Raleigh, N.C. — Sometimes when he drives home from work, his 12-hour shift in the rearview mirror, Jeff Mitchell sits in silence – no radio, no phone calls, nothing. When you’ve listened to a dying man take his last breath or a parent screaming as a child convulses on the floor, you don’t want to hear any more sounds.r6
In his years as a 911 call taker in Alaska and now at the Raleigh-Wake Emergency Communications Center, Mitchell has heard people at their worst and most vulnerable. He has been cursed at, cried to and hung up on. But he has also helped deliver babies, saved people with CPR and comforted a lonely, old lady.r11
“You never know when that phone rings what’s going to be on the other side,” Mitchell said. “This is one of the jobs where you have to be 100 percent all the time. You can’t have a bad day, because if you do, people die.”
DURHAM, N.C. — A North Carolina sheriff’s deputy says he heard wailing in the darkness and plunged into an apartment complex’s pond at night to rescue two young girls who, police say, had been thrown there to drown by their father.
When’s the last time you read or saw something that put a police officer in a bad light?
EDNEYVILLE – State and local crime fighters huddled near the football field at the former Edneyville High School Tuesday morning to carry out a game-changing play to ease a backlog of criminal cases awaiting evidence analysis throughout the state.
ROCKINGHAM — The black and silver motif of the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office fleet was enough to arrest the attention of judges in a vehicle design contest.
Carteret County Sheriff Asa Buck has been appointed to serve on the North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice.
Over the past several months, an undercover investigation with the Macon County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) revealed that at least nine businesses in Macon County were illegally operating sweepstakes gaming machines.
It’s been almost five years since a brush fire pickup lunged forward and crushed volunteer firefighter Leonard Murray, killing him. But the Indiana man’s family continues to wait for an answer from the federal government about whether they will or won’t get a one-time death benefit meant to help the survivors of fallen public safety officers. Hundreds of families have waited for a year — and sometimes several years — for action from the Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Programs set up in 1976 to help out families of police, firefighters and other emergency workers who die in the line of duty or after severely stressful events on the job. A USA TODAY Media Network investigation, including a review of almost 1,500 claims filed by families since 2009, found the program mired in delays for more than a decade despite millions of dollars spent on outside audits and efforts to hire extra legal help to speed up processing languishing claims. As of August, about 750 families were caught waiting for answers on their claims for the one-time payment of about $340,000. 
Raleigh, N.C. — The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that state lawmakers went too far in 2011 in using some court fines to help offset the cost of housing state prisoners in county jails.