Reveal exposes how a lack of enforcement mechanisms and patchwork state laws have contributed to the deaths of dozens of domestic violence victims. FIJ Grantee, Jennifer Gollan, did an analysis of 21 states and tallied the number of intimate partners, children and bystanders whose lives are shattered by abusers who fail to give up their firearms. She found that from ...
Half a century ago, the United States carried out history’s largest per capita bombing campaign—in Laos. Between 1964 and 1973, US forces flew approximately 600,000 armed missions over the small landlocked country neighboring Vietnam. Up to 30 percent of those bombs did not detonate at the time, and an estimated 80 million remained in the soil. Old US ordnance has ...
As part of a months-long investigation, “Locked Up and Left to Die,” reporters Michael Barajas and Sophie Novack reviewed more than 400 investigations by the Texas Rangers, the detective arm of the state police. “The records show that state police regularly document jail conditions that can lead to preventable deaths,” Barajas and Novack write. Records received from the Texas Commission ...
Over the course of five years, Grantees Andrew Burton and Micheal Kirby Smith investigated how climate change is impacting U.S. citizens in real time by documenting the lives of residents of Newtok, AK. Their film, Newtok, uses verite scenes and sit down interviews to document the community’s efforts to relocate their village due to thawing permafrost, intensifying storms, an encroaching ...
For years the California agency that regulates Uber and Lyft gathered annual reports about assaults that happen on their rides but kept that data secret. FIJ grantee Seth Rosenfeld is the first reporter to obtain some of those reports following an eight-month effort using the state’s public records act. His story in the nonprofit San Francisco Public Press revealed not ...
Over the course of the pandemic, hundreds of public health officials have been ousted from their positions. Many faced targeted harassment and community outcries for their removal. FIJ Grantee, Jane Hu, reveals the role of right-wing militia groups’ online networks in organizing these campaigns through this piece for High Country News. ...
Nearly 60 years after the city of Long Beach purchased the historic RMS Queen Mary at auction, the ship is in disarray. The city and a string of operators have sunk millions of dollars into the aging vessel, and it still has a host of structural problems that render it unsafe to the public. A team at the Long Beach ...
FIJ Grantee, Noy Thrupkaew, investigated the stories of dozens of diplomatic domestic workers in the U.S. for an upcoming feature in The Washington Post Magazine.Noy learned diplomatic domestic workers have been victims of all sorts of abuse, including labor trafficking while working for diplomats in the U.S. While lawyers, domestic worker organizers, and advocates have won civil suits, settlements, and immigration ...
The number of workers who have died of heat illness in Texas has nearly doubled in the last decade. But the state has not implemented comprehensive protections for workers toiling in high temperatures.FIJ Grantees, a team at Columbia Journalism Investigations, investigated two companies, Hellas Construction and Republic Services, who violated safety agreements with the U.S. Department of Labor after workers ...
“Criminal Behavior” began as an investigation into security camera footage that seemed to show a guard at the City Justice Center in St. Louis abetting the beating of a mentally ill detainee by two other inmates. However, public records requests, reviews of lawsuits, as well as extensive interviews with the victim’s family and with former CJC corrections officers revealed that ...