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by Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois, and Molly Parker, Lee Enterprises Midwest

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Lee Enterprises, along with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Newly released reports from the Illinois Department of Human Services’ watchdog office reveal shocking instances of cruelty, abuse and poor care of patients who have mental illnesses and developmental disabilities at a state-run facility in rural southern Illinois.

The eight reports, obtained last month under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, provide new evidence of an ongoing crisis at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center, which has been the subject of numerous investigative articles by Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica.

In one report from November, the IDHS inspector general wrote that two Choate employees who had broken a patient’s arm in October 2017 bragged about how staff got away with abusing patients by providing scant details on reports and blaming resulting injuries on accidental patient falls. The staffers also boasted about intimidating and bullying other employees to keep them from reporting abuse and bragged that they retaliated against those who spoke up.

In another report, the inspector pointed to years of concerns about the care provided to patients who have pica, a disorder in which people feel compelled to swallow inedible objects such as coins and zippers.

Several nurses told an investigator that it was common practice to force patients with pica to dig through their own excrement with gloved hands or a spatula to determine whether objects they swallowed had passed, the inspector general found. The investigation was triggered by a complaint to the agency’s abuse hotline made last spring by a facility monitor who observed a patient walk out of the bathroom with a bag of feces. Patients questioned by investigators said they felt disgusted by the practice and viewed it as punitive.

A clinical consultation conducted on behalf of the inspector general found that the practice violated nursing standards and amounted to incompetence on the part of the Choate nursing department. The facility was cited for neglect, though the inspector general did not cite individual nurses for misconduct because the investigation found it was a “widely accepted procedure.” This week, an IDHS spokesperson told reporters that the practice was “limited to the reported incident and was stopped immediately upon discovery.”

In yet another report, the inspector general cited two nurses for neglecting a terminally ill patient in the days before he died in July 2021. One of the nurses failed to properly manage his pain, and the other failed to notify a physician that the patient had lost 21 pounds in one week. These shortcomings caused him to experience pain, emotional distress and further deterioration of his physical health, according to the inspector general’s clinical review. Proper care “could have provided him a higher quality of life and more time with his family,” the report said.

These newly released reports, relating to events that occurred between 2017 and last spring, come on the heels of a series of news stories documenting repeated failures at the Choate facility. In September, reporters found that the IDHS inspector general had investigated more than 1,500 reported incidents of abuse and neglect over the decade ending in 2021, though staff have rarely faced serious consequences.

In addition to the abuse and neglect at the facility, which houses up to 270 people with disabilities, the series revealed a culture of cover-ups at Choate, later confirmed by inspector general reports. The news organizations uncovered workers colluding before being questioned by investigators, obstructing investigations and lying to avoid consequences in abuse and neglect cases. In response to that reporting, Gov. JB Pritzker said the patient abuse at Choate was “awful” and called for change.

IDHS has not disputed the news organizations’ findings and has acknowledged the seriousness of concerns about the facility that date back years. Once again this week, in response to reporters’ questions, the agency detailed some of the steps it has taken to correct poor conditions at Choate, including enhanced staff training on responding to abuse and neglect allegations, campus safety assessments and a partnership with an outside organization to provide additional clinical support for patients who have experienced trauma.

Other findings in the new inspector general reports include mental health technicians who neglected patients and compromised safety by sleeping on the job or failing in other ways to provide proper supervision. In one case from May 2019, two patients who had been left unsupervised each accused the other of rape. In another, a patient was discovered wandering naked outside at about 4 a.m. on a mid-December morning in 2021 when the temperature had dipped into the 30s. And in a third case, a staff member’s failure to provide proper supervision led to one patient assaulting another in June 2022.

Further, an incident in November 2021 extended beyond neglect. A mental health technician was found to have also mentally abused and retaliated against a patient who wet himself after the tech rejected his request to use the bathroom. The worker made the man mop up the mess and tossed his personal letters in the bucket of dirty water, according to the inspector’s report. When questioned by an investigator, one of the patients who witnessed the incident and corroborated the account began to cry and said he “was tired of being abused.”

“Unwritten Rule” to Cover Up Abuse

A patient abuse case from 2017 reflected a broad range of problems that have been documented at Choate. It revealed how some employees hide abuse and obstruct investigations, retaliate against those who speak up and indoctrinate new employees into the cover-up culture. Their actions, the inspector general wrote in his November 2022 report, reflect “a brazenness and sense of impunity amongst certain Choate staff that must be combatted.”

The case involved two mental health technicians who fractured a patient’s shoulder in October 2017 but failed to report it. Nearly five months later, someone called the agency’s abuse hotline and said they had overheard the technicians — Cody Barger and Jonathan Lingle — bragging about breaking a patient’s arm and coordinating their stories to say the patient had fallen in the shower.

That call led the Illinois State Police to investigate. One person told them that he had been interested in working at Choate but had confided to Barger that he was not confident he could handle the residents. He said Barger told him it was easy “to get around stuff,” for instance by claiming the patients had injured themselves.

Another worker told police that Lingle had instructed him to disregard most of what he would learn in training, saying that he should fill out injury reports with minimal details and abide by the “unwritten rule” that staff cover for each other.

But in this case, the staff culture of complicity went even further. Months later, a security officer at the facility told Barger who had called in the complaint against him. Two days after that, he showed up at his then-fiancee’s house, yelling at her for reporting him, knocking her down and daring her to kill herself before shooting an AR-15-style rifle twice into the air, according to police records. The woman’s young son called 911. The security officer who disclosed the identity of the person who reported Barger to the inspector general’s office was initially charged with felony official misconduct, but her case was dismissed; she received more than $65,000 in back pay.

Barger and Lingle were fired from Choate in 2018 for unrelated misconduct. Both men were criminally charged in the injury case, not with battery, but with obstruction. They each pleaded guilty and received probation. Both men agreed not to seek employment in a health care setting. In the administrative review, the inspector general ruled that claims that both men had physically abused the patient were substantiated. Attempts to reach Barger and Lingle by phone, via Facebook messages and through their attorneys were not successful.

The case prompted Peter Neumer, the IDHS inspector general, to issue recommendations to combat Choate’s “cover-up culture,” including subjecting employees to consequences for retaliatory threats or behavior. He also reiterated his repeated request for Choate to install cameras.

The IDHS spokesperson said the agency protects employees who report misconduct, and that “instances of retaliatory threats or behavior are investigated and administrative actions taken as appropriate.” She said that IDHS is in the process of installing cameras at outdoor locations across the campus and in some interior public spaces.

More broadly, the troubles at Choate have led to calls for reform from advocacy organizations, the IDHS inspector general and the governor. Last month, Pritzker renewed demands that Choate clean up its act or face closure.

