in 2025.

Female students continued to report higher rates of mental health and suicide risk than male students. In 2025, 43% of female students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, compared with 24% of male students.

But the report also shows that several measures of youth health have worsened over the longer term.

Just 25% of high school students were physically active for at least 60 minutes a day in 2025, unchanged from 2023 and down from 27% in 2015. Twenty-four percent got at least eight hours of sleep on an average school night, compared with 27% in 2015.

Daily breakfast consumption fell from 36% in 2015 to 27% in 2025. The report also found long-term declines in daily physical activity, muscle-strengthening activity and daily physical education.

About 36% of students said they used social media every hour or more in 2025, little changed from 37% in 2023.

A different look at adolescent health

The latest report’s focus marks a significant change from the CDC’s 2023 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey report.

That report, published during the Biden administration and as the country was recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, was organized around sexual behavior, substance use, experiences of violence, mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. It also examined emerging issues including parental monitoring, social media use, racism in schools, unfair school discipline, school connectedness and unstable housing.

The 2023 report included more student demographic data broken down by sex, race and ethnicity, and sexual and gender identity. For the first time, the national survey asked students whether they identified as transgender, and the report highlighted disparities affecting LGBTQ+ students and marginalized racial and ethnic groups.

The 2025 report does not mention LGBTQ+ students or sexual and gender identity. It also provides fewer detailed demographic comparisons. The CDC says the new report includes only selected statistically significant demographic differences, while the underlying survey data remain available through the agency’s data system.

The new public-facing report does not mean the CDC stopped collecting underlying information about many of the issues featured in previous youth risk behavior reports. The agency continues to make the national dataset available publicly, including demographic information, through its online data tools.

Instead, the change is in how the CDC presents the findings nationally. That produces a different portrait of the nation’s high school students — one that captures some notable improvements while giving considerably less attention to several categories of health and risk that have been prominent in the CDC’s national youth surveillance reports for years.

Declines in substance use

For example, the decline in teen substance use that has unfolded over decades is absent from this year’s report, despite the 2025 data showing alcohol and marijuana use at or near historic lows.

About 20% of high school students reported current alcohol use in 2025, down from 22% in 2023 and nearly 52% in 1995. Current marijuana use also fell to about 13% in 2025, from 17% in 2023, while the share who had ever used marijuana dropped to about 25% in 2025 from 42% in 1995.

The share of students who had ever used other illicit drugs, including cocaine, inhalants, heroin, methamphetamines, ecstasy or hallucinogens, was 9.7% in 2025, essentially unchanged from 9.9% in 2023 and about 13% in 2015.

Vaping also continued its long-term decline. Current e-cigarette or vape use fell to 16% in 2025 from a high of nearly 33% in 2019. The share of students who had ever used these products also fell to 30% in 2025 from about 34% in 2023 and about 45% in 2015.

Sexual activity and school violence

The new report also gives little attention to several measures that have long been part of the CDC’s youth survey, including sexual activity and violence at school.

The share of high school students who reported being currently sexually active fell to about 19% in 2025, down from nearly 21% in 2023 and nearly 40% in 1995.

Other measures show longer-term declines but less consistent changes. The share of students who reported carrying a weapon on school property fell to about 3% in 2025, from more than 4% in 2023 and almost 10% in 1995.

The share who said they had been threatened or injured with a weapon, such as a gun or knife, at school was about 8% in 2025, compared with 9% in 2023 and about 8% in 1995. Bullying on school property was reported by 19.7% of students in 2025, roughly unchanged from 19.2% in 2023 and about 20% in 2015. Reported bullying hit a low of 15% in 2021.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

Students ages 12 to 18 experienced higher rates of reported crime at school than away from school in 2024, according to a new federal analysis. But the overall rate of crime victimization at school has not changed significantly since 2014.

The rate of total victimization, including theft and nonfatal violent crimes such as robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault, was 27 per 1,000 students at school in 2024, compared with 17.7 per 1,000 away from school, according to a new federal Bureau of Justice Statistics report released this month.

The findings come as school safety remains a chief concern among educators, students, parents and policymakers nationwide, with ongoing attention to violence, discipline and shootings.

The report’s findings are based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual survey in which people report crimes they experienced. The survey measures crimes that occurred during the six months before respondents were interviewed, and crimes are classified by the year of the survey rather than the year they occurred. The 2024 survey covered crimes experienced from July 2023 through November 2024.

These figures capture a different aspect of school safety than administrative crime or discipline data because the survey measures victimization reported by respondents, rather than all crimes known to police or school officials.

The report also defines victimization “at school” broadly, including crimes that occurred inside school buildings, on school property, on school buses or while students were going to or from school.

There was no significant change in the overall rate of crime victimization at school between 2014 and 2024, or between 2023 and 2024, according to the report. The same was true for the overall rate away from school.

