Dozens of reports about an indigent man in Bradenton, Florida, showed the cruel excesses of local news’s homelessness coverage.

The Crescent City is in the final stages of a multimillion-dollar federal police reform process. Here‘s why it and other programs like it fail to achieve real reform.

Three Bronx friends recount their 2012 arrests in the NYPD’s ‘Operation Crew Cut,’ along with their experiences with the court system and incarceration, and reflect on their lives seven years later.

In California, Texas and Florida, advocates sent letters to district attorneys, demanding that they refuse to work with officers with histories of misconduct.

A new effort to reduce arrests and summonses is criticized as continuing to criminalize homelessness.

Offices across the state conduct operations under the guise of saving victims of human trafficking. But the vast majority of people detained, including sex workers, are charged with prostitution.

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri of Pinellas County, Florida, is one of the state’s most controversial lawmen.

For far too long, the press has leaned on wrong-headed tough-on-crime officials like the former NYPD commissioner when reporting on the criminal legal system.

“Five years ago, my son said ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times as officers placed him in a banned chokehold and killed him. After patiently waiting, following the rules, hoping for accountability and closure, we now learn that the Department of Justice has decided not to bring federal charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo. “The DOJ has […]

A Shippensburg man faces 15 years on the sex offense registry for offering a girl a ride.

A California Superior Court ruling gives officers accused of misconduct access to investigator notes and files while cases are in progress.

Sensational and false news reports about the drug are pushing lawmakers to enact harmful policies.

Expert reports in a 2017 federal lawsuit explore an alleged pattern of discrimination against men perceived to be gay.

Louis Ackal has said he isn’t seeking re-election. But advocates fear that may not be enough to bring change.

An NYPD database labels over 18,000 people in New York City as active gang members. Three of the people labeled this way are 13 years old, and more than 400 others are under 18. Nearly 99 percent of the people whose names are in the database are people of color. Nearly 88 percent are Black […]

ABC News claims anti-police violence is on the rise but offers no data.

The accusations span decades and involve two separate Biddeford cops and at least seven alleged victims.

Brandi Courtesis lost her job with the Gettysburg force after saying a colleague sexually harassed her. The accused, fired for another reason, may be back in uniform soon.

After the rapper Nipsey Hussle was killed on March 31, there was an outpouring of grief in Los Angeles and across the country. Hussle has been applauded as the rare star who remained rooted in his community and committed to it through his art, entrepreneurship, and activism. (Hussle was posthumously honored with the 2019 Humanitarian Award at […]

Reality shows like ‘The First 48,’ ‘Live PD,’ and ‘Cops’ are interfering in legal cases, exploiting people of color, and threatening lives.

The police union’s newly elected vice president led the investigation into the shooting that cleared Officer William Gourley of any wrongdoing.

On June 1, BuzzFeed and Injustice Watch reported on the Plain View Project, a new database of racist, violent, and otherwise offensive public Facebook posts and comments by active and retired police officers. (We covered the Plain View Project, the online behavior it exposed, and the additional investigation by Injustice Watch / BuzzFeed in our […]

The California county has a thin blue line that appears to protect not just the police, but also the DA’s office, criminal justice advocates say.

In January, when Phil Sims became the sheriff of Marshall County, Alabama, he found a cardboard box in a storage closet containing five government-issued smartphones, each with multiple holes drilled clear through them. His predecessor had destroyed them. The hard drives had been removed from his computers. Records were missing. The jail’s refrigerators and shelves […]

Jose Montelongo-Morales challenged the jail’s immigration detainer policy. He and some of his family members were arrested months later.

Thanks to the diligence of one assistant state attorney, 119 cases were thrown out and the officer is under state investigation.

When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was interviewed this week on a local news network, he was asked about Layleen Polanco, the 27-year-old transgender woman who was recently found dead in her cell at Rikers Island. The specific cause of her death is not known, but why was she held for two months […]

In 2015, the Chicago City Council passed a reparations ordinance. That ordinance, the first of its kind in the country, was the city’s official acknowledgment that Jon Burge, a Chicago police commander, and detectives under his command, “systematically engaged in acts of torture, physical abuse and coercion of African American men and women at Area […]

The popularity of Axon’s tech soared after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014, but it may be doing more harm than good in protecting people from excessive force.

Last week, in a 4-3 vote on the 2019-20 budget, the City Council in Durham, North Carolina, voted against funding 18 new police officers. It voted instead to raise the wage for part-time city workers to just over $15 an hour. With that, the city joined jurisdictions around the country that are critically evaluating requests for increased […]

The sensationalist coverage of a handful of fights highlights local media’s misplaced priorities.

  If I open an app called Citizen, which offers neighborhood “911 crime and safety alerts,” an alert pops up: “200 FEET AWAY: police search for four suspects after shooting incident.” There is a thumbnail picture of a map with a bright red dot in the middle, and shades of red cover the area around […]

On Saturday, Injustice Watch and BuzzFeed News published an investigation into racist and violent social media posts by current and retired police officers. The article by Emily Hoerner and Rick Tulsky came out of a collaboration with the Plain View Project, which examined the Facebook accounts of police officers from eight departments across the county. The Plain View Project looked […]

City officials say its vast network of cameras are simply a tool when responding to 911 calls and complaints of criminal activity. But several cases suggest the system serves an additional purpose.

In Pennsylvania, mothers are harshly penalized for leaving children unattended in vehicles, even for several minutes.

Chicago hands out millions in settlements and legal fees for police misconduct. Its newly inaugurated mayor should take a dollar from the department’s budget for every dollar the city spends settling with its victims.

Newly released records show that task force members faced allegations of theft and questionable overtime, all under the watch of a commander later fired for lying as the misconduct was investigated.

Trooper testimony inconsistent with video and misconduct among state and local law enforcement in New Hampshire and Massachusetts have caused at least 15 drug cases to unravel.

A former Baltimore officer says the Hopkins plan should be viewed skeptically because campus police have a history of deadly force and its officials come from troubled Baltimore Police units.

Instead of building ‘humane jails’ to replace Rikers Island, let’s push the NYPD to cut down on arrests.