Virginia police deny access, even when investigation is over

"19-year-old Hailu Brook was shot and killed by Fairfax County police after he allegedly robbed a bank and crossed the county line. Officers fired 25 shots into his body, and the Arlington County Police Department conducted an official investigation into the actions of the Fairfax officers."

"The case is closed, but the Arlington police chief is refusing to release the document to the public or even the father of the slain teenager.”Transparency wouldn't kill anybody," the father told investigative reporter Michael Lee Pope, who reported the story as part of a partnership between WAMU 88.5 News and the State Integrity Investigation."

"Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department announced a first-of-its kind investigation into how rape cases are handled by the University of Montana and its campus police, along with the Missoula Police Department and the Missoula County Attorney's Office because of a series of investigations by the Missoulian."

"Since December, the paper has been reporting about UM's handling of alleged rapes involving students - including allegations of gang rapes by members of its football team. The Missoulian and the Wall Street Journal have since filed a joint FOIA request on the topic."

In a three-part series for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, Kate Golden and Amy Karon used the state’s open records law to receive Gov. Scott Walker’s official calendars.

"To analyze how Walker has used his time as the state’s chief executive, WCIJ reporters created a database of the more than 4,400 entries in Walker’s calendars from his first 13 months in office, through Jan. 31, 2012."

Elmira Star-Gazette reporter Jason Whong showed that despite having the benefit of the newspaper's archives and knowing where to look and which dates to research, New York's Freedom of Information and open records law couldn't help him -- or any parent -- find much evidence of an accused sexual predator's history of similar crimes and convictions going back 42 years.

"A WVUE-TV investigation reveals a timeline that a government watchdog says needs to be probed by the FBI.  Lee Zurik, the station's chief investigative reporter, requested and received emails that show a questionable relationship between a disgraced sheriff and a former FBI agent turned businessman.  WVUE-TV uploaded all source documents to DocumentCloud."

Beth Cooper of The Daily Helmsman reports that after following rumors of alleged sexual harassment at the University of Memphis' Physical Plant department, larger problems within the administration arose. Freedom of Information requests show that administrators could not determine the validity or falsehood of the allegations or how to correct the situation, due to a possible faulty procedural process.

Accounting by the Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today shows that a University of Wisconsin-Madison chairman has received more than $25 million in royalties from Medtronic, a medical device firm, since 2003.

"Additionally, UW Hospital spent $27 million for Medtronic spinal products from 2004 to 2010, according to documents obtained through an open records request. And the chairman, Zdeblick, a renowned spinal surgeon, has co-authored several positive research papers about the company's spine products."

"A flurry of freedom of information laws adopted over the past decade has given more than 5.3 billion people worldwide the right, on paper, to know what their governments are doing behind closed doors.

However, The Associated Press found in the first worldwide test of this promised freedom of information, that more than half the countries with right-to-know laws do not follow them."

A report by Jennifer Kay of the Associated Press shows a statewide audit of Florida's public records law found that the vast majority of agencies in the state were in compliance with with the law.  The audit was conducted as part of Sunshine Week.  201 agencies were initially contacted.  Of the 148 who responded, 86.5 percent complied with the requests. "That’s a major improvement from audits in past years that showed less than half the agencies complying, said Barbara Petersen, president of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation."

Police in Ohio and Indiana have launched new murder investigations after a Scripps Howard News Service investigation revealed dozens of clusters of unsolved killings of women nationwide that are likely the work of serial killers. Also, authorities in Nevada acknowledge they are hunting a serial killer, although the public has not been told that the unsolved murders of up to seven women are connected. Through analysis of over 525,000 murders in America, Thomas Hargrove created a database that crime experts say is the most complete accounting of homicide victims ever assembled in the United States. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Hargrove obtained details about 15,000 murders never reported to the FBI. Hargrove also created a Serial Killer Detector, a computer algorithm that flags potential serial killings. Using the Detector, readers and viewers can sort through a database of 185,000 unsolved murders to determine for themselves if serial killers are at work in their communities.