San Francisco has a long history of pushing for publicly-owned power utilities, which was renewed in 2019 when Pacific Gas & Electric – the investor-owned utility that owns the grid in San Francisco – filed for bankruptcy in the wake of wildfires in the state. City officials made a $2.5 billion offer to purchase the grid, but PG&E rebuffed the ...
Attacks on energy infrastructure have increased significantly over the last few years, amid plots hatched by right-wing extremists, known as accelerationists, who seek to sow chaos as a way to hasten societal collapse. Even when attacks on energy substations are robberies, rather than politically motivated, extremists seize on them to advance their agenda, Jane C. Hu found in an investigation ...
The city of Gainesville, Florida, placed a landfill in the backyard of Joseph Williams Elementary School in the 1950s. The dump was closed 60 years ago, but even after other environmental issues were discovered on the site, it was never fully cleaned up. With support from the Fund, Georgia Gee’s yearlong investigation – based on hundreds of public and archival ...
New reporting by The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering education, shows that Louisiana school officials only notified victims that their data had been compromised in a cyberattack after media coverage of the issue. With support from the Fund, The 74 and The Acadiana Advocate uncovered the data breach last year. The school district insisted that student and teacher information ...
With support from the Fund, Kelli Duncan investigated the effects of a five-year-old local policy to dispatch crisis clinicians some emergency calls in Eagle County, Colorado. Duncan reported that, while the program has helped some callers get mental health care and social services, crisis teams can only be dispatched at the request of police, rather than alongside them or instead ...
In new series, grantee Kristi Coale is looking into San Francisco’s electric future for The Frisc. The first story in the series examines the long and troubled relationship between San Francisco and PG&E, the regional power company. With support from the Fund, Coale conducted the most robust public accounting yet on incidents and project delays that affect every aspect of ...
“The Strike,” a new documentary produced with the Fund’s support, chronicles the largest hunger strike in U.S. history, to protest solitary confinement at the Pelican Bay “supermax” prison in Northern California. For decades, the prison held mostly Black and brown men alone in tiny cells indefinitely. Then one day in 2013, 30,000 prisoners went on hunger strike. The film, directed ...
With support from the Fund, Sammy Sussman, Annika Grosser and Sanjana Bhambhani obtained disciplinary records of New York City’s Department of Homeless Services Police, a little-known law enforcement agency that uses non-lethal weapons to maintain security in city-owned shelters. For an investigation for Muck Rock and New York Focus, the team focused on 31 officers and found that a small ...
With support from the Fund, Lila Hassan dug into “GunTube,” the online ecosystem of firearms videomakers and influencers on YouTube. She found that T.Rex Arms, a firearms accessories company with over a million followers on YouTube, is pushing a hardline Christian ideology. Her reporting in Mother Jones uncovers the gap in online social media policy where extremism festers, because content ...
More than a third of people shot nonfatally by Detroit police in recent years were not charged with a crime or convicted of the conduct officers said prompted them to open fire, a first-of-its-kind investigation by the Detroit Free Press found, raising questions about whether their shootings were justifiable. Most of those shooting survivors were unarmed or shot in the ...