David Burnham, a former investigative reporter for The New York Times whose exposé of corruption in the New York Police Department in 1970 led to public hearings, tarnished top officials, and inspired the movie “Serpico,” about Burnham’s source, Detective Frank Serpico, died at 91 in a choking incident. Burnham was hired by the newspaper after he told an editor that the paper’s coverage of law enforcement was “not very smart.” Burnham was brought on to write about the inner workings of the police department. He scored a scoop in 1968 when he learned that officers on overnight shifts routinely slept in their patrol cars, a practice known as cooping, often because they were worn out from second jobs during the day, the Times reports.
Burnham left The Times in 1986 to pursue book-length investigations of government institutions. He wrote “The Rise of the Computer State” (1983), “A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS” (1990) and “Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice” (1996). In 1997, The Nation devoted an issue to an article by Burnham challenging the FBI’s management skills and investigative competence. His reporting was based on data obtained from the Justice Department by a project that Burnham helped found at Syracuse University. That project, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) uses open-records requests to gather hard-to-find data from government agencies.
Its data is frequently cited by journalists, including this year by reporters covering immigration. “TRAC was very near and dear to his heart,” said his wife, Joanne Omang. “He worked on it for 32 years and was still active there until his death.”
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