A sweeping eight part-series, “Broken Justice,” by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, in collaboration with several universities and news organizations, outlines systemic failures in the criminal justice system. For one of the stories, supported with a grant from the Fund, students from five universities around the country investigated coroner systems nationwide. They found that coroners, who aren’t required to ...
Louisville, Kentucky, police officer Jervis Middletown was demoted for improper conduct and then fired after he aligned with local Black Lives Matter protestors in the wake of the George Floyd killing. He is appealing his termination in court, claiming that the police department treats Black officers more harshly than white officers. With support from the Fund, reporter Gabbriel Schivone wrote ...
An anonymous tip led reporters from Fort Worth Report to investigate claims that public library staff across the city were regularly being physically, sexually and verbally assaulted by patrons. Even after staff members reported the assaults to management, nothing was done. With support from the Fund, reporters Emily Wolf and Rachel Behrndt investigated the story for six months, obtaining documents ...
For a few thousand dollars a year, a high-tech artificial intelligence system offers colleges a way to scan students’ social media posts to look for students at risk of harming themselves. The tool, Social Sentinel (now called Navigate360 Detect), claims that it could help save lives. In an investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of ...
Nonprofit news organization Open Vallejo has covered police shootings in Vallejo, California, extensively, including in a joint report earlier this year with ProPublica, supported by the Fund. In a new story supported with one of the Fund’s follow-up grants for continued coverage after initial investigations are published, the team found that reforms that leaders pledged to implement in 2020 have ...
In 2016, Christian talk radio host Eric Metaxas begrudgingly encouraged his listeners to vote for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. By 2020, he pledged his life to fighting the “stolen election” while talking with Trump on the air. Ahead of the midterm elections, Metaxas and many of his fellow talk radio hosts made sure the falsehood of massive 2020 election fraud ...
After being awakened repeatedly in the middle of the night by the Los Angeles Police Department’s helicopters, Capital & Main reporter Angelika Albaladejo set out to learn if the public safety value of these aerial patrols is worth the costs incurred and harms inflicted. With support from the Fund, Albaladejo spent more than six months requesting records from law enforcement ...
Freelance journalist Spenser Mestel, who specializes in election-related reporting, used one of the Fund’s new emergency grants on democracy threats to dig into a well-funded effort to promote online voting. For a story in the Intercept, Mestel looked at a non-profit formed by Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist who promotes online voting around the country. Tusk’s Mobile Voting organization has ...
A year after photographer Jocelyn Knight discovered a toxic dump on private land inside Point Reyes National Seashore, she and reporter Peter Byrne returned to see if it had been cleaned up, as park officials said would happen. They found discarded machines, piles of tires, plastic barrels and other waste. The family that owns the private ranch on the land ...
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case challenging a federal law preventing Native families from being separated. Non-Native foster parents who want to adopt Native children brought the case, claiming that the law discriminates against white people. With a grant from the Fund, Rebecca Nagle wrote in The Nation that the case may be part of ...