More than 30 years ago, the General Assembly created a fund to reward tipsters who shared information leading to motor vehicle theft arrests. If there’s leftover money in the Help Eliminate Auto Theft — better known as HEAT — reward fund, the Virginia State Police can allocate it to educational programming to help drivers prevent auto theft or to support local law enforcement or judicial agencies in their efforts to reduce theft. Since 2022, the Virginia State Police has been using an increasing amount of money from the fund to help local law enforcement agencies buy equipment to help them prevent and solve vehicle theft and related crimes. Cardinal News reviewed more than 1,200 documents relating to the Virginia State Police’s HEAT equipment reimbursement program, which were obtained via the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The documents spanned July 2023 to February 2025 and included emails, application forms, vendor invoices and reimbursement forms, along with reports about HEAT initiatives and grant programs.
A filing by Purcellville Vice Mayor Ben Nett is looking to nullify an opinion issued by Commonwealth’s Attorney Bob Anderson that found Nett should not participate in any Town Council or staff discussion surrounding the town’s Police Department. Anderson’s opinion was provided April 21 in response to a request by Councilmember Caleb Stought regarding Nett’s participation in discussions surrounding the department from which he had been fired on April 4. “He is prohibited from all of the following actions: voting on behalf of the police department, attending any closed meeting addressing the police department, participating in transactions relating to the police department, and lobbying or discussing any matter relating to the police department with other town officers,” according to Anderson’s opinion. Anderson said taking part in any of those actions could be a misdemeanor offense. Nett’s Complaint for Declaratory Judgement requests that the Circuit Court determine that Anderson’s opinion is “legally and factually erroneous” stating that the opinions have “chilled” his participation in the Town Council and “disenfranchised the majority of the Town’s citizens.”
Indexed data from more than ten million records from the state of New York for the years 1880-2017 have now been ordered released by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York. The court has also remanded the parties back to a lower court so that a judge may conduct an “in-camera review” of which additional fields of data for all years may potentially also be disclosed by the state, with the presumption being that most data contained in death indices should be open to the public. The data will be freely published here once the state eventually turns over the finalized public data set to Reclaim The Records, as ordered.
