Brown County, Wisconsin police officers involved in seven fatal shootings since 2002

Since 2002 in Brown County, police have been involved in 11 shootings, seven of which were fatal, according to Press-Gazette Media analysis of records involving the largest departments in the state’s fourth most-populous county. That’s about one every 14 months.

Green Bay police officers have been involved in five fatal shootings since 2002, Press-Gazette analysis shows. Brown County sheriff’s deputies have been involved in four shootings — one fatal — during that period.

In police and fire departments across South Hampton Roads, a small number of employees work substantial amounts of overtime, while others receive little or no OT pay - at a time when there have been few raises.

Twenty public safety employees in South Hampton Roads each worked more than 1,000 hours of overtime in the 2013 fiscal year. At minimum, that equates to almost 60-hour weeks.

The hearing was kept quiet.

Officers with the Dobson Bike Patrol displayed a lack of respect to the homeless and immigrants in their community, keeping bulletin boards of mocking photos and signs. One officer even posed for a photo as a Nazi stormtrooper.

The hearing resulted in disciplinary action against the officers, but the department kept their misconduct quiet. Former Mesa Police Chief George Gascón said that the hearing could not be publicized because it involved personnel issues.

Experts say it's not unusual for impoverished places to have more crime and tougher cases to solve. But the Tribune found that those two factors alone don't explain what has happened in Harvey, where the competence and integrity of the department frequently come under fire.

It's a suburb that commissioned an audit that ripped its Police Department's detective work, and then promoted the head of the detective bureau.

It's a community where officers can keep their guns and badges despite questionable conduct highlighted in scandal after scandal.

Less than two dozen of Virginia’s roughly 300 law enforcement agencies filed a required drug destruction report to the state’s Board of Pharmacy in 2012, according to a report by Richmond, Va. television station WRIC.

“Since the ABC 8 News investigation first aired in February 2013, the number of law enforcement agencies complying with the drug disposal law has more than tripled—from 19 in 2012 to 60 in 2013, but stills falls significantly short of 100 percent compliance,” according to the story.

Of the 18 deaths in law enforcement custody from 2008 through 2012 in Milwaukee County, 12 were classified as suicide or natural. Officials at every level have used those rulings to absolve themselves of responsibility for prisoners' deaths, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found. In many cases, officials did not evaluate all of the circumstances surrounding the fatalities.

It took the Honolulu-based Civil Beat almost one year and $935 to get access to files on three discharged police officers. The records, which were heavily redacted, provide new insight into the case of an officer accused of raping a woman on the hood of his patrol car.

The officer’s case “illustrates how difficult it is for the public to check on police misconduct and whether police officials are effectively addressing it, including removing bad cops from the street,” the Civil Beat wrote.

Read the full story here.

The online news service has been investigating police misconduct as part of its series "In the Name of the Law.”

"The San Diego Police Department has often failed to follow its own rules regarding the collection of racial data at traffic stops, saying the community isn't concerned about racial profiling. A local black officers group, the NAACP and a city councilman disagree," the Voice of San Diego writes in its investigation. Read the full story here.

"USA TODAY examined FBI data -- which defines a mass killing as four or more victims -- as well as local police records and media reports to understand mass killings in America. They happen far more often than the government reports, and the circumstances of those killings -- the people who commit them, the weapons they use and the forces that motivate them -- are far more predictable than many might think."

Since at least 2006, Nassau County Police Department's deadly force investigators have never ruled an officer's actions unjustified, Newsday reports. 

A Nassau County police officer shot an unarmed man in the back. Another intentionally ran down an unarmed man with his squad car, costing him a leg. Still another shot an unarmed cabdriver after a night of drinking off duty.

The investigation into Nassau's use of deadly force found cases where officers fired on suspects after incorrectly believing they were armed, shot people later convicted of no crime at all, and took action that a jury would later call excessive, resulting in one civil settlement of more than $15 million.