You don’t often hear from us apart from our daily neighborhood alerts.
We’re writing today to ask you a special favor. Our friends at Spot.Us and OakBook Magazine are pitching a special investigative report on the difficulties of the Oakland Police Department: on any given day, the department has an absentee rate of 30 percent. Morale is in the cellar. The current chief has taken a leave of absence, and from the outside, it’s not clear who is running things.
Reporter and OakBook editor Alex Gronke hopes to “arrive at a deeper understanding of what ails OPD, what internal culture gives rise to the failings described above. This is not the sort of reporting that is likely to turn up evidence of concealed wrongdoing, but rather it seeks to shine a light on problems that are hiding in plain sight.”
Gronke’s pitch, Oakland Police Blues, is currently at 63% of its $1000.00 goal. Can you help push it to 100% with a small donation of $10-$25?
Normally, such investigations are funded by news organizations, but Gronke is turning to the “community funded reporting” of Spot.Us, a non-profit project of the Center for Media Change. All your donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available to all through a Creative Commons license.
Please visit Spot.Us now to learn more about this project and Alex Gronke’s pitch: http://spot.us/pitches/35