Policing Phoenix

Following the racially-charged Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, the journalists at ABC 15 Arizona ran an explosive series of stories demonstrating how the Phoenix Police Department had brutalized and trumped up criminal charges against scores of protestors. The investigation led to the dismissal of 39 felony cases, the retirements of high-level police officials, and the launch of a three-year U.S. Department of Justice “patterns-and-practices” investigation. Not content to stop with those results—and a well-deserved Peabody Award—the station followed up in 2024 with a 32-part series breaking down the DOJ’s damning 128-page final report, accompanied by a page-by-page analysis on its website. While the DOJ withheld names and other details from most of its findings, investigative reporters Dave Biscobing, Melissa Blasius, and their colleagues rebroadcast and contextualized harrowing video evidence of excessive force, discrimination, and rights violations, and added to the record with more stories of abuse by the nation’s fifth largest—and most deadly—city police force. For dogged investigative reporting and innovative explanatory journalism that stands to influence police practices in Phoenix and beyond for years to come, “Policing Phoenix” is honored with a Peabody.