How ‘the public is priced out of public records’ by Michigan universities

By Anna Clark, CJR

In Michigan, transparency comes at a cost—and a seemingly arbitrary one at that.

The Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Central Michigan University recently conducted a FOIA audit of the state’s 15 public universities. It asked for a year’s worth of information on expenses from the university presidents and governing boards, and also police reports on campus sexual assaults. The goal: to compare how universities respond to requests for public information, and how much they charge.

No university denied the requests. But the price to fulfill all of them totaled more than $20,000. That ranged from Eastern Michigan University and two other schools that offered records for free, to the University of Michigan, where it would cost $2,774 just for presidential spending records. UM attributed that cost to its estimate that it would take 46.5 staff hours to search for records, and many more to review and duplicate documents.

In total, presidential expenses were the most costly records; it would take $10,750.93 to fulfill them all. Arielle Hines, president of CMU-SPJ and a senior journalism major, questioned the hours it would take to fulfill the requests. “What archaic system are you using?” she said. “You have to think they’d have some kind of auditing process for the president, and if not, that’s a bigger story.” (Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that Hines, the editor of CMU Insider, has pushed for more and better transparency at public universities.)

The universities also collectively charged $5,104.51 for sexual assault police reports and $4,759.54 for governing board expenses. Eight universities indicated that the requests would take more than a thousand hours to fulfill at up to $78 per hour. These are requests that Hines described, in a Bridge column, as “crafted specifically to make retrieval easy and to minimize ‘review.’” The audit, she wrote, demonstrated that “at too many public universities, members of the public are priced out of public records,” and “revealed a system largely hostile to any sort of reasonable openness.”

Student journalists on other campuses have conducted similar experiments that illustrate not only the costs of public information, but also the unpredictable rates. In 2011, The Michigan Daily, the campus paper at the University of Michigan (which I once wrote for), FOIA’d a year’s worth of information on parking tickets issued by campus police, and information about employee use of purchasing cards (PCards) from all the Big 10 universities. It found that most schools provided the information for free. Michigan State charged a total of $450. UM, on the other hand, charged $1240 for the ticket information, and “unspecified thousands of dollars” for PCard information.

Similarly, The Post at Ohio University led a statewide FOIA audit in January in which students from eight different campus papers requested, in person, identical information from 12 public universities. They did not identify themselves, and state law doesn’t require them to do so. Nearly half the requests were denied or obstructed.

David Jesse, higher education reporter at the Detroit Free Press, said that the CMU-SPJ experiment reflects his own experiences. His paper built a major investigation on charter schools (which often receive their charters from a public university) on FOIA requests, and its ongoing examination into campus sexual assaults relies on the same. The Freep also used FOIA to expose the Eastern Michigan University board’s reprimand of the then-president for a drinking incident.

“It’s often cost prohibitive for most organizations to pay for the material,” Jesse wrote in an email. “I happen to work for a media organization that has resources to pay, but even we get stretched when we get bills for thousands of dollars.”

That ultimately limits, or denies, public information to the reporters. Jesse said that he recently sent FOIA requests for emails and memos to one of the state’s large universities. He was warned of a big bill. Either the paper could pay it, or Jesse could truncate his request to cut the cost. He did the latter. “The problem is, what information am I missing because I limited the scope of what I was seeking in order to keep costs down?”

Sam Gringlas, a UM senior and former managing news editor at The Michigan Daily, said his paper ran into a similar wall when it FOIA’d information about the Department of Education’s Title IX investigation into UM’s handling of sexual misconduct cases. The Daily was told that it would cost thousands of dollars to fulfill their request. “That seemed like pretty much a huge fee that would eat into our budget significantly, so we went back through all the things on our list … and basically went shopping for documents. We can’t afford to get all we wanted.”

As it turned out, after paying one of two $445 fees for their pared down list, UM delayed the documents, and then ultimately rejected the FOIA request. (It refunded the money.) The paper’s appeal to the president’s office was also denied. The Daily ultimately ran a special report on sexual misconduct investigations at the university that relied on a narrative of a particular case, rather than on public documents.

In the wake of the Flint water crisis, there has been a renewed push for open records reform in Michigan, a state with a notoriously poor reputation for transparency. The CMU-SPJ report raises a new point of needed change. Not only is the plain cost of information eyebrow-raising, but so are the scattershot rates and response times—even for identical information requests.

“Most of the decisions made by Michigan’s universities are made behind closed doors,” Jesse said. “FOIA allows the public to see the information the decision makers are seeing.”

To make that happen, Jesse said, we need more than a legal change. “It will take a university willing to be a leader and adapt the spirit of the law, and not just the letter of the law.”

Gringlas echoed this idea. “In my ideal world, journalists would not have to pay money for FOIA costs; it would just be the university doing its duty as a public institution.”

