Editorial standards

Routine automated publication requires a recognized official source or corroborated reporting from verified news organizations. Social posts alone never satisfy the threshold. Every update preserves the source URL, publication date and time when available, and retrieval record.

Sensitive reports involving minors, unverified identities, sexual violence, mass-casualty events, conflicting accounts, sealed matters or victim-notification concerns are held for human review.

Arrested, charged, indicted, convicted, sentenced, wanted and suspected are not interchangeable. Crime Current carries the most specific confirmed legal status beside each headline and updates it when the record changes.

An indictment is an accusation, not proof. Defendants are presumed innocent unless and until guilt is established in court.

Automation may collect, classify, group and summarize source material. It may not invent quotes, charges, motives, evidence, relationships, locations, criminal histories or outcomes. Low-confidence matches enter a review queue.

Duplicate detection favors updating a living story or Case Track over publishing disconnected rewrites of the same event.

Official or properly licensed imagery is preferred and source-captioned. Nonliteral AI artwork is labeled “AI Editorial Reconstruction” and never presented as documentary evidence. Crime Current does not generate fake mugshots, victims, suspects or crime-scene photographs.

Surveillance and wanted material displays only while an issuing agency identifies the request as active, with clear attribution and an expiration check.

Material changes are recorded in an update history. Corrections state what was wrong and what changed. Retractions and unpublishing decisions retain an internal audit record even when the public page is removed.