The Force Report

The story behind this story starts in the summer of 2017, when New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled that the routine forms police fill out every time they use force against a suspect were subject to the state’s public records law. Previously, we had a hard time wrestling them out of police departments during the normal course of reporting daily stories on arrests, police shootings and other incidents.

When the high court said they were unequivocally public records, a colleague had a crazy idea:

What if we requested all of them?

More than 500 records requests and 72,677 documents later, we built the largest statewide database of police use-of-force ever created. Almost immediately after our first stories dropped, state authorities promised to reform how New Jersey tracks police use of force.

The poet and the FBI

In early 2017, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the poet William Carlos Williams' FBI file. A few months later, I got a stack of documents and set out to learn how a loyalty investigation derailed his appointment to a prestigious national poetry post. 

Death and dysfunction

I spent 18 months working with a colleague investigating New Jersey's dysfunctional medical examiner system. This is what we found. 

Presidential visit II

The president of the United States came to Jersey, and I traveled by car, by Marine Osprey and by Lyft to cover it as the designated local press pooler. 

Overturned

This summer, I took a 4,000-word deep dive into the case of two Paterson, New Jersey men who say they falsely confessed to a crime they didn't commit. In September, citing new DNA and other evidence uncovered by a pair of innocence groups, a judge gave the two men a new trial. 

Behind bars

I spent six months digging into the case of a corrections officer who was fired after an internal investigation found he had sexually abused multiple inmates at New Jersey's women's prison but was never charged with a crime. 

Show your work

Every year, the Harvard Nieman Foundation's NiemanLab asks "some of the smartest people in journalism and digital media what they think is coming in the next 12 months." I contributed this piece imploring my fellow reporters to show their work. 

The pig farmer who would be president

Around Election Day 2016, I dug into the archives to tell the story of the colorful New Jersey pig farmer who was a perennial candidate for office in the middle of the 20th century, pledging to put an end to "piggy deals" in Washington.  

Right to remain silent

In 2016, I found out about an attorney who filed suit against the New Jersey State Police after she claimed a pair of troopers cuffed her and threw her in a holding cell for refusing to answer questions during a traffic stop. I went right to the video tape, filing an Open Public Records Act request for the dashboard video of the stop. The video backed up the woman's claims and drew national attention after we published excerpts showing the troopers arresting her and then telling her she had "the right to remain silent." 

More than a year later, the state settled the case for $30,000. They admitted no wrongdoing, but the lawyer got a letter conceding she had been arrested without cause and a State Police spokesman told me the troopers received additional training. 

Among the dead

Aside from journalism, I have a little bit of a background in anthropology, having studied it in college and worked on a couple of archaeological digs. So it was very gratifying to dust off those skills and spend some time with the New Jersey State Police's forensic anthropologist for this profile. 

Wreck of the Binghamton

Around 2014, I filed a Freedom Information Act Request with the FBI after learning about the tragic history of a ferry boat rotting on a mudflat next to a Trader Joe's parking lot in Edgewater, New Jersey. It took a while, but the result was this piece for Inside Jersey magazine: a true story of  history, murder and decay. 

Presidential visit

In November 2015, I covered then-President Barack Obama's visit to Newark, New Jersey to discuss prisoner re-entry and criminal justice reform. This brief deadline story focuses on the New Jersey man who got a presidential shout-out during Obama's speech. 

My crappy iPhone shot from the speech. 

My uncle, the Jersey Devil.

Another piece for Inside Jersey magazine, this one tells the story of a New Jersey man descended from the Leeds family, which has for centuries been associated with the Garden State's own cryptid, the Jersey Devil. Two skeptics head into the pine barrens in search of a monster neither believes actually exists. 

Their last resort

This two-part series was the result of a yearlong review of trial transcripts, police records and evidence gathered by the Last Resort Exoneration Project, which is trying to free two men serving life for a 1995 double murder in Camden, New Jersey. In September 2017, a judge denied their motions for a new trial, but the legal group plans to appeal to a higher court.