The state’s crackdown on habitual criminals was fueled by a Fresno father whose daughter had been murdered.
Amid another debate over California’s three strikes law, never-before-released inmate profiles show a high number of substance abusers but much fewer prisoners with high-risk “criminal thinking” scores.
Police officers at the Office of Protective Services, the in-house force at California's five board-and-care institutions, are among the state government's most proficient users of overtime. The data below documents every sworn peace officer employed by the Office of Protective Services from 2006 through 2011.
More than 17,000 local agencies across the country have taken advantage of the Defense Department’s equipment giveaways. California police accumulated more equipment in 2011 than any other year in the program’s two-decade history.
Five institutions in California house nearly 1,800 patients with developmental disabilities, including those with cerebral palsy, mental retardation and severe autism. This population is at a high risk for physical abuse and injury. The Office of Protective Services and the state Department of Public Health investigate allegations of patient abuse and unexplained injuries at the centers, which are located in Sonoma, Los Angeles, Orange, Tulare and Riverside counties.
Data provided by Bay Area Rapid Transit covering calendar year 2006 through October 2011 show a 20 percent increase in the number of bike theft reports, with eight stations – Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre, Dublin/Pleasanton, Ashby, Fremont, North Berkeley, MacArthur and Concord – accounting for half of the thefts. The Walnut Creek and neighboring Pleasant Hill stations are the top targets for bike thefts. The two stations accounted for more than 430 thefts of bicycles or bicycle parts, nearly 17 percent of the thefts in the entire system.
Many schools in California are near fault lines or other earthquake hazards. That doesn't mean they'll collapse in a quake, but many school construction projects have failed to follow basic safety standards. California Watch uncovered about 20,000 projects that lack Field Act certification. Is your school one of them?
The project started out as a simple Loma Prieta quake anniversary story by a solitary reporter. Nineteen months later, nearly four dozen reporters, producers, and freelancers had joined the project. Learn more about how we reported this series.
Local governments received grants for drunken driving enforcement, which pay police officer overtime at sobriety checkpoints. The funds come from money the U.S. Department of Transportation provides to the state for roadway safety. The grants detailed below pay for checkpoints year-round. You can sort by clicking on any category header below.
Sobriety checkpoints are generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue for California law enforcement agencies, cities and counties. Police are far more likely to impound vehicles from unlicensed drivers than arrest a driver for a DUI. The Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley has been able to determine how often police officers are arresting people for a DUI and how often they are impounding cars.
