The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said it has stopped keeping a list of people deemed likely to commit future crimes and repeatedly sending deputies to their homes, according to documents filed in a federal lawsuit. The agency’s practice of targeting people deemed at risk of committing crimes was the subject of a 2020 Tampa Bay Times investigation, supported by ...
Katie Thornton’s “The Divided Dial” podcast, aired by NPR’s On The Media program, has been nominated for a Peabody Award. Thornton’s podcast, with support from the Fund, examined how one side of the political spectrum came to dominate talk radio — and how Salem Media Group, the largest Christian, conservative multimedia company in the United States, is using the airwaves to ...
A story by students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, published in the Dallas Morning News and supported by the Fund, exposed universities’ use of a high-tech tool to spy on students, prompting the University of North Carolina to drop the system and sparking investigations at 11 universities in seven states. Reporters Arijit Sen and Dereka Bennett found that a ...
A story by Investigate West, supported by the Fund, exposed a cozy relationship between the federal Environmental Protection Agency and a mining company in Butte, Montana, that it was supposed to regulate. As a result of the reporting, the EPA announced several steps to increase transparency and engagement with the local community, including holding more public meetings, evaluating public health data to ...
The Hawaii legislature is considering several bills to protect the constitutional rights of parents suspected of abuse and neglect. The measures would dramatically narrow the rules for when children can be taken from their parents without a judge’s order. The legislation comes after extensive reporting by Honolulu Civil Beat’s John Hill and colleagues, with support from the Fund. Civil Beat’s ...
Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana asked the state’s inspector general to investigate Ware, one of his state’s largest juvenile detention centers, after a New York Times report supported by the Fund documented a long record of abuse, lenient oversight and suicide attempts. The Times report, published in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, ...
“Dodging Standards,” a series of stories by Carolina Public Press reporter Kate Martin exposed a series of deficiencies in North Carolina’s child welfare system, including that state officials had long known that counties paying less for social services workers experienced substantial turnover in staffing and hired unqualified workers. Since the series, supported by the Fund, was published in March, the state government ...
Following an extensive investigation by San Francisco Public Press’s Seth Rosenfeld about secrecy surrounding ride-hailing companies’ safety records, the California Public Utilities Commission for the first time is requiring the industry to adopt comprehensive measures to prevent sexual assaults. Rosenfeld’s series, supported by the Fund, chronicled how the commission failed for years to consistently monitor passenger complaints about rapes and assaults. The commission’s new decision ...
Two months after The Daily Chronicle, which covers several communities in and around DeKalb County in Illinois, began its series on the condition of the public drinking water system in Sycamore, Illinois has stepped in to help clean up the system to replace lead pipes that were delivering water to residents. The state has allocated $1,606,426 in funding to Sycamore ...
For much of 2021, the Mississippi Center for Investigative reporting zeroed in on the human cost of diabetes, a killer disease that over the past three years has killed more Americans than every war since World War 1. The Mississippi Delta is ground zero in that fight, with the greatest frequency of diabetes found anywhere in the United States. With ...