More backward than Mississippi?

When I worked as a crime reporter in South Carolina, I was used to reading through ALL police incident reports. Some information was redacted (such as witness names in sensitive investigations) but not much. The default was always on openness as it was the public who paid for the police and in whose name they [...]

YRTK is expanding

I have not always been as diligent as I would like with this blog or answering readers’ queries and correspondence. Apologies for that, but it’s been difficult doing all this on my own plus trying to run some sort of viable career. But all that is changing.
YRTK now has two new people working to [...]

Local Papers and crime data

A fear of violent crime is a common enough headlines so it is understandable that the public should have questions about the effectiveness of British law enforcement.
Since the FOIA, it has been possible to request figures about crime and policing and many local newspapers are doing just that.  The Sunderland Echo made an FOI request [...]

Article: council audits

Get your nose stuck into the council’s books
The Big Issue, August 2008
Government bureaucrats spend a lot of money telling us what they wants us to know but very little on what we actually want to know, namely how they spend our money.
I discovered this first hand after putting MPs’ rhetoric to the test in relation [...]