Nicole Santa Cruz is a reporter covering issues of inequality in the Southwest.

She joined ProPublica from the Los Angeles Times, where she spent nearly 12 years as a staff writer. As lead reporter on the Times’ Homicide Report, a groundbreaking public service project that documents every homicide victim in Los Angeles County, she reported on the lives of hundreds of people, highlighting neighborhoods that were disproportionately affected by violence and uncovering trends, including an increase in women being killed even as officials hailed a decline in murders. Santa Cruz also assembled a first-of-its-kind database of county prosecutor memos detailing fatal police encounters.