A series of bright orange evidence markers with black numbers are placed on a dark, wet road, indicating evidence at a crime scene. The markers are arranged near a vehicle with a visible license plate, and pieces of debris or evidence are scattered around the markers. Yellow police tape is partially visible, draped near the markers.
Evidence markers lay scattered across the ground near the Vallejo police killing of William Heinze on March 20, 2013. In 2021, Vallejo police and a senior city attorney illegally destroyed evidence in the case, which Open Vallejo uncovered in a public records lawsuit more than a year later. (Obtained by Open Vallejo through a California Public Records Act request)

Open Vallejo is a finalist for one of the nation’s most prestigious journalism awards for its investigative series into how the city of Vallejo systematically and illegally hid killings by police from public scrutiny.

The four-year-old nonprofit newsroom is a finalist for the 2024 Scripps Howard Journalism Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment for a collection of articles detailing how Vallejo illegally destroyed evidence in multiple police killings, as well as how the city misclassified multiple in-custody deaths as accidents and obfuscated the killing of a minor through the misapplication of juvenile privacy laws.

The Scripps Howard Journalism Awards, one of the nation’s foremost journalism competitions, honors works across multiple media, including television, radio, print newspapers, and online news outlets. The judges — a panel of veteran journalists and media leaders — selected this year’s finalists from 775 entries across 14 categories. The Fund will present $170,000 in prize money to the winning news organizations and journalists.

The other finalists for the Distinguished Service to the First Amendment Award are the Hearst Connecticut Media Group, for an investigation into how Bridgeport, Connecticut, ignored open record laws, and The Kansas City Star and The Wichita Eagle, for their combined coverage of an illegal police raid on a local newspaper. The police chief who ordered the raid resigned weeks later and is now facing a felony charge in connection with the incident.

The winners of the Scripps Howard Journalism Awards will be announced during a special program airing at 5 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, Oct. 20, on Scripps News.

Geoffrey King is the executive editor of Open Vallejo. Prior to founding Open Vallejo, Geoffrey worked as an attorney and journalist focused on free expression, open government, press freedom and privacy. He is a proud native of Vallejo, California.