ELON COLLEGE – – Jo Craven, a 1985 graduate of Elon College, was recognized with the 1999 Pulitzer Prize board’s Gold Award for public service for her work on an investigative series that appeared in The Washington Post. The award, which is often called journalism’s highest honor, was announced April 12.
The five-part series, “Deadly Force,” which was the result of nearly a year’s work by a team of 15 reporters, computer analysts, graphic artists and editors, examined the unusually high rate of police shootings in the District of Columbia. The series appeared in November.
“It was her idea that led to the production of the series,” said Marilyn Thompson, investigative news deputy editor at the Washington Post.
A database manager, Craven came to the newspaper in October 1997 from the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting with a story idea she wanted to pursue. She had found out that the FBI collects – but doesn’t publish – statistics on justifiable homicide by police nationwide.
By using computer data and other reporting methods, the paper found that District of Columbia police killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other big-city U.S. police force. The investigation also identified a pattern of shootings that involved reckless and indiscriminate gunplay by officers with insufficient training and little oversight.
“It really is grand to have a Pulitzer and be recognized. But to know that you affected the community – that’s a powerful thing,” Craven said
Since the series ran last year, District of Columbia Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey has doubled the number of hours officers must spend to re-qualify for their handguns, adding more than 100,000 officer-hours of use-of-force training.
Craven left the Washington Post earlier this month. She will teach this summer at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where she received a master’s degree in journalism in 1997.
While a student at Elon majoring in English and journalism, Craven was editor of The Pendulum, the student newspaper. After graduation she worked for the Burlington Times-News as a reporter. In 1989 she began working for the Durham Sun and later the Durham Herald-Sun. She left that paper to attend graduate school.
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