“We obviously want to make sure that we’re keeping everybody safe in these facilities,” Pritzker said at an unrelated news conference in January. “And if we can’t — and I’ve said this before — then we shouldn’t have that facility open.”

Stacey Aschemann, a vice president with Equip for Equality, a legal advocacy organization that has been appointed to monitor troubled state facilities including Choate, said the most recent reports of misconduct were “very disturbing and at times chilling to read.” Staffers’ actions, she said, were inhumane, set individuals back in their treatment and, in some cases, caused lasting harm.

“The large number of staff involved in these multiple substantiated OIG reports reveals a concerning trend indicative of a culture problem at the facility,” she said.

by Kristen Doerer for ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On Jan. 23, 2023, the IRS began accepting and processing returns for the 2022 tax year. That means that the window for filing your individual tax return is nearly three months long.

There’s hope that the process will be less of a headache this year: The IRS promises improved service and has added 5,000 new phone workers and more in-person staff to support taxpayers, thanks to an influx of funding from the August passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. With the new funding and electronic filing options, tax time might just be smoother this year.

When Are My Federal Taxes Due?

2022 federal income tax returns for individuals are now due April 18, 2023. The IRS announced in January that its tax deadline would be pushed back from the usual date, April 15, due to the 2023 calendar.

A note for victims of severe storms: In January, after torrential rainstorms, mudslides and tornadoes hit California, Georgia and Alabama, the IRS announced that victims of severe storms in these states have until May 15, 2023, to file their taxes.

Members of the military serving in a combat zone also get an extension. This extension is typically 180 days after leaving a combat zone.

I’m a victim of a severe storm. Am I eligible for the May 15 tax deadline?

Whether you’re eligible for the May 15 deadline largely depends on the county you live in and is based on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster declaration. A list of counties eligible for the May 15 deadline is available on the IRS website. The new deadline applies to various individual and business tax returns as well as payments.

The IRS automatically identifies individuals living in those counties as eligible for the new deadline. If you’re a taxpayer affected by these severe storms who’s living outside the disaster area, you can call the IRS disaster hotline at 866-562-5227 to request this tax relief.

Does the April 18 deadline apply to all taxes?

Yes. This applies to all individual tax filers as well as trusts, corporations and other noncorporate tax filers. Quarterly estimated taxes for individuals are due April 18, 2023, too.

When Are My State Taxes Due?

There’s a good chance the April 18 deadline applies to your state taxes, too. Most states have followed the IRS’ lead and made their tax deadlines April 18. Some have imposed slightly later deadlines. Your state’s tax office website will have the most accurate information about your state income tax deadline.

Can I Get an Extension on My Taxes?

Yes. Individual taxpayers can ask for an extension to Oct. 16, 2023, by filing form 4868 by April 18. The IRS encourages taxpayers to file for an extension electronically, filling out form 4868 with IRS’s Free File program. You can also file for an extension when you pay your estimated income tax electronically with IRS’s free Direct Pay, the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System or a credit or debit card and indicate that the payment is for an extension.

An extension provides you with more time to prepare and file your tax return. It does not, however, grant you more time to pay your taxes. Taxpayers who need an extension to file but still owe tax payments can avoid penalties by making an estimated payment by the deadline.

A note for victims of severe storms: Victims in FEMA-designated disaster areas can request an extension from the IRS after April 18, but they must do so by mail instead of electronically. Electronic extension requests are only available prior to April 18. Details are provided on the IRS website.

When Should I Expect My Tax Refund?

The IRS says that most tax refunds are being paid within 21 days of filing. The IRS encourages taxpayers to file electronically with direct deposit as it’s the quickest way to receive your refund.

While the IRS continues to accept paper forms, it has a severe paperwork backlog and warns that it may take six months or more to process your tax return if you file on paper.

There are two credits that may delay your refund. If you filed for the Earned Income Tax Credit or Additional Child Tax Credit, by law, the IRS cannot begin issuing your refund until mid-February.

About this guide: ProPublica has reported on the IRS, the Free File program and other tax topics for years. ProPublica’s tax guide is not personalized tax advice. Speak to a tax professional about your specific tax situation.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Kristen Doerer is a reporter in Washington, D.C. Her writing has appeared in PBS NewsHour, The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other outlets. Follow her on Twitter at @k2doe.

by Paul Kiel and Jeff Ernsthausen

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

At first glance, July 24, 2015, seems to have been a brutal trading day for Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO. He dumped hundreds of stocks, losing at least $28 million.

But this was no panicked sell-off. Among the stocks Ballmer sold were those of the Australian mining company BHP and the global oil giant Shell. Had Ballmer lost confidence in BHP’s management? Was he betting that the price of oil would not soon recover? Not at all. That very day, Ballmer also bought thousands of shares in BHP and Shell.

Why would he sell and buy shares in the same companies on the same day? The answer is counterintuitive to the average person but obvious to a sophisticated investor: A loss, for tax purposes, is valuable; a big one can wipe out millions in potential taxes. Ballmer’s two-step process allowed him to use the loss to lower his taxes, while the near-simultaneous purchase meant he effectively hadn’t changed his investment.

Since 1921, claiming tax losses from so-called wash sales — selling shares of a company then buying them again within a short period — has been forbidden. But Ballmer collected his losses anyway because, technically, the types of shares he bought and sold weren’t the same.

Both Shell and BHP offered two different versions of their common stock. For each company, the two stocks were legally distinct, but they performed very similarly because, after all, they were shares in the same company.

Ballmer’s not-so-bad day, in fact, was carefully planned, part of a strategy by Goldman Sachs, which conducted the trades on Ballmer’s behalf, to wield the stock market’s natural volatility to the billionaire’s advantage. At Goldman, the hundreds of stocks in Ballmer’s “Tax Advantaged Loss Harvesting” accounts were selected to follow the movement of the broader markets. Over time, the markets, as they had historically, would buoy Ballmer’s investments upward. When, inevitably, some of the stocks underperformed or the whole market dipped, Goldman was ready to pounce, selling off the losers and replacing them with equivalents.

Sometimes, the replacements were nearly identical securities, as with Shell and BHP. More often, they were not. But well-tuned software could easily find the right stocks to keep the accounts tracking the market. His losses secured, Ballmer was ready to catch the bounce back.

Over and over, Ballmer sold and bought stocks in roughly equivalent amounts, as on that July day, when he swapped around $200 million worth. A month later, he did it again, landing at least $23 million in tax-reducing losses. Similar efforts that December brought $26 million more.

ProPublica estimates that from 2014 through 2018, Ballmer was able to generate tax losses totaling $579 million without changing his investment portfolio in a meaningful way. The tax savings from these losses amount to at least $138 million.