But the data showed a notable change from the previous year in reported nonfatal violent victimization at school. That rate rose from 14.2 per 1,000 students in 2023 to 21.8 per 1,000 in 2024. The report’s authors, however, did not find a significant change in the rate of nonfatal violent victimization at school in the decade between 2014 and 2024.

Simple assault accounted for much of the nonfatal violent victimization measured in the survey. When simple assault was excluded, the rate of violent victimization at school was 5.8 per 1,000 students in 2024 — a rate that did not differ significantly from 2014 or 2023.

Meanwhile, theft victimization at school declined over the longer term, falling from 14.1 per 1,000 students in 2014 to 5.2 per 1,000 in 2024. Away from school, the theft rate fell from 11.2 to 5.1 per 1,000 over the same period.

Differences among students

The report also found differences in victimization rates based on where students lived and their household income, though many demographic differences were not statistically significant.

Students in suburban areas had a higher rate of total victimization at school in 2024 — 31.5 per 1,000 — than students in rural areas, whose rate was 11 per 1,000. 

Students in urban areas had a victimization rate of 27 per 1,000 in 2024, though the authors cautioned that the estimate is less reliable because it was based on a small number of cases.

Students living in households earning less than $25,000 annually had the highest rate of total victimization at school, at 60.3 per 1,000. The rate was 26.7 per 1,000 among students in households earning $25,000 to $49,999, 28.4 per 1,000 among those earning $50,000 to $99,999, and 18.9 per 1,000 among those earning $100,000 or more — the lowest rate among the income groups.

The report found no statistically significant differences in total victimization at school by students’ race or Hispanic origin. Nor were there significant differences between male and female students in rates of victimization at school across the types of crime measured.

Away from school, however, female students experienced a higher rate of total victimization than male students: 23.5 per 1,000 compared with 12.2 per 1,000.

Age differences were limited as well. The overall rate of victimization at school did not differ significantly between students ages 12 to 14 and those ages 15 to 18.

Younger students did have a higher rate of theft victimization at school: 7.5 per 1,000, compared with 3 per 1,000 among students ages 15 to 18.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the surveillance infrastructure built and expanded in its aftermath has become part of a far larger digital ecosystem — producing tools that can collect and analyze information on a scale unimaginable in 2001.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did more than reshape the nation’s approach to terrorism. They changed the architecture of American intelligence and policing. They expanded how government agencies collect, share and analyze information, and brought national security tools deeper into ordinary law enforcement.

The infrastructure built in the attacks’ aftermath has proved remarkably durable. Joint terrorism task forces and fusion centers brought federal, state and local agencies into closer intelligence-sharing networks. New laws expanded the government’s ability to obtain information. And police departments acquired technologies that once belonged largely to the realm of national security.

But the expansion of surveillance did not go uncontested. Civil liberties groups warned that the new powers could erode Americans’ privacy and constitutional protections, while many Americans accepted expanded government surveillance as a necessary tradeoff for safety in the aftermath of the attacks. 

The country also entered a period of heightened scrutiny for people perceived as foreign or potentially threatening — with American Muslims and immigrant communities bearing a particularly heavy burden.

Then came the digital revolution.

Americans began carrying smartphones, broadcasting their lives on social media and generating enormous amounts of commercially collected data. Police gained access to license plate readers, networks of cameras, cellphone location information and other technologies capable of tracking people and mapping their movements.

Now, artificial intelligence is adding another layer: systems that can sift through those vast stores of information, connect previously separate databases and generate analyses in seconds.

Some surveillance and privacy experts say that the amount of information available to the government — and its ability to make sense of it — has fundamentally changed since 9/11. 

That has taken on new urgency as surveillance systems have moved further into everyday life. Automated license plate readers can track where people drive. Facial recognition can help identify people in crowds. Commercial data can reveal where and how people live and travel. And increasingly, artificial intelligence can analyze and connect these streams of information at a speed no human investigator could match. 

Those capabilities have raised concerns among some experts and advocates about how surveillance could be used to monitor protests, track immigrants and identify people seeking reproductive healthcare.

Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the security and surveillance project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, described the post-9/11 era as a “perfect storm.”

“That storm is both the expansion of the legal powers that have been conferred on the government to collect and share information, combined with the advance of technology, which has given the government more tools to collect information from more people in more contexts,” Nojeim said.

From intelligence silos to everyday policing

In the months after 9/11, officials sought to fix a critical weakness exposed by the attacks: Intelligence that could have helped uncover the plot was held across government agencies that failed to connect or share it effectively. The response was a sweeping effort to tear down those silos and build a more integrated intelligence network.

Federal, state and local agencies quickly expanded intelligence-sharing, and the government established and expanded networks designed to move information across traditional institutional boundaries. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces brought together federal, state and local law enforcement and intelligence personnel. 