By David Uberti, CJR

In early 2015, an anonymous source began forwarding German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung encrypted files from a Panamanian law firm specializing in offshore companies. The trove of documents kept growing, and eventually numbered in the millions. Seeking help to break down all the data, the Munich-based daily contacted a small investigative outfit in Washington that specializes in global analyses. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists quickly organized nearly 400 journalists across 80 countries to jump on the story. 

The fruits of ICIJ’s labor since then became clear on Sunday, when it orchestrated the mass publication of a global leak investigation through more than 100 partners. The “Panama Papers” collectively reveal how that Panamanian firm aided global elites in sheltering wealth through offshore tax havens. Stories kept pouring out on Monday as governments began to respond. Spanish prosecutors have reportedly launched a money laundering probe, the Icelandic prime minister is fending off calls for his resignation, and China appears to be censoring coverage of those implicated. 

The project is a testament to ICIJ’s partnership model, which aims to maximize impact through inclusive global collaboration. Media partners around the world localized the Panama Papers for their respective audiences, while near-simultaneous publication of that work created a critical mass of coverage needed to drive discussion worldwide. Such joint efforts are also more resilient to government or corporate pushback in any particular country.

Global networks of any kind—and financial networks in particular—are inherently difficult for individual news organizations to cover. ICIJ responds with a global network of its own, a much-needed answer for stories that transcend borders and languages. Cash is universal, so it’s fitting that ICIJ attempted to match that ubiquity in order to broaden and deepen the Panama Papers’ impact.

How to maximize impact is the ultimate question for nonprofit investigative outfits. They take the time to dig deep into difficult stories, but a slower publishing schedule typically prevents them from building a large audience on their own. Partners oftentimes want exclusive work, meanwhile, limiting the net benefits of distributing the journalism elsewhere.

Nonprofit newsrooms have devised various models in recent years to address such questions, but few have managed to connect as consistently as ICIJ. A project of The Center for Public Integrity, the organization has become a go-to facilitator for such massive international leaks. Just last year, it organized the team that exposed how Swiss bank HSBC held money for arms dealers, tax dodgers, and other international criminals. 

The organization claims the Panama Papers “is likely the biggest leak of inside information in history”—11.5 million files mentioning 214,000 companies in more than 200 countries. (Edward Snowden chimed in to agree.) ICIJ acted as a sort of central communications hub as it proceeded to share the information with outside partners, as Wired reports:  

ICIJ’s developers then built a two-factor-authentication-protected search engine for the leaked documents, the URL for which they shared via encrypted email with scores of news outlets including the BBC, The Guardian, Fusion, and dozens of foreign-language media outlets. The site even featured a real-time chat system, so that reporters could exchange tips and find translation for documents in languages they couldn’t read. “If you wanted to look into the Brazilian documents, you could find a Brazilian reporter,” says [ICIJ Director Gerard] Ryle. “You could see who was awake and working and communicate openly. We encouraged everyone to tell everyone what they were doing.” The different media outlets eventually held their own in-person meetings, too, in Washington, Munich, London, Johannesburg and Lillehammer, Ryle says.

ICIJ journalists have produced big-picture text and multimedia pieces from the information. National and international media have further upped the pressure, spotlighting offshore connections from powerbrokers in Russia, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Pakistan,Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere.

This model of promiscuous collaboration and concurrent publication isn’t unique in the nonprofit world. California Watch, a project launched by The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2009, periodically blanketed the state with investigations in newspapers, radio stations, TV channels, and digital outlets. More recently, CIR received funding to essentially turn that model on its head, creating a self-contained platform for both its own reporting and partners’ work. Many other nonprofits, such as ProPublica, typically share work exclusively with partners. 

In an interview with CJR last year, former CPI head Bill Buzenberg highlighted both the promise and difficulty of bringing an ICIJ-type model to the United States:

So many stories aren’t just state stories or local stories. They’re national and international stories. And if you can create a coalition, or a consortium, to tackle it using the same data, you can have a much bigger impact and do a better job. Is it doable? Yes, I believe it’s doable. Is it a lot of work? Yes, it is, and it means giving up some central control in a way, too. I don’t know that American journalists want to work that way.

Only a handful of American-based organizations partnered with ICIJ on the Panama Papers, including McClatchy, Univision, and The Miami Herald. National outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post—not part of ICIJ’s network—have begun publishing follow-ups.

Despite the lack of initial involvement with American media, the ICIJ-organized wave of stories made it stateside thanks to their collective digital reach. The organization’s model fills a pressing need on the international stage. With the Panama Papers, it should also be commended for the logistical feat of keeping more than 100 newsrooms organized—one is overwhelming enough.

By Bernice Yeung

There are many lessons about journalism to be learned from “Spotlight,” the film that chronicles The Boston Globe’s investigation into the Boston Archdiocese’s systemic cover-up of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

As the story behind the story, “Spotlight” highlights themes that are especially instructive to investigative reporters: That there’s the unspoken complicity among institutions —including, at times, the news media — to look the other way when vulnerable people are being harmed. That there’s a need for bold editors to back big-picture and long-termprojects. And that there are inevitable internal conflicts that reporters experience in the process of doing their job.

