Law enforcement on alert for Election Day threats, new report says
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(NEW YORK) — Election workers across the country are being bombarded with threats, and law enforcement agencies nationwide are dedicating “substantial resources” to ensure public safety during the election, according to a new threat assessment obtained by ABC News.
The document, transmitted Monday by the NYPD Intelligence Bureau, encapsulates the full picture of Election Day threats, including the risk of physical violence and disinformation generated by foreign governments. Potential targets include “election personnel and government officials, campaign offices, as well as voting-related sites, infrastructure, and technology,” the assessment said.
“Individuals may employ a variety of tactics that could include physical attacks, threats of violence, delivery of suspicious packages, swatting, arson, and property destruction, harassment, as well as cyberattacks and mis/dis/mal-information campaigns,” the assessment also said.
The FBI has received more than 2,000 threats to election workers and “opened at least 100 investigations into these unlawful actions” as of April, the assessment said, citing a September report by the U.S. Department of Justice, with more than 20 people charged.
In the last week alone, multiple individuals in separate states have faced charges related to threats against election officials, according to the assessment:
Teak Brockbank, 45, of Colorado, pleaded guilty to transmitting interstate threats after he made a series of online threats against election officials in Colorado and Arizona, a judge in Colorado, and federal law enforcement agents.
Richard Glenn Kantwill, 61, of Tampa, allegedly made threats against an election official.
John Pollard, 62, of Philadelphia, allegedly threatened to kill a state party representative who was recruiting poll watchers online.
Threats and hostile rhetoric against election officials have proliferated online, according to the assessment:
Last month, the NYPD Intelligence Bureau found users on several platforms that accused Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of attempting to influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and called for his execution.
A user in an online extremist messaging channel called for a “national militia for the defense of the Republic” to ensure “election integrity.”
In September, suspicious packages containing powder were sent to secretaries of state and state election offices in at least 15 states.
“Each state runs elections a little bit differently but the commonalities across all the states are that election officials are professional, they follow the laws of their state, and the process is transparent,” Benjamin Hovland, chairman of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, told ABC News.
(NEW YORK) — Homicides across the United States are poised to plummet for the third straight year as 2024 winds down, driving the nation’s annual murder toll down to levels not seen since before the pandemic, according to preliminary data from cities both large and small.
Based on available crime statistics from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a nearly 16% drop in homicides nationwide and a 3.3% decline in overall violent crime, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 13% decline in 2023, then the largest decrease on record until now. In 2022, the number of murders across the country fell 6%, according to the FBI.
The three consecutive years of declining homicides come in the wake of a 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century.
“Considering where we were just three or four years ago, we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
In contrast, a dozen major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records in 2021.
Philadelphia — which recorded an all-time high of 562 homicides in 2021, 516 in 2022 and 410 last year — has seen a 40% drop in homicides in 2024.
Other major cities seeing precipitous reductions in homicides this year are New Orleans, down 38%; Washington, D.C., down 29%; Memphis, Tennessee, down 23%; Baltimore, down 24%; Kansas City, Missouri, down 20%; and Los Angeles, down 15%.
New York City, the nation’s largest city, had recorded 357 homicides through Dec. 15, a 7.3% drop from 2023, according to New York Police Department crime statistics. The city — which tallied 442 murders in 2020, a 45% jump from 2019 — has seen homicides fall 15% over the past two years.
Chicago has recorded a 7% decline in homicides as of Dec. 15, down from 603 murders at this time last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s crime data. Over the past three years, homicides in Chicago have fallen 29% after skyrocketing 55% between 2019 and 2020 to 769 murders.
Homicides this year in 63 cities with populations of more than 250,000 declined by at least 15% and murders were down at least 19% in 246 cities with populations under 250,000, Asher’s research found.
“It’s a tremendous achievement in terms of how far murder has fallen in just really two straight years,” Asher said.
Property crime plummets
In addition to violent crime falling, property crime is also poised to finish the year down 8.6% nationwide, mostly due to a 21.4% decrease in motor vehicle theft, Asher said.
“Auto thefts went up 12% last year. They’re coming down more than 20% this year,” said Asher, who added that the 2023 spike in car thefts appears to be tied to social media instruction videos on how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.
