'Virtual rangers' help South African reserve keep poachers away

Corruption in Mexico is ingrained in all systems and interactions. President Vicente Fox and his administration are trying to change this. Their mentality is that for corruption to truly be fought the government needs to actively make change and implement rules to counteract it, and some of Fox's changes are now beginning to see improvements.

Protected species of animals and plants are illegally sold online mainly due to buyers and sellers having no knowledge of laws or the consequences to the ecosystem. Enforcement Gaps Interface (EGI) is a software which uses machine learning to determine if the animal product is illegal or not.

When a people in Playa El Jobo, La Cruz realized that their beaches were home to sea turtle eggs, they took action to protect the species by joining together. What started as a neighborhood effort to patrol the beaches has now turned into a successful NGO that collects data for research purposes and teaches tourists, students and children how to become research assistants.

In Rochester, NY, the Center for Teen Empowerment, a nonprofit that trains youth in community organizing, personal development, and anti-violence, is working to bring kids off the street and into safety. The program, which started in Boston, is centered on four ideas: jobs (paying the youth hired as organizers), teamwork, agency (letting them build their own activist agendas), and peer influence. While hard to evaluate because of its situational, qualitative nature, city officials, including law enforcement, point to the program as a factor in the decrease in violence across the city.

In Seattle's police-free street encampment that sprang up during protests over policing abuses, a mostly unarmed group of volunteer "sentinels" has defused a number of potential problems while largely avoiding the use of force. Trained in de-escalation and mediation tactics, the sentinels have used listening techniques to understand people's anger or mental state. Among the incidents they have addressed: fights, attempted vandalism of storefronts, visits from armed people who wanted to confront a supposed leftist threat, and the attempted arson of a police precinct building.

For 28 years, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, stripped more than 100 people of U.S. citizenship and deported them for their direct participation in Nazi war crimes. The most successful Nazi-hunting operation in the world, OSI’s painstaking investigations – historical research combined with criminal sleuthing and international diplomacy – pried needed records from other nations’ files in order to prove that post-war refugees who ended up in America had immigrated under false pretenses, hiding their true role in the Holocaust’s extermination camps.

Local Ocean Conservation is in Watamu, Kenya has made approximately 21,000 turtle rescues and "treated more than 650 turtles in its rehabilitation center and clinic" since it's inception in 1997. The group responds to fishermen who have accidentally caught turtles in their nets and then remunerates the fishermen for their "time, effort, and phone calls." This incentive-based relationship combined with a ban on the international tortoiseshell trade has helped decrease the poaching of turles, and the group has now expanded their efforts to include more initiatives to protect the endangered species.

A growing number of governments, companies, and nonprofit organizations are working together with new technology and data to identify fishing vessels that are breaking laws and engaging in human rights violations. Using satellite imagery and tracking signals, for example, a philanthropic company and a nonprofit worked with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to help the Ghanian navy arrest four vessels for illegal fishing practices. Technology by itself won’t stop forced labor and unregulated ships, but it can be helpful for cash-strapped governments looking to increase oversight of their fisheries.

The nonprofit group Save Giraffes Now, the Kenya Wildlife Service, the Northern Rangelands Trust, and local community members are working together to save the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe species. Rising lake levels and flooding have stranded the animals on its island, so they made a custom-built steel barge to relocate them to a protected wildlife reserve. It’s not easy to move giraffes, but so far they’ve successfully moved three out of nine of them.

Grand Rapids is working to reform behavioral health services and the way law enforcement interacts with those in a mental health crisis through efforts like its county-run crisis access center. An increased need has led to an expansion of these programs, and the city now has a psychiatric urgent care center, mobile crisis teams that make house calls, social workers who join the police on 911 calls and plans for a 24/7 behavioral health crisis center that will open in November.