For years in New Hampshire, press, policymakers, advocates and the public have tried to get access to records detailing misconduct by individual police officers and other public officials, but they were often blocked by a 1993 state Supreme Court ruling that allowed government agencies to withhold the information.Nancy West, previously of the New Hampshire Union Leader and now executive editor ...
When an 18-year-old woman in Washington state reported that she was raped, police didn’t believe her. They charged her with filing a false police report. Her life was upended, and her rapist remained free to victimize other women. Ultimately, two detectives in Colorado identified and caught the rapist.As reported by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller in their Pulitzer Prize-winning ...
For more than a year, a team at Earth Island Journal and Truthout investigated health hazards in prisons resulting from environmental issues. Some prisons are located on or near contaminated land, including landfills, hazardous waste sites and mines, leading to contaminated drinking water and unsafe air quality in some facilities. In some instances, prisons themselves are the source of pollution ...
As the opioid crisis has escalated in the U.S., more people are looking for information and help online – and some major players in the $35 billion drug rehabilitation industry have been gaming Google, Facebook and other major online platforms to target millions of people with unethical and predatory practices.Reporter Cat Ferguson began digging into the issue and found some ...
A team from the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, led by Daffodil Altan and Andres Cediel, joined PBS FRONTLINE for an investigative report on labor trafficking. The story, with seed funding from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, focuses on several teenagers from Guatemala who were brought to the United States and forced to work on an egg farm in Ohio.The investigative ...
Covering homelessness and other issues for KPCC — Southern California Public Radio, reporter Rina Palta began to notice that shelters in Los Angeles County often had empty beds, despite large numbers of homeless people who needed somewhere to sleep. She secured a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and dug for months to get the story.Palta reviewed public documents from ...
For years, people of color in Washington state have reported that they are pulled over by State Patrol officers more often than white drivers. Reporters Jason Buch and Joy Borkholder, of InvestigateWest, decided to look into whether people of color are also searched more often during those stops.With a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Borkholder and Buch filed ...
When President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act into law in 1862, its so-called “Land Grant” program was intended to give fledgling colleges and universities public property that they could use or sell. But much of the land was taken from Native American tribes without payment, sometimes with force.A team at High Country News, with a grant from the Fund for ...
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, state and local government responses varied significantly – and often were shielded from public scrutiny.A team at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation issued open-record requests to government agencies in all 50 states and set out to create an online repository of the material, available to journalists nationwide. With an emergency grant from the ...