Jones is one of hundreds of city educators whose violent and traumatic encounters with students have led them to seek — and often receive — compensation for mental and physical injuries, a Baltimore Sun investigation of workers’ compensation claims has found. Those claims provide a behind-the-scenes look at violence that is rarely documented in school…
Read MoreThe head of Virginia Beach’s second-largest department hasn’t been to work in nearly three years and keeps volunteering for military service instead of returning to his $150,000-a-year job. Since deploying in June 2011 – days after a city auditor’s report recommended that he be fired – Public Works Director Jason Cosby has become vested in…
Read MoreAs California prison officials began looking into the September death of a breathing-impaired inmate who had been pepper-sprayed by a guard, they found themselves facing unusual interference and oversight from above, according to documents from an internal corrections investigation obtained by The Sacramento Bee. A corrections psychologist whose duties included a review of the Sept.…
Read MoreElectronic monitoring was supposed to help Los Angeles County deal with the influx of thousands of felons moved out of California’s prison system to ease overcrowding. The nation’s largest probation department strapped GPS ankle monitors on the highest-risk of those convicts, expecting the satellite receivers to keep tabs on where they spent their days and…
Read MoreDo you have reporters or editors on your staff who would benefit from training to help them produce enterprise and investigative stories? Thanks to a grant from Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ) is working with Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE)and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) to offer a two-day Watchdog Reporting Workshop for…
Read MoreThe New York Police Department’s Freedom of Information Law Unit is refusing to release its FOIL guide. Yes, you read that right. Public records request service MuckRock asked for the document in late December. Last week a lieutenant in the department’s records unit denied the request, calling the guide “privileged as an attorney-client communication.” You…
Read MoreBoston Globe reporter Todd Wallack thought it would be a simple, short-term project to look into settlements made between the state of Massachusetts and some of its employees. After all, he’d done the same thing in California, uncovering an agreement between UC Davis and one of its administrators to avert a nasty lawsuit. But the…
Read MoreDuring the 26 years that James Preston spent incarcerated for murder, he always told his family that he didn’t commit the crime. Now, the FBI says their analyst’s testimony about key hair evidence in the case exceeded the boundaries of science, raising the possibility that Preston, who died in custody, was wrongfully convicted if not,…
Read MoreAccording to the Associated Press, “A newly-released email shows that 11 days after the killing of terror leader Osama bin Laden in 2011, the U.S. military’s top special operations officer ordered subordinates to destroy any photographs of the al-Qaida founder’s corpse or turn them over to the CIA.” When the AP initially asked for emails…
Read MoreExperts say it’s not unusual for impoverished places to have more crime and tougher cases to solve. But the Tribune found that those two factors alone don’t explain what has happened in Harvey, where the competence and integrity of the department frequently come under fire. It’s a suburb that commissioned an audit that ripped its…
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