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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Over the past few decades, a handful of massive nationwide companies have come to dominate the home health care industry. A new report by grantee Jake Bittle for The New Republic shows how one of those companies, LHC Group, has managed to squeeze out big profits from a low-margin business.Drawing on several employee interviews and hundreds of documents, the report ...
A decade after Iowa law enforcement agencies started using body cameras, Iowa has a widely divergent, unregulated system of rules and policies governing public access to a tool that many saw at the outset as a way of monitoring the conduct of police. Those disparities, found in a review of the policies of more than 200 agencies, can endanger the ...
In 2014, a second grader named Relisha Rudd disappeared from a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. where she had been living with her family. By the time the city formally declared Relisha “missing,” 18 days had passed since the last time she’d been seen at school or in the shelter. Relisha has never been found.Through the Cracks investigates gaps in ...
The LMPD conducted 72 forced entries from September 2019 through March 2020, according to a review of police records by grantees at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. They kicked in doors, broke windows, and picked locks. They used battering rams and sledgehammers and, in one case, a concrete planter.Occasionally, officers were in a race against the clock and breaking ...
As part of a unique reporting project, grantees Dagmar Thiel and Frank LaRue interviewed dozens of Latino journalists across the U.S. about their experiences as journalists. What they uncovered were stories of disrespect and discrimination. Their reporting is punctuated by an ongoing study started in 2020 by Fundamedios, a Pan-American nonprofit that advocates for media freedom and the protection of journalists, ...
An investigation by grantee Ruslan Gurzhiy at the Russian-language media outlet, “Slavic Sacramento,” has revealed possible reasons why Slavic communities across the U.S. have been especially vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The unique investigation highlights the spread of the pandemic in Russian-speaking religious communities from California to New York and uncovers a culture of mistrust towards the government, resulting in the ...