The Scoop

Jason Grotto of the Miami Herald evaluated Florida’s law regulating sexual predators to show that “seven years after the law’s passage, Florida’s program for screening, confining and treating sexual offenders who pose the greatest threat to women and children is failing.” The paper analyzed data on more than 100,000 sexual crimes and reviewed thousands of [...]

Phillip Reese of the Sacramento Bee used Census data and maps to report that “more than 150,000 of Sacramento County’s most vulnerable residents - the elderly, the poor and the disabled - live in areas prone to substantial flooding, and local officials acknowledge they don’t know whether they could quickly get them to safe ground.” [...]

Lisa Hammersly Munn, Binyamin Appelbaum and Ted Mellnik of the Charlotte Observer have a three-part series on mortgage foreclosures, finding that “home loan failures have more than quadrupled in Mecklenburg County since 1999. More foreclosures are filed here, per person, than any other county in the state. On average, 11 Mecklenburg houses are sold in [...]

Jim Miller and Gail Wesson of the Riverside Press-Enterprise used state data to show that “at least half of California’s urban areas would become off-limits to registered sex offenders under a proposed ballot measure championed by Gov. Schwarzenegger and some Inland lawmakers.” Nearly 75 percent of Los Angeles would be off-limits, and nearly 70 percent [...]

Leslie Eaton and Ron Nixon of the New York Times used federal data to show that the pace of homeowner loans in the Gulf Coast is lagging. “The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government’s main disaster recovery program for both businesses and homeowners, has processed only a third of the 276,000 home [...]