For governments, getting sued unfortunately comes with the territory. But in recent years, the amount that cities are shelling out for police misconduct lawsuits has become not just a criminal justice issue but a financial one as well.

For big cities, the costs are alarming -- equivalent to huge line items in agency budgets.

The opioid epidemic ravaging states and cities across the country has sent a record number of children into foster and state care systems, taxing limited government resources and testing a system that is already at or near capacity.

An analysis of foster care systems around the country shows the number of children entering state or foster care rising sharply, especially in states hit hardest by opioid addiction. The children entering state care are younger, and they tend to stay in the system longer, than ever before.

The National Transportation Safety Board is sending a technical specialist to observe Tesla Inc.’s examination of a Model S that caught fire in California on Friday, the agency said in a statement.

The action is not a formal probe of how the lithium-ion battery pack caught fire without being involved a crash, NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said. NTSB’s participation in Tesla’s review “will provide the agency with an opportunity to learn more about fires in all types of battery-powered vehicles,” he said.

(TNS) - Always ready. Always there.

That’s the motto of the National Guard, and for 48 days — and counting — soldiers and airmen from this component of the military have been doing safety and relief work amid volcanic threats and destruction on the east side of Hawaii island.

In this installment of the Innovation of the Month series (see last month's story here), we explore the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Urban Spatial Analytics (MUSA) Practicum and how the graduate students in the program work with city officials to develop data science tools that their clients can use to determine how best to use their resources. The program is led by Professor Ken Steif along with Karl Dailey and Michael Fichman.

MetroLab’s Executive Director Ben Levine sat down with Professor Steif and some of the program’s graduate students to learn more.

(TNS) — In the 13 years since Hurricane Katrina hit South Mississippi, much has changed.

A quick drive down U.S. 90 is a constant reminder of the past — the things that are new and that have been rebuilt and the places that are memories of life before the storm.

One of the things that changed significantly besides the landscape is technology. Facebook was in its infancy in 2005, having been launched the year before the storm, and most social media users were using MySpace. It would also be another two years before Apple released the iPhone and helped to usher in the era of smartphones and tablets.

Four bills sponsored by the California Department of Insurance that the department believes will strengthen consumer protections for wildfire survivors have passed the Senate Insurance Committee with unanimous, bipartisan votes.

Assembly Bill 1772 would extend the amount of time a home or business owner has to rebuild an insured property from two to three years after a declared wildfire emergency and receive the full replacement costs to which they are entitled.

Research suggests the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rocked California wine country in 2014 may have been caused by an expansion of Earth’s crust because of seasonally receding groundwater under the Napa and Sonoma valleys.

The vineyard-filled valleys flank the West Napa Fault, which produced the quake that killed one person, injured several hundred and caused more than $500 million in losses.

As campus security industry professionals have seen, particularly in the last few months, there isn’t just one thing schools can do to keep their students and faculty safe. School safety is a multi-layered approach that involves participation from all members of a school’s community.

Last month, Campus Safety hosted a webinar led by Gary Sigrist, a retired school district safety director and current CEO and president of Safeguard Risk Solutions, to discuss the different layers of security needed in schools to protect students and staff from violence.

Lower workers’ compensation rates in California will bring down written premium once again this year, according to a forecast from the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau.

That revelation is expected in a full report on the state of California’s workers’ comp system is due out in about a week, but David Bellusci, WCIRB executive vice president and chief actuary, gave a rundown of what to expect during the group’s annual conference in San Francisco on Thursday.