Since 2009, the Louisiana Department of Insurance has recorded 247 complaints against bail enforcement agents, also called bounty hunters. The list of reasons given on the spreadsheet provided indicate that the wide range of problems that exist in an industry notorious free of oversight, and range from abusive behavior to outright theft.

In recent years many states have begun to to reform civil asset forfeiture, by either reducing the percentage of money police are allowed to keep, or reducing the number of situations in which assets are allowed to be seized. While some of these efforts have been more successful than others, a practice called Equitable Sharing continues to undercut these efforts and keep the worst excesses of police seizure alive.

In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, MuckRock will be continuing our coverage of the American Indian Movement and other Native American activist groups. In typical MuckRock fashion, this involves mainly FBI files.

A request was intended to uncover which local and state law enforcement agencies were using federal training centers produced a long list of course offerings - and a long black bar where the agencies’ names should be.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism was able to return to the Dakotas as part of his ongoing project on the impact of police militarization. Here’s a short travelogue of what he heard, saw, and did.