This data-driven story looks at how after school shootings around the country, and two last year in particular—Parkland, Florida, (Feb. 14) and Santa Fe, Texas (May 18)— schools in Texas started taking an increasingly harder line against students who threaten violence, including criminal referrals that advocates say can harm students and do nothing to increase school safety. Texas Juvenile Justice Department data analyzed showed that more students were charged with making terroristic threats in 2018, than any year since 2013.

This front-page story I reported on debunked the idea proposed by many politicians and law enforcement officials that “crisis intervention training” (CIT) will decrease police shootings of people with mental illness. Having scraped data on police shootings, interviewing victims, mental health advocates, and most importantly those law enforcement officials who had devised the CIT program, my reporting found that CIT, as a remedy to reduce excessive force is counterproductive when police departments train their entire force. CIT is built on a specialist model made for only those officers who volunteer for the program.

In Dallas County, Texas, ordinary folks accused of crimes have their bail set behind closed doors — without any family, lawyers, social workers or journalists present. I reported on this story after obtaining video footage of these never before seen bail hearings. The tapes showed in most cases that the encounter between the judge and the accused lasted no more than 15 seconds. I wrote about these hearings through looking at a class action lawsuit that is trying to challenge this practice.

To understand what life is like for undocumented New Yorkers and their loved ones, the Marshall Project and New York Magazine contacted more than 100 people around the city — immigrants, lawyers, and advocates. Along with reporting on various aspects of the package, I also featured Jasdeep Mangat, a physician who works at Rikers Island. He volunteers his time in New York-area ICE detention facilities and over a series of interviews described to me in detail his experiences of how he works with asylum seekers and records their evidence of abuse and torture.

Wrote a first-person essay with Kimberly Davoren, a former correctional officer, who spoke to me about her relationship with Dana, who was suicidal, and incarcerated at Bedford hills, a maximum-security New York women’s prison. Wrote this essay after a series of interviews with Davoren and obtaining the final report from the New York State Commission of Corrections discussing Dana’s suicide.

Keeping Culinary Traditions Alive In Little Pakistan

Bklyner I Multi-Media Package Producer