IRE Radio IRE Radio

Police rely on alcohol breath tests to convict drunken drivers. But what happens when the machines they use aren’t reliable? Stacy Cowley of The New York Times looked into the problem of faulty breath test machines and found thousands of cases where the tests were thrown out. On this episode, Stacy breaks down how she discovered unreliable breath tests and the consequences they pose for real people.

EPISODE NOTES: https://www.ire.org/archives/40664

Opioid addiction is a decades-long crisis that killed roughly 47,000 people in 2017 alone, largely due to the potency of fentanyl. But despite all the warning signs, Congress didn’t pass any legislation on opioids until 2016. On this week’s episode, we’ll hear how Katie Zezima of the Washington Post tracked inaction in Congress and visited a small town in rural Massachusetts to witness the consequences firsthand.

EPISODE NOTES: ire.org/archives/40144

Investigative Reporters and Editors was formed in 1975, the year before Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was killed by a car bomb. He died days before he was scheduled to speak at IRE’s first annual conference. Now, decades after his death, the team at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com found tapes Bolles recorded before he was killed. On this special episode, we’re sharing the first installment of the their new podcast “Rediscovering: Don Bolles, A Murdered Journalist.” We hope you love it as much as we do.

EPISODE NOTES: ire.org/archives/39877

On this bonus episode, we’re sharing audio from the 2016 IRE Conference. In a session on narrative storytelling, reporters T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong explain how they wrote their Pulitzer-winning story “An Unbelievable Story of Rape”. Their reporting is the basis of a new Netflix limited series called “Unbelievable".

EPISODE NOTES: bit.ly/2PXWzLW

When protests rocked Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, few realized the tensions could be traced to a policy-based problem — local police were fining residents at abnormally high rates to fund the city’s operating budget. Mike Maciag of Governing Magazine spent a year looking into other communities reliant on fines. He found a trend that’s destabilizing governments in low-income communities across the country.

EPISODE NOTES: www.ire.org/archives/39170

When police kill civilians, the victims are often people of color. So, when Arizona Republic reporters Uriel Garcia and Bree Burkitt decided to investigate police shootings in their state, they knew their sources should be as diverse as their community. On this week’s episode, we’ll go behind the reporting to learn how they tallied police shootings, identified sources, and used data and documents to show the true scope of the problem.

EPISODE NOTES: bit.ly/2ms5dFy