Lori Curry was incensed when she heard the stories of mistreatment her boyfriend faced in a Missouri prison in 2019. Wanting to air complaints about the Missouri Department of Corrections but at the same time worried her criticism might have consequences for her boyfriend, she created a new Twitter handle and tweeted anonymously about the ordeal.Without intending to, Curry became ...
The Chicago Police Department’s overtime spending has grown nearly every year since 2012, and fraud and abuse prompted Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General to audit the department’s overtime practices in 2017. The audit revealed practices such as officers improperly extending their tours or abusing Court overtime, and that the department lacked adequate controls and oversight. Despite the audit, spending continued to ...
The Fund for Investigative Journalism teamed up with grantees from the Documenting COVID-19 Project to hold an online forum on accessing and investigating COVID-19 vaccine data.The Documenting COVID-19 Project at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation started gathering government records in the first weeks of the pandemic and has broken multiple major stories over the last year. In the ...
By Eric Ferrero, Executive DirectorIn the wake of several recent cases in Iowa about whether police body-camera footage must be released publicly, journalists in the state came together to develop an ambitious collaborative investigation. They planned a series of stories on the issue that would be available to all of the state’s 250 newspapers free of charge, starting with obtaining ...
Early one morning in October 2019, James Plymell was out of gas on the side of the road in Albany, Oregon. Less than an hour after police responded to help, he was dead — but his death would not be blamed on at least four tasings he received from the police that day. Leah Sottile’s longform investigation reveals a history ...
Akron put America on wheels, manufacturing most of the country’s tires and earning the title Rubber Capital of the World. Once among the fastest-growing U.S. cities, it attracted tens of thousands of people seeking work in its rubber factories. Those jobs are mostly gone, but the health effects of the toxins that workers encountered every day still linger. Some illnesses ...
Click to RSVP.Please join us Wednesday, March 17, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern for a webinar on states’ data-sharing about the race and ethnicity of people who have received COVID-19 vaccines.You’ll hear from our grantees at the Documenting COVID-19 Project who have obtained states’ data-sharing agreements with the federal government and found that some aren’t providing race and ethnicity data. The ...
A special series by grantee Caio de Freitas Paes for Mongabay reveals U.S. interests related to major land theft cases and unsustainable water withdrawal for irrigated farming in the West of Bahia state.The series of two written pieces and a short documentary reveal that Cargill bought tons of soy harvested from land grabbed areas in Bahia, an agricultural expansion zone ...