Fines not paid by out-of-state violators

Gregory Korte of The Cincinnati Enquirer analyzed nearly 100,000 parking tickets issued in Cincinnati last year, finding that "Kentucky violators rarely pay anything at all, because the office responsible for collecting fines doesn't trace out-of-state license plates. That resulted in an out-of-state collection rate of just 2.5 percent, compared to 87.9 percent overall." Fines for parking infractions increased in 2005.

Steve Myers of the Mobile Register reveals the existence of hundreds of court cases where convictions were removed from the public record. "The practice of expunging records came to the forefront recently due to the case of Mobile County school board President David Thomas, who was arrested for drunken driving in 1998. Before he was ever scheduled to appear in court, a Mobile municipal judge ordered that Thomas stay out of trouble for a year and that the DUI record be expunged. The file was held from public view until recently, when the Mobile Register learned of its existence and asked that it be opened. Hundreds of other expunged city cases - 268 last year alone, according to police - remain closed and are the subject of a lawsuit filed by the Register." The practice appears to happen much less frequently in the state courts.

Paul Goodsell and Lynn Safranek of the Omaha World-Herald examined 911 calls between 2000 and 2004 to find that "police took longest to respond to west Omaha calls. East of I-680, it took an average of 6 minutes and 31 seconds last year for the first officer to arrive on the highest priority calls. West of I-680, the average time was 8:28. The difference held true for priority two calls, which are less urgent and far more numerous. In the east, the average response time was about 11 minutes. In the west, 14 minutes." The gap between east and west widened in 2004 compared to earlier years.

Ron Menchaca and Glenn Smith of the Charleston Post and Courier investigated South Carolina's agency that oversees law enforcement, finding "endemic failures in the state's system for tracking police officers that allow problem cops to keep their badges despite histories of misconduct and even criminal behavior... Until three years ago, the state turned a blind eye toward misconduct, allowing police departments to hire virtually whomever they wanted. Being charged with serious crimes such as manslaughter, kidnapping and criminal domestic violence didn't stop some cops from finding law enforcement work in South Carolina." A second story shows how problem cops keep getting hired in South Carolina, while a third details how budget cuts have hampered the state's ability to police its own police.

Michael Montgomery of American Radioworks spent five months investigating following inmates at staff at Pelican Bay State Prison in California. He found that prison gangs are controlling crime "far outside prison walls and across the country." Some of the gang leaders were already serving life sentences and are now facing prosecution for crimes committed outside of the prison walls, while they were incarcerated.

Michelle Roberts of The Oregonian found that warnings about abusive behavior by state parole officer Michael Lee Boyles went unheeded for years, and Oregon officials acted only after the suicide of a young man supervised by Boyles. "State officials received repeated and detailed warnings from a family raising concerns about Boyles and his behavior with another boy on his caseload. The warnings, received and responded to at a high level within the juvenile department, were earlier and more detailed than previously known. Top juvenile department officials promised to investigate Boyles, according to a letter sent to the family, and to remove the child in question from his caseload. But documents show neither happened."

Andrew Tilghman of the Houston Chronicle analyzed local court data to show that "residents of Harris County's predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods are up to seven times more likely to show up for jury duty than those in the county's lower-income, mostly minority neighborhoods." The paper used the area's more than 140 ZIP codes to divide up juror pools, finding that "the 10 ZIP codes with the lowest turnout, all below 10 percent, have populations that are predominantly Hispanic or black. Those areas had a median income of $29,636."

Karisa King and Kelly Guckian of the San Antonio Express-News analyzed 12 months' of traffic and pedestrian police stops, finding that "blacks were more than three times as likely as whites to face certain types of police searches. Yet police found contraband in the searches at about the same rate for both races, a finding that civil rights groups said shows the disparate treatment was unwarranted." The data, from 2002, show that "San Antonio police stop minority and white drivers at rates that are roughly similar to their share of the population."

Jerry Mitchell of The (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger reports that the Hinds County judicial system "at times resembles an elephant balancing on toothpicks. A yearlong investigation by The Clarion-Ledger has uncovered many long-term problems that have not been addressed." The county had fewer prosecutors and fewer indictments in 2004 than similar-sized cities. "Between 1998 and 2003, the percentage of dismissed cases increased from one in five to one in three. That includes dismissals, inactive and remanded to files. That means if a suspect is indicted today in Hinds County, he has a one in three chance of seeing his charges go away."

Mike Hoyem of The (Fort Myers) News-Press has a new twist on Florida land deals: the use of phony deeds to sell land owned by dead people. "Forged signatures, faked notarizations, phony witnesses and easy access to land records via the Internet are robbing the dead and their relatives of land as property values in Lee County skyrocket. And the fraud could cause big problems for the people who are buying the properties." The paper posted copies of fake deeds on its site, and state and federal authorities are investigating the scam.