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In one talk radio appearance after another, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan has declared that his department had eliminated the racial bias that plagued it under his former boss Joe Arpaio. As a result, he’s quick to add, a landmark racial profiling court case dictating much of what the Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff’s department does should be dismissed. “I believe we are in compliance with the court order. We’re not a racist organization, and we don’t racial profile,” he said on Phoenix-area talk radio in March 2025.  In May, he told the same radio host: “Is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office racially profiling or are they racially biased? We have documentation for well over 10 years that that is not the case.” His evidence for ending oversight stemming from Melendres v. Arpaio, the federal case whose 2013 settlement imposed parameters the department has operated under ever since, was a monthly sampling of a few dozen traffic stops. The settlement requires deputies to document eac...

They asked nicely at first.  After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who’d recently moved to Minneapolis, local law enforcement officials requested a partnership with the federal government to investigate the case, as they’d done in past shootings involving federal agents. When the Trump administration refused to cooperate, Minnesota prosecutors ratcheted up their efforts. They sent a series of strongly worded legal letters demanding evidence in the Good shooting as well as the shootings of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant who was wounded a week after Good was shot, and Alex Pretti, who was killed on Jan. 24. Still, the administration rebuffed the requests. This week, prosecutors from Hennepin County and the state of Minnesota took the next step to force the Trump administration’s hand. They filed a federal lawsuit against the departments of Homeland Security and Justice over the evidence in the ...

The mayor of Hammond, Indiana, says train company Norfolk Southern is reneging on a promise to partly finance the construction of a pedestrian overpass at a dangerous rail crossing that was the subject of a ProPublica investigation. And without the funding, he added, the project is dead. Officials began pursuing the overpass in 2023, after the news organization and its reporting partner, InvestigateTV, documented dozens of children crawling through, over and under trains that blocked them from getting to and from school in the city. Hammond is a nearby suburb of Chicago, the busiest train hub in the nation. At the time, the area served as a kind of parking lot for Norfolk Southern’s trains as they idled between two busy intersections — a growing problem in Hammond and railroad communities like it across the country as trains get longer. After publication, Norfolk Southern’s CEO at the time, Alan Shaw, called Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott to discuss solutions, including a pedestri...

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek is on the verge of giving the Portland Trail Blazers a major gift: hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to overhaul the team’s arena in an effort to keep the Blazers’ incoming owner, billionaire Tom Dundon, from moving the NBA franchise to a new city. The deal came together with little public discussion of how Oregon and other states in 2020 landed a $550 million settlement with the car loan company where Dundon built his wealth . The settlement followed an investigation into lending practices that Oregon’s then-attorney general, in a news release, described as “predatory and harmful.” Now, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica have obtained documents that reveal the role Dundon played in pushing some of the key company practices that regulators later presented as problematic. Specifically, the documents show that Dundon, as the company’s CEO, was behind what regulators called an “aggressive push” at Santander Consumer USA in 2013 to waive requirements...