ralph evangelous: Live & Latest News Updates : Vimarsana.com

Local gang member, felon sentenced for retaliatory Creekwood shooting

WILMINGTON — A Wilmington felon was sentenced to 96 months in prison Friday for an incident that occurred last October. Quajohn Anthony Crews, 21…

Former crime lab director ordered mediation in lawsuit against law enforcement, DA

NEW HANOVER COUNTY – A judge has ordered top brass in local law enforcement and the district attorney’s office to reach a compromise in a lawsuit filed by a…

ShotSpotter Tech, good for Turks & Caicos Crime Fighting?

By Dana Malcolm Staff Writer   #TurksandCaicos, November 14, 2022 – ShotSpotter, true to its name, is a gunfire locator that uses acoustic detection from sensors mounted on existing infrastructure to capture and report sounds that may be gunfire and the Opposition PDM party has repeatedly called for its use in the Turks and Caicos […]

New filing in Wilmington crime lab lawsuit alleges culture of gender bias at WPD

Lawsuit claims authorities downplayed Wilmington crime lab issues, kept quiet about missing drugs

The former director of the Wilmington Police Department crime lab alleges that she was denied employment when the Sheriff’s Office took over the facility in 2019. The director claims this was retaliation, in direct response to her giving testimony under oath about concerns with the lab that authorities had not made public after WPD fired an ‘untruthful’ lab chemist.

City plans to bulldoze Hillcrest, replace public housing with 'vibrant' mixed-use development

The Wilmington Housing Authority is aiming to redevelop Hillcrest, an 80-year-old development that was supposed to only exist temporarily for war efforts. (Port City Daily photo/Alexandria Sands) WILMINGTON –– Between 13th and 16th on Dawson Street, garments swing on clothes lines in front of dull, masonry one-story buildings. The dwellings, originally built with the intention to later tear down, house more than 200 impoverished Wilmington families. Spread out amongst 26 acres, the public housing structures decay as investors pour millions into revitalizing and enriching the surrounding land. Hillcrest was built as temporary housing to support the efforts of the Second World War. It’s now 80 years old and crumbling. Meanwhile, City of Wilmington and New Hanover County leaders frantically search for a solution to the area’s lack of affordable housing as the workforce population skyrockets. The answer could be dense housing –– apartments and townhomes –– that take up little land but hold a lot of people. If it were developed today, the property Hillcrest sits on would likely have double or quadruple the number of units.

Wayne Soller jury returns guilty verdict in 1996 rape case

Wilmington-area untested rape kits lead to new arrests

As the latest numbers show, only 40 rape kits remain untested in the Wilmington area Attorney General Josh Stein's Office continues to request additional funds to process any backlog of rape kits in the state N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein's initiative to decrease the number of untested rape kits in the state has also helped solve more rape cold cases -- including in the Wilmington area. According to Laura Brewer, N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein's communications director, there are currently 16,186 rape kits that have been inventoried since the last inventory count in 2019. Of those, 2,925 kits completed testing, and an additional 5,342 are in process.

Open records laws help rebuild WPD's internal report, which was significantly truncated this year

--- Since 2008, the Wilmington Police Department has annually released a report from its Internal Affairs division (after 2016 known as the Professional Standards division). Traditionally, these reports are released in the spring or early summer, and have been two to four dozen pages, containing a number of data sets and infographics. The 2019 report was quietly released in mid-October. It was just four pages long and wasn't posted along with the past decade of other reports (it was posted as a news item on the department's website, here). The report was largely good news for the department, showing a decrease in citizen complaints and allegations, and an decrease in sustained investigations (after a spike in 2018).