Connecticut’s violent crime rate increased slightly from 2015 to 2016, but its murder rate fell dramatically to its lowest point in decades, running counter to a national trend, according to FBI data released Monday.
Jake Kara
Jake was Data Editor at CT Mirror. He is a former managing editor of The Ridgefield Press, a Hersam Acorn newspaper. He worked for the community newspaper chain as a reporter and editor for five years before joining the Mirror staff. He studied professional writing at Western Connecticut State University and is a graduate student in software engineering at Harvard Extension School.
Posted inPolitics
CT online voter registration was ‘targeted by Russian agents’
Connecticut’s online voter registration system was among election-related systems in 21 states targeted by Russian agents before the 2016 presidential election, state officials learned Friday, but they said the agents didn’t manage to get past the state’s network security.
Posted inNews
Unhappy with credit-freeze fees after Equifax breach? So is attorney general
Updated Sept. 15 at 3:15 p.m.
Consumers looking to protect themselves from identity theft following a massive data breach of credit report provider Equifax could face fees, thanks to a decade-old state law that has similar counterparts in many other states. Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen thinks Equifax should be on the hook for those fees.
Posted inEducation
Care4Kids enrollment down 7,500 since closing to new families
Care4Kids, which once helped low-income parents of more than 22,000 children pay for day care so they could work, has reduced its enrollment by one-third, a year after closing to virtually all new applicants.
Posted inPolitics
Trump talks tax reform but is mum on deduction CT taxpayers rely on
Speaking in Missouri Wednesday the president promoted four tax reform principles but offered few specifics and no indication on whether he’d continue to target a deduction that benefits Connecticut more than most other states.
Posted inEducation, Money
Poorest districts spared some ed funding cuts, still to be hit hard by others
In the absence of a state budget, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has spared Connecticut’s most impoverished communities from losing their largest education grants, but there are plenty of other lesser grants these towns rely on that will be decimated or scaled back under his executive orders.
Posted inEducation, Money, Politics
The state of CT’s cities and towns in charts
State aid to municipalities largely has been spared cuts over the last decade – and has even been increased in some years – even though the state has regularly faced budget deficits. Now it’s time for some municipalities to share in the pain, the Malloy administration maintains. As the debate rages, here, in graphical form, are some key indicators of the fiscal condition of the state’s 169 cities and towns and how they are spending their money.
Posted inEducation
Explore 2 years of ‘universal’ SAT scores for your school district
Use this tool to see how your district performed on the SAT in 2016-17, and how that compares with 2015-16 performance, the first year in which all juniors were required to take the test.
Posted inPolitics
700,000 CT taxpayers claim a deduction that’s at risk in D.C.
Among the proposals being considered in Washington for reforming the federal tax code is one that would eliminate the deduction that Connecticut taxpayers rely on most — the one for state and local taxes.
Posted inEducation
SAT shows large numbers of juniors unready for college or jobs
The test scores were a slight increase over the previous year’s results, but minorities and students from low-income families were far behind state averages. See the results from your city or town.
Posted inHealth, Money
Report: Medicaid-expansion states, led by CT, reduce per-person costs
Connecticut curbed per-person Medicaid spending more than any other state over a five-year period that included the first year of expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Posted inMoney
State workers to finish voting today on concessions deal
More than 40,000 workers were eligible to cast ballots. The outcome will have a major impact on the gridlocked budget debate now consuming the Capitol.
Posted inMoney
A cartoon primer on how the union concessions vote works
Beginning last week and continuing through Monday, more than 40,000 unionized state workers are eligible to cast ballots on the tentative concessions deal reached on May 23 by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. This cartoon illustrates how the voting works.
Posted inNews
New Census estimates: Retirement-age population keeps growing
Connecticut’s 65-and-up crowd grew from 14.2 to an estimated 16.2 percent of the population from 2010 to 2016, according to Census Bureau estimates released Thursday.
Posted inEducation
Judge: Magnet schools cannot be made more segregated
Filling empty seats with more black and Hispanic students from Hartford, a Superior Court judge ruled Friday, would erode the Connecticut Supreme Court’s landmark Sheff v. O’Neill desegregation decision, issued nearly 21 years ago, which found Hartford students “suffer daily” from the inequities caused by severe racial isolation.