By Gavin Off
Tulsa World I drive by an elementary school on my way to work every day. More than once there’s been a police cruiser idling in the school’s parking lot with lights flashing and the officer standing nearby. Although those incidents never involved a major crime, on several occasions this year the Tulsa World has chronicled arrests at schools. In January, police arrested an 18-year-old man found with a stun gun, two samurai swords and six knives in his car in a high school parking lot.

David Cay Johnston, author and journalist, and Leonard Downie Jr. of The Washington Post won seats on the IRE Board of Directors at the 2009 IRE Conference in Baltimore. (See voting results online)

Ron Koziol, a co-founder of Investigative Reporters and Editors and a member of the Arizona Project team, died Saturday, June 13, of congestive heart failure. He was 74. Koziol was a longtime police reporter at the Chicago Tribune. In 1975 he helped found IRE, and he was a member of the group of reporters who went to Phoenix following the murder of reporter, and fellow IRE founder, Don Bolles. The team’s mission was to complete the investigation Bolles was conducting into organized crime and land fraud.

The investigation is about the use of Tasers by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national police force with a storied history that does most of the front-line policing in the Western provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. In the latest installment, we analyzed the 2008 data that we compiled from information from the force's 2008 Taser-use forms. We determined that there were at least 16 instances (we were being ultra conservative) in which the police used Tasers on someone five times or more, and in most of those instances the person was unarmed.