The Center for Public Integrity is releasing a dataset of polling place locations used in the 2020 general election to help journalists and researchers analyze access to the ballot box and the potential impact of a slew of changes to state election laws. The new data release, available via Github, includes polling place locations and […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
After a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes, the government response stalls
Nearly two years since the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed an anti-Asian backlash and almost seven months since federal legislation was passed to address it, little has been done. At a May ceremony for the signing of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, President Joe Biden called attention to the lack of reliable data on hate crimes, saying […]
Posted inCheated at Work
See which retail companies didn’t pay their workers
When you’re shopping for gifts this holiday season, keep in mind that some of the outlets selling furniture, electronics and other goods may have a history of failing to pay their workers. Wage theft occurs in every industry and Public Integrity has reported about many of those this year. In 2019 alone, the U.S. Department […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
Join us for a live discussion: cheated out of pay at the USPS
Update: Dec. 13, 4:05 p.m.: Douglas Lape has been added as a guest to the panel. We want to hear from you If you would like to receive details about the event or submit a question, click here. A Center for Public Integrity investigation revealed that U.S. Postal Service workers across the country have been cheated […]
Posted inCheated at Work
Llegó la época de compras navideñas, ¿se les pagará a los carteros por todo su trabajo?
Un cartero de 43 años de la zona rural de Texas les tiene pavor a las próximas dos semanas. No porque sea la época del año de mayor actividad para el Servicio Postal de Estados Unidos, sino porque le preocupa no cobrar todas las horas extra que va a trabajar. Ha estado laborando unas 12 […]
Posted inCheated at Work
The holiday rush is here. Will mail carriers get paid for all their work?
A 43-year-old mailman in rural Texas is dreading the next two weeks. Not because it’s the busiest time of year for the U.S. Postal Service, but because he worries he won’t get paid for all the extra hours he will be working. He’s been clocking about 12 hours of overtime each week since the start […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
Challenges to the Voting Rights Act far from over
When the U.S. Supreme Court decided an important voting rights case earlier this year, its ruling made it more difficult for voters to challenge restrictive state voting laws. Now, the state of Texas is making an argument that, if adopted, would further hobble use of what remains of the Voting Rights Act. In a brief […]
Posted inCoronavirus and Inequality
Six lessons from the Paycheck Protection Program
As a key pandemic-aid program pushed money out faster to bigger companies and majority white areas than to small firms and communities of color, the U.S. Small Business Administration made repeated changes to try to make it more equitable. Some worked. Some didn’t. Now that the Paycheck Protection Program is almost entirely in the rearview […]
Posted inHousing in Crisis
HUD got $9 billion to combat COVID-19 impacts. Only a quarter has been spent.
Tucked in the massive pandemic relief act in March 2020 was about $9 billion for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to divvy up between cities and states for housing-related coronavirus fallout. The funds could be used on rental assistance for tenants struggling to pay their landlords, housing homeless people in safe, sanitary […]
Posted inCheated at Work
Chart: Clothing factories have a wage theft problem
Wage theft is pervasive in the U.S. In 2019 alone, the Department of Labor cited about 8,500 employers for stealing $287 million from workers. This long-standing practice affects companies large and small and in every industry. Even the venerable USPS is a major offender. Immigrants are among the workers most vulnerable to wage theft. A […]
Posted inInequality
Carol Anderson: The Second Amendment is anti-Black
The constitutional right to a well regulated militia and to keep and bear arms does not apply equally to Black and white Americans — just as intended. Carol Anderson lays out the evidence in her book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. “The Second Amendment was really a bribe to the […]
Posted inCriminalizing kids
Students wanted police out of schools. The replacements have guns.
