Cheryl W. Thompson
Cheryl W. Thompson is an investigative correspondent for NPR.
Prior to joining NPR in January 2019, she spent 22 years at The Washington Post, where she wrote extensively about law enforcement, political corruption and guns, and was a White House correspondent during Barack Obama's first term. Her investigative series that traced the guns used to kill more than 500 police officers in the U.S. earned her an Emmy, a National Headliner, an IRE, a White House News Photographers Association and other awards. In 2015, her reporting found that nearly one person a week died in the U.S. after being Tasered by police. The story was part of a year-long series on police shootings in the U.S. that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In 2017, her examination of Howard University Hospital revealed myriad problems with the storied facility, including that it had the highest rate of death lawsuits per bed than the five other D.C. hospitals. Her project published in May 2018 investigated the unsolved serial murders of six black girls in the nation's capital nearly 50 years ago, and won an SPJ DC award for magazine feature writing. She has won numerous other awards, including two Salute to Excellence Awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, and was named NABJ's Educator of the Year in 2017. She was part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2002 for Sept. 11.
Thompson is a member of NABJ, teaches investigative reporting as an associate professor at George Washington University and serves as board president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a 6,100-member organization whose mission is to improve the quality of investigative journalism.
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More than 250 people have died since 2013 when trenches they were working in caved in. In most cases, the employers failed to follow basic government regulations for making trenches safe. -
In collaboration with Texas Public Radio and member station WAMU's program 1A, NPR's Station Investigations Team finds that 250 workers have died in trench collapses in the past decade.
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About 100 prosecutors across Ohio violated standards meant to protect a defendant's civil rights in criminal trials, an investigation by NPR and its reporting partners found. Some did so repeatedly. -
A thumbnail-size "switch" turns a gun from semi-automatic to automatic. Authorities see a correlation between an uptick in mass shootings and the rise of switch-equipped guns and extended magazines. -
Many of the actors who star alongside Adam Sandler in the new basketball movie Hustle are real NBA athletes. NPR's Cheryl W. Thompson talks with director Jeremiah Zagar about the film. -
Lawmakers are pushing for a "do-over" of an Interior Department contract to review tribal jail deaths awarded to a former official. Nearly half of the deaths he was to review occurred on his watch. -
Racial covenants made it illegal for Black people to live in white neighborhoods. Now they're illegal, but you might still have one on your home's deed. And they're hard to remove. -
Heat has killed hundreds of workers in the U.S., many in construction or agriculture, an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found. Federal standards might have prevented them. -
NPR reviewed sex offender registry databases nationwide and found a system with myriad problems, including tens of thousands of convicted offenders who law enforcement have lost track of. -
In many states, officials have mandated how many people can gather in one space at a time. Some funeral directors ask mourners to stand six feet apart and implore priests and other clergy to be brief.