In laying out the general contours of an impressive investigation, “Spotlight” also drives home an obvious but overlooked point: We cannot do our work without human sources.

This was, after all, a story for which no data was available, where cases were hidden by private and confidential legal settlements, and where key documents were either undercourt seal or had been — as shocking as it is to believe — removed from public access by the Catholic Church.

How do you excavate a story that is so deeply buried? The Boston Globe reporters turned to human sources: lawyers, victims, law enforcement, researchers and churchinsiders. They did the hard and sensitive work of developing trust with sources, knocking on doors, pushing hesitant sources to confirm information and confronting the accused.Crucial turning points in the reporting came when people offered testimony of abuse, a revelation about the scope of the problem or a tip about where to find documents. Then bitby bit, the reporting team pieced things together. The picture that emerged was a damning one of intentional obfuscation of widespread sexual abuse.

The reporting team did not rely on interviews alone. They methodically pored over years of Catholic Church directories to pinpoint potentially errant priests. The newspaperfought to have court documents unsealed, which ultimately proved that the Boston Diocese had known about a priest’s transgressions for decades and had failed to act. Butwithout the cooperation and the courage of human sources, the size and severity of the problem would have gone undetected and unproven. 

This is an especially important moment to remind ourselves that an investigative story cannot succeed without excellent sourcing. As investigative reporters seeking to providethe public with evidence of wrongdoing, the recent emphasis on data and documents is undisputedly necessary. In the era of big data, we’re able to dig deeper into darkercorners than ever before.

But in the absence of human insight, we would continue to fumble around in the dark for answers. Regardless of new technologies or increased computing power, we will alwaysneed human sources to provide critical information, to tell us where to look, to offer context and to extract us from confusion. Sources are our sherpas through complicatedmaterial, wonky science or a seemingly incomprehensible set of facts.

And as journalists, we write and produce stories, not white papers. Our work does not have impact and relevance if we fail to connect the facts to the power of lived experience.Journalism requires human testimony to illustrate why, beyond the abstract, the public should care and why the problems we have identified demand reform.

Investigative reporters also have a special responsibility and opportunity to seek out sources that others have ignored. As Martin Baron, the then-editor of the Boston Globe whooversaw the 2002 Boston Archdiocese investigation, told The New Yorker: “I hope that ‘Spotlight’ will cause us all to listen to people who are essentially voiceless, and listen tothem closely." 

As crucial as sources are, we don’t talk nearly enough about their role in contemporary investigative journalism. And this means we often don’t think deeply enough about ourrelationships with — and impact on — the people who lend us their stories and who lead us to our most critical findings.

I remember taking an anthropology course in graduate school, where I learned that it is standard practice for a researcher to think through their “positionality” to the researchsubject. I had never heard the term before, but as a reporter, I understood intuitively what it meant: There’s an inherent power dynamic between journalists and their sources.

We know instinctively that this dynamic exists. We play on it every time we seek strategies to encourage someone — whether they’re an elected official, a whistleblower or asexual abuse victim — to share information that they’d prefer not to disclose. Making demands on people for information is part of our job. But it doesn’t mean we have to do itthoughtlessly. This is especially true with sources who are not public figures, and who never set out to be martyrs or heroes.

There are many ways to work with sources, and each scenario requires its own approach. But in my time covering topics such as domestic violence, human trafficking andsexual assault, I’m guided by three practices when asking sources to discuss sensitive and potentially traumatic topics:

Apply the Golden Rule. I start by asking myself, “How would I want to be treated by another reporter who is asking me to speak publicly about the most difficult thing that’s everhappened to me?” I use that mindset to guide my interactions with sources.

To reach a source about a painful topic, I try to put myself in his or her place. It’s unlikely that I would agree to do an interview on a sensitive subject with someone who cold-called me or who I’d never met before. So I try to contact an intermediary that they trust — a lawyer, social worker or family member — to ask for help arranging an in-personintroductory meeting with the source. Some sources are ready to tell their stories right away, but for those who are more hesitant, these meetings are a chance to explain whatthe reporting is about and an opportunity for the source to get to know me. I’ve found that showing up and meeting people in their own spaces can be persuasive in and of itself.Sometimes the source even agrees to begin the interview process at what was supposed to be the introductory meeting.

By putting myself on the other side of the table, I’ve also learned that there are a few things I can do to make sure the source is making an informed choice about telling theirstory publicly. Unsurprisingly, most of it has to do with direct and clear communication. If the source is hesitant, it’s helpful to recognize their concerns — and then talk throughcreative solutions that responds to their worries and allows you to get what you need for the story. Sometimes the detail that holds a source back from participating is not ajournalistic deal breaker, but you won’t know it unless you have the discussion. A source-journalist relationship is ultimately a two-way street, and in exchange for the source’scandor, you can offer clarity and transparency about your journalistic objective and the reporting question you are trying to answer. One way to do that is by putting your work incontext by explaining why you are asking for painful or personal information.

