The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "neighborhood watch" ...
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Nonprofit groups and Legal Action say Fire Department money is up in smoke
The Milwaukee Street Beacon uncovered thathundreds of thousands of Community Development Block Grant dollars went to play Milwaukee Fire Department staffers, instead of to neighborhood organizations.
Tags: HUD; Housing and Urban Development; Community Development Block Grants; Fire Fighters Out Creating Urban Safety; FOCUS; fire detectors; fire prevention; Neighborhood Improvement Development Corporation; NICD; Merrill Park NEighborhood Association; Legal Action; Community Parole Watch
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Children Left Behind
The reporters set out to assess the problems children in Cleveland face. They managed to uncover hazards that even the public officials and community activists who had dedicated their careers to these issues. for example, they found that half a million Ohio Children live next door to a toxic waste site. Another finding was that nearly 1 million children live in poor housing, putting them at greater risk for fires, accidents, and environmental health hazards such as lead poisoning and asthma. They also discovered that babies born to teenage mothers are much more likely to be premature, and these babies had cost the state roughly $161 million dollars in five year. Another finding was that children of color were in most danger, they account for about a quarter of all child deaths.
Tags: toxic waste; poor housing; fires; accidents; environmental health; teenage mothers; teen pregnancy; premature babies; inner-city neighborhoods; Guatemala; African American children; child deaths; Ohio Environmental Protection Agency; Planned Parenthood; Federation for Community Planning; Ohio Department of Health; lead poisoning; poor housing; asthma; Child deaths; food banks; poverty; Rocking Horse Center; birth rate; child mortality rate; hazardous waste sites; Sherwin-Williams; Benjamin Moore; Environmental Health Watch in Cleveland; pollution; youth prison; Youth Health Empowerment Project; STD's; birth control
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Policing the Police
The American Prospect reports on police abuse of citizens and examines the potential of civil law to influence police practices. The story points to trends nationwide, but focuses mostly on cases in Los Angeles. The major examples include recent successful lawsuits on behalf of people bitten by police dogs, and some controversial shootings by sheriff's deputies in Los Angeles County. There is a "baffling disconnect" between lawsuits and police internal investigations, the story reveals. The author finds that a possible solution to the problem could come from nonprofit legal groups in every city, which would take on individual police abuse cases.
Tags: crime; litigation; courts; Police Watch groups; New York City's Neighborhood Defenders of Harlem; brutality; weapons; fleeing felons; torture
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Know Justice, Know Peace
Crogan tells the ins and outs of the "... chilly reaction by officials to the announcement of a citywide gang truce in April 1992 by Bloods and Crips peacemakers. Since that time, local government has failed to provide either political of financial support to bolster the momentous agreement, perhaps squandering a rare window of opportunity to stop what amounts to urban street warfare among the city's minority youth....There was also the published Bloods-Crips proposal to the city which circulated in South-Central, including $2 billion for infrastructure, $700 million for educations, $6 million for Neighborhood Watch patrols $20 million for economic redevelopment, and $1 billion for social-service and recreation programs. In exchange, the so-called 'Bloods-Crips Organization' promised to 'ask drug lords to invest their monies in L.A. area businesses and properties and to stop their drug trade'".
Tags: gangs; Watts; youth violence; blacks; LAPD; Los Angeles Police Department; projects; hood war; grassroots; South-Central; crime; CYA; California Youth Authority
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Our Town
"Take a look at the sad statistics of the Southeast Police Division, the deadliest neighborhood in Los Angeles. Now look again. While some are killing each other, others are working, raising kids and building dreams." In the LAPD's Southeast Division, also known as South-Central, crime and violence is a way of life. From January 1, 2000 to mid-December 76 people were killed, of those 23 were 21 years or younger. The area has been given the title of "deadliest police division in the city." But as Stewart finds, people in South-Central aren't willing to give up. Resident's are trying to revitalize the community through clean-up programs and make it a safer place for children through watch programs. Stewart collects stories of hope and devastations from the people who live in the "deadliest police division in the city."
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Bob's Boys
Icon reports how one day Bob Maupin got sick of smugglers and immigrants invading his Texas backyard and decided to stop them. But a neighborhood watch that uses army surplus is an international incident. They've always had uninvited guests, but no more than a handful until October 1994, when President Clinton launched Operation Gatekeeper, a $50 million campaign to seal the San Diego - Tijuana border that doubled the station's number of Border Patrol staff. The INS knew that would steer traffic to the east. Illegal entries in the San Diego area have been sliced nearly in half since Gatekeeper began, but six months after its launch, apprehensions in Bob's neighborhood shot up 809 percent and inflated from 2,300 seizures in 1994 to 78,000 in 1996. "It's a war zone, nothing less." But the Border Patrol is scared that law enforcement is giving vigilantes a green light.
Tags: Immigrants; INS; vigilantes; neighborhood watch
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When No One is Watching
GQ reports how people had no idea how brutal teenage girlfriends could be. On a Friday night in mid-November, under a full moon, 14 1/2-year-old Reena Virk was beaten by her teenage girlfriends, drowned and left to drift face-down in a tidal inlet in the suburbs of Victoria, British Columbia. Those things are certain. The rest is lies, half-truths, make-believe. Stories. Police and prosecutors had to reconstruct events from the statements of teenagers: They had to practice the art of storytelling. And standing in the way of a coherent narrative was the enveloping code of silence of the kids out by the Gorge. Many of the kids at Shoreline junior high had heard about the dead chick in the water; none of the kids from the neighborhood ratted.
Tags: Murder; teenager; urban myth; storytelling
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Detroit Crime - Breaking The Myth
Many Detroit Neighborhoods are as safe or safer than those in many neighborhooding suburbs. Individual neighborhoods have successfully cleaned up crime, identified areas that need more work and showed ways that police, residents and others can work together to make progress.
Tags: fighting crime; neighborhood watch; crime
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Omaha Crime
The World-Herald investigated reported crime in Omaha from January 1990 through September 1997. The study found that crime is most prevalent in the older, eastern part of the city. But it found that all areas, even affluent neighborhoods, are affected by crime.
Tags: Police; Safety; Neighborhood Watch; Burglary
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In Search of Ben Linder's Killers
During the 1980s, there was a neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, known as Gringolandia -- a district of hotels, flophouses, private homes, and open-air restaurants filled with visitors from Berkeley, Cambridge, Manhattan, Madison, and other American places. It was here that a young American mechanical engineer named Benjamin Linder lived. He had spent a year and a half working for the electrical utility in Managua. A Sandinista sympathizer who had been working on plans to build of tiny hydroelectric plants in the villages, Linder was shot point-blank,stripped of his wallet, watch, camera and cartridge belt. His killers -- the U.S.-sponsored Contras. The uproar back home was loud -- and discomfiting for the U.S. government. As Linder's friends searched for answers, they waded through the complex Nicaraguan politics.
Tags: Ben Linder; Nicaragua; Sandanistas; Contras