An in-depth look at Las Vegas police shootings

"In the wake of two controversial officer-involved shooting deaths in the summer of 2010, the Las Vegas Review-Journal analyzed two decades of shootings by officers with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

The newspaper found an insular police department that is slow to weed out problem cops and slower still to adopt policies and procedures that protect both its own officers and the citizens they serve. It is an agency that celebrates a hard-charging police culture while often failing to learn from its mistakes."

"White criminals seeking presidential pardons over the past decade have been nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities, a ProPublica examination, co-published with The Washington Post, has found.

Blacks have had the poorest chance of receiving the president's ultimate act of mercy, according to an analysis of previously unreleased records and related data."

In a recent analysis of 46,000 traffic stops, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Ben Poston found that black resident drivers are "seven times as likely to be stopped by city police as a white resident driver." Additionally, the study found that "Milwaukee police pulled over Hispanic city motorists nearly five times as often as white drivers."

Poston also reports that "the disparities found in Milwaukee are greater than other large metro police departments where traffic stop data is collected, including Charlotte, Kansas City, Raleigh and St. Louis."

"In a multi-day project, Anthony Cormier and Matthew Doig of The Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigate why law enforcement agencies around Florida employ officers despite cases of serious misconduct in their past, involving everything from violence and perjury to drugs and sexual assault. Many more cases stay hidden because agencies fail to thoroughly investigate or report complaints."

Cormier and Doig used DocumentCloud to embed the source documents, internal affairs investigations, they obtained. 

"From 2008 through 2010, Chino Valley Medical Center in San Bernardino County claimed that 35.2 percent of its Medicare patients were suffering from acture heart failure. That’s six times the state average, according to a California Watch analysis of Medicare billing data.

However, in 2006, before Medicare began making bonus payments to hospitals treating patients with major complications, Chino Valley reported no cases of acute heart failure."

ScrippsNews' Isaac Wolf found that "for thousands of teens accused of crimes, punishment precedes any conviction in court. While awaiting trial and ostensibly presumed innocent, they can be held for months or even years in county jails for -- and sometimes with -- adult suspects.

Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows, in 2010, roughly 5,600 suspects at any given time lack "sight and sound" protection."

"Chicago Tribune reporters found eight Chicago-area fugitives during an 18-day trip to Mexico -- five wanted for murder, two for raping or molesting children and one for shooting a man. Growing numbers of criminal suspects flee the U.S. each year to evade trial for murder, rape and other serious felonies. Breakdowns in the criminal justice system allow the suspects to escape, then cripple efforts to bring them to justice, the Tribune found in an investigation based on new Justice Department data as well as sealed warrants and other government records on 129 border-crossing fugitives from northern Illinois."

“At least 93 Milwaukee police officers – ranking from street cop to captain – have been disciplined for violating the laws and ordinances they were sworn to uphold, a Journal Sentinel investigation found.

Their offenses range from sexual assault and domestic violence to drunken driving and shoplifting, according to internal affairs records. All still work for the Police Department, where they have the authority to make arrests, testify in court and patrol neighborhoods.

Officers who run afoul of the law often aren’t fired or prosecuted, the newspaper found.”