Most true-crime coverage is built out of other coverage. Somebody read a wire story, somebody else read that, and by the fourth retelling the case has a shape nobody who worked it would recognize. We wanted to do the boring thing instead. The arrest affidavit is a public record. So is the trial transcript. The police file becomes one the day the case closes. We ask for them, we wait, we pay the copying fees, and we write from what comes back.

What this place is

Crime Docket is a small news outlet in Michigan. We publish written reporting here and documentaries on YouTube at @CrimeDocketdotcom, and the two are meant to be read together. The film gives you the story. The article next to it shows you the pages. When an agency sends us three thousand items in a day, or closes a request in seven hours with a one-line brush-off, that goes on the site too, because how the public record gets handled is part of the story.

We are published by Crimedocket Media LLC. Nobody pays us for coverage, no subject or source reads a piece before it runs, and we don’t sell advertising. It keeps the incentives simple.

Who does what

Jack Rancher edits Crime Docket and writes most of it. Jack Rancher is a pen name. We’d rather tell you that here than have you find out on your own. It is the only invented name on this site, and the person behind it answers for everything published under it.

Rozanne Powell runs the Records Desk. She is a paralegal and records researcher, and every public-records and Freedom of Information Act request we file goes out under her signature on behalf of the company. She tracks the statutory clocks, pays the fees, writes the follow-ups when an agency goes quiet, and keeps the ledger of what came back. If you are a records custodian reading this to work out who you’re dealing with, it’s her, at foia@crimedocket.com.

Chad Gembel is our location scout and production assistant. When a story needs a real place on camera, he finds it, clears it, and gets us there.

Stories run under the Crime Docket Editorial Desk byline rather than a personal one. Most pieces are a joint effort between the records desk and the writing desk, and we’d rather you weigh the work by its sourcing than by a face.

How we work

We start from the record and say so. Where a claim comes from a document, we tell you which one. Where we lean on someone else’s reporting, we name them. Where the record is silent, we say that too, instead of filling the gap with mood.

Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent until a court says otherwise, and we write that way. An allegation belongs to the affidavit or the prosecutor who made it, and an acquittal or a dismissal gets the same prominence the charge did.

We use software, including AI tools, for the tedious parts: transcribing hours of interview audio, indexing a few thousand pages, keeping a timeline straight. None of it is a source. Every factual claim has to land on a document a person here has read. The long version of all this is in our Editorial Standards, and when we get something wrong, the Corrections page explains how to tell us and what happens next.