Crunching the numbers
Since 2016, Asher has crunched the numbers for an end-of-the-year report on crime trends. This year, his report is based on preliminary crime statistics from 309 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the most data he has ever received.
Asher’s analysis aligns closely with data released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing murders down 14%. The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings across the nation, shows homicides are down around 11%.
“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.
“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.
The numbers also come just days after a 15-year-old girl allegedly carried out a shooting rampage at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a classmate, and injuring six other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
The Wisconsin shooting came three months after a 14-year-old boy allegedly killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine others at his high school in Winder, Georgia, with an AR-style weapon police alleged his father gave him as a Chrismas present.
‘We have turned the tide against violent crime’
During a Dec. 10 briefing of the Justice Department’s Violence Crime Reduction Steering Committee meeting, Attorney General Merrick Garland said preliminary crime data showed significant declines in violent crime in 85 cities in 2024, including a 17.5% drop in homicides nationwide.
“Over the past two years, we have turned the tide against the violent crime that spiked during the pandemic,” Garland said.
He said the numbers build on the historic drop in homicides nationwide last year, which he said was the lowest level of violent crime in 50 years.
Merrick attributed the tumbling violent crime rate partly to the DOJ’s Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, a one-stop-shop created to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing and evaluating the strategies to prevent, intervene and respond to acts of community gun violence.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also sought to curb gun violence in recent years through executive actions and signing into law in 2022 the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, allocated $750 million to help states implement “red flag laws” to remove firearms from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.
Biden also established the in 2023 the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus on ways to assist states and cities reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
Some cities such as Philadelphia have credited the work of violence interrupter programs, community-based initiatives that use peacebuilding methods to head off incidents of violence before they occur.
In Philadelphia, city leaders also pointed to a $184 million investment in gun violence initiatives in 2022, including one that attempts to identify people who are at risk of being involved in violence to provide them with mental health services or job placement. While the city also boosted the Philadelphia Police Department’s budget that year by $30 million, it instituted a violence prevention plan that emphasizes a combination of law enforcement strategies, environmental improvements and youth programs to reduce its homicide numbers.
“We need to continue pressing forward with our comprehensive approach, which is prevention, intervention and enforcement,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said at a Nov. 1 news conference on the city’s falling homicide numbers.
In October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed six bills to strengthen New York’s gun laws, including one requiring gun sellers to post tobacco-style safety warnings and another that cracks down on illegal devices called “switches” that convert semiautomatic handguns into automatic weapons.
Asher said that in 2020 and 2021 when violent crime rose to alarming levels, programs such as community violence interruptors didn’t exist and the budgets of many police departments were getting slashed in the defund-the-police movement stemming from nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Asher said states and local governments, as well as philanthropies, are pumping money into programs to bring down violent crime.
“Some of that is undoubtedly contributing to what we’re seeing now,” Asher said. “I’m not naïve enough to suggest that that’s the entire explanation. There are undoubtedly a multitude of factors that help to explain this complex problem.”
ABC News’ Calvin Milliner contributed to this report.
(LOS ANGELES) — Even as four wildfires continued to burn in Los Angeles County on Thursday, the blazes were already rewriting the record books.
Over the last nine days, seven fires have broken out across the nation’s second-largest metropolitan region, ravaging a combined area bigger than the 40 square miles that comprise the city of San Francisco and nearly twice the size of Manhattan, New York. An eighth fire ignited Monday night near Oxnard in neighboring Ventura County, but fire crews held it to 61 acres.
The two biggest infernos, the Palisades and the Eaton fires, are now among the most destructive blazes in California history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).
Tune into “Good Morning America” on Friday, Jan. 17, as ABC News and ABC owned stations kick off “SoCal Strong” (#SoCalStrong) coverage in support of Los Angeles-area communities amid the devastating wildfires. Coverage continues across ABC News programs and platforms.
As of Thursday morning, the Eaton Fire, which has burned 14,117 acres and destroyed more than 7,000 structures, was the second most destructive fire in state history behind the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California’s Butte County, which consumed 153,336 acres and leveled 18,804 structures, according to Cal Fire.
The Palisades Fire has surged to fourth on Cal Fire’s list of most destructive wildfires in the Golden State after destroying more than 5,000 structures and burning 23,713 acres of drought-parched land.
