The Eugene Weekly in partnership with a student project out of the University of Oregon started looking into the correlations between race, homeless and criminal charges. They requested data from the courts and police.
Reporter Kenny Jacoby reported this in a story about their methodology:
In May, the Eugene police declined to provide the computer data as we had requested. Instead, the police told us we would need to examine the actual paper tickets and case files — more than 37,000 of them. We would be allowed to examine the files if the police pulled each file by hand, one by one, and only if we paid the police department’s costs for providing the documents.
The bill for this service? $139,132.50.
You can check out that story here.
And you can check out the story Criminalizing Homelessness here.