Be patient. Dealing with vulnerable sources takes time so don’t be surprised by it. Instead, plan for it. Set the right expectations with yourself and your bosses from the outset bycreating realistic timetables and deadlines. When checking in with a non-responsive source, be courteous and persistent — what I call the “polite full-court press” — but notoverly aggressive. I’ve rarely found sources who have been victimized to respond favorably to tactics that are too pushy or desperate.

And don’t give up on your sources. While we do need to guard against excuses, keep in mind that you are not the number-one priority in a source’s life, which might involvemultiple jobs, family illnesses or other challenges. Find ways to make it easy for them to interact with you by showing up where they already are. Remind them of the publicinterest reasons that they should work with you on the story. But at the same time, don’t make promises that you can’t keep.

Think about the future. It’s a lot to ask someone to recount a harrowing and traumatic experience, and we shouldn’t forget that in the push to meet a deadline. Be sensitive to thefact that after you’ve packed up your recording equipment or published your story, it’s the source who will feel the ripple effects most profoundly. But there are some ways tominimize negative effects: When interviewing someone about a traumatic event, rely on documentation whenever possible to avoid asking upsetting questions that areunnecessary.

Wind up and down from the traumatic event through the arc of your questions. Ask the source if they would like to have a confidant in the room during the interview who can staywith the source after you’ve left. Most importantly, after the story runs, stick with your source if and when there’s blowback. We may not be able to resolve a source’s post-publication problems, but we can still check in occasionally and listen to what they are going through.

The importance of approaching sources thoughtfully was driven home to me most recently by a woman named Maricruz Ladino, a former farmworker who used to wake upbefore dawn to pick lettuce in the agricultural town of Salinas, California.

I met her in 2013 because I was on a reporting team where The Center for Investigative Reporting collaborated with UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program and KQED-FM and investigated the sexual assault of agricultural workers — a phenomenon that has been described as an “open secret” in the fields.

Ladino said she had been raped on the job by her supervisor, and she had taken the rare step of making her case public by filing a lawsuit. It would take months before shewould agree to talk to us — partially because it was a hard decision and partially because unbeknownst to us, she had changed her cellphone number and she hadn’t received anumber of our voicemails. But she eventually became the face of the documentary produced by my reporting colleagues and a crucial voice for the entire project.

Soon after publication and air date, she told us that terrible things were happening to her. People were calling her and leaving hateful messages — some were calling her an“unfit woman.” And Ladino’s fiancé was caught off guard by how public her story had become and broke up with her. He would come around a few months later and propose toher again. (She said yes.)

Throughout all of this, she said that she never regretted telling her story.

A few months after the story broke, I asked her why. We were in her second-floor apartment, decorated with family photos and religious trinkets. She started to explain how hardthe process had been for her, and to make her point, she went into her bedroom and came back with a journal. In it, she had written letters to her deceased father — her way ofdealing with the painful process of talking about the sexual assault. But she explained that she had eventually agreed to tell her story because she wanted other women to knowthat they were not the only ones. And while it was difficult, talking about the rape had also been cathartic for her. “Now it’s part of the medicine I take,” she told me. “It’s like I havea cancer, and I remove a little bit … (with) this medicine.”

There are a million potential ethical pitfalls when journalists deal with human sources. As journalists, we can’t make any promises. We can never fully know in advance how ourwork will affect people — in potentially righteous or unjust ways. In the end, the only thing we can offer a source is an honest explanation of our journalistic objectives and anopportunity for them to give us their truly informed consent.

Because Ladino made her decision to participate with intention, she was capable of weathering the blowback. And while she was driven to tell her story in part to help herself,she also came with an altruistic purpose.

To me, Ladino is the model for what a source can be. She knowingly accepted the potential consequences of talking to reporters, and she shared our belief that telling the storycould serve the public interest.

 

Bernice Yeung is a reporter for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. She was part of the Rape in theFields reporting team, a project that won a 2014 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Most recently,she was on the reporting team that produced Rape on the Night Shift, which resulted in text, radio and TV documentaries.

By Brian Collister

“You were right, and we were wrong.”

It was a stunning reversal by Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who couldn’t deny what KXAN spent months documenting: His troopers wereinaccurately reporting the race of minority motorists, mostly Hispanic, as “white” and skewing crucial racial profiling data.

For months, the state’s top cop had used statistics collected by his agency to defend against allegations of racial profiling following the controversial arrest of Sandra Bland, ablack driver who was found hanged in her cell in a Texas jail. In the wake of that case, several news organizations and academics analyzed the agency’s racial statistics whichshowed a dramatic rise in the number of stops involving Hispanic drivers.

During this same time, another reporter in our investigative unit mentioned seeing some Hispanics listed as white on court affidavits. I had seen this before back in 2004 whilereporting in San Antonio where I uncovered San Antonio police doing the same. So we decided to find out how the DPS was collecting its racial profiling data. What weuncovered revealed that the number of Hispanic drivers being stopped was actually being underreported.