The 62 square miles comprising the fire zones are just a part of the 4,083 square miles that make up all of LA County.
Regarding the death toll from the fires, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner is investigating 16 deaths in connection with the Eaton Fire. That makes it the fifth deadliest wildfire in state history, leaping over three fires that each caused 15 deaths — the Rattlesnake Fire of 1953 in Northern California, the 2003 Cedar Fire in San Diego, and the 2020 North Complex Fire in Northern California’s Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties.
The medical examiner is investigating nine deaths in connection with the Palisades Fire in the oceanfront community of Pacific Palisades, which ranks 14 on the list of deadliest California wildfires.
The Eaton and Palisades fires combined have burned an area the equivalent of 2,324 Los Angeles Memorial Coliseums, one of the biggest football stadiums in the country.
The Palisades Fire was 22% contained on Thursday, according to Cal Fire. The Eaton Fire was 55% contained.
The fires are expected to cost insurers as much as $30 billion, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs estimated in a report released this week. After accounting for non-insured damages, the total costs will balloon to $40 billion, the report said.
While Wednesday marked the third straight day the National Weather Service (NWS) had issued a rare “particularly dangerous situation” red flag alert for Los Angeles County, the winds were not as strong as expected overnight allowing residents and firefighters to breathe a sigh of relief that no new fires were reported.
Offshore Santa Ana winds will continue to diminish for the majority of Southern California on Thursday, according to the NWS. However, a red flag warning continues for the San Gabriel and Santa Susana mountains until 3 p.m. local time Thursday.
This morning and early afternoon, winds of 15 to 25 mph with gusts up to 40 mph will continue for the Western San Gabriel Mountains, Santa Susana Mountains and the I-5 corridor.
However, a red flag warning continues for the San Gabriel Mountains, 50 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, and the Santa Susana Mountains, about 30 miles north of downtown LA, until 3 p.m. local time Thursday.
A marine layer and even some clouds could bring a chance for a sprinkle to Southern California late Thursday and into Friday.
Up to more than 15,000 firefighters, including crews from outside the state and nation, are taking advantage of the calmer weather to increase fire containment lines, pre-position equipment in crews in vulnerable areas and use air tankers to coat hillsides in front of the burn areas with fire retardant in advance of the next Santa Ana wind event, officials said.
The NWS is forecasting a return of strong Santa Ana winds to the region next Monday and Tuesday.
Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Sheila Kelliher told ABC News a big concern continues to be protecting communities where no fires have yet to emerge, saying, “The start that hasn’t happened I think is what kind of keeps us up.”
The causes of the fires remain under investigation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Meanwhile, FEMA is reporting that it has received more than 53,000 applications for emergency disaster aid.
About 80,000 people remain under mandatory evacuation.
Fire victims like Zaire Calvin of Altadena, whose sister Evelyn McClendon perished in a blaze that burned down their family home, shuddered to think of another blaze like the Eaton Fire igniting.
“It looked like a volcano,” Calvin told ABC News. “When you’re mourning your sister’s death, there’s no real understanding. There’s no understanding. There’s no way to even take it in.”
Calvin said residents like him, whose lives have been upturned by the fires, face an uncertain future as they decide whether to rebuild.
“Everyone is fighting,” Calvin said. “Everyone is literally just asking, leaning on each other to say, ‘What’s next? What’s the best thing to do?'”
WASHINGTON) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is set to head to Capitol Hill next week for meetings with multiple senators, Kennedy’s spokesperson says.
Kennedy transition spokesperson Katie Miller told ABC News that Kennedy will be on the Hill for four consecutive days for marathon meetings as Kennedy works to shore up support ahead of Senate confirmation hearings.
The meetings, which are typical before confirmation hearings, are planned for Dec. 16, 17, 18, and 19.
That includes a meeting on Dec. 19 with Republican staff of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, according to a separate person familiar with the plans.
Kennedy, a longtime environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic, founded and has drawn a salary from the Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine nonprofit that has campaigned against immunizations and other public health measures like water fluoridation. Some medical experts have expressed concerns about Kennedy contributing to a rise in medical misinformation.
HHS oversees major federal health agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others.
