A New York City Department of Buildings inspector has been charged with taking a $1,200 bribe in exchange for not citing a construction firm that had continued working despite a stop-work order. — Construction Dive

The rapid transformation of downtown Los Angeles’ skyline is being fueled in good measure by huge investments from Chinese companies eager to burnish their global brands and capitalize on L.A.’s real estate boom.

Now some of those projects have become a focus of federal agents seeking evidence of possible bribery, extortion, money laundering and other crimes as part of a corruption investigation at City Hall. — Los Angeles Times

A Romanian man who used threats of violence and indebtedness to keep a group of his countrymen as slaves while he pocketed their wages from a London construction site has been sentenced to seven years in jail. — Global Construction Review

Can design keep you safe from crime? Architects and urbanists have been making that claim since urban crime — or the threat of it — reached crisis proportions in the 1960s. [...] But with scant evidence to support those claims, at what cost do we build “defensible space”? Architectural historian Joy Knoblauch looks back at sixty years of attempts to secure space and asks whether safety lies in the design of the built environment, in our social structures, or in our heads. — Urban Omnibus

Two men were hit with 487 counts on Wednesday in a complaint alleging they spent years running a scam that has potentially left hundreds of homeowners across Southern California with homes that may not be structurally sound. [...]

Huntington Beach resident Ruben Gutierrez, 43, and 46-year-old Wilfrido Rodriguez of Downey each face numerous counts of forgery, identity theft and grand theft in a scheme involving falsified documents and fraudulent engineering services [...]. — KTLA

The stamp, forged signatures, false paperwork — they were like the scaffolding of a building of his own design, one with no firm foundation. — New York Times

Students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.” — The Harvard Crimson

Documents that Macedonia's Special Prosecution, SJO, seized on Tuesday with a court order from the Culture Ministry refer to a million-euros-worth tender to build the Museum of VMRO and Macedonian Struggle for Independence...The SJO [...] says it will reveal the start of two new investigations. If one refers to "Skopje 2014", it will be the first-ever serious criminal investigation into this costly project which, according to BIRN’s database, has cost 667 million euros already. — Balkan Insight

With the growing trend towards hostile architecture now openly admitting its political incentives, are we in an age of transparent hostility? [...]

Whereas other instances of hostile architecture are marked by their deliberate obscurity, the Camden Bench was developed, constructed and deployed in plain sight, making it an all too visible reminder of persistent negligence, raising the question: will hostile architecture become an accepted feature of the built environment? — failedarchitecture.com

The Los Angeles Business Journal reports in this week's issue that the filmmaker, Steven Slomkowski, sought to get out of the project after the suicide of Mark Stahl, one of three siblings who control the property, also renowned in architecture lore as Case Study Home #22. Slomkowski sued in 2014, alleging that the surviving siblings, Bruce and Shari Stahl, got cold feet over depictions of Mark and their late father, Buck. The Stahls countersued... — LA Observed

The thorny task of comparing crime rates across the world is tricky because legal interpretations vary. Sweden's definition of rape is not the same as America’s, for example. Murder however should be easier to record because there is an identifiable victim, something that can be counted. But the way in which this is done in poorer, often more corrupt countries makes truly comparable statistics hard to pin down. Where there are inefficient public health systems or police, it is even harder. — the Economist

Burglary is a spatial crime: its very definition requires architecture...Indeed, burglary's architectural interest comes not from its ubiquity, but from its unexpected, often surprisingly subtle misuse of the built environment. Burglars approach buildings differently, often seeking modes of entry other than doors and approaching buildings—whole cites—as if they're puzzles waiting to be solved or beaten. — BLDGBLOG