In an ongoing investigative series based on arbitration files from the past 25 years – records that have only recently become public due to a change in state law – grantee Nick Grube of Hawaii Civil Beat analyzes and reports on the role the collective bargaining process and grievance procedures play in efforts to improve police practices in Hawaii. Civil ...
A new multi-part podcast by grantee Sara Ganim for Meadowlark Media and Advance Local explores the story of Shawn Sinisi, a victim of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse, and takes listeners into the world of addiction rehabilitation, where trauma-informed therapy is scarce, resources shame addicts for their medical issues and there is little regulation for the institutions dolling out healthcare. In the ...
In an investigation for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, grantee Amy Silverman revealed that despite a class-action lawsuit that led to decades of mental health care reform, Arizonans with chronic mental illness are not getting the help they need, thanks in part to a settlement agreement that removed most accountability and transparency measures from the system and softened the ...
Grantees at the Lens in New Orleans collected thousands of documents to explore how fast and how much the New Orleans Police Department has expanded its surveillance – and how little the community knew about it. With support from the Fund, the team spent a year investigating and creating a multipage, interactive data story looking at the tools used, the ...
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. ...