After an 11-year-old Navajo girl was kidnapped, her family and friends sprang into action to find her. Why did it take so long for law enforcement to join them?

The many problems with a common forensic technique called “pattern-matching” — comparisons of bite marks, tool marks, hairs, shoe prints, tire tracks, or fingerprints.

How cops use arcane pedestrian laws to racially profile people in Jacksonville, Florida.

There’s no telling how many guns there are in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.

Davon Mayer was a smalltime dealer in west Baltimore who made an illicit deal with local police. Then they turned on him.

Bobby Hadid joined the NYPD after 9/11, to protect his new country. But when he questioned the force’s tactics, his life began to erode.

The story of the “Barefoot Bandit,” a teenage fugitive on the run.

The story of September 26, 2014, the day 43 Mexican students went missing.

An anatomy of a failure.

A federal judge resents the harshness of mandatory drug sentences.

From 2009 to 2014, police in Florida shot 827 people. Many of these incidents were avoidable and unnecessary.

The rise and fall of the Seven-Seven - stationed in the war zone of 1980’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn - and how an idealistic young recruit became part of cash-snatching, drug-reselling, renegade clique of cops

We like to believe that the blame for wrongful convictions falls on individuals: the racist prosecutor, the crooked cop. It doesn’t always work that way.

Baltimore’s state’s attorney gambled that prosecuting six officers for the death of Freddie Gray would help heal her city. She lost much more than just the case.

The perilous existence of confidential informants.

The state attorney, who prosecuted Marissa Alexander and failed to convict George Zimmerman, has put hundreds of children behind bars.

Uncovering Baltimore’s secret aerial surveillance program.

The stolen youth of Lorenzo Montoya.

A murder case in Los Angeles, cold since the late ’80s, heats up thanks to breakthroughs in forensic science and leads detectives to “one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.”

The search for the world’s most elusive skyjacker.

An interview with Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown.

Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?

Ardelia Ali was raped in 1995. Twenty years later, her attacker was convicted.

A Montana sheriff and a manhunt in the mountains.

Today, Robert Dowlut is the National Rifle Association’s top lawyer. Fifty years ago, he was convicted of murdering a woman with a handgun.