The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
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The Education Department is charged with enforcing laws on how schools deal with sexual assault, but its Office of Civil Rights rarely investigates student allegations of botched proceedings. When cases do go forward, the civil rights office rarely rules against the schools, and virtually never issues any sanctions against institutions, according to an investigation by…
Read MoreOfficials at the University of Massachusetts Amherst acknowledge that they allowed a student who confessed to raping a friend on campus last fall, a felony, to remain enrolled and avoid significant discipline, according to a report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University. Newly obtained Justice Department data show that reports…
Read MoreBy Doug Haddix IRE Training Director Journalists can dig deeper and produce high-impact stories by developing a “document state of mind.” Get practical advice in this short video featuring Brant Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois. Houston is the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Houston spoke…
Read More“U.S. soldiers have been twice as likely to die from aviation accidents as they were from ground mishaps or incidents over the past two and a half decades, according to an Aerospace DAILY analysis of U.S. Army data.” An increased reliance on aviation has contributed to the increase in these deadly air accidents. There have…
Read MoreAn ongoing series in The New Mexico Independent explores allegations that state agencies interfered with fraud and elder abuse investigations. The Medicaid Fraud Division stated that Human Services Department and the Health Department had “withheld, ‘filtered’ and ‘sanitized’ information and documents requested by investigators, hindering numerous investigations.” Medicaid Fraud The series led to an attempt…
Read MoreThe Orange County Register’s Brian Joseph exposes how overlapping laws allow California state lawmakers to leverage their tax-free travel allowance to buy homes, secure tax deductions and sometimes pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. “This legal patchwork has created a benefit legislators in other states rarely see and blurred the lines between allowance…
Read MoreThrough interviews with families and advocates and a review of thousands of pages of public records, the San Antonio Express-News reports that some of the city’s most frail and vulnerable residents are suffering at the hands of their caregivers in Texas nursing homes. Yet state officials allow troubled nursing homes to continue operating with little…
Read MoreJoin Kristen Lombardi and David Donald of The Center for Public Integrity in a one-hour webinar that will help you understand how to investigate the ways colleges and universities handle allegations of sexual assault. This session is free but space is limited. To register please send an email to campus@ire.org. After 12 months of reporting,…
Read More“Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers,” according to a report by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley and California Watch. It is estimated that in 2009 such checkpoints generated $40 million…
Read MoreA package of stories by The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.) reveals that a Louisville Metro police detective has been accusing people of crimes they did not commit. Many of the accused have been juveniles. “Detective Crystal Marlowe has pursued charges against some defendants for crimes they could not have committed because they were already in jail.…
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