Washington Post reporters spent 2021 traversing the corners of the country most ravaged by natural disasters to find out if the government really has people’s backs in the long-term. The reporters conducted 300 interviews and several databases, filed dozens of records requests, and analyzed thousands of pages of individual Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) case records and other documents. What they found was that FEMA was regularly not providing help when it was needed for survivors of disasters. They chronicled the agency denying help to Black families living on land passed down since a generation after slavery, abandoning poor families without assistance for transitioning out of FEMA trailer parks as they shut down, and denying aid to 90% of disaster survivors, often for minor errors in their paperwork. This reporting led to major process changes at FEMA to directly address these issues, and bipartisan legislation currently working its way through Congress.
Wires and Fires
Electrical fires are often treated as accidents in Milwaukee, but an investigation by reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that they are actually foreseeable tragedies that hit Black renters by far the hardest, with the government doing little to fix the problem. As part of their reporting, the team hired a master electrician to inspect a random selection of homes in Milwaukee’s hardest-hit area, which found that 80% of single and two-family rental properties in the study area had serious electrical problems. The investigation prompted an immediate outcry by leaders in state government and prompted city officials to reexamine and potentially restore an inspection program previously mothballed by state lawmakers. The city is also launching a tenant education program around the issue of electrical safety and is examining potential requirements for city agencies to better document electrical fires.
Poisoned
Hillsborough County had the highest number of adult lead poisonings in all of Florida. Reporters from the Tampa Bay Times set out to discover why. They interviewed more than 100 current and former employees at a local battery recycling plant suspected to be the cause. Johnson, Woolington and Murray gathered over 100,000 pages of documents and hundreds of photos and videos from employees that showed the perilous conditions inside the factory. They even became certified lead inspectors as they exposed how the factory had contaminated the surrounding community. After the initial parts of the series ran, OSHA sent inspectors into the plant for the first time in five years, confirmed the Times’ reporting, and issued one of the steepest fines in recent Florida history. Local children were screened for lead, and county regulators increased monitoring and oversight of the company, which also saw its credit rating downgraded and was driven to improve its safety systems. The Times’ project was supported by PBS FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, which provided partial funding and consultation.
Juvenile Injustice, Tennessee
In 2016, police arrested four Black girls at an elementary school in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Through more than 50 records requests and hundreds of hours of audio and video, reporters from WPLN and ProPublica uncovered a deeply unjust juvenile justice system that illegally arrested and jailed children, and disproportionately detained Black children. They discovered that the four girls, one as young as 8, were arrested for a crime that does not exist, in an investigation led by an officer who had been disciplined 37 times, on charges approved by judicial commissioners without law degrees, in a system overseen by a judge who failed the bar exam four times, in a county whose policy for locking up kids violated Tennessee law but was missed by inspectors year after year. Members of Congress have called for a federal civil rights investigation, and some members of the Tennessee legislature have called for the judge’s ouster. After the story was published, the judge announced she would be retiring at the end of her term this summer.
Mauled: When Police Dogs Are Weapons
In a year-long collaboration between regional and national outlets, reporters assembled the a first-of-its-kind database of incidents nationwide in which police dogs were used to attack suspects, resulting in serious injuries. They found that most victims were suspected of low-level non-violent crimes, and some were just bystanders. Injuries, both physical and psychological, were often severe and long-lasting. They resulted in disfigurement, reconstructive surgeries, permanent disability, and at least three deaths. This collaborative reporting project started with one journalist examining a local case in Alabama, and expanded nationally, joining forces with a similar investigation that had started in Indiana. In response to the series, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police announced it was tightening its policies for deploying police dogs; a national police think tank is drafting new guidelines on the use of K-9 units; and lawmakers in several states are using the reporting to push for new restrictions on the use of police dogs to bite people.
The Tampa Bay Times discovered that the Pasco County, Florida sheriff’s office spent nearly a decade secretly collecting data and building an algorithm designed to predict which residents were likely to break the law. Using this algorithm, but often without probable cause or evidence of crimes, the department continuously monitored and harassed nearly 1,000 residents in the span of five years. The Tampa Bay Times’ interviews with former deputies discovered that the harassment tactics were designed to make these residents move out of the county or file a lawsuit. Some cases had far more dire consequences, including that of a teenager who died by suicide while under surveillance based on the sheriff’s algorithms. As a result of this reporting, state lawmakers have filed legislation to curb this style of policing in Florida, the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor has called for a federal investigation and four residents who were targeted are suing the sheriff’s office with the help of a national non-profit legal firm.
As police violence and the failings of the U.S. justice system became front-page news across the country in 2020, Reuters reporters produced a series of data-driven investigative reports that included the first in-depth examination of qualified immunity; a revealing story on how police unions protect abusive officers; the first ever jail-by-jail accounting of inmate mortality in local lockups; and the first comprehensive, national accounting of judicial misconduct. This reporting led to increased awareness of the institutional failings of U.S. law enforcement, and was cited specifically in calls for reform of qualified immunity, and in cases against a corrupt judge and violent jail guards.
Restoring Health Care for Pacific Islanders After Decades of Unfilled Promises
Tens of thousands of Marshallese islanders fled their homes for the United States after extensive nuclear weapons testing in the 1940s and 50s washed their islands in dangerous radiation. Under an international agreement they were promised federal benefits, including Medicaid. But, in 1996 Congress stripped them of their Medicaid benefits, and the Marshallese – many of whom now work in factories and farms in America’s heartland – have been struggling to get healthcare ever since. Their community was ravaged by COVID-19, as POLITICO reporter Dan Diamond documented through first-hand visits and outdoor interviews. As a result of his reporting on the COVID-19 crisis and the decades of neglect that the Marshallese community had suffered at the hands of the federal government, Congress officially restored Marshallese islanders’ rights to Medicaid in December 2020.
Mississippi’s Dangerous and Dysfunctional Penal System
Mississippi has America’s most dangerous and antiquated penal system – The Marshall Project and Mississippi Today uncovered why. Severe understaffing has made prisons so dangerous that even guards aren’t safe. The state is paying millions of dollars to private prisons for workers who don’t show up. And Mississippi is the only state still running debtors prisons, where people with mostly low-level convictions are sentenced to prison-like facilities to work off fines, court fees, and restitution. Residents in these “restitution centers” often stay longer than necessary to pay off their debts. Lawmakers have called for defunding the centers and turning them into halfway houses, and the Mississippi State Auditor issued a scathing report, saying “the state must fix this, and now.” He also launched an investigation into the tax dollars paid for ghost workers.
Indianapolis Star reporters uncovered that government officials in Indiana took more than a billion dollars in federal funds earmarked for nursing home care and redirected it to hospital construction projects, while losing millions to fraud and padding the pockets of hospital executives. The state exploited loose rules and minimal oversight, and left Indiana with some of the worst nursing homes in America, just as the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Inadequate nursing home staffing across the state contributed to hundreds of deaths that likely could have been prevented with more resources. As a result of the IndyStar’s investigation, the state’s largest hospital system committed to a full review of its nursing home operations and the system’s longtime leader was forced to resign. At the state level, reforms have been proposed to increase nursing home funding, and tie Medicaid payments to quality of care.
