Hearst Newspapers did a national project that looked at the frequency in which school staff use restraints and seclusion on students. Restraints can be techniques ranging from a physical hole to using chairs or straps to confine a student, usually in the midst of a behavioral crisis. Seclusion involves using small rooms or other spaces to enclose a student in crisis in a small space.

The team aimed to assess judges’ roles in deciding protection orders and domestic violence cases, what those factors were and the altering consequences for people involved.

Invisible Institute compiled a database of complaints against police officers and use of force reports in cities outside of Chicago across Illinois. The initial database has 7,000 records from the City of Champaign, Illinois and Urbana, Illinois and is geared toward both the public and journalists. The nonprofit worked with local journalists to both build the database and report stories based on the records obtained. This was modeled after work the group has done with public records regarding police in Chicago.

The Local explored the rollout of a road safety project called Vision Zero in Toronto by analyzing the rate of injuries and deaths happening on Toronto streets due to vehicle collisions. The team surmised that in some parts of the city the rollout of the Vision Zero Road safety project over the last five years had been a failure - particularly in areas where vulnerable populations lived. The team wanted to understand why. And they wanted to investigate the role that municipal politics played in the rollout ahead of the upcoming elections.

The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer, two McClatchy newsrooms, took a deep look at North Carolina’s poultry industry that’s very lightly regulated and growing profoundly.The state has implemented a lot of rules to protect the industry from public scrutiny, including keeping the locations secret. As part of its project, the paper mapped all the poultry operations within the state, the first publicly available resource documenting where operations are.

Georgia law gives every tax commissioner the choice. When people don’t pay their taxes, the commissioners can collect the debt on their own. Or they can let investors do it for them.

Of all the counties in Georgia, possibly only one, Fulton County, takes investors up on this offer. The practice can be a quick way to shore up the county budget. But the policy comes at a cost. It puts investors in charge of a process that can end with residents losing their homes.

A WABE investigation showed the harmful results for Black homeowners.

The newsroom’s initial ambitious effort to scrutinize the prison complaint system and the lack of independent scrutiny over inmate complaints. This ended up yielding an interim story about an ongoing 5, 6, 7-months plus lockdown and deteriorating conditions within the prison as well as medical neglect within the prison. And that led to further reporting and further discoveries about lockdown conditions at additional prisons across Wisconsin that hadn't been publicly reported.

Deadly synthetic opioids like fentanyl have led to an increase in nonfatal and fatal overdoses nationwide. In Wyoming alone, health officials reported 93 people dying from drug overdoses in 2022 — 48 involving fentanyl. Millions of dollars, meanwhile, are pouring into counties and towns to help confront the crisis, but access to vital information that could inform how to use those resources remains limited.

In its four-part series Withheld, WyoFile looked into what data the state collects and why it doesn’t always make it into the hands of local decision-makers and harm reduction groups.