Brad_Heath

Sure. The problem is nobody really knows whether or to what extent that's true. We know who gets arrested for crimes, but there are a lot of crimes that never result in arrests. Take marijuana use as an example. We know from a lot of surveys going back more than a decade that white people and black people tend to use marijuana at about the same rate. But black people are arrested for marijuana possession at a rate four times higher than white people are.

I was surprised that, by the numbers at least, Ferguson, Mo. turns out to be pretty ordinary. We've heard a lot there from people who feel singled out by the police because of their race. But the disparity in arrest rates in Ferguson matches the national average almost exactly. It's much higher in many other cities, including some that are close by.

No threats. There were two big challenges here: First, most of the people who know about the program weren't authorized to talk about it. Some did anyway, but many didn't. Second, it's been going on for so long that some of the people who were involved in the early stages don't remember a whole lot.

Yes. Everything we write gets edited, and most of our investigative pieces are looked at by our lawyers, too. That's pretty common. (And comforting: It turns out our lawyers are actually pretty good copy editors, too.)

Also, do we have a story about a cat being rescued by a goat? That'll be huge.

The DEA disclosed the bare bones of this program in a court filing in January. But the language was pretty spare, and it was pretty clear there were details they didn't want to talk about. Just check out the redactions: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1719876-database.html#document/p2/a212333