Daniel Ruth and Tim Nickens of the Tampa Bay Times won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. (Photo courtesy of Amy Hollyfield/Twitter.)
By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
The Sun Sentinel and Tampa Bay Times won the most prestigious award in journalism yesterday: the Pulitzer Prize.
The Sun Sentinel won the Pulitzer for public service for its “well-documented investigation of off-duty police officers who recklessly speed and endanger the lives of citizens, leading to disciplinary action and other steps to curtail a deadly hazard,” the awards committee said.
The Sentinel‘s “speeding cops” series exposed a history of reckless driving among the area’s police forces.
A three-month Sun Sentinel investigation found almost 800 cops from a dozen agencies driving 90 to 130 mph on our highways.
Many weren’t even on duty — they were commuting to and from work in their take-home patrol cars.
The extent of the problem uncovered by the newspaper shocked South Florida’s police brass. All the agencies started internal investigations.
“Excessive speed,” Margate Police Chief Jerry Blough warned his officers, is a “blatant violation of public trust.”
The Sentinel reported that cops in South Florida had killed or maimed about 21 people since 2004 because of speeding, but had received little to no punishment for their actions.
Because of the Sentinel’s reporting, about 36 police officers reprimanded for speeding and a cop that led a state trooper on a chase was suspended.
Tim Nickens and Daniel Ruth of the Tampa Bay Times won the Pulitzer’s editorial writing award for the paper’s “diligent campaign that helped reverse a decision to end fluoridation of the water supply for the 700,000 residents of the newspaper’s home county,” the Pulitzer committee announced.
The Times‘ editorials criticized the Pinellas County Commission for voting to stop putting fluoride in the county’s water. This made Pinellas the largest urban county in Florida not to fluoridate its drinking water. The Pinellas County Commission halted fluoridation after local tea party activists alleged fluoride in drinking water harms children.
“Fluoride is a toxic substance,” said Tea Party activist Tony Caso, according to the Times’ reporting. “This is all part of an agenda that’s being pushed forth by the so-called globalists in our government … to keep the people stupid so they don’t realize what’s going on.”
But Nickens and Ruth of the Times pushed back, criticizing the 2011 vote by the Pinellas County commissioners to remove fluoride from the county’s drinking water.
Pinellas County commissioners did not just ignore established science when they voted 4-3 to stop adding fluoride this year to the county’s drinking water. They also cost families plenty of money and unlimited frustration, because dentists are now advising parents to give fluoride to their children to prevent tooth decay. Two of the Fluoride Four are on the ballot Tuesday seeking re-election to their countywide seats: Nancy Bostock and Neil Brickfield. Their challengers, Charlie Justice and Janet Long, support restoring fluoride to the county’s drinking water. It only takes one new commissioner to reverse the backward decision — and save Pinellas County families time, money and frustration.
After the editorials were published, voters ousted two of the commissioners who supported removing the fluoride, replacing them with candidates who pledged to add it back. Those new commissioners eventually voted to put fluoride back in the water.
The Tampa Bay Times was also a finalist in two categories — in investigative reporting for Alexandra Zayas’ probe of unlicensed religious group homes and in feature writing for Kelley Benham’s account of the survival of her premature baby.
The Orlando Sentinel was a Pulitzer finalist as well, for local reporting for coverage by David Breen, Stephen Hudak, Jeff Kunerth and Denise-Marie Ordway of hazing at Florida A&M University’s marching band.