A lawsuit in Los Angeles and a motion in Orange County highlight battles to get key information.

Criminal case files from Oakland’s seminal Riders scandal were among documents shredded by the Alameda County Superior Court in 2015.

Last week, the City Council reinstated a “no camping” ordinance meant to discourage people experiencing homelessness from sleeping on sidewalks and outside a shelter. Advocates say the city is criminalizing poverty.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Early Saturday morning, Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, was at her home in Texas playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew when police officers responded to a call […]

Sheriff Mike Chapman, who runs the Loudoun County jail, has received close to $15,000 in contributions from the provider since taking office in 2012.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva was elected on the promise of reforming the scandal-plagued sheriff’s department. But eight deputies now accuse Sheriff Villanueva of allowing a violent group, the Banditos, to thrive in his department’s ranks.

The former Dallas police officer should be held accountable for killing Botham Jean, but sending her to prison does not keep us safe.

The gang database in the state gives police increased authority to approach and harass people for virtually no reason at all.

The Madison County Sheriff’s Department was sued in 2017 for allegedly subjecting Black motorists and pedestrians to unconstitutional stops and searches.

“For some legal observers, there was only one word for the Amber Guyger guilty verdict on Tuesday: stunning,” the Dallas Morning News reported. “That’s because a police officer likely never even would have been charged just a few years ago.” Between 1973 and 2016, there were no Dallas police officers who faced murder charges for killing a civilian, […]

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood and District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer intend to openly defy a 1975 state Supreme Court precedent that says law enforcement cannot intentionally discriminate against a person or group of people.

WJLA’s Kevin Lewis selectively reports on immigrants arrested for sex crimes to paint a misleading picture of violence in Montgomery County.

At least a quarter of all people killed by police each year suffer from untreated mental illnesss. New York City’s Public Advocate is proposing a new hotline and mental health crisis teams.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Meralyn Kirkland got a call last Thursday about her granddaughter, Kaia Rolle. She was told that the 6-year-old girl had been arrested at her Orlando charter school and was […]

The Washington State Patrol has added thousands of old sealed juvenile records to a database it shares with law enforcement agencies across the country—erasing for many their chance of a clean slate.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. “Donald Trump has long understood that he can leverage homelessness to motivate people,” writes David Graham for The Atlantic. “In the early 1980s, the developer was desperate to get […]

In a rare case of local media nuance, a Boston TV news station provided a humane and health-focused segment on safe drug use.

Court records and interviews with former prosecutors show that internal assessments of police dishonesty are rarely memorialized, potentially violating the rights of people charged in criminal cases and sometimes keeping the records of bad cops clean.

Climate activists in Houston are charged under a new law aimed at criminalizing protest

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. “After 147 years, California residents are now free to turn down law enforcement officials who ask for help with an arrest,” reported Jacey Fortin for the New York Times […]

Police are accused of lying to obtain the warrants to conduct military-style raids on the homes of poor people and people of color.

Jose ‘Lil Joe’ Chapa says one way to make Beauregard Parish ‘great again’ is to stop construction of a new jail and divert resources to services that keep people out of lockup altogether.

Advocates and homeless people are suing Sacramento County over its treatment of homeless—and the city responded by filing a lawsuit against seven men for being a ‘public nuisance.‘

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. While progressives and reformers wax poetic about reducing low-level arrests, one group is making it happen: the NYPD. Not out of some newfound understanding about the moral […]

Kansas City news outlets called scores of people ‘violent criminals’ based solely on the word of police and the federal government.

In a civil rights lawsuit, an officer in Allentown claims he was subjected to racial discrimination before he was fired.

Elsewhere in the country, lawsuits and legislation seek to protect people from predatory mugshot sites.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Yesterday seemed by all accounts a good day for police accountability. Scholars recently revealed that police violence is a leading cause of death for Black men, but […]

Police and prosecutors claimed facial recognition technology wasn’t at the center of a shoplifting case, but defense attorneys say it was the sole basis for probable cause to arrest.

Media coverage obsessively focuses on homicides, which are at historical lows. Meanwhile, suicides and overdoses skyrocket, quietly driving record declines in American life expectancy.

Murder rates are at an all-time low in Brooklyn, but one would hardly know it reading the New York Times.

In Valencia County, a sheriff’s deputy who once faced allegations of excessive force in Albuquerque is accused of assaulting an elderly man.

Heather Marlowe, now an activist, says neglected kits are a reflection of who and what police prioritize.

Most coverage of police raids targeting homeless people and substance users parroted official—and fraught—talking points.

Children as young as 4 years old are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result, the complaints say.

A new internal audit shows that officers disproportionately strike, tussle with, and draw guns on Black people but then fail to disclose the incidents in their reports.

A federal lawsuit claims that Palo Alto, California, police falsely detained, arrested, and beat a gay Latinx man—then boasted about their brutality.

The family of Ricardo Treviño, an unarmed 21-year-old killed by police last year, says they’ve spent months waiting for answers on why he was shot.

Police unions resist accountability and exert influence over criminal justice reform.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. In 2017, the coalition Freedom to Thrive looked at the enormous outlay on policing and incarceration across the U.S.—over $180 billion annually—contrasting it with the systemic underinvestment […]