California's attorney general has joined the U.S. Department of Justice and several other states in a whistleblower lawsuit against for-profit educational firm Education Management Corp. See which attorneys general in other states have launched investigations of for-profit colleges.
Dozens of community college districts in California – no more than 20 miles apart – spend millions on similar administrative costs. Find out how much money is being spent in our interactive.
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.
California has funded less than half of an $800 million program intended to repair shoddy school facilities. The Emergency Repair Program, which was born out of a landmark class-action lawsuit that sought to entitle every student to a clean, safe and functional school, should be in its final year of funding. The state's contributions to date — $338 million — have remained unchanged for the past five years.
Lavishing their largesse to legislators and political committees alike, the largest donors to California politics spent $1.25 billion from 2001 through 2011.
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.
About 1.8 million Californians – primarily Latinos – live in low-income, unincorporated communities that lack sewers, clean drinking water, sidewalks, streetlights or gutters – infrastructure known to curb public health and safety risks. The U.S. Census Bureau only tracks some of them, and federal tallies of characteristics like income often diverge markedly from more localized surveys. Without hard numbers, advocates have found it difficult to argue effectively for change.
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.