16 million records reviewed

A Texas law aimed at preventing racial profiling requires officers to determine and document the race of every driver they arrest or give a warning or citation to. The state’s racialprofiling statute requires they report “the person’s race or ethnicity, as stated by the person or, if the person does not state the person’s race or ethnicity, as determined by theofficer to the best of the officer’s ability.” The law requires race and ethnicity be treated the same, and officers must differentiate between white and Hispanic.

Our analysis of statewide traffic stop data from the past five years uncovered troopers inaccurately recording the race of minority drivers as white. We reviewed more than 16million records — data obtained under the Texas Public Information Act.

First, we filtered out the records of more than eight million drivers reported as white. After sorting the data by last name it didn’t take long before we saw large numbers ofHispanic names. Next we ran a count query and found the most common surnames for drivers documented as white, after Smith, are Garcia, Martinez, Hernandez, Gonzalezand Rodriguez. Although not everyone with a Hispanic last name is of Hispanic descent, our analysis shows approximately 1.6 million drivers with Hispanic last names wererecorded as white — including thousands with home addresses in Mexico.

Through several more public information requests, we obtained copies of about 150 citations issued by troopers to make sure there were not data entry errors. Another series ofrequests yielded about 50 dashcam videos that allowed viewers to see what the troopers saw, how the drivers looked and the fact that many drivers only spoke Spanish. Bothproved that the race entry of white was incorrect.

We searched online court records and jail records for mug shots of those in the sample with criminal histories. We made contact with many of them through social media andwent knocking on doors to make contact with those we were otherwise unable to reach.

Sergio Raul Mejia received a traffic citation in Georgetown. The trooper wrote down his race as white on the ticket.

“That’s bad,” Mejia said in broken English. “I’m Hispanic. He was not supposed to put white people.”

Richard Kai-Tzung Chang is from Taiwan. But when a trooper stopped him in Austin, he reported Chang as white.

“It’s almost incomprehensible that I could be mistaken for a white male because I don’t look anything like a white male,” Chang said, speaking with a Taiwanese accent.

Racial profiling reports unreliable

Experts in racial profiling told us that what KXAN found shows DPS data is flawed, if not possibly manipulated.

“I think there could be accidents every now and then, but the sheer number of the reports that you found, where it looks like the people who are not white are being classified aswhite, means there is something else going on here,” said Professor Ranjana Natarajan, director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. “What itshows is there either seems to be a complete lack of training on the part of DPS officers…or there is deliberate, sort of trying to not follow the policy.”

We also showed our findings to lawmakers, including state Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso.

“We’ve got to stop playing these kinds of games,” Rodríguez said. “I mean, people want to know why Hispanics are being singled out. That’s a simple question, and you can’t goaround saying, ‘Well, they’re white.’”

Rodríguez had already asked the DPS director to explain the reason behind the rise in traffic stops of Hispanic drivers shown in his agency’s data. McCraw replied in a letter tothe legislator, claiming the increase is partly because troopers are doing a better job of documenting race after a change to the racial profiling law in 2009 requiring officers toreport if they knew the race of the driver prior to a stop.

McCraw wrote: “In implementing this new requirement, troopers received additional training on the collection of racial profiling data, which emphasized the importance ofaccurately reporting the race and ethnicity.”

KXAN requested DPS records showing that additional training. The agency provided a slide from a presentation used to teach troopers to choose from the categories named inthe law, including Hispanic, and determine what “most closely represents race.”

Hitting roadblocks

We anticipated trying to get answers and interviews from the DPS would be difficult. After all, there is a good reason why the agency was a finalist last year for IRE’s GoldenPadlock Award, which recognizes the most secretive publicly-funded agency. KXAN requested an interview with McCraw, but the DPS declined. We contacted every member ofthe Texas Public Safety Commission, which oversees the DPS. They each declined our requests, as well.

So we caught up with McCraw at a commission meeting. As several troopers and public relations staff hovered over us, we finally got our chance to show the director what wehad uncovered.

“With so many minorities being put down as white, how can you say that the data is still accurate?” I asked McCraw.

“Your point could be valid,” McCraw told me, blaming the inaccurate reporting on a problem with the in-car computer system used by troopers. But when I pressed him, McCrawconfirmed troopers are aware of the system’s limitations and trained to determine and report the race of each driver, as required by the law.

“I don’t doubt that there may be mistakes made on occasion, but I don’t know the details of that, until I see the data and I sit down with my experts,” he added. “And I’d like to seehow wrong we are.”

Reaction and results

Within days, state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, called a hearing of the Texas House Committee on County Affairs. McCraw was called to testify and said his agency isscrambling to correct the problem KXAN uncovered.

“What we can do better — and we should have been doing better — is collect the data accurately, as it relates to Hispanics,” McCraw said. “Plain and simple, [we’re] guilty. Thatshould have been done better, and we’ve got an obligation to fix that.”

State Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Fort Worth, the lone Hispanic member of the committee, said he planned to request an independent audit of DPS’ collection of racial data.

“I was disappointed by (McCraw’s) lack of urgency,” Romero said. “The fact that he continued to defend the numbers.”

The DPS director told lawmakers he had ordered troopers to start asking drivers to identify their race. We followed up with a story in which the state’s leading expert in racialprofiling criticized the move, saying it lead to costly lawsuits and put officers in a difficult position.

A month later the director did an about-face and rescinded the order. He issued a new directive instructing troopers to record what they believe is the race of the driver and giveeach motorist the chance to confirm or object to the race category selected when they sign the citation. DPS is also instituting new audit procedures to regularly test the accuracyof the data and agreed to hire third-party experts to audit the agency’s data collection in order to recommend further improvements.

Some viewers expressed concerns over the difference between race and ethnicity. So in subsequent reports, we emphasized the law requires race and ethnicity must be treatedthe same to gather the data, and troopers must select from the categories listed in the statute — “Caucasian, African, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, or Middle Easterndescent.”

“People might disagree about racial categories, whether they apply, whether they are real and whether Hispanics should be included as white or not,” said Natarajan. “Peoplecan argue about that all day long, but when the state chooses a method then the state officers must follow that method.”

Investigating in your city or state

Texas is one of 30 states with racial profiling laws and reporting requirements. Find out when the law in your own state took effect, and use that as a starting point for the timeframe of the data you collect.

Even if your state has no law, you can still see if your state or city’s traffic stop data could yield a story on whether police are stopping a disproportionate number of minorities orinaccurately recording drivers’ races.

KXAN also uncovered the same problem in the Austin Police Department, which has ordered an independent audit of its collection of racial profiling data.

Before you request traffic stop or citation data from police, get an understanding of the fields of data they maintain, how they maintain them and how they can provide them toyou. In some cities, the data comes from municipal courts. If your state’s open records laws do not apply to courts, as is the case with Texas, then they can provide information attheir discretion.

Make sure to request the actual citations, and never assume what the data shows is what the officer actually wrote on the ticket.

And check the retention schedule for all the records you need. How long do police agencies have to keep dashcam video footage on file? In Texas, only 90 days after a case isclosed.

Lastly, get an expert in racial profiling to review and interpret your data, regardless of what you think it shows.

 

Joe Ellis and Josh Hinkle contributed to this article. 

Brian Collister is an IRE Award and Emmy award-winning investigative reporter with KXAN, specializing in uncovering fraud, corruption, and government waste. Brian’s reportinghas resulted in the criminal convictions of public officials, passage of new laws and the return of embezzled public funds to taxpayers. He is also a licensed private investigatorand a board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

IRE-Chicago: Please join us at the Billy Goat Tavern on Wednesday, April 13, as we socialize and hear Darryl Holliday, Yana Kunichoff and Sam Steckler of City Bureau talk about their recent cover story for The Chicago Reader! The piece, which gained recognition from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, revealed that Chicago’s police union has long served as the propaganda arm of the Chicago Police Department, often misleading the public in the wake of police-involved shootings. Please RSVP on the Meetup page and, if you haven’t done so already, join the group.

IRE-Los Angeles: If you're a journalist in Los Angeles, we hope you’ll join us for a Meetup on Thursday, April 21. Grab a drink and swap ideas about storytelling apps like Snapchat or tell us about the apps that make your lives and work easier and more productive. This is a joint event put together by the Online News Association (ONA) and our friends from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). We hope to see you at Finn McCool's! Please RSVP on the Meetup page and, if you haven’t done so already, join the group.

IRE has member-organized Meetup groups in eight cities. Learn more about them on our IRE Meetups page.

IRE is proud to announce the winners and finalists of the 2015 IRE Awards contest. 

Journalists who helped free enslaved laborers, improved the safety net for injured workers and brought about reforms for failing schools serving mostly black youth, are being honored as winners of the 2015 Investigative Reporters & Editors awards.

This year’s winners come from a mix of new and established media, with many of the winning entries involving collaborations between teams of reporters from a wide range of news organizations.

“This year's entries show that fearless investigative reporting continues to thrive in an era of industry change,” said Ziva Branstetter, chair of IRE's Contest Committee. "The judges were impressed by examples of strong investigative work being done in all mediums and markets. These award-winning projects prove that news organizations understand investing in investigative journalism is more important than ever."

This year’s winners were selected from among more than 550 entries. Two organizations, ProPublica and NPR, teamed up for two award-winning projects. And three projects were singled out for IRE Medals, the highest honor the organization bestows.

The awards, given by Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc. since 1979, recognize the most outstanding watchdog journalism of the year. The contest covers 17 categories across media platforms and a range of market sizes.

Click here for a complete list of winners and finalists.