The scale of Goldman’s feat was remarkable, but Ballmer was just one client pursuing such a strategy. And Goldman was just part of an industry that helps the ultrawealthy report billions in losses — and save billions in potential taxes — even as their fortunes rise.

ProPublica was able to reconstruct the tax-loss strategies of scores of the nation’s wealthiest people, including Ballmer and Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, using a trove of IRS data that has been the basis for “The Secret IRS Files” series. This trove includes not only some two decades of tax returns for thousands of the nation’s wealthiest citizens but also voluminous records of their trading.

After inquiries by ProPublica, Goldman said it would halt transactions like Ballmer’s Shell and BHP trades. Goldman conducted a review, according to a statement by the bank, and found that a “very small percentage” of its “tax investment solutions” trades were “inadvertently made in a manner inconsistent with our strategy.” The bank said it strives “to provide best-in-class investment advice to clients, consistent with both the letter and the spirit of all applicable tax laws and regulations.”

A Ballmer spokesperson said: “Steve takes his responsibility to pay taxes very seriously. Goldman Sachs has just provided Steve with corrected loss reporting information for prior years. Steve will amend his filings and pay any associated tax, interest or penalty promptly.”

But, by Goldman’s own description, it is halting only a narrow slice of its loss-generating trades — the ones involving two kinds of stock from the same company. The bank will continue its broader practice of finding similar stocks that achieve the same effect.

(Sources: Forbes, IRS data, ProPublica analysis. See below for our methodology.)

Goldman’s ability to deliver tax losses to its clients won’t be significantly curtailed. That’s because over the past 25 years, investing has undergone a transformation that’s made the law against wash sales toothless. Improved computing, new financial products, cheaper trading costs and a shift away from picking stocks to passively tracking the broader market are the main ingredients of the change.

Asset managers have used these advances to forge loss-harvesting accounts that boast hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. What the law sought to prevent — generating a tax loss without a substantial change in the investment — is now commonplace.

That ability is available even for small-time investors, who can mimic the sorts of techniques used by Goldman on their own or opt for products offered by mass-market brokerages such as Vanguard and Charles Schwab. But relatively few Americans have stocks or mutual funds outside of tax-protected retirement accounts, meaning most can’t employ the strategy.

It is the wealthiest who benefit most. The losses can be used to erase an unlimited amount of investment gains. Someone like Ballmer can easily deploy $100 million in losses to cancel out a $100 million gain from selling some of his vast Microsoft holdings. It’s a very different story when it comes to wages and other forms of income, of which only $3,000 can be offset. On average, only the top 0.001% of taxpayers made a majority of their income through investment gains in 2018, according to public IRS data.

Those gains, like many aspects of wealthy Americans’ tax returns, are usually the result of careful planning. Since, in the U.S. system, gains aren’t taxed until they’re sold, even the richest Americans can have years where they owe no tax at all.

The story is exactly the opposite with investment losses. From 2014 to 2018, Ballmer grew $22 billion richer, a fact that doesn’t appear on his tax returns. Meanwhile, Goldman made sure that even momentary losses were listed by the thousands.

High-Income Taxpayers Collect the Right Sort of Investment Losses and Avoid the Wrong Kind (Source: Public IRS data, ProPublica analysis. Note: Data includes taxpayers with net short-term or long-term capital losses on their tax returns as a percentage of all taxpayers in that income range who reported either capital gains or losses.)

For the rich, the “tax system is sort of like a rigged coin,” said David Schizer, a tax expert and professor at Columbia Law School: “If you win, you get to keep all of it, but if you lose, you can pass some of those losses on to the government.” The wash sale rule, he said, is easily skirted by “well-advised taxpayers.”

IRS data shows how widespread the use of investment losses is among the richest Americans. In the U.S., short-term gains, those sold less than a year after buying, are taxed at about twice the rate (around 40% for the top bracket) as long-term gains. That makes short-term losses more valuable since they reduce this higher tax rate income. In 2018, almost two-thirds of Americans with income over $10 million reported net short-term losses. That was the highest share of any income slice; with more income, counterintuitively, came more losses — at least, on their taxes. Meanwhile, long-term losses were rare for them.

Take a look at the taxes of Jim Walton, the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton and the 10th-wealthiest American, and you’ll see years of short-term losses, thanks to a tax-loss harvesting account at Northern Trust, a bank that specializes in managing the assets of the rich. (A representative for Walton declined to comment.) From 2014 to 2018, Walton grew $10 billion richer, according to Forbes, but reported only $111 million in long-term gains on his taxes. Since his losses easily overwhelmed those gains, he paid no taxes on them at all.

In November 1920, a reader of The Wall Street Journal identified as R.H.T. wrote in with a question. It was a time with parallels to today: The stock market, after reaching highs amid a pandemic (then the Spanish flu), had plummeted. R.H.T.’s portfolio had fallen about $50,000 ($750,000 in current dollars).

“I do not want to sell these stocks at the present market,” wrote R.H.T. “Would it be legal for me to sell these stocks and deduct the loss from this year’s income, even though I bought them in again the same day?” Yes, the Journal responded, the transaction was permitted under the law.

“Basically, the strategy went viral,” said Lawrence Zelenak, a law professor at Duke Law School, and author of a history of the early income tax.

Lawmakers decided to do something about “evasion through the medium of wash sales,” as a 1921 Senate conference report put it. They passed a law that barred taking a tax deduction if, within either 30 days before or 30 days after a sale, an investor bought a security that was “substantially identical” to the one sold.

In the following decades, investors still found ways to collect losses that would reduce their taxes. Often, the volume of selling at year-end was enough to temporarily depress stock prices.

But with the wash sale rule in effect, there were real risks to what was often known as “tax-loss selling.” Investors could sell their losers and try to pick stocks with better prospects. That, as The New York Times reported in 1983, often led to “regret” when an abandoned stock went to the moon. If investors wanted to stick with a stock, they’d have to work around the 60-day limitation. That meant either buying the same stock 30 days before they sold (called “doubling up”) or after. Both options carried danger. If the stock continued to tank while they were doubled up, their losses were compounded, and if the stock boomed before they could buy back in, they missed out.

In the mid-1990s, amid a historic market ascent, new strategies were forged to serve a new generation of superrich Americans. Asset managers began to emphasize post-tax returns. “Tax-aware investing is the challenge of the moment,” wrote Jean Brunel, the chief investment officer of JP Morgan’s global private bank, in the journal Trusts and Estates in 1997. The “tax-sheltering volatility” of stock movements, he explained, presented a “free option” to investment managers, who should “make a greater effort to identify ‘harvestable’ tax losses.”