Fusion centers, generally run by state and local governments with federal support, became another part of the post-9/11 intelligence architecture, with at least one operating in every state. The centers serve as intelligence hubs where law enforcement agencies can share information, analyze data and flag potential threats across jurisdictions.

Katie Kinsey, chief of staff and tech policy counsel at the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law, said the original goal was straightforward — prevent another terrorist attack.

Over time, some fusion centers began supporting investigations and enforcement involving lower-level crimes, Kinsey said. Local police departments also developed their own versions of centralized intelligence hubs, often called real-time crime centers, that can integrate information from cameras, automated license plate readers and other surveillance systems.

David Viola, an adjunct professor at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of “You Have Unleashed a Storm: New York City’s Descent into Chaos During America’s Most Explosive Era of Radical Violence,” said the post-9/11 period also marked a major shift in the kind of information available to investigators. 

Before the attacks, he said, intelligence work relied heavily on traditional investigative techniques. Today, digital records can provide information about where people go, with whom they communicate, what they purchase and what they post online.

But technology is only part of the transformation. Viola said the institutional relationships forged among local, state and federal authorities after 9/11 are among the period’s most lasting legacies.

“These are institutions that have cemented the close coordination between state, local, federal, tribal authorities in the past 25 years, and they’re going nowhere, for better or worse,” he said.

Nojeim, of the Center for Democracy & Technology, was directing lobbyists in Washington, D.C., on 9/11. His office was evacuated as officials tried to determine whether the U.S. Capitol was the target of another hijacked plane.

In the aftermath, he said, civil liberties advocates understood that decisions made in response to the attacks could extend far beyond the immediate crisis. 

About a month after the attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law, dramatically expanding the federal government’s ability to collect information and conduct surveillance in terrorism investigations. Some of its most sweeping surveillance authorities were later curtailed or allowed to expire, but the law helped establish a new framework for national security surveillance that continues to shape how Americans’ data is collected and monitored.

“In the days after 9/11, we all realized that what the government did in the next few days to respond could have lasting implications for the civil liberties of Americans,” Nojeim said.

The data economy

The growth of surveillance after 9/11 also coincided with a separate transformation that would make those systems far more powerful. Americans were beginning to carry smartphones, use social media and spend more of their lives online, generating enormous amounts of digital information that did not exist before.

Kinsey, of the Policing Project, said that created a new dynamic for law enforcement. Agencies had expanded their ability to collect and share intelligence after 9/11, while technology was producing more information about people than ever before. Much of that information was collected by private companies for commercial purposes, but it could also become available to law enforcement, either through data purchases or when companies turned information over to authorities.

At the same time, Kinsey said, Americans have become accustomed to giving up personal information without necessarily understanding how it is collected or what can ultimately be done with it.

“There’s still a lack of awareness because there’s a lack of transparency on the part of law enforcement, but also on the part of these private tech companies about what they are actually collecting on us, and then what they’re doing with that information,” Kinsey said.

That lack of visibility extends beyond the cameras and other surveillance tools people can see. Personal data can be combined and shared behind the scenes, allowing the government to draw conclusions from pieces of information that may seem insignificant on their own.

“Never in human history has the government had more information about what we are doing, who we are doing it with, what we like to buy, and indeed what we are thinking about, than ever before,” said Nojeim, of the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Jessica Katzenstein, a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University, said technological advances have also changed what Americans consider normal, making forms of live, mass surveillance that once seemed dystopian increasingly commonplace.

“The things that we would have taken for granted as forms of privacy we can all expect have just completely vanished,” she said.

That normalization can make surveillance difficult to roll back once law enforcement agencies have invested in the technology and incorporated it into their work, she said.

“Once you have a sense of both a need and access to tools, it will be very, very difficult to get you to give that up,” said Katzenstein, who also studies police in the U.S. as an ethnographer.

Communities living with the consequences

The expansion of surveillance after 9/11 also had consequences that were not felt equally. American Muslims faced heightened scrutiny in the name of national security, and advocates say the surveillance practices and assumptions that emerged in that period have since affected other communities of color.

Haris Tarin, vice president of policy and programming for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who also spent more than a decade working in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said many American Muslims experienced the aftermath of 9/11 as a “dual attack.”

“We were attacked twice. First by the terrorists, we were attacked for being Americans, and then we were attacked by our own government and people within our own country, where we were cast under suspicion, and that has continued for the last 25 years,” Tarin said.

Tarin said that suspicion soon extended beyond American Muslims to other communities.

“After 9/11, American Muslims were easy to go after because there was not much political consequence,” he said. “But it just didn’t stop with American Muslims. We’ve seen that now extend to immigrants. We’ve seen that now extend to anti-Semitism. We’ve seen that now extend to anti-Black hate.”

