California's psychiatric hospitals can be highly dangerous places, both for patients and staff. Lost work days and overtime pay are huge. But reporters looking to track down reliable data on assaults face an uphill climb.
Community Safety
A reporter who was on the scene shortly after the terror attack in San Bernardino follows up with the victims and first responders over the following year to understand how the event impacted their mental health.
Dr. Glenda Wrenn of Morehouse School of Medicine discusses narratives of recovery and how journalists can do justice to the concept of resilience in their reporting.
“We wanted to see the sun because the lights were on inside all the time. They would wake us up all the time, they wouldn’t let us sleep,” said one unaccompanied minor placed in a Texas detention center. “I wanted to cry. I thought, ‘God why am I here. Why did I come?’”
"Finding families touched by the death of a child was hard," writes Sammy Caiola of the Sacramento Bee. "And convincing them to talk to me was even harder."
A year after Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, a reporter returned to the neighborhood and spent months talking with families about how they cope with toxic levels of stress and violence.
In Florida's youth corrections system, the cycle has been long and predictable: A teen dies a preventable death. Juvenile justice administrators announce reforms and promise change. Repeat.
Despite decades of effort and millions in taxpayer money, Cleveland’s kids continue to have some of the highest rates of lead poisoning in the country. Bad housing and urban blight only compound their stress and suffering.
It’s an ongoing debate that has been given special urgency in light of recent attention to police killings of black men. When does the need to inform cross over to sensationalism?
African-American children die at more than twice the rate of other children in California's Sacramento County, a new Bee investigation finds.