Dead men tell no tales. Butre- porters at the Dallas Morning News know that death records can reveal patterns reflecting grave social ills. In fact the News' first com- puter assisted project showed that an "epidemic of violence" is stalk- ing Dallas' teenagers The process that led to this discovery began by sifting teen deaths out of the city-owned death ecords, which the News has on on nine-track magnetic tape.
Then teen homicides were pulled from that table, explained Allan Pusey, as- sistant projects editor at the News. "Since there were no names, only dates and data, we worked backwards from police reports, developing a list of teen homi- cides from police reports," ex- plained Pusey. Using a computerized map- ping system, this data was plotted by neighborhood and the high- risk areas defined. It was discovered that "a handful of impoverished, crime-rid- den neighborhoods accounted for the majority of teen homicides in 1989 and 1990," according to the story by reporter Bruce Tomaso.
"The result, I think, is a genu- ine balance of statistics versus hu- man experience," said Pusey. "The statistics told us a lot of surprising information we wouldn't have known without the computer. For instance, in a race-conscious city like Dallas, the virtual non-existence of cross- racial slayings came as a complete surprise." Still, Pusey has not lost touch with the human element essential to every good story and recognizes computers as part of a good reporter's toolbox.
"I think the real triumph of the series was the human suffering Bruce brought to the story," Pusey said of Tomaso's story on teen vio- lence. "I think the writing is extraor- dinary; powerful and empathetic without being maudlin. The com- puter could not and did not do that." HUD scandal The News' latest computer- assisted project helped produce a six-part update on the HUD scan- dal. The series looked at the 24 developers with the biggest HUD rehabilitation contracts.
However, that information was not conveniently located on one database, which just goes to show, "there's no way around the legwork," Pusey said. These developers and the locations of their projects were iden tified from a database obtain through a government agency, which Pusey was "not at liberty to disclose." Then reporters Craig Flournoy and Bobbi Miller contacted the local housing authorities where the projects were located.
Through the contracts at the local housing authorities they figured out exactly how much money and tax credits the developers received. Pusey also created a data- base on the size of the apartments in the developments. It turns out a lot of the units were single dwellings, which does little to help the families the HUD projects were supposed to tar- get. A further database, using information from the Inspector Gen- eral of HUD, recorded which devel opers were audited, how much t were fined and how much they actu- ally paid.
"It was dismally small," said Pusey of the amount remitted on the fines. And finally, Pusey cross-ref- erenced the list of top HUD develop- ers with FEC data available on nine- track tape. "Suprise surprise, the biggest contributions were going to those congressmen overseeing housing," said Pusey. With this information, Flournoy and Miller set out across country to see what all this meant for the tenants who had to live in those buildings.
The investigation "found that these projects enriched a handful of politically connected private devel- opers while consigning thousand families to inadequate and overpriced apartments," reported Flournoy and Miller. The two reporters investigated 95 projects completed by the top 24 "mod rehab" developers. More than 250 tenants were interviewed. Another project done by the News' involved a computerization of the civil rights data kept by every school in Dallas and helped writer Jonathan Eig produce two stories.
"We utilized the reporting from each individual school to produce a database that encompassed all the Dallas-area school systems," Pusey explained. Computer examination of this data revealed that black students in the Dallas suburbs are assigned to special education far more frequently than their white classmates. Using the same database, a second story was produced which illustrated a "wrinkle in the paddling pattern" for Dallas schools.
In other words, minority students were more likely to receive corporal punishmen than white students. "Again, I think the project would have been all but impossible without the computerization of the data," said Pusey. After these initial successes Pusey said his "worst fear and great- est joy is coming true. Everyone is thinking of projects and there is actu- ally a bottle neck." Pusey is putting together a proj- ect to join several different databases that, when combined, will provide reporters with a quick profile on a neighborhood.
Using this system, reporters will be able to plot the address they're interested in on a computerized grid mapping system. This, in turn, will correspond to census tracks. With all these databases loader onto the News' mainframe, informa- tion like crime statistics, birth and death records and census data for a particular area will be available in one package.