Meg O’Connor
Hi there. I'm an award-winning reporter for The Appeal, a worker-led publication that covers the criminal legal system.
I mostly write about police and prosecutors. I also run The Appeal’s weekly newsletter.
I previously worked for the Phoenix New Times and the Miami New Times, where my work drew national scrutiny to misconduct from law enforcement officials and on six separate occasions led to the firing of five police officers and one prosecutor.
My reporting has thrice caused some of the biggest police departments in the country to change internal policies and has helped spur Department of Justice investigations.
My work has won several investigative journalism awards and has been featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO, The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, The Majority Report with Sam Seder, and several local news and radio stations. I have also been published by VICE, CNN, The Houston Press, and Gotham Gazette, and others.
Get in touch: meg.oconnor@theappeal.org
featured work
Roland Harris has watched his son die a hundred times. The final moments of his life, documented in thermal video captured by a police aircraft, are burned into Harris’s mind: His teenage son, Jacob, steps out of a car. He runs from the police. Two seconds later, officers open fire. Bullets pierce his heart, lungs, and intestines. He falls to the ground, bleeding. Police pepper him with rubber bullets, hitting him in the face and backside. He is dying in the dirt. Then officers sic a dog on him.
Lisa Lowery will never forget the moment police told her that her son Trevor had died.
Officer Hynes had just hog-tied the bleeding woman when he turned his bodycam off.
Sheila used to collect newspaper clippings. But 14 years is a long time to hope.
Miami police sent 5,255 people to jail for possession of less than 20 grams of pot.
Wherever the Proud Boys go, violence seems to follow.
Jane soon learned it wasn't the first time the instructor had molested a teenager on the ship.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday that it has opened an investigation into the New York City Police Department’s sex crimes unit.
As The Appeal previously reported, the NYPD’s sex crimes division has been plagued by problems for years. In 2018, The Appeal documented instances in which special victims detectives pressured rape victims into signing a form that closed their case against their will. In 2019, data showed that the NYPD closed nearly 500 rape cases — 25 percent of all rapes reported that year — due to an alleged lack of participation from rape victims. Then in 2020, the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau investigated several SVD sergeants and lieutenants over allegations that they had stolen company time and drank on the job.
