Canadians have every reason to believe that the water that runs from their taps is beyond reproach: abundant, clean and safe. But the Tainted Water investigation, an unprecedented national collaboration of universities and news organizations, exposed the risks faced by millions of Canadians whose drinking water contains elevated levels of lead, a powerful, insidious neurotoxin, and other contaminants. Coordinated by the staff at the Institute for Investigative Journalism (IIJ), Tainted Water is the largest project of its kind in Canadian history, and possibly the largest student-led project worldwide. The consortium brought together more than 120 journalists, student journalists and faculty members from nine post-secondary institutions and six news organizations and their bureaus over a period of 18 months to report the series. Journalism students and reporters combined their findings and produced local, regional and national investigative features, released as a series of print, digital and TV stories, making international headlines.
Read MoreSince 2008, at least 306 people across the Northwest have died after being taken to a county jail. Until now, that number was unknown, in part because Oregon and Washington have not comprehensively tracked those deaths in county jails. If they did, they would find a crisis of rising death rates in overburdened jails that have been set up to fail the inmates they are tasked with keeping safe. Key findings: - Over the past 10 years, the rate of jail deaths has trended upward in Oregon and Washington. In 2008, county jails in Washington had a mortality rate of about 123 deaths for every 100,000 inmates. By 2017, that rate was 162. Jail population data for 2018 were not yet available at the time of publication, but reported deaths spiked that year. A conservative estimate puts the 2018 mortality rate closer to 200 deaths per 100,000 inmates. - In 2018, police shot and killed 39 people between Oregon and Washington, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. For that same year, our investigation found 39 deaths in Oregon and Washington county jails. - At least 70 percent of Northwest inmates who died in the past decade were awaiting trial at the time of their deaths, still considered innocent under the law. - More than 40 percent of deaths happened within an inmate's first week in jail. A third of all inmates who died never made it past three days. - Suicide, by far the leading cause of jail deaths in the Pacific Northwest, accounted for nearly half of all cases with a known cause of death.
Read MoreIn cities from coast to coast, the odds that a shooter will be brought to justice are abysmally low and dropping. Police make an arrest in fewer than half of the murders committed with firearms. If the victim survives being shot, the chance of arrest drops to 1 out of 3. Staffing constraints are so dire at many police departments that thousands of nonfatal shooting cases are never even assigned a detective. The shooters are left free to strike again, fueling cycles of violence and eroding the public's trust in law enforcement. The Trace, in partnership with BuzzFeed News and later WTTW, published Free to Shoot Again, a series of stories that interrogates this failure in policing and the toll that it takes on the people who live in the communities most impacted by gun violence.
Read MoreFor nearly a year, the Texas Tribune's Shannon Najmabadi and Jay Root have been on the hunt for records detailing the state's spending on Gov. Greg Abbott's 2019 inauguration. From a source, they obtained a program and fundraising solicitation for the celebration. The documents revealed that dozens of influential corporations and individuals; AT&T Corporation; H-E-B grocery; a handful of political appointees had donated thousands of dollars for front-row access during the festivities and, perhaps, beyond.
Read MoreIn the name of protecting men and women in uniform, states across the country have made it nearly impossible to identify dangerous law enforcement officers with a track record of violence and other misdeeds. Records detailing their misconduct often are filed away, rarely seen by anyone outside of the department. Police unions and their political allies have worked to put special protections in place ensuring some records are shielded from public view, or even destroyed. A national tracking system for backgrounding officers is incomplete and not available to the public. More than two years ago, USA TODAY and its network of newsrooms across the nation set out to change that. More than two dozen reporters began collecting public records from the communities they covered and beyond. Also contributing substantially to the record-gathering was the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization in Chicago that focuses on issues around policing tactics and criminal justice. We pieced together lists of decertified officers in more than 40 states. We collected logs and paper records related to 110,000 internal affairs investigations. We gathered information on 14,000 lawsuits against departments and fought to obtain so-called Brady lists, documenting officers flagged for lying and other misdeeds. Then we scoured story archives from our newsrooms and others to piece together the most comprehensive list of police misconduct cases ever built.
Read MoreIn cities from coast to coast, the odds that a shooter will be brought to justice are abysmally low and dropping. Police make an arrest in fewer than half of […]
Read MoreAfter losing hard-fought reelection campaigns, Alabama's sheriffs often turn their attention to undermining their successors in ways that abuse the public trust. On his way out the door, one sheriff drilled holes in government-issued cell phones, while another pocketed public money intended to feed inmates. The ousted leaders dumped jail food down the drain and burned through tens of thousands of sheriff's office dollars by purchasing thousands of rolls of toilet paper. These are among the findings of my six-month investigation into these practices for AL.com and the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. In June 2019, I chronicled the actions of nine defeated Alabama sheriffs, seven of whom allegedly destroyed public property, stole public funds and/or wasted taxpayer money after their electoral defeats. These stories were made possible by my realization that incoming sheriffs were often more willing to talk on the record about the bad behavior and criminality of predecessors who had taken advantage of them than they would be under other circumstances.
Read MoreThe Bribery Division, an international investigation into Latin America's largest construction company, reveals fresh evidence of hundreds of millions of dollars in suspicious payments linked to major infrastructure projects. Brazilian […]
Read MoreBitcoin surged in 2018, attracting billions of investor dollars before prices plummeted. The Journal used innovative data reporting and traditional human sourcing to investigate the crush of frauds, money launderers […]
Read MoreAn investigation into sex abuse by United Nations peacekeepers in the world's conflict zones. Award-winning correspondent Ramita Navai traces allegations from Congo to the Central African Republic, with firsthand accounts […]
Read MoreFRONTLINE and the Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley tell the inside story of Guatemalan teens who were forced to work against their will on an Ohio egg farm in […]
Read MoreDave Repsher burned in post-helicopter crash fire in 2015, because the system designed to protect flight nurses and other helicopter passengers failed. Three years later, KUSA-TV's "Fueling the Fire" investigation […]
Read MoreCBS News initiated a multi-part investigation into the sale and use of deadly paint strippers containing the chemical methylene chloride. Over the course of the investigation, CBS News found that […]
Read MoreWhat happens to children who are born drug-exposed - and what happens to their parents? Over the course of the generation spanning ‚Äúcrack babies‚Äù to ‚Äúheroin babies,‚Äù California and the […]
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