About the Project
Bloomberg Law has built an investigations team focused on civil rights that combines traditional public service journalism with the industry’s best data and research tools—including AI. To uncover important stories, the team dives deep into civil rights lawsuits in the United States using large language models and other deep learning techniques, marrying traditional investigative journalism techniques with LLMs and other AI tools to dive deep into litigation records to uncover important and accurate stories that would have been nearly impossible to tell before.
For the three stories we are submitting, the team explored over 240,000 civil rights and prisoner-related complaints filed in federal district court from Jan. 1, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2024. Normally these cases are only accessible in PACER, so reporters would have to know what case they’re looking for and then go retrieve it. But the team has access to Bloomberg Law’s digital platform, which consists of a vast database of federal cases that are keyword searchable, and they harness the power of that data. With the help of our engineering teams, the team gathered and then used an LLM to summarize all federal civil rights complaints. Reporters turn those summaries into a dataset that tracked why people were filing the lawsuits, the allegations of harm, the location the harm was alleged to have occurred, and who was said to have committed it.
So far, this team produced three groundbreaking stories:
- Systemic failures in the criminal justice system have led to pregnant women accused of petty crimes being held on bail they can’t afford and trapped in isolated cells without the emergency medical care that jails are legally required to provide, saying their cries for help were ignored as they miscarried or gave birth into cell toilets or on filthy floors, sometimes with deadly consequences. This crisis is largely hidden because there is no federal mandate to track pregnancies in jails. Bloomberg Law, in partnership with NBC News, exposed these harms through a multimedia investigation, including a narrative feature, a 17-minute digital documentary, an interactive database encapsulating 54 women’s accounts.
- Children and teenagers across the country are being strip searched by school officials without their parents’ knowledge or approval and most often for minor offenses. For this story, the team found 40 federal civil rights lawsuits since 2017 claiming children were strip searched at school. More were found using news reports. The accounts are harrowing. An Ohio 7-year-old claims she was strip searched after she pocketed $3 while getting change for a teacher. The number of cases is almost certainly an undercount.
- Across the country police and ICE are using a mummy-like restraint to secure combative people from shoulders to feet with straps and buckles. Bloomberg Law identified 41 incidents where law enforcement used The Wrap on someone who died. The analysis found that officers and jail guards failed to follow the manufacturer’s instructions in 32 of the 41 deaths, according to Bloomberg Law’s analysis.
