The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "criminal records" ...
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Trail of the Gun
After a wave of gun violence in Seattle, KING 5 examined some of the most basic techniques that police use to solve gun crimes. By analyzing documents received through public records requests the television station learned that most large police departments in Washington state are not conducting routine ballistics tests on the so-called “crime guns” they seize from suspects and crime scenes. This means that guns, that could hold clues to unsolved crimes, are sitting right under investigators’ noses in their own evidence rooms. The investigative series "Trail of the Gun" also unearthed the results of federal firearms “traces”, which police use to determine how a gun ended up in the hands of a criminal. These trace results revealed that a large number of Seattle’s crime guns came from an unexpected place. After the stories aired, several large police departments pledged to begin ballistics testing programs for their crime guns. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms offered to assist local police agencies to test every gun in their evidence rooms. And, the feds unveiled a warrant targeting one of the gun dealers identified in the series.
Tags: Guns; gun crimes; police
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Bales: Army suspect in Afghan shooting was liable in financial fraud
On the day that tips arose about a U.S. soldier who may have strafed two Afghan villages, I left the office for a flight to Tacoma. Within 48 hours of the soldier’s being identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, I and two colleagues broke the news that the emerging hagiography of Bales drafted by family and attorneys had more to it than the story of a soldier who enlisted at the ripe of 27 driven by outrage over the 2001 terrorist attacks—and then broken down by an unrelenting cycle of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Our story started with pure spidey senses: Bales’ s family and lawyer said he had left a stockbroker’s career to enlist, as they explained his call to serve. Yet he had not finished college and clearly had financial troubles, I had determined. And he was active in brokerage in the late 1990s in Florida I learned by checking assorted online records—which raised my suspicions about the quick-money penny stock trading that was commonplace then. Based on those instincts, while also doing the running daily story from Bales’ Army base in Washington state, I had checked some online brokerage records and enlisted Julie Tate to look at others and run through civil and criminal filings in Ohio (Bales’s home state and then nationally). Within an hour, I had found one suspicious record and Julie had found others and we were off on a 30-hour run of investigative reporting and boots on the ground interviews that yielded the breaking news of Bales’s more complicated—and less laudatory—past in the period just before he joined the Army. We located and I interviewed an elderly couple who had lost substantial savings in accounts managed by Bales and received copies of detailed financial records that corroborated their claims and showed Bales as the account manager. We also peeled back corporate records for a now-shuttered firm run by Bales and his brother with backing from a longtime friend and reached him to further flesh out the checkered professional history of the Staff Sgt. at the center of an explosive, fast-moving and intensely competitive story. The story demanded intense investigative reporting that netted notable results in far far less than 30 days of a breaking event.
Tags: U.S. soldier; Afghanistan; military draft; terrorist attacks; deployment
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Shades of Mercy: Presidential Pardons
Reporters obtained exclusive access to thousands of internal documents and conducted scores of interviews with pardon applicants, Justice Department, and top legal advisers to every president since Ronald Reagan. What the documents showed were repeated instances in which white applicants with serious criminal records received pardons, while minority applicants who committed lesser crimes were rejected.
Tags: presidential pardons; justice department; pardon; race; discrimination
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Digital Footprint & Sunshine Law
Our investigation led to a politician's resignation and criminal charges using social network search engines, traditional online databases and open records requests to identify his criminal past and as many as seven females who were pictured in nude photos, harassed, stalked or suffered cyber identity theft.
Tags: broadcast; criminal past; politician; resignation
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Criminalizing Cartoons
The investigation exposes a police chief's desperate attempt to acquire the name of an anonymous cartoonist, mocking his department on the Internet. A person going by the moniker MrFiddlesticks (and other names) was airing internal affairs dirty laundry in the form of parody. To find out who, the city prosecutor, police chief and a local judge teamed up to craft a criminal search warrant. KIRO-TV's investigative unit not only uncovered questionable legal tactics (like prosecutor shopping), but later caught police shredding hundreds of records related the case. First Amendment and FOIA issues are central to this ongoing investigation.
Tags: cartoonist; search warrant; shredding
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The Carmel Assault Case
The WTHR team investigates the alleged attack of a 14-year-old boy by three senior basketball players. The school dismissed it as a case of bullying, but a relentless push for Open Records revealed criminal activity.
Tags: bullying; open records; high school; school; bully
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Wrongful Arrest?
On a tip that a viewer's 74-year-old father was in jail for a string of Wal-Mart robberies he did not commit, KCTV investigated the challenge of righting a conviction wrong when found on the wrong side of the law.
Tags: wrongful arrest; wrongful conviction; criminal justice; crime statistics; criminal record; eyewitness testimony
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Sex offender, other felons ran camps for homeless kids
This investigation "found that Palm Beach County officials paid a convicted child molester, drug dealers, thieves and other people with criminal records nearly half a million dollars in public money to run summer camps for homeless, foster and impoverished children during the past three years."
Tags: child safety; sex offender; criminal records; child care; criminal background; camp; child welfare
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The Other Side of Mercy
"On Nov. 29, 2009, Maurice Clemmons shot and killed four Lakewood police officers in a Pierce County coffee shop, committing one of the worst crimes in the history of the Pacific Northwest. "The Other Side of Mercy" chronicles Clemmons' criminal history, exposing a variety of system breakdowns that set the stage for this shocking ambush."
Tags: Maurice Clemmons; police; murder; criminal history; criminal record; violence
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A Horrible Answer
Fire years into massive reforms, Washington, D.C.'s pledge to create a more compassionate juvenile justice system remains unfulfilled, and youth in the custody of the city are killing and dying at epidemic proportions. This series looked comprehensively at the statistics and the stories behind a year's worth of deadly violence among juveniles in the custody of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS), in most cases because they had a juvenile criminal record. Reporters found that during the year they studied, one in five homicides in the city involved a youth in the custody of the city as either a victim or a suspect.
Tags: Juvenile; Washington, D.C.; Crime; Violence; Youth; State; Homicide; Ward of City; Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services; DYRS