FREELANCE INVESTIGATIVE DATA JOURNALIST
DATA ANALYSIS
I pursued records for months from state health departments across the country that demonstrated the rise in spending on the opioid treatment drug Vivitrol. In Colorado alone, taxpayers spent 6,500% more on the drug from 2013 to 2018. The story was published in May 2019 and won a national 2020 Edward R. Murrow Award.
unconstitutional prison labor
An analysis of Colorado court data also reveals prosecutors have been steadily charging more people with bias-motivated crimes, which can include harassment and assault. But only 32% of the time, those kind of charges resulted with an actual conviction according to the analysis from years 2014 to 2018.
I used SQL and Excel to conduct this query. These conclusions were used in a multi-part series on the status of hate and hate groups in Colorado published in November 2019.
I found that 71% of those arrested during five nights of racial protests live near Denver - which is counter to the chief's claims that outsiders caused the trouble. We wanted to fact-check an assertion from the chief of Denver police.
This a solid example of how my data abilities can be used on a quick-turn basis. Within days, I built a database with arrest data from Denver police that I cleaned and expanded using public records like voter registration and deeds. The piece aired in June 2020.
After hearing numerous complaints and viewer questions about the escalator, elevator and moving walkway outages at Denver's airport, I used SQL to run the numbers.
Outages have increased across all three types. have all increased year over year since 2015. In 2019 alone, the airport averaged more than 34 outages a day among all three mechanisms -- that includes an average of about 18 escalators, 11 moving walkways and five elevators per day. This investigation aired in Februrary 2020. In addition to the broadcast portion, I created multiple info-graphics to visualize the data on the 9News website.