By Steve Weinberg

With so many superb investigative/ explanatory books published by U.S. journalists during 2015, singling out just a few to this year’s IRE investigative book list feels daunting. That is true every year, but for reasons I cannot decipher precisely, the year 2015 felt more that way. Certainly, the impressive quality and quantity of investigative/explanatory books signify a positive trend for our craft.

As a result, this year I have decided to mention a few that stayed with me the most vividly weeks or months after I reached the fi page. I realize that this approach is especially subjective, because it reveals as much about my particular subject matter preferences. And, as you must have already realized, I could not read every book on the book list. So if the book you published during 2015 is not mentioned among the few in this brief essay, I hope you will understand.

The book from this compilation that stuck with me most vividly throughout the year is “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America,” written by Jill Leovy of the Los Angeles Times, published by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House. Parts of the book focus on a “routine” murder in Los Angeles, the death of an 18-year-old black man shot while walking on a street, apparently because the style of hat he wore suggested a gang affiliation.

The exploration of that homicide relates how a squad of detectives is trying to reckon with the pandemic, which, in their division, involves so many black men killing so many other black men. The vast majority of those murders never result in anyone going to prison, and the cases go cold.

To some readers, the situation might seem superficial like an ugly cliché, but Leovy avoids that trap, in large part because of her empathy grounded in being embedded with detectives during their workdays. The detective who becomes Leovy’s primary character for narrative purposes grew up as the son of a homicide detective and is extremely demanding of himself, as well as his colleagues.

Leovy’s insights are frequently stunning. For example: “The state’s inability to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers in black enclaves such as Watts was itself a root cause of violence … The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.”

In a bizarre way, the anarchy of violence stops being anarchy and looks something like a systematic approach to existence, with the establishment criminal justice system beside the point. Leovy shows that when a dedicated, persistent detective cares deeply about solving a murder most folks barely seem to notice, justice can prevail.

Leovy told Walter Heymann, who featured her in the magazine Kirkus Reviews, “I never think of myself as a nonfiction writer. I don’t even think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as a homicide person. That’s my thing. I’ve just been into homicide.”

Other books from the list that have stayed with me month after month include some that are predictably, and importantly, topical, including:

• ”Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone” by Scott Shane, Tim Duggan Books.
• “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS” by Joby Warrick, Doubleday.
• ”Where Everybody Looks  Like  Me: At the Crossroads of America’s Black Colleges and Culture” by Ron Stodghill, Amistad.
• “Michelle Obama: A Life” by Peter B. Slevin, Knopf.
• ”Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big Money Culture of College Football” by Gilbert M. Gaul, Viking.
• ”Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America” by Bruce Barcott, Time Home Entertainment.
• ”The Story: A Reporter’s Journey” by Judith Miller, Simon & Schuster.
• ”Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence and Cover-Up in the Wake of Katrina” by Ronnie Greene, Beacon.

Tracking investigative/explanatory books becomes more difficult every year due to the rise of self-publishing and boutique trade publishers. If you know of a book (including your own) that should have a place on this list, please contact me: weinbergs@missouri.edu. Although I dislike circumscribing the list, please realize that it is limited for practicality to books with a 2015 publication year, published as a hard copy version.

 

Steve Weinberg served as IRE executive director from 1983-1990. Now he writes books, magazine articles and newspaper features as a full-time freelancer.

Investigative Reporters and Editors is now welcoming nominations for its fourth annual Golden Padlock award recognizing the most secretive government agency in the United States.

"Thwarting the public's right to know has become a mission statement inside many government bureaucracies across the country," said Robert Cribb, chair of the Golden Padlock committee. "This award recognizes tireless commitment to that principle and honors the most creative ways in which it is executed every day by determined civil servants."

Nominations should be emailed to goldenpadlock@ire.org including the name of the government department or individual along with reasons and/or media coverage and documents detailing the intransigence. Entries must be submitted to IRE by April 30.

The Massachusetts State Police won the 2015 Golden Padlock for habitually going to extraordinary lengths to thwart public records requests, protect law enforcement officers and public officials who violate the law, and block efforts to scrutinize how the department performs its duties.

Previous winners also include:

• The U.S. Navy FOIA office for its commitment to keep documents and images from a navy yard massacre from public view and the governors of Oklahoma and Missouri for their dedication to secrecy around execution records.
• The U.S. Border Patrol won the inaugural Golden Padlock award in 2013 for refusing to make public the details of use-of-force incidents involving its agents.

If you're a journalist in the Seattle Area, we hope you’ll join us for a Meetup on Thursday, April 14. We’ll be gathering at The 5 Point Cafe starting at 6 pm. Everyone is welcome. Bring some colleagues from your newsroom to introduce them to the power of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

As always, this event is open to members and non-members. Please RSVP on the Meetup page and, if you haven’t done so already, join the group.

IRE has member-organized Meetup groups in six cities. Learn more about them on our IRE Meetups page.

By Jonathan Peters, CJR.org

Sunshine Week brought some welcome news for transparency advocates this year: Two state courts ruled, in suits brought by news organizations, that freedom-of-information laws require private entities to disclose their records if they perform a public function.

