Brian Howey is an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered topics ranging from policing to wedgefish. He has published work in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, the Los Angeles Times and various other national, regional and local publications. Howey currently works as a freelance investigative journalist with Mississippi Today, which co-publishes with The New York Times, where he focuses on law enforcement issues in Mississippi. He earned a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he studied investigative reporting and narrative writing.
Impact
In September, 2025, California legislators passed a bill that, if signed into law, will require law enforcement investigators to inform the families of people killed by police of their loved one’s status before questioning them. The bill came after Howey’s reporting found that California investigators had been withholding death notifications from the families of people killed by police in order to mine them for information that police agencies could use to defend their officers in court.
Howey’s and his colleague’s reporting on the lack of accountability for police Taser use in Mississippi inspired lawmakers to draft two bills in 2025 that would increase oversight over law enforcement Taser use.
After Howey and his team published their series investigating criminal acts by Mississippi sheriffs, state lawmakers passed a 2024 law that gives investigative powers to Mississippi’s law enforcement certification board, allowing the board to revoke officer licenses even if they are not charged with a crime.
Howey’s reporting on policing practices in Vallejo, Calif., and Aurora, Colo., prompted reviews of department policies at those cities’ police departments.
In 2020, Howey’s reporting on San Francisco’s controversial use of encampment sweeps to confiscate unhoused residents’ belongings led the city to temporarily halt the practice.
Awards
Howey’s reporting team was named a finalist for a 2024 Pulitzer Prize and the 2024 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs, a series about abuse of power by sheriff’s departments for Mississippi Today and The New York Times.
Howey won a George Polk Award in 2024 for his two-part exposé of a controversial police interview tactic popularized by one of the nation’s largest developers of law enforcement policy manuals. He published the stories in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program, the Los Angeles Times and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The Reveal segment of that exposé also won a 2025 duPont-Columbia Award, and the Los Angeles Times version won a 2024 Sacramento Press Club Journalism Award for Best Criminal Justice Reporting.
He also won a 2020 SPJ Excellence in Journalism Award for his reporting on San Francisco’s response to homelessness during the onset of the pandemic, and was a producer on the CalMatters reporting team that won third place at the 2020 Best of the West journalism awards for Force of Law, a series about California legislation that was promised to be the strictest police shooting law in the country.