Lia Nitake, senior director of technology, telecommunications and media policy at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said the consequences have been particularly pronounced for communities of color. She said the heightened surveillance of people based on their race, religion or other aspects of their identity has created a climate of fear.

“In a lot of ways, these surveillance measures have also eroded this idea that everyone should have an equal right to privacy,” Nitake said. 

Both Tarin and Nitake said the growing use of artificial intelligence raises new concerns about how those disparities could be reproduced or amplified. Police agencies could increasingly rely on technology to monitor communities rather than invest in relationships with them, Tarin said.

“In the AI age, it will be easy for government agencies and law enforcement agencies to use technology to surveil and not do the hard work of community policing and engaging communities,” he said.

Stronger surveillance systems

Police departments nationwide are already using AI-assisted tools to analyze evidence, search databases, draft reports and translate conversations in real time.

North Carolina Central University Police Chief Robert Gaddy, who previously served as a Durham police officer for more than 25 years, sees the technology as a practical response to the growing demands on modern policing.

Information that once had to be gathered and shared manually can now flow through centralized digital systems, while AI-assisted cameras and license plate readers help officers identify suspects, gather evidence and solve crimes.

“If I can take this technology and at least give that (victim’s) security back to them by solving this crime, it’s worth every every bit of it,” Gaddy said.

Gaddy said technology can also help departments facing staffing shortages. But he said its use requires clear limits and oversight, including rules governing how officers access and share information and audits to identify potential misuse.

Still, some experts and advocates worry that newer AI-assisted systems could make existing surveillance infrastructure significantly more powerful by connecting databases that previously operated separately. Some tools allow officers to search multiple databases using natural-language prompts and generate summaries, raising questions about accuracy, missing information and how much officers may rely on the results.

Nojeim, of the Center on Democracy & Technology, said those concerns become especially serious when AI is used in decisions that can affect someone’s liberty.

“We all know from our work or our play with AI that it can make mistakes and that it hallucinates,” he said. “Now we’re in a world where an AI hallucination can be the thing that set off an investigation that landed you in jail inappropriately.”

Modern law enforcement agencies have access to more information than any human could reasonably process, said Viola, the adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. AI could help investigators identify connections that might otherwise be missed. But Viola said those capabilities also come with risks.

“These are very capable tools that can be used to great effect for the betterment of American society and safety,” Viola said. “They can also be used for ill effect if there is an administration who wants to use them for such activity.”

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

Women on parole report higher rates of housing instability, poor health and serious mental health and substance use disorders than men on parole and women who weren’t on parole, according to a new analysis from the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice.

For people leaving prison, parole is a period of transition that can involve finding housing and work, reconnecting with family and accessing health care while also meeting the conditions of supervision. How well those pieces come together can shape whether someone successfully settles back into the community — a key part, some argue, of reducing future involvement with the criminal justice system and promoting public safety.

The council’s latest report examined nationally representative 2021-2023 data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, comparing women who reported being on parole both with women who were not on parole and with men who were on parole.

About 13% of women on parole reported moving three or more times in the previous year, compared with 2% of women who were not on parole and 6% of men on parole, according to the analysis.

Women on parole also were more likely to report poor health. About 29% rated their overall health as fair or poor, compared with 16% of women not on parole and 17% of men on parole.

About 24% of women on parole met the criteria for a severe mental health disorder, compared with 7% of women not on parole and 10% of men on parole, according to the council’s report. About 25% of women on parole also reported experiencing a major depressive episode during the previous year, compared with 10% of women not on parole and 12% of men on parole.

The analysis found that substance use disorders were common among people on parole, but severe disorders were more prevalent among women. About 32% of women on parole met the criteria for a severe substance use disorder, compared with 24% of men on parole and 3% of women not on parole.

The disparity was especially large for opioid use. About 18% of women on parole met the criteria for a severe opioid use disorder, compared with 5% of men on parole and 0.4% of women not on parole.

Health and housing can make the demands of reentry harder to manage, including maintaining employment, attending treatment and supervision appointments, and managing family responsibilities, according to the report.

Women on parole also were more likely than men on parole to report living in a household with minor children. About 29% of women on parole lived in a household with at least one child under 18, compared with 19% of men on parole and 30% of women who were not on parole.

The survey, however, did not indicate whether respondents were parents, caregivers or financially responsible for the children, according to the report.

Health insurance coverage also differed among the groups. About 11% of women on parole reported being uninsured, compared with 7% of women not on parole and 20% of men on parole, according to the analysis.

The report’s authors wrote that the findings point to the need for reentry planning that goes beyond supervision requirements to address housing, health care, mental health and substance use treatment and family responsibilities. The authors could not determine whether the conditions preceded or resulted from criminal justice involvement, but the findings strongly suggest women on parole face distinct reentry challenges.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.