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Welcome to Bleeding Edge!

Welcome to Bleeding Edge! After 17 years as a reporter and unreconstructed Luddite, I've decided to take the plunge and set up an archive for my reporting that can also double up as a way to publish regular updates on the fields I cover: criminal justice, privacy, and extremism.

The title of this page/publication is a reference to the excellent eponymous Thomas Pynchon novel from 2013 (let's be honest, Against the Day or Vineland aren't great names for journalistic entities) and a nod to my longstanding practice of reporting away from the pack. Whether it's ferreting out municipal or police corruption scandals, digging up secretive agreements to bring counterinsurgency prediction methods home to American police departments, pulling the veil back on California's massive gang database or bringing murderous Neo-Fascist guerillas and street gangs to light, that's the sort of work I have and will keep doing.

Bleeding Edge will feature weekly updates on investigations new and past, a roundup of notable stories and developments in areas of interest, as well as reviews of books, films, television, podcasts or whatever else catches my eye. There'll be an updated reading list of books that catch my interest here (support your writers, Bookshop over BezosCorp!). As time goes on, I'll expand to reporter's notebook entries that delve further into my past stories, upload documents of interest, and audio interviews with experts and colleagues. Who knows - I might break a few stories here if the urge strikes me or some good material gets left on the cutting room floor from another project

Subscriptions will help me not only devote time to this project, but allow me to continue investigations for other publications. I'm currently neck-deep in a few features about reactionary tech money's profound impact on Bay Area politics, prisons and the Neo-Fascist youth revival, and something absolutely horrible called 764.

A little about me: I've written for a wide range of American and International outlets, including The Guardian, Rolling Stone, ProPublica, The New York Times, Der Spiegel and reported documentaries for BBC Panorama and PBS Frontline. My reporting on police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance have earned several awards, including a George Polk Award for Local Reporting, an Alfred I. duPont Award, and a News & Documentary Emmy.

Along with my colleague Darwin BondGraham, I'm the co-author of The Riders Come Out At Night: Brutality, Corruption and Cover-Up in Oakland (Atria Books, 2023). It's a history of policing in Oakland, California that draws on 15 years of reporting to delve into the longest-running police reform saga in the United States (over twenty years and still going), and the broader question about whether law enforcement can be truly reformed. The book was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, selected as a New York Times Editor's Choice, and received work-in-progress grants from the Whiting Foundation and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.

You can find more spontaneous updates/rants/threads/ephemera on Twitter and BlueSky @awinston.

If you'd like to reach out via email, either in the clear or securely, I'm at ali.winston [at] protonmail.com. We can take it from there. I take source protection extremely seriously.

[the banner photograph is a 2010 shot of a mural outside Fruitvale BART in Oakland of Oscar Grant III, who was murdered by former transit cop Johannes Mehserle on New Year's Day, 2009.]