I’ve always considered the response to a big data request a fair indicator of how good the story might be:
“Why do you want this? Nobody’s ever asked for that before.” Nice.

“It’s impossible to get this to you and even if we could, you wouldn’t understand it.” Even better.

“Screw the public records law. You’ll need a court order.” I’m drooling into my keyboard.

But I’ve had to rethink that philosophy following publication of “Unfit for Duty,” our nine-day series on how state and local officials handle serious incidents of misconduct by ...

When 19-year-old Taylor Kennedy woke up to find his friend dead, he called the police.

Just the day before, he had gone with Shannon Gaddis, 17, to buy heroin in St. Louis, police said.

Though officials determined that Taylor was sleeping when Shannon snorted heroin, Taylor was charged with drug-induced homicide for buying the heroin that led to her death.

If convicted, the Troy, Ill., teen faces up to 30 years in state prison.

The Illinois state and federal prosecutors in the Metro-East area, adjacent to St. Louis, announced they would investigate overdoses more thoroughly.

And they would go after ...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported an illegal immigrant who was a witness in a homicide case, an attorney told me. "Prosecutors are going to drop the charges."

Sure enough, the case crumbled and the U.S. citizen who had been charged with murder was set free. ICE agents had deported the witness after he was arrested on unrelated charges and booked into the county jail, court documents showed.

Local and federal authorities responded by pointing fingers at each other and insisting this was an isolated incident. The problem, a breakdown in communication, had been addressed, they promised ...

Houston’s massage parlors are as ubiquitous as the city’s trademark sprawl. And they’re mostly unregulated.

The Chronicle discovered hundreds of unlicensed parlors in the nation’s fourth largest city by digging through state and local databases and commercial websites.

We started with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which had a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of 100 of licensed operations on the agency’s website.

But a simple search on the Yellow Pages website returned more than 400 business listings for Houston.

So who’s watching the other 300?

To answer that, I sent out Texas Public ...

Badger Guns and Ammo in suburban Milwaukee rose to national prominence in the 1990s when reports showed it had sold more crime guns than any other dealer in the nation.

In 2007, I learned from sources that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had found serious problems at the store, known then as Badger Outdoors. Such records on gun stores are shrouded in secrecy by law but I discovered the ATF was considering revoking the license – a rare move taken against only the worst gun dealers.

However, a few months later ATF’s plan evaporated. The ...

I had always wanted to write a story about police chases after I watched a crazy high-speed pursuit unfold on local television. I wondered how often these chases go bad, and how the San Antonio Police Department kept track of that information.

Law enforcement agencies usually churn out tons of paperwork. For instance, I learned that officers must fill out a pursuit-evaluation form after they chase someone. The reports have check boxes for different categories of information, such as whether someone was injured during the chase.

When you see boxes like that on a report, chances are, someone at the ...