Berkeley Law alumna wins Pulitzer for police dog reporting

By Andrew Cohen  Berkeley Law graduate Abbie VanSickle '11 was the lead reporter of a year-long investigation into injuries caused by police dog bites that received a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. VanSickle works for The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization launched in 2014 that focuses on urgent issues within America's criminal justice system. The Marshall Project, which garnered its second Pulitzer Prize, collaborated on the initiative with AL.com, IndyStar, and the Invisible Institute. Their joint series "Mauled: When Police Dogs Are Weapons, " revealed how police dogs bite thousands of people every year in the United States, resulting in serious injuries and sometimes death. The series also won the Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability from the White House Correspondents' Association. "I was surprised that there was no national regulation or tracking of how these dogs were trained and how they were used to bite people," VanSickle says. "At a time when our country is focused on examining police use of force, I thought it was important to understand and examine how officers used dogs." VanSickle says a reporter for AL.com, Challen Stephens, contacted The Marshall Project after noticing a troubling pattern of police dog violence in Alabama.  "I then started looking nationally to try and understand how the dogs were used, who was injured, and how often," VanSickle says.