In this week’s FOIA round-up, calendars and emails reveal communication between Trump administration officials and corporate executives in a mining project, a contract with a private pretrial services firm raises questions about the role of for-profit companies in the legal system, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention records reveal that rates of people detained with criminal records has decreased in the past couple of years. Also, a Supreme Court ruling is bad news for people seeking government records pertaining to private entities.

In July of 2016, following a series of high-profile police shootings, Black Lives Matter protests erupted in cities all over the country. Some local police departments, ostensibly fearing for the safety of both protestors and officers, reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for help in monitoring upcoming demonstrations. According to documents recently obtained by MuckRock, the FBI provided assistance in the form of social media surveillance and on the ground threat monitoring.

As e-scooter companies chose to ask for forgiveness, not permission while setting up shop across the country, cities worked quickly to pass regulations. MuckRock surveyed the different approaches they took.

Legislative bodies in four states have made themselves exempt from public record laws. Despite their roles in literally enacting those laws, they are not held to the same standards of transparency as the rest of the governmental bodies in those states.

Some researchers in the JFK assassination community are aware of the fact that one of the doctors that treated Jack Ruby was none other than Louis Jolyon West, a figure equally infamous for allegedly killing an elephant with LSD and for his work in MKULTRA - the Central Intelligence Agency’s infamous interrogation, hypnosis, and mind control program.

In recent years many states have begun to to reform civil asset forfeiture, by either reducing the percentage of money police are allowed to keep, or reducing the number of situations in which assets are allowed to be seized. While some of these efforts have been more successful than others, a practice called Equitable Sharing continues to undercut these efforts and keep the worst excesses of police seizure alive.

On April 20, 1995, just one day after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the received a tip from the unlikeliest source - Dr. Ed May, head of the CIA’s research into psychic phenomenon. May claimed one of his remote viewers had a lead on the people responsible: five Arab men and somebody named Carl.

As part of our collaboration with Campaign Zero, MuckRock requested use of force policies from the 100 largest police departments in the country, including Tulsa PD. In the wake of the recent release of the video of the shooting of Terence Crutcher, we wanted to give you a chance to read the policy yourself.

With combined revenues of over $3 billion dollars, it’s easy enough to point to GEO Group and CCA as fueling the private incarceration industry. But between their prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers, youth residential centers, and community corrections facilities, there are now 151 communities complicit across the country, where local cooperation has been necessary to the expansion of private prisons.

The expansion of private - and public - prisons across the U.S. helps illustrate the tangle created when social and economic needs come into conflict.