Investigations

The Investigative Reporting Workshop, in partnership with E&E News and NBC News, set out in 2020 to examine the health of people living in the shadows of U.S. oil refineries.

In a segregated community outside of an Alabama oil refinery, chronic illness tells a story of racial inequality, poverty and disease as U.S. deaths from COVID-19 surpass 300,000.

Protesters arrested after the May 25 death of George Floyd were a diverse, young group of people who demonstrated close to home and were charged largely with nonviolent crimes, according to a Washington Post review of data on more than 2,600 people detained in 15 cities.

After two nights of chaotic protests near the White House, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department found its supply of rubber ball grenades, high-impact sponge rounds, long-range tear-gas projectiles, and pepper spray nearly depleted. The shortage did not last long.

After a fire left charred loan documents on a boardroom table, investigators unraveled a 10-year scheme to defraud the Enloe State Bank in prairie Delta County. “People were betrayed,” said Texas’s top banking official.

Nearly 250 women have been fatally shot by police since 2015, when The Washington Post began tracking police shootings nationwide. While women represent a small subset of the 5,600 fatal shootings overall, they are also often overlooked. Many of them were in their homes when they were killed.

What explains the U.S. record of near-constant warfare? Author and anthropologist David Vine examines the “forever war” that began with the war on terror after Sept. 11, 2001.

In a successful PIT, the pursuing officer uses the cruiser to push the fleeing vehicle’s rear end sideways, sending it into a spin and ending the pursuit. But the tactic can have deadly consequences.

At college health centers, students battle misdiagnoses and inaccessible care.

In Shreveport, where some of the ugliest episodes of Jim Crow-era violence and redlining played out, COVID-19 also tells a story of sustained community disinvestment.