A recent USA Today article highlights the dangers law enforcement officers face when they blow the whistle. A follow-up opinion piece provides more insight into the investigation into police whistleblower retaliation and the investigative reporters’ takeaways from the whistleblowers’ stories.
The original investigative piece aimed “to quantify, for the first time, the extent of the problem and how it impacts the whistleblowers,” the opinion piece states. Author Nicole Carroll describes the challenges that the reporters faced in getting records about whistleblower complaints, finding little success in asking police agencies for documentation. “They cited privacy issues and ongoing investigations or just ignored the requests,” Carroll writes. To find answers, reporters instead went to whistleblowers themselves and asked about the other avenues down which they pursued blowing the whistle.
From there, the reporters found that whistleblowers turned to a variety of agencies and organizations outside of their own departments to make their complaints. USA Today requested records from these places, which include state labor boards, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, state police, etc. However, Carroll writes that “[m]any fought the requests, and we fought back for the public’s right to know. We sent reporters to seven states to interview police officers, victims of misconduct and grieving families.”
Ultimately, the reporters “found 300 cases in the past decade where an...
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