Enabling this new “tax-loss harvesting” was a shift away from stock picking and toward passive products, such as funds that track the S&P 500. The wash sale rule still foreclosed easy solutions to the problem of replacing a specific stock. But replacing an investment in something as broad as the S&P 500 with another similar product became increasingly simple. As the Times reported in 1998, “it is getting easier for investors to find a close double for almost any portfolio.”

Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, which emerged in the ’90s, fit this purpose perfectly. Unlike mutual funds, they could be traded like stocks, making them easier to use in loss-harvesting transactions.

Consider a trade by one billionaire in the summer of 2015. Markets had dropped after troubles in the Chinese economy, providing a loss-harvesting opportunity for investors with exposure to Asia.

Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp, which a year before had been sold to Facebook for $19 billion, was one of those investors. He owned shares of Vanguard’s emerging markets ETF, which tracks an index of companies in China and elsewhere.

At the end of August 2015, according to ProPublica’s IRS data, Acton sold $17 million in shares, resulting in a loss of $2.9 million. The same day, he bought $17 million worth of the emerging markets ETF offered by Blackrock.

The two funds have only minor differences, with large holdings in many of the same Chinese companies. Unsurprisingly, the two funds perform similarly.

When emerging markets fell even further toward the end of the year, Acton did the same deal in reverse: He sold Blackrock and bought back into Vanguard. That allowed him to bank another $600,000 in tax losses.

In 2015, well over 100 wealthy Americans in ProPublica’s database switched from one company’s emerging markets ETF to another to collect tax losses.

Asked about loss-harvesting transactions, Acton told ProPublica, “To be honest I’m not really aware of any events like that.”

“Broadly my wealth is managed by a wealth management firm and they manage all the day to day transactions,” Acton, who has donated to ProPublica, added in a brief exchange over the messaging app Signal, where he is now interim CEO. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Why was Acton’s trade, and the many others like it, not a wash sale?

In theory, the stocks inside two different funds could overlap so much that the IRS might deem them “substantially identical” and thus disallow any tax loss on such a trade.

In practice, however, there is only one scenario in which the wash sale rule is consistently enforced. IRS regulations require brokerages to mark a trade as a wash sale if, in the 60-day period around the sale, the investor buys, in the exact same account, the exact same security (with the same ID, called a CUSIP number). The amount of the forbidden loss is then noted on a form, called a 1099-B, that brokerages send to the IRS each year to detail stock trades.

Beyond that, the IRS has provided no clear guidelines. Instead, the agency has commented on only a few little-used scenarios, while directing taxpayers to “consider all the facts and circumstances” of a trade. Is it OK to swap Vanguard’s ETF tracking the S&P 500 for Blackrock’s version of the same index? Some tax experts say yes, some say no. Besides the IRS’ vague guidance, there are few relevant court cases, and all are decades old. (The IRS declined to comment.)

ProPublica’s analysis of its IRS data found dozens of examples of taxpayers switching between funds with the exact same holdings. More common were switches like Acton’s between funds with significant, but incomplete, overlap.

The clearest sign that these sorts of trades do not, in the IRS’ eyes, violate the wash sale rule is that ProPublica could find no example of the agency challenging one.

In fact, audits very rarely target wash sales at all, attorneys who’ve represented wealthy taxpayers in IRS disputes told ProPublica. “I have had only one audit on this,” said Bryan Skarlatos, a partner with Kostelanetz & Fink, and it was “for a trader who totally screwed up.”

As popular as ETFs are for harvesting losses, the premier vehicle for delivering tax losses to wealthy clients is another innovation of the 1990s: the separately managed account.

In these accounts, managers make decisions about what to buy as they would for a fund, but the investor owns the stocks directly. When the account mimics an index like the S&P 500, it’s called direct indexing. Such products have boomed in recent years. A 2021 report by the consulting firm Cerulli Associates estimated that $362 billion was invested in direct-indexing accounts, most for “high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients.” The main use of such accounts are for “tax optimization,” the report said.

The advantage, as Goldman Sachs explained in a recent promotional document, is that “with an ETF, an investor may only harvest a loss when the entire index is down.” But if you own the components of an index, now you have hundreds of stocks that might dip.

The year 2017, for example, was great for investors, with the U.S. market up around 20% and world markets up even more. There were no obvious, broad dips to exploit — but that didn’t stop Goldman Sachs from delivering big tax losses to its clients.

That year, Ballmer’s direct indexing accounts, which tracked both U.S. and world indexes, posted over $100 million in tax losses through 15 loss-harvesting transactions. At the same time, the performance of those indexes in 2017 meant that, overall, Ballmer’s accounts were actually way up.

In a direct indexing account, you don’t need to own all the stocks that compose the index, and it doesn’t really matter which specific stocks they are. Instead, what matters is that the collection of stocks closely tracks the index’s movements. This is achieved via a “thoughtful sampling of the underlying positions,” as a team of Morgan Stanley wealth managers put it in a recent issue of an investment journal. When it comes time to harvest tax losses, the manager sells off the losing stocks and then chooses replacements with the aim of continuing to match the index.

Tax records show that Goldman Sachs routinely made trades for direct-indexing clients like Ballmer that included the sale and purchase of the same company’s stock. These companies offered two classes of common stock, and when Goldman traded from one class to another, it was not required to flag them as wash sales.

Often, these two classes of common stock were distinguished only by the right to vote on things like directors and shareholder initiatives. The sports apparel company Under Armour, for instance, offers a Class A voting stock and Class C nonvoting stock. The two classes command a slightly different price, with the Class A shares usually trading at a premium of around 10%. But the prices move in sync, making them nearly perfect loss-harvesting replacements.

As part of larger rebalancing trades, Goldman clients also swapped other voting-nonvoting pairs from companies like Discovery, Twenty-First Century Fox and Liberty Global.

Shell and BHP, both part of Ballmer’s loss-harvesting trade in 2015, each offered shares based in two different countries. Each company viewed these two versions as interchangeable in value. In fact, in 2022, both companies chose to merge their two classes into a single stock on a 1:1 basis.

ProPublica’s IRS data contained several hundred examples of these kinds of trades by Goldman clients dating back as long as 10 years ago. The records show instances of these sorts of trades through other brokerages, but the overwhelming majority were made through Goldman.

Goldman said that the impact of the now-halted trades on its clients would be “minimal,” and that it would “cover any costs they incur” as a result of disallowed losses. “We have also initiated a discussion with the IRS and will address any questions they may have on this matter,” the statement said. Generally, only returns filed within the past three years would be subject to possible audit.

At wealth management firms, loss harvesting accounts are often designed to work in tandem with other services, as a kind of knob to turn up or down, depending on the need.

