Umansky joined ProPublica when it started in 2008. Before that, he wrote a column for Slate. Umansky has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and many others. He is also a co-founder of Document Cloud.
Spurred by a ProPublica investigation, the federal Department of Education found the evangelical school in Virginia had discouraged students from reporting rape and other crimes.
ProPublica editor-at-large Eric Umansky started investigating police oversight after an NYPD officer hit a teenager with a car in 2019. In the years since, he’s learned how police departments have undermined the promise of body-worn cameras.
The city has a long history of brutal, violent policing, but its latest approach to body-worn cameras and police oversight could serve as a national model.
After questions from ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, the New York Police Department pledged to end its practice of not sharing videos in ongoing investigations with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability. Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when officers kill.
We obtained the NYPD’s full investigation into the killing of Kawaski Trawick, including documents and audio of interviews with the officers. The records provide a rare window into how exactly a police department examines its own after a shooting.
Why are so many people now embracing demagogues? Barbara Walter, political scientist and author of “How Civil Wars Start,” tells ProPublica that the vital signs of healthy democracy are in decline around the world.
Civilian investigators found that officers engaged in serious misconduct, including hitting one boy with a car, pointing a gun at another and wrongly arresting three teens. Then the NYPD intervened.
A New York state judge said the NYPD was operating in “bad faith” when it denied requests to release body-worn camera footage from the killing of Kawaski Trawick.
The inspector general for the NYPD concludes, as ProPublica has detailed, that the police aren’t giving civilian investigators full access to body-worn camera footage.
New York City’s police oversight agency brought disciplinary charges against the officer who killed Kawaski Trawick. While the NYPD found no wrongdoing, ProPublica published footage showing it was the cops who escalated the situation.
To understand why police are so rarely held accountable for killings, you should know about Kawaski Trawick, and what didn’t happen to the officer who shot him.
Last week ProPublica cited epidemiologists saying New York was “crazy” to keep closing schools over two unlinked positive cases. This week, the city ended the rule.
Many New York City public schools have been repeatedly closed because of two positive COVID-19 tests, even without evidence of in-school spread. Experts call it “crazy.” And it’s driving me nuts.
After ProPublica detailed the lack of disclosure about protest cases by New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the agency has revealed how little progress has been made on many of the investigations.
Emails show New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board leaders discouraged staff from confronting the NYPD about a lack of cooperation on abuse investigations. The agency declined to disclose how many officers are facing misconduct charges.
On Tuesday, the 2nd Circuit rejected unions’ appeal to keep NYPD discipline records secret. ProPublica published thousands of those files last year. “The cat is not only out of the bag, it’s running around the streets,” one judge noted then.
The council has announced a package of bills to reshape the NYPD and improve officer accountability. A City Council member cited a “direct line” from ProPublica’s coverage to the proposals.
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