Public records law is making headlines this week with new legislation on the horizon. States across the nation are looking to revise, change, and add new directives that will affect records requesters in their state and across the nation.

As part of a project to to shed light on how domestic violence is still treated differently from other violent crimes, we requested domestic violence response policies for state police departments in all 50 states. Today, we’re looking at North Dakota, where victims can be arrested, kicked out of their homes for, or even lose their children because they had the misfortune of being abused.

MuckRock asked all 50 states for a copy of the data frame that they use to track pregnancy-related deaths, in order to figure out if every department is using a similar system, or even tracking the same information. Spoiler alert: they’re all doing their own thing.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Curtis Waltman was able to return to the Dakotas as part of his ongoing project on the impact of police militarization. Here’s a short travelogue of what he heard, saw, and did.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Curtis Waltman was able to return to the Dakotas as part of his ongoing project on the impact of police militarization. Here’s a short travelogue of what he heard, saw, and did.

Looking to build off our reporting on the National Sheriffs’ Association and their help with linking North Dakota law enforcement with the public relations firms Delve and Off the Record Strategies during the #NoDAPL protests, we filed a request with the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, which took on a central role in law enforcement’s response to Standing Rock. Their reply was shocking: over nine thousand documents were responsive, resulting in a bill of over $19,000.

This Sunday, I will board a plane and fly to Bismarck, North Dakota once again. I am asking readers of MuckRock to contribute either their own voices to my research, or to connect me with folks in either of the Dakotas that may be willing to speak with me - particularly people who live either on Reservations or are connected to the Indigenous communities that protested for their water source and their continued survival.

State Departments of Corrections nationwide are regularly taken to court by employees and inmates, and returns from an initial round of MuckRock requests begin to provide some insight into how prevalent those conflicts are.

Flimsy threat assessments issued by North Dakota fusion center regarding the Standing Rock protests reinforce much of the criticsim that’s been leveled against fusions over the last decade and a half: namely, that fusion centers are not very good at their job, do not produce intelligence which is actionable or particularly useful, and are instead used to gain intelligence about activist groups, and members of the public who are not a crime risk, violating their civil liberties for basically no reason at all.

While a release-and-monitor system can provide relief to those awaiting trial, overcrowded prisons, and families hopeful for their their loved ones’ returns, the charges being transferred to inmates and their support networks are sometimes comparably destructive.