The rulings, which arrived last week during the annual effort to promote awareness of open government, took up one of the key recurring disputes in public-records law, and both resolved it in favor of greater access. Together, the cases provide even more evidence of judges breathing new life into the right to know.

In the first case, which CJR covered in July, the Chicago Tribune secured an order compelling the private foundation for the College of DuPage, a public school in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, to release a federal subpoena that it had tried to keep private. DuPage County Judge Robert Gibson’s ruling is believed to be the first of its kind in Illinois requiring the disclosure of records of a public college’s private foundation, according to the Tribune.

The paper began investigating the College of DuPage in January 2015, and its series, as of this writing, includes more than 100 stories on everything from prosecutors’ interest in the foundation to non-competitive contracts awarded to its board members. The lawsuit started after the Tribune requested, under the state public-records law, foundation and college documents related to their spending. The college initially said it didn’t have responsive records but later released some. The foundation refused to release anything, saying it was not a public agency.

The lawsuit ultimately focused on the Tribune’s request for a federal grand jury subpoena sent to the foundation. The paper argued that the college was using its foundation, housed on campus and staffed by college employees, “as an artifice to circumvent” the law. According to the complaint, “The foundation is mostly or entirely under the control of [the college, which] has been using the … foundation as an excuse or a subterfuge to shield its … records … from public view.”

The judge agreed. Although he held that the foundation was not a public body or a subsidiary of one, Gibson went on to find that it was contracted with a public body—the College of DuPage—to perform public functions, such as fundraising, and so records in its possession could be subject to disclosure.

“It is undisputed,” the judge ruled, “that the foundation is not merely soliciting donations from individual citizens and private corporations for the college educational programs, but the foundation also holds all private donations to the college, even those the foundation did not solicit. The [college] has no separate endowment, so all donations are routed through the foundation.”Supported by those findings, Gibson held that the federal grand jury subpoena was a public record and should be disclosed. The foundation, for its part, is considering an appeal. Its attorney also asked the judge to seal the decision—only to be denied.

“Certainly, the court’s not going to announce a decision in open court and then say the order is private,” Gibson said. “It will be a matter of court record and open to the public to review.”

In the second case, which CJR covered in February, ESPN and Outside the Lines reporter Paula Lavigne persuaded an Indiana appeals court to rule that the University of Notre Dame’s police department is a public agency and thus subject to the state public-records law. The case stems from Lavigne’s investigation of college athletes and the justice system, beginning in 2014. She wanted to know whether athletes receive favorable treatment during criminal inquiries, so she requested incident reports involving athletes from campus police departments at 10 universities—including Notre Dame, which refused to release anything.

In January 2015, Lavigne and ESPN sued Notre Dame in state court to compel the private school to release the documents, arguing that the department is a public agency because it exercises police powers granted by the state. They lost at the trial court. There, the judge held that lawmakers could—and perhaps should—declare that campus police at private universities are subject to public-records laws, but he ruled that the statute’s plain language did not support that conclusion. 

The appeals court, however, disagreed and found that it was “clear” that the private police department exercised “a public function,” because “police power is a sovereign power.” The court reasoned that the state had delegated to Notre Dame’s officers generally “[t]he same common law and statutory powers, privileges, and immunities as sheriffs and constables.”

With that in mind, the court remarked, “It would not be appropriate for the Police Department, having availed itself of its statutory right to exercise these public functions, to then be able to circumvent public records requirements to which all other entities exercising these same functions are required to adhere.”

The court remanded the case to the trial court for it to determine exactly which records must be released under the state records law; meanwhile, Notre Dame is preparing an appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court.

The Notre Dame case is one of several in recent years in which state courts have taken up the question of whether private-college police records are public. It’s notable that the Indiana appeals court cited a ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court, which also ruled for disclosure in a similar case last year. That suggests that at least some state courts may be coalescing around a common framework for this issue.

For the moment, though, the case’s impact is an open question—and not just because of the appeal. As the South Bend Tribune has reported (and editorialized), while the case was being argued in court, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill setting specific public-records rules for private university police forces. That bill would make clear that information about incidents resulting in arrest or incarceration is public, but it would exempt private-college police from many of the disclosures required of other law-enforcement agencies. That would limit the effects of last week’s ruling.

But that’s not the last word in this matter, either. Gov. Mike Pence, who has until Thursday to decide whether to veto the bill, has expressed concern about it, saying that he has a “strong bias for the public’s right to know.” The bill’s lead sponsor, meanwhile, has said that even if the measure becomes law, a ruling for ESPN by the state Supreme Court would be reason to “re-examine” the issue to require more disclosure. Let’s hope that, come next year’s Sunshine Week, transparency advocates will still have reason to celebrate.

Update, 3/27: Pence vetoed the bill. “Limiting access to police records in a situation where private university police departments perform a government function is a disservice to the public and an unnecessary barrier to transparency,” he said in a statement, according to the Indianopolis Star.