Wisconsin Watch Media Partners Center (https://partners.wisconsinwatch.org/post-type/audio/)
On this week’s episode of Precious Lives, a two-year project examining gun violence among young people in the Milwaukee area and statewide, reporters Kate Golden and Sean Kirkby visit the Madison area’s Allied Drive Boys and Girls Club to ask children what they know about guns. The reporters found that nearly all of the young people they talked to had some level of experience with guns.
Center reporters Kate Golden and Taylor Chase and artist Jacob Berchem talk about their recent experiment in animating the news.
In 2012, a federal appeals court ruled that the village of Palatine, Illinois, may have violated the act by leaving parking tickets, which included personal information, on the windshields of motorists. Some Wisconsin police departments, instructed by their insurers, began redacting personal information from police reports. No other state — not even Illinois, where the Palatine case occurred — adopted this interpretation.
Walker, a possible presidential contender, says this extraordinary spending owes to extraordinary circumstances, like the opposition he faced from unions and others. Absent these factors, “my guess is, at least in the gubernatorial election, I doubt you’re ever going to see something that high again.”
Reporter Alison Dirr just finished a yearlong internship with us, during which she covered the sprawling beat of Wisconsin’s fast-growing frac sand industry. We talk about that in the latest podcast. And below the audio link, further reflections from Dirr. Also, we now have music for the podcast. Alison Dirr: After a year as WisconsinWatch’s frac sand beat reporter, I’m leaving with a real appreciation of the complexity and nuance of this controversy.
About this series
The Center’s Nora G. Hertel teamed up with Gilman Halsted of Wisconsin Public Radio on “Rethinking Sex Offenders,” a three-day series examining Wisconsin’s changing methods of dealing with sexually violent persons. Find stories, audio, photos and data at this page: Project: Rethinking Sex Offenders. Involuntary commitment for crimes not (yet) committed. The men of Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center, known as “sexually violent persons,” have a strange in-between status. They are in treatment, learning to control their impulses so they can eventually be released.
Today we’re continuing our new occasional podcast series with a conversation between the Center’s Kate Golden and freelancer Jake Harper, about his recently published piece showing that over the past decade, Wisconsin Supreme Court justices tended to favor clients whose attorneys had donated to their campaigns, and recused themselves from just 2 percent of cases involving attorney donors.