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by Stephen Engelberg ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches , a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. One thing I’ve learned over more than three decades of work as an investigative editor and reporter: There’s plenty of waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. The problem is finding it. Some things that look suspicious at first glance make sense when you understand how a system really works. And that understanding doesn’t come easily. If you hope to identify serious shortcomings in an agency, ones that add up to many millions or even billions of dollars, you have to immerse yourself in the intricacies of, say, how Medicare pays for prescription drugs. Steeping yourself in such minutiae is inevitably a trial-and-error process in which insights emerge only after journeys down multiple initially promising avenues that lead to dead ends. That really helps ex...

by Eric Umansky ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Lawmakers and advocates have slammed New York City Mayor Eric Adams and called for changes in the wake of ProPublica’s investigation into a secretive, problematic police unit led by allies of the mayor . ProPublica found that the mayor championed the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team despite a pattern of aggressive and often abusive policing flagged by department officials. An officer in the unit killed a motorcyclist after swerving his police car into him. A team commander punched and kicked a driver in the head. And another commander shoved a man into a car window after the man complained about being stopped for no apparent reason. Two of the unit’s founders, who are close to the mayor, have their own problematic records. One, Chief of Department John Chell, once shot a man in the back, killing him. Wh...