Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • As law enforcement nationwide faces scrutiny, cameras protect both public and officers

    Across the United States, 95 percent of law enforcement agencies have started using body cameras. In North Carolina, the majority of departments have started using such technology in the hopes of increasing transparency, trust, and accountability. While the use of body cams is wanted by both police and the community, finding the funding to purchase and maintain them has been a challenge for some departments.

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  • Court Observers Are Shining a Light on the Immigration Court System

    One way that any ordinary citizen can lend a hand to the plight of those caught in the American immigration system is by being a court observer: someone who sits in immigration court and takes notes by hand. Several organizations are working to develop a standardized way of evaluating judges' treatment of migrants to put it in a central database so that the data can be used to evaluate the human impact by the system as a whole. People who participate testify to the job alleviating despair over the situation as they can mitigate any unfair practices going unnoticed.

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  • Evidence of a solution: Using data to report more than just bad news

    Fact-based, data-driven, and solution-oriented journalism can shift the media paradigm from asking “what” to asking “how.” Solutions journalism, known also as constructive journalism in Europe, focuses on data and evidence to shift discourse from political advocacy and ideological debates to problem-solving and productive discussion. Using this approach, students in Eugene, Oregon, brought accountability to municipal administrators who had previously obfuscated the effectiveness of a program to reduce court caseloads.

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  • Black People Are Charged at a Higher Rate Than Whites. What if Prosecutors Didn't Know Their Race?

    The San Francisco District Attorney’s office has been instituting “blind charging,” making it impossible to see someone’s name, race, and other demographics before deciding to charge them with a crime. This new practice comes as a response to accusations of racial bias and profiling when deciding whether to pursue a charge – citing that black people are disproportionately targeted within the criminal justice system.

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  • How They Did It: Exposing Police Violence Against the Yellow Vests

    In what started as a series of posts on Twitter and evolved into a public database published by an investigative media outlet, Mediapart, a lone reporter documented police violence against France's Yellow Vest protesters in an act of accountability that had been neglected by other journalists and the government. David Dufresne's “Allô Place Beauvau” (a "hello" to France's interior ministry) documented 800 cases of police violence or misbehavior. Many of the cases came to Dufresne as tips from the public, which he then verified. His work was cited by French and international authorities.

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  • 'It changes the way you see everything': the shocking film about gerrymandering

    In a time of extreme division in American politics, one documentary is highlighting an issue both sides agree is an issue--gerrymandering. As contorted districts have made elections pointless in many Michigan elections, the grassroots group Voters Not Politicians, featured in a recent documentary Slay the Dragon, worked to establish an independent, public citizen's commission for redistricting.

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  • How USA Today and its network of local papers prioritized investigative journalism

    Shrinking newspaper staffs that deprive communities of local news have struck the nation's largest newspaper chain, Gannett, as well. The company has responded by deploying limited resources toward stories in the public interest with the most potential impact, on such topics as hospital safety and government corruption. Local newspapers pool resources to do investigative-reporting joint projects, which then feed into the chain's national newspaper, USA Today. Some stories have inspired reform legislation.

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  • Calif. newsrooms team up to handle police misconduct records dump

    When a new California law unlocked the disciplinary records on misconduct from 700 police agencies statewide, competing news organizations formed the California Reporting Project to accomplish as a team what would have been daunting, if not impossible, for each news organization individually: compile a database of all the records as they are released. Just months into the project, the resulting news stories informed the public of officers who escaped serious consequences for misconduct, and whose careers benefited from keeping the public unaware.

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  • With vast records of police misconduct now public, California news outlets are collaborating instead of competing

    More than 30 California news organizations collaborated to gain access to, and publish news stories about, previously secret police disciplinary cases. Filing more than 1,100 records requests with more than 600 law enforcement agencies, members of the California Reporting Project leveraged each others' resources rather than competing to tackle the massive reporting project made possible by a new state transparency law. The collaboration is an example of local and regional partnerships that have helped a struggling news industry still cover local and state government news.

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  • Police accountability: Statewide media coalition pushing hard to acquire police records

    A new California law requiring that police departments make public their records of police officers' misconduct revealed numerous cases that had not been known before. Police unions and state and local governments sought protection in the courts from having to disclose the records, but when they lost those challenges the records began coming out. The California Reporting Project formed as a coalition of news organizations statewide that have teamed up to make full use of the new transparency law. The project filed hundreds of records requests seeking more disclosures.

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