The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (LEB) is available at leb.fbi.gov . If you need assistance or have questions or comments, please contact the staff at leb@fbi.gov .
Below is a list of articles you can read this month on the LEB website.
December Content
Featured Article – Recognizing 90 Years – For nine decades, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin has informed, educated, and broadened the criminal justice community’s understanding of current law enforcement issues.
Featured Article – Negotiation Position Papers and Verbal Briefs – Because negotiations continue to evolve, the authors offer an updated look at this valuable tool for use during crisis barricade incidents.
Leadership Spotlight – Workplace Burnout: A Growing Challenge – Encouraging healthy work-life balance, ensuring proper communication, and offering support can help leaders counteract this threat.
Bulletin Notes – Officers Thomas Foley and Josh Smith of the Plymouth, Massachusetts, Police Department rescued an unconscious kayaker from drowning
When clarity matters most, the FBI turns to its Operational Projects Unit—a team of artists, architects, and forensic experts who transform fragments of evidence into visuals that tell the full story.
HUNTSVILLE – Citing the FBI’s newest facility on Redstone Arsenal as a “strategic investment,” U.S. Rep. Dale Strong joined government and law enforcement officials, along with the first graduating class of trainees, today to cut the ribbon on the FBI’s National Counter-Unmanned Training Center.
The newly established center – the first of its kind – will serve as the nation’s premier hub for preparing law enforcement and security professionals to detect, assess, and counter emerging unmanned aircraft system threats.
Strong (R-Huntsville) praised the center as a strategic investment in America’s homeland security and applauded its mission as essential to protecting communities and major national events.
“This center represents a major step forward in how we prepare our law enforcement and security professionals to confront new and evolving threats,” said Strong. “In the years leading up to today, I’ve worked to strengthen our national counter-UAS posture, and the men and women trained here will play a critical role in securing our homeland and protecting millions of Americans.”
Strong said the center’s creation delivers on years of bipartisan, bicameral efforts in Congress to advance a unified national approach to counter-UAS training. The facility also ensures officials at all levels have access to advanced instruction and tactics.
He also said the center will support security preparations for upcoming global events hosted in the United States, including the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics.
“Redstone Arsenal continues to play a central role in our nation’s security mission – from missile defense and space operations to cyber innovation and counter-UAS testing,” Strong said. “Now, through this center, that world-class expertise expands even further to safeguard our communities, infrastructure, and national events.”
The Office of Personnel Management has moved another step closer to its yearslong goal of modernizing the federal retirement process.
Federal employees and annuitants can now access digital versions of four key retirement booklets online, OPM announced this week. Previously, the detailed retirement information was only available as paper copies.
OPM said the digital versions of the retirement booklets are immediately available for download through the retirement services online portal and should reduce delays to federal retirees who need to access information about retirement services.
The four booklets now accessible online are: The original annuitant booklet; the current annuitant booklet; the original survivor booklet and the current survivor booklet.
Before the update, annuitants and survivors received physical copies of those booklets in the mail. Retirees who lost their copies would have to call OPM to request new printed copies of the materials and then wait for them to be delivered.
The process of digitizing the retirement booklets took about a year and a half, according to an OPM official. Creating the online copies required building out new infrastructure and redesigning the booklets’ formats, as well as loading the existing data into the digital versions.
OPM said the update “required complex technical coordination between engineering teams and retirement leadership.”
“This is an important step forward in our efforts to modernize retirement services and improve the experience for federal retirees,” OPM Acting Director Chuck Ezell said in a statement. “It’s also another example of how smart, digital-first solutions can reduce costs and save taxpayer dollars over time.”
The four digitized retirement booklets bring OPM one step closer to its seemingly never-ending goal to update federal retirement systems. The IT modernization effort has continued for well over a decade and transcended multiple presidential administrations.
For the time being, the federal retirement process is still largely paper-based. At the same time that OPM is attempting to modernize the system for the long term, the agency in recent years has also tried to make the legacy process easier for retiring feds in the meantime. In 2023, OPM published a retirement quick guide, which aims to help federal employees and recent retirees better understand and navigate the current retirement process.
The modernization work will likely still take years to complete. But the agency has taken some other recent steps toward that end goal over the last several years. In 2024, for example, OPM piloted an online retirement application. And in 2023, the agency added a chatbot for users to ask and get answers to common questions, and increased staffing in its retirement services call centers.
Most recently, OPM announced in February that it had processed a fully digital retirement claim for the first time ever.
However, the slow build toward a modernized federal retirement system is affecting other areas for OPM, according to a 2024 report from OPM’s inspector general office.
“Reducing improper payments from OPM’s retirement programs hinges on modernizing OPM’s retirement systems, which has been a longstanding challenge for the agency,” the IG wrote in its report on OPM’s fiscal 2025 top management challenges.
The IG, at the time, pointed to the need to both fund and modernize legacy systems, while also moving federal retirement services to an online platform. At the same time, “insufficient staff capacity and incomplete retirement applications from federal agencies” remain barriers to the modernization efforts, the IG said.
But looking ahead, a current OPM official said there are more “exciting developments in progress” for retirement services modernization.