In June 2020, amid protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, school districts across the nation began to reexamine their relationships with law enforcement agencies. Denver was among the districts that ended contracts with police and pulled school resource officers off its campuses. Padres & Jôvenes Unidos, a Denver-based […]
Posted inCoronavirus and Inequality
The evidence is piling up that pregnant people should get vaccinated
There’s a long list of things pregnant people are taught to avoid: soft cheeses, cat feces, sushi. So perhaps it’s no surprise so many expectant mothers are wary of a new vaccine: Only 34% of pregnant women are vaccinated against COVID-19, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even as nearly […]
Posted inDemocracy
Pro-Trump nonprofit gives millions to groups boosting his agenda
A nonprofit closely tied to former President Donald Trump and his administration gave millions of dollars in 2020 to an array of conservative groups, a new tax filing from the nonprofit, now called America First Works, shows. The largest grant to an outside group, nearly $4.8 million, went to Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund often […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
Indigenous solutions to climate change could inform nationwide policies
Following heavy rainfall earlier this week, Northwest Washington residents rescued neighbors in fishing boats on washed-out roads. Rising flood waters closed most routes to and from the peninsula where the Lummi Nation Reservation is located. Aerial footage of the area showed houses surrounded by several feet of water, like islands in a sea of flood […]
Posted inCheated at Work
This year at USPS: Mail slowdowns, big executive bonuses for DeJoy and others
The U.S. Postal Service paid its top executives more in bonuses and perks last year than at any other point in the past decade, adding up to $370,622 in extra income for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and four of his deputies, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of the agency’s financial disclosures. DeJoy […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
Addressing school safety fears could have unintended consequences
Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s promise to add more police officers in schools could have unintended consequences for the state’s children. New research from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found that school resource officers can reduce some forms of violence, such as fights and physical assaults. But those benefits come with tradeoffs: increased absenteeism, especially […]
Posted inHealth
New research links racism to higher preterm birth rates in Black women
Based at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, The Journalist’s Resource, where this piece was originally published, examines public policy news topics through a research lens — and research through a journalistic lens. Its goal is to get more high-quality research into the media and to summarize and contextualize high-quality research on newsy public policy topics. Two […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
In the rural South, poor health tied to systemic racism and legacy of slavery
The legacy of slavery looms large in the rural South. After the Civil War, Jim Crow and a sharecropping system robbed Blacks of wealth and power. Violence and other government-sponsored segregation disenfranchised many Black Southerners until a critical triumph of the Civil Rights movement — the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That same year, Medicaid […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
Subject of Public Integrity investigation cited over prison banking practices
A private contractor has been ordered to pay restitution over predatory prison banking practices similar to those exposed in a Center for Public Integrity investigation. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Oct. 19 ordered JPay, a company that provides financial services to prisons and jails across the country, to pay a $2 million fine […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
States urged to repeal cops’ special legal protections
Late last month, once-promising negotiations to strike a bipartisan deal on policing reform broke down on Capitol Hill, dashing hopes for the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. “After months of exhausting every possible pathway to a bipartisan deal, it remains out of reach right now,” U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, a New […]
Posted inFuture of Warfare
The US nuclear arsenal is becoming more destructive and possibly more risky
A sophisticated electronic sensor buried in hardened metal shells at the tip of a growing number of America’s ballistic missiles reflects a significant achievement in weapons engineering that experts say could help pave the way for reductions in the size of the country’s nuclear arsenal but also might create new security perils. This story also […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
FOIA and fact checking: Essential to investigative reporting
The Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country, and Research Editor Peter Newbatt Smith is its longest-serving employee. He’s at the center of two critical aspects of Public Integrity’s investigative journalism — overseeing the newsroom’s rigorous fact checking process, and pressing government agencies to comply with the […]
Posted inInequality
Officials announce new mortgage discrimination enforcement
This story was reported by The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom investigating the effects of technology on society. Citing a recent investigation by The Markup as evidence of a nationwide problem, the U.S. Department of Justice, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies announced a new initiative Friday to combat discriminatory mortgage lending practices. At the […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
Public Integrity joins argument in free press court case
The Center for Public Integrity has joined Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and three other nonprofit news organizations in submitting a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a press freedom case. In the case of CoreCivic Inc., v. Candide Group LLC, the brief argues for affirming […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
Election officials scramble to find poll workers
A few weeks ago, election officials in Camden County, New Jersey were starting to worry. Already halfway through poll worker recruitment and training, they still had too many empty spots. “We were a little bit panicky,” remembers Richard Ambrosino, a member of the elections board in the southern New Jersey county. Many older poll workers […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
An investigative reporter’s duty to confront ‘inconvenient truths’
Racial, gender and economic disparities in education is a key focus of the Center for Public Integrity’s investigative journalism about the causes and effects of inequality in the U.S. Senior Reporter Corey Mitchell brings more than a decade of experience to the education beat. Prior to joining Public Integrity, Mitchell was associate editor and a […]
Posted inWatchdog newsletter
Underreporting undermines accountability about police and schools
Public Integrity’s recent report, “When schools call police on kids,” showed that nearly 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement across the country during the 2017-18 school year and more than 50,000 were arrested. But our reporting also revealed something else: the numbers likely were far worse. Some of the nation’s largest school districts had […]
Posted inCheated at Work
El robo de salarios es peor en industrias con muchos inmigrantes
This story also appeared in Associated Press and Univision Audelia Molina, una inmigrante mexicana, ganaba 10 centavos por cada prenda que cortaba en una fábrica de Los Ángeles, la capital estadounidense del ensamblaje de ropa. Su salario era tan miserable que empezó a trabajar 11 horas por día para incrementar su producción. Cuando pidió un […]