At Iconiq Capital, this is part of an approach that goes far beyond investing to things like managing personal staff. In 2007, the firm’s co-founder, a former Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley banker named Divesh Makan, told a wealth management magazine that he’d even organized clients’ parties and helped find possible marriage partners. Clients, he said, “want us to look after them these days.”

The San Francisco-based firm manages about $13.2 billion for its 337 high-net-worth clients, according to a regulatory filing. Among them is Facebook co-founder Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s old roommate at Harvard. Since the mid-2000s, when Moscovitz’s six-figure Facebook salary made up almost all his income — he’s now worth more than $7 billion — his financial life has grown considerably more complicated. After leaving Facebook, Moskovitz co-founded Asana, a software company, in 2009, but his stake in Facebook still accounted for the vast majority of his wealth. He set about changing that. From 2012 through 2018, he sold $3.6 billion worth of his stock, funds that he, with Iconiq’s help, could then use for other investments.

One of those new ventures was a tax-loss generating account. In late 2012, Moskovitz harvested his first tax losses, according to ProPublica’s analysis. It was a tiny haul by the standards of a billionaire, just $309,000, but it was a start. By 2013, he’d put over $100 million into the account, and his tax losses began to swell. In December of that year, he sold off 153 stocks to produce his first million-dollar loss.

Asset managers recommend adding to a direct indexing account over time, since it ensures there are always new losses to harvest. That’s the strategy Moskovitz followed, every few months seeding $13 million here, $25 million there. As the account grew, so did the tax losses.

Although ProPublica could not determine which index Moskovitz’s account tracked, the transactions followed the telltale pattern of direct indexing. In March 2016, for instance, Moskovitz sold off a basket of 85 stocks worth $27 million and bought a collection worth about the same amount. The two baskets were stuffed with stocks that had performed very similarly in the previous year, according to ProPublica’s analysis. The trade delivered $6.2 million in losses.

Meanwhile, Iconiq arranged other investments for Moskovitz, and the point of these was simply to make money. Most of the money Iconiq manages is in the form of venture capital, private equity and hedge funds, and Moskovitz bought large shares of partnerships run by the firm with names like Iconiq Strategic Partners and Iconiq Access. From 2014 to 2018, Iconiq entities sent over $200 million to Moskovitz.

The two types of investments were complementary, with the direct indexing account helping to blunt the tax sting from that income. Over the same period, Moskovitz’s dozens of loss-harvesting trades resulted in $84 million in tax losses. That saved him at least $20 million in taxes, ProPublica estimates.

For Zuckerberg, too, Iconiq provided the same twin services of providing and erasing income. His Iconiq investments earned him $88 million during the five-year period, while his tax-loss harvesting trades produced losses of $34 million.

Representatives for Iconiq and Moskovitz, who has tweeted that he’s “in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy,” did not respond to written questions. A representative for Zuckerberg said, “Mark has always paid the taxes he is required to pay.”

To prevent the wealthy from easily skirting the wash sale rule, Congress would need to change the law, experts said. One fundamental, but long-shot, reform would be to automatically tax the annual fluctuations of investments’ value (called “marking to market”). That would prevent the wealthy from being able to defer taxes on gains forever — and also render tax-loss harvesting unnecessary.

But even narrower changes could have an impact. Steve Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center suggested a law aimed at how products like direct-indexing accounts are marketed: If an asset manager touted the ability to replace securities with positions that were economically the same, then those losses could be deemed wash sales. This, he said, wouldn’t be a major change, “but it might slow people down.”

Schizer, of Columbia Law School, suggested a more comprehensive reform: Congress should replace “substantially identical” with “substantially similar,” a phrase that is used in some other areas of tax law. That could rule out some of the most common harvesting moves, he said. The rule, he said, “ought to be updated to reflect how people invest today instead of how they invested 100 years ago.”

Methodology Total Tax Losses Harvested

To calculate the total tax losses harvested for each taxpayer, we limited our analysis of 1099-B forms to days in which all the following conditions were true:

• At least 10 positions were sold that day.
• Of those positions, at least 90% resulted in a loss.
• The total losses from sales that day exceeded the total gains by a factor of 10 or more.

The purpose of these limitations was to exclude days that did not appear to be motivated by harvesting losses. The method effectively identified sales from direct-indexing accounts, which tend to involve dozens or even hundreds of positions, but did exclude some loss-harvesting transactions that involved only a few positions — for instance, selling a couple large ETF holdings. As a result, these are conservative estimates that likely understate total losses. The totals shown in the story represent the net losses accumulated from loss-harvesting days in 2014-18.

Steve Ballmer’s estimate uses a different methodology to calculate his total losses. For an unknown reason, ProPublica’s IRS database did not have information about Ballmer’s 2018 trades, so we based his totals for 2014-18 on the Schedule D forms from his tax returns. Our analysis of his 1099-Bs from other years showed that his direct-indexing accounts at Goldman Sachs dominated his short-term trading results, as represented on his tax returns. These he noted on his Schedule D, in the field reserved for trades that had been reported on a 1099-B form that included the basis. As a result, Ballmer’s total is the sum over 2014-18 for short-term trades that included a 1099-B form with the basis reported.

ProPublica provided detailed descriptions of our loss calculations to all the individuals named in this article, and none contested our totals or methodology.

Tax Savings

Since both Ballmer and Moskovitz did not have extensive net capital gains from short-term trading during the periods we studied, we opted for a simple method for calculating their tax savings: 23.8% of losses, representing the long-term capital gains rate plus the net investment income tax. The tax benefit of a harvested loss can be diminished if stock is sold in the future (given the lower basis). But Ballmer, Moskovitz and other billionaires we analyzed held on to their gains, and there’s good reason to think they will hold on to them indefinitely.

Help Us Report on Taxes and the Ultrawealthy

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Image credits: Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images, Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED, Araya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch, Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images, Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Alejandro Serrano, The Texas Tribune

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

A Texas state senator announced a slate of bills this week that aim to better prepare schools and law enforcement for mass casualty events, including one that seeks to improve emergency medical response.

Flanked by several family members of victims of the Uvalde massacre and of the 2018 Santa Fe, Texas, shooting, Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat, on Tuesday called for more robust training to improve coordination among public safety agencies. The proposed measures include establishing a clearer chain of command and better preparing emergency medical responders so that they can minimize casualties.

The legislation comes two months after an investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Washington Post revealed that communication lapses among medical crews further delayed treatment for victims.

Nineteen children and two adults died in the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary.

Nearly 400 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting, but police did not confront the gunman for more than an hour. While experts said that law enforcement’s failure to do so was the most serious problem in getting victims care, the news organizations’ investigation revealed for the first time communication flaws and unclear lines of authority in the medical response that further hampered lifesaving efforts. An earlier story by ProPublica and the Tribune found failures to take charge at all levels of law enforcement.

Since the shooting, several local and state police officers who responded that day have been terminated or suspended. Others remain under investigation. Law enforcement leaders have defended most officers’ actions as reasonable under difficult circumstances.

Eric Epley, executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, a nonprofit that helps coordinate trauma care in Southwest Texas during mass-casualty events, previously told the news organizations that medics encountered challenges, including a faulty radio system, and did the best they could in an “inherently confusing” situation.

Gutierrez said the problems in the Uvalde response require thoughtful and far-reaching action from the Legislature.

“Everybody in Texas needs to examine the complete and utter failure that happened on this day,” he said. “It must not ever happen again.”

As part of the investigation, ProPublica, the Tribune and the Post detailed medical responses for multiple victims who emerged from the school with a pulse but later died.

Gutierrez said those victims and others “might have lived” had the response been more in line with the average length of a mass shooting, which he said was about 12 to 14 minutes, compared to the 77 minutes children waited in Uvalde before the shooter was killed.

“We do not know how many of the other kids that didn’t have a pulse, at what time did they expire?” he said. “We do not know that.”

Gutierrez introduced other measures that sought $2 billion for school hardening, such as bulletproof glass and fencing at campuses, and another $2 billion to expand mental health care access. He said he wants about $750 million to fund 10,000 additional state police officers, who would be assigned specifically to school security efforts.

The state senator also pushed for legislation that would bolster rural communication tools. Emergency radios faltered on the day of the shooting, in part because Uvalde’s frequency was designed for rural terrain rather than inside buildings, according to Forrest Anderson, the county’s emergency management coordinator who oversaw its radio system’s implementation two decades ago.

Gutierrez called the fact that the radios did not work a “complete and utter failure.”

“Imagine that. 2022, and everybody in Texas should be very afraid. 2022, not one damn radio worked inside of that building. Not one radio. Cops were out there playing telephone for 77 minutes, trying to figure out what was going on inside and outside and who was talking on one side of the hallway and who was talking on the other.”

He took aim at Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative, saying that if Texas is going to spend billions of dollars on Operation Lone Star, the state should also increase funding for improved emergency communications in border counties. Under the governor’s program, thousands of National Guard members and state police have deployed to the region.

“This story, yes, is a story about terror. It’s also a story about rural neglect, neglect in Texas,” Gutierrez said.

A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to questions about Gutierrez’s proposals or his criticisms of the border security program. Neither did representatives for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick or the Department of Public Safety.

At the news conference, Christina Delgado, a Santa Fe mother who has become an advocate with the Community Justice Action Fund, a nonprofit focused on ending gun violence, said that in the coming weeks she and others impacted by gun violence would meet with lawmakers to discuss legislation related to mass shootings.

“We have got to take a stand. Now,” she said, pleading for lawmakers to listen and act. “This is coming up on five years of zero action, of showboating, of putting out legislation and allowing it to die just as we let our Texans and our children die in classrooms and in communities.”

by Marjorie Childress, New Mexico In Depth, and Steve Myers, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New Mexico In Depth. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

This is a follow-up to an investigation into high discipline rates of Native American students in New Mexico. Read the article: “This School District Is Ground Zero for Harsh Discipline of Native Students in New Mexico.”

At New Mexico in Depth and ProPublica, we practice “no surprises” journalism: No one should read anything about themselves in our articles without first having had a chance to respond.

So journalists in our newsrooms were surprised to read in the Gallup Sun, a weekly newspaper, that the superintendent of Gallup-McKinley County Schools had criticized our story about his school district. We had given him ample opportunity to respond to our reporting, but the Sun did not give us that opportunity in turn.

Superintendent Mike Hyatt told the Sun and school board members that he ignored our requests to talk to him because he believed we had a predetermined narrative.

That’s not the case. ProPublica, a national nonprofit investigative news outlet, partnered with New Mexico In Depth, a state-based nonprofit news organization, to look at school discipline across New Mexico. We wanted to understand what was driving high rates of discipline for Native American students in the state.

We found that Gallup-McKinley County Schools was responsible for a disproportionate amount of the disparity. It has a quarter of the state’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020.

Our Dec. 21 story was republished by the Albuquerque Journal, the Gallup Independent and the Gallup Sun.

We had reached out to the school district months earlier, in February 2022, to ask about disparities in discipline between Gallup-McKinley and other school districts in New Mexico. We called and emailed repeatedly over the following months, reiterating our desire to talk to district officials and asking for additional data. Hyatt was copied on almost 100 emails with district staff.

We emailed Hyatt a 10-page letter on Nov. 11, a month before publishing our story, to detail our findings, ask again for an interview and seek clarifications or corrections. We never heard from him.

Hyatt disputed our findings at a school board meeting on Jan. 9 and elaborated in the Sun article on Jan. 27.

He said most of the 211 expulsions we found in the district’s own data for the four academic years ending in 2020 should be reclassified as suspensions because those students were not permanently removed from school. Under that definition, he said, the district had expelled just 15 students over the most recent seven years.

The Sun sent us an email on Jan. 25 to say it planned to publish a story in response to ours, which would include an interview with Hyatt. When we asked for the opportunity to respond to claims about our work, the reporter refused, saying we could respond afterward. Gallup Sun publisher Babette Herrmann later told us that was her call. She didn’t think it was necessary for the reporter to interview us, she said, even though the story quoted Hyatt criticizing our reporting.

Here’s what we would have said if the Sun had given us the opportunity to respond.

After a careful review of the data, we stand by our conclusions. Our analysis relied on the district’s own data as reported to the state, and the vast majority of expulsions we analyzed fit the district’s definition at the time. Before this school year, the district’s handbook defined an expulsion as a removal from school for at least 90 days and up to 365. Now it says an expulsion is a “permanent” removal from school.

Our original reporting found that Gallup-McKinley was responsible for at least three-quarters of all Native expulsions in the state over four years. That held true when we counted all removals from school of 90 days or longer, regardless of whether they were called suspensions or expulsions.

Download the Data

We’ve compiled enrollment and discipline data on all New Mexico school districts. Download it here.

We also reported that Gallup-McKinley’s expulsion rate for those four years was at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state. When we counted all removals from school of 90 days or longer — again, regardless of whether they were categorized as expulsions or suspensions — Gallup-McKinley’s rate was just as high.

In addition, we looked at suspensions and expulsions longer than 10 days. Gallup-McKinley still reported far higher rates of these removals than the rest of the state.

Our findings remain unchanged: Gallup-McKinley County Schools is responsible for an outsized share of serious punishments of Native students in New Mexico. Revising the definition of an expulsion does not alter that fact.

Hyatt’s comments come after months of denials and delayed responses to many of our public records requests. When we asked for enrollment data broken down by race, the district at first claimed the data didn’t exist. Then they said they couldn’t provide it. We eventually got it from the state, which had received it from the district.

That pattern continues. When we asked to see the documents that Hyatt read from during his presentation to the school board, the district responded that they’d need at least another 30 days to provide them because doing so within the 15-day legal deadline was too onerous.

A principal even called the police when we came to the school to drop off a document saying a student’s guardian had given us permission to review the student’s school discipline records. (We dropped off the form without incident and only later learned, as we reviewed emails obtained through a public records request, that the principal had called the police.)

According to Gallup-McKinley’s own numbers, the district bears significant responsibility for the disparity in harsh punishments faced by Native students in New Mexico. We worked hard to understand that data. We engaged with the school district at every turn. And we believe it was in the public interest to share what we found.

Marjorie Childress is managing editor at New Mexico In Depth. Steve Myers is a senior editor at ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

by Megan Rose

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Join us for an upcoming live virtual event, “Post-Roe: Today’s Abortion Landscape.”

For 50 years, Roe v. Wade shut down the biggest ambitions of the anti-abortion movement. Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned that decision, unleashing a flurry of abortion legislation across the nation. And anti-abortion advocates have eager partners in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country.

“It’s exciting because our hands have been untied,” Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said. “We’re going to see what we can do and do it.”

The new legal landscape has also energized blue states, shaking them out of their longstanding confidence that federal protections for abortion were unmovable.

Dueling efforts to protect and restrict abortion, divided along political lines, are making what was already a patchwork of access across the country even more pronounced.

“We’re going to see a bigger shift to the edges,” said Elisabeth Smith, a director with the Center for Reproductive Rights.

ProPublica reviewed proposals across the nation to see what trends are developing as state lawmakers began the first full legislative sessions since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling in June.

Going Beyond Abortion Bans

States that already outlawed abortion are looking to further limit access by introducing novel ways to hinder people from evading such bans. Twelve states currently enforce abortion bans in almost all circumstances, in most cases through trigger laws, which were passed while abortion was protected by the court but went into effect after Roe was overturned.

“The next step is: Who’s helping people getting abortions and how do you regulate those organizations?” said Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a global research group that advocates for abortion access.

Lawmakers in some states are either moving in some fashion to block residents’ access to abortion medication — a two-drug combination approved by the Food and Drug Administration to be taken in the first 70 days of pregnancy — or considering measures that target companies and local governments that protect abortion access.

In Texas, a lawmaker has introduced a bill to deny tax breaks to businesses that help pay for employees to leave the state for care. Tennessee, which has one of the strictest bans in the country, is considering a bill that would prohibit local governments from providing financial and health benefits to their employees who seek abortions. And in Idaho, a proposed law would withhold tax dollars from municipal governments that refuse to enforce state abortion laws.

Katie Glenn, the state policy director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said that controlling distribution of abortion medication at the state level is a top priority. Georgia, for example, she said, is one of the only states in the deep South that doesn’t explicitly prohibit telemedicine, which pregnant people can use to obtain abortion medication from out of state. Glenn said she is expecting the state’s legislature to introduce a bill outlawing at least some aspects of telehealth soon. Georgia bans abortion after around six weeks.

In Wyoming, where a near-total abortion ban is being blocked by the courts, the state is considering legislation that would outlaw medication abortions unless the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest or the abortion was necessary to save the pregnant person’s life. But the legislation explicitly says that mental health conditions and the risk of suicide can’t be used as a reason to allow a medication abortion.

Republican lawmakers are also brainstorming ways to prevent abortion pills from being mailed into their states.

In Texas, which has long tested the limits of state regulation and already has a near-total ban, lawmakers are looking to target other realms of reproductive health. They’re debating a bill that would allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense not just abortion medication but also emergency contraception, which helps prevent conception after unprotected sex.

Republican-Controlled Legislatures Look to Amp Up Restrictions

The aim is to pass increasingly restrictive laws until the goal of ending abortions nationwide is reached, anti-abortion advocates said.

In Nebraska, for example, a total ban was defeated by a Democratic filibuster last year, so the focus is now on a newly introduced bill that would ban abortions once cardiac activity can be identified in an embryo, at around the sixth week of pregnancy. Many people don’t yet know they are pregnant at that time.

“That’s where they’ve found the political will to be,” Glenn, with SBA Pro-Life America, said. “That certainly would be a great step forward, in our estimation.”

Advocates on both sides are closely watching Florida. Despite previously passing a 15-week ban last session, Republicans, who have a supermajority, have vowed to enact an even earlier cutoff. In the South, where many states have total or bans that start around six weeks, Florida currently offers critical abortion access. The state has more than 50 clinics, which often see out-of-state patients, so any change to Florida’s laws has an outsized impact across the region, said Nash, of the Guttmacher Institute.

In Kansas, where voters last year rejected a ballot initiative that would have amended the state constitution to say there was no right to abortion in the state, the Republican-controlled legislature is planning to limit access anyway. GOP lawmakers announced they will look to pass more abortion restrictions and increase funding to crisis pregnancy centers, which often aim to prevent people from getting abortions.

State Courts Take the Reins

Ultimate constitutional oversight of abortion law has moved from the U.S. Supreme Court to 50 state courts that are newly interpreting what rights are protected by state constitutions. South Carolina’s highest court, for example, recently struck down a six-week ban for violating the state constitution, but was ambiguous about whether a ban at a later stage of pregnancy would be constitutional. The same day, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled the opposite way: Its state constitution did not protect abortion, allowing a near-total ban to go into effect.

Georgia bans abortion after around six weeks, but the law’s constitutionality is being challenged and the issue will likely be heard by the state’s highest court this spring. Several states, including Utah, Indiana and Wyoming, passed bans that are currently blocked by the courts as part of ongoing litigation.

Without the Roe precedent, the guardrails are gone, Nash said. “You don’t have federal protections, and it’s unclear what state constitutional protections are,” she said. “I think we’re going to see a lot of experimentation in this period.”

Some states frustrated by judicial intervention on abortion restrictions are moving to limit the authority of state courts. In Utah, for example, Republicans are looking to restrict the power of judges to grant injunctions. Utah passed a trigger law in 2020 to ban abortion, but after Roe was overturned, a judge blocked the ban from going into effect while a lawsuit challenged its constitutionality.

Contemplating What Was Once Taboo

A common refrain of many anti-abortion advocates has always been that should Roe be overturned, they wouldn’t try to punish people who obtained abortions. They claimed the liability should fall on the provider. Recently, however, some officials have put proposals criminalizing abortion-seekers on the table.

Last month in Alabama, where abortion is banned but the law doesn’t allow prosecuting the patient, the attorney general said that he’d use the state’s chemical endangerment law to go after people who took abortion medication. The law is intended to protect children from drug manufacturing operations, such as meth houses, and the state has used it aggressively to punish pregnant people, as ProPublica reported. The attorney general later walked back his comments.

But he’s not alone in his instinct to punish patients: Lawmakers in Oklahoma and Arkansas have proposed removing language from each state’s abortion ban that prohibits prosecuting people for obtaining abortions.

In May of last year, more than 70 anti-abortion organizations signed a letter denouncing any effort to hold a woman criminally liable for obtaining an abortion. They stated that in their view, patients in such situations are victims.

Medication abortion is a gray area. Advocates have been largely mum on whether private individuals, such as a family member or a teacher, should be targeted forhelping someone obtain the medicine. Glenn said SBA Pro-Life America is focused on those who make and sell the medication, but she did allow that some areas of enforcement will require prosecutorial discretion.

Blue States Shore Up Protections

For those who support abortion rights, the last six months have been disheartening as abortion became unavailable in 14 states, including two that have no clinics providing the procedure. But one bright spot is that there’s a “nationwide conversation about abortion like never before,” Smith, of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said.

A majority of Americans support legal abortion, but prior to the Dobbs decision, Smith said, many didn’t think it was possible for Roe to be overturned and were complacent. Now the country is hearing more from parties who previously stayed out of the political fray, such as doctors.

“I think doctors who provide care but never saw themselves as abortion advocates realized they had an important story to tell,” Smith said.

The amplification of the issue is galvanizing states where abortion is still accessible but there are barriers to care, such as a waiting period, according to Angela Vasquez-Giroux, with NARAL Pro Choice America.

“There’s more awareness. More willingness to hear about it,” she said, adding that abortion rights advocates are now finding willing partners to dismantle those laws.

And in some states that abortion-rights advocates might have given up as lost causes a year ago, the midterm elections have thrown those calculations out, Vasquez-Giroux said. In Kentucky and Kansas, voters soundly rejected changes to each state’s constitution saying there was no right to abortion. And now advocates have seen that those people who show up in opinion polls as supporting abortion rights are willing to also vote, even in solidly red states.

States that have maintained access to abortion and are controlled by Democrats are rushing to enshrine abortion rights in their states.

Minnesota, where the highest court had already ruled that the state constitution protects the right to abortion, has fast tracked a bill to codify abortion rights into law. And though a judge last summer struck down several restrictions on abortion, including a 24-hour waiting period, Minnesota lawmakers say they intend to remove those laws from the books. After the fall of Roe, relying on court precedent felt more precarious, Minnesota Democrats said.

Other Democratically held states, such as California, New Mexico and Maine, are boosting protections for providers and for reproductive choice. Illinois has already passed a shield law taking immediate effect, which protects providers and patients from out-of-state legal action involving abortions.

California voted last year to amend its constitution to guarantee abortion as a right. The New York legislature just voted to put a similar constitutional amendment on the ballot next year, and Maryland is working on doing the same.

California, which sought to advance abortion access even before Roe fell by passing measures such as a mandate requiring college campuses to carry abortion medication, has a website that gathers the text of all its abortion-related laws to inspire lawmakers in other states.

Are You in a State That Banned Abortion? Tell Us How Changes in Medical Care Impact You.

by Seth Freed Wessler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

For the second time in six months, a federal agency reprimanded a Louisiana developer for its failure to offer an adequate assessment of the harm that its proposed $400 million agricultural development would cause to neighboring Black communities and historic sites.

In a forceful letter dated Dec. 23, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected claims by the developer, Greenfield LLC, that its massive grain transfer facility in St. John the Baptist Parish upriver from New Orleans will have “no adverse effects.” The Corps is considering a permit application by Greenfield to build on federally protected waters and has the power to halt the project.

This is the second time the Corps has intervened.

In May, ProPublica revealed that a whistleblower had raised alarms about the project after the report she drafted on behalf of Greenfield — concluding that the facility would inflict damage on communities and historic sites — was gutted by the consulting firm where she worked to exclude any mention of that harm. In response to that story, the Corps deemed the drastically edited archaeological and historical survey “insufficient” and ordered Greenfield to produce a new report.

That new report, which the Corps received in November, did not address the agency’s demand that the developer conduct a more complete assessment of how the project could damage historic sites and harm residents of nearby towns, according to the Corps’ December letter.

“The report,” the letter reads, “just doesn’t demonstrate adequate engagement and that must be rectified.”

A Greenfield spokesperson said in a statement that “we and our team of respected expert consultants have done thorough evaluations to consider any and all potential impacts.” The statement went on to say that “Greenfield takes seriously its responsibility to provide regulatory agencies with accurate and complete information consistent with the regulatory requirements.”

The Corps’ letter criticizes Greenfield and its contractors for failing to meaningfully consult with people whose lives would be impacted by the dozens of looming grain silos, new rail, truck and shipping traffic and pollutants from the facility. It says Greenfield and its consultants have not done enough to account for the ways that the development project might harm communities of color, a requirement under federal environmental justice standards.

“It’s very disappointing that they would continue to double down on the report, that they are still saying there will not be any detrimental effects,” Erin Edwards, who blew the whistle on the earlier report, told ProPublica in a recent interview. Edwards co-authored the first version of the report when she worked as an architectural historian for Gulf South Research Corporation, the for-profit cultural resources and archaeological consulting firm that had been hired by another of Greenfield’s consultants to conduct a federally required assessment of historic sites.

Edwards resigned in late 2021 after her report was stripped of every mention of possible harm to communities or cultural properties, including her conclusion that the area surrounding the development should be listed as a historic district because of its connection to histories of slavery. In internal Gulf South emails obtained by ProPublica, a company manager wrote that it would lose its contract for the report — and could lose future work — if it didn't change the findings.

“Gulf South knew all along that the project would have an adverse effect on the historic plantations there, and they knew that it would have an adverse effect on the area as a whole,” Edwards said. “There’s no way to look at the evidence and not see that it’s going to be detrimental.”

Gulf South, which did not respond to questions about the new report or the Corps’ response letter, had earlier told ProPublica that it stood by the edited report and that Edwards’ version had been nothing more than a draft. Ramboll LLC, the consulting firm Greenfield hired to clear permitting hurdles and had in turn contracted Gulf South, also did not respond.

In response to the Corps’ recent letter, Ramboll said in a letter