The conversation around police reform has cooled down slightly over the last year, but that doesn’t mean law enforcement agencies around the state aren’t quietly implementing new policies — policies that came on the heels of the movement that gained steam after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020.

For the fourth time in eight years, a person has died while incarcerated at the Jackson County Detention Center.

Maggie Calhoun Bowman’s family has spent the last 17 years making peace with the fact that they will never know how she ended up dead in a rain gully, covered over with leaves and a pink coat.

The job of the county sheriff is important even though the county sheriff’s job is widely misunderstood.  

Haywood County commissioners took an important step forward on April 4 by selecting Moseley Architects of Charlotte as the preferred firm to handle architectural and engineering services for the county’s proposed jail expansion project.

It’s hard to believe there was ever a time when reports of stalking, sexual assault, domestic violence and dating violence weren’t taken seriously by law enforcement, courts or the general public, but there was – and it wasn’t even 30 years ago.

In Suzie Pressley’s 11 years on the job, she’s seen the agony people face trying to leave an abusive relationship and the freedom they feel when it happens.

Every so often — about 20 times a year — Western North Carolina’s social media networks flare up with impassioned pleas from friends and family members of a missing person, begging for any information that could help bring their loved one home. But the reasons for the disappearances, and the results of the investigations, are often as unique as the missing persons themselves.

Make no mistake, it would be a stretch to say a partnership between Western Carolina University and the town of Sylva’s Police Department  is the model for the future of policing in small-town America.

As one of Waynesville’s three “urban” cores, Frog Level holds an identity as distinct as any other. Of late, that identity has not been all that good.