David Morales grew up two blocks from a precinct he was taught not to trust. In the South Bronx of the 1990s, policing was something that happened to your neighborhood, not something done for it — a distinction that shaped Morales’s understanding of public safety long before he became a journalist covering it. He has spent the last decade reporting on the NYPD and New York’s criminal justice system with that understanding intact: writing about law enforcement with neither reflexive deference nor reflexive opposition, but with the specific knowledge of someone who grew up inside the system’s consequences.

Morales studied criminology and journalism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice — a choice his professors found redundant and his sources have found invaluable. His academic background gave him fluency in the statistical methods, legal frameworks, and departmental structures that public safety journalism requires; his South Bronx upbringing gave him the community access that the statistics alone can never provide. He covered courts for a legal trade publication for three years before joining the New York Daily News city desk, where he spent seven years on the crime and justice beat.

At the Daily News, Morales broke stories on NYPD disciplinary records that the department had sought to keep sealed, covered the rollout and fallout of multiple police reform initiatives, and reported on the Bronx’s homicide crisis of 2020–2021 with a granularity that national outlets, parachuting in for the numbers, consistently missed. He spent three months embedded with a Bronx community violence intervention program for a series that was cited as an IRE investigative journalism award finalist. He speaks fluent Spanish.

“Public safety journalism fails when it treats crime as a statistic and police as a brand. The people on both sides of every incident are human beings with histories. That’s where I start.”

At NYC Pulse, Morales covers the full range of public safety: NYPD accountability, criminal justice reform, community violence, and the city agencies at the intersection of law enforcement and social services. He files with the speed of a breaking news reporter and the depth of an investigator, and maintains one of the more extensive source networks in New York’s public safety journalism — from NYPD brass to defense attorneys to community organizers who rarely speak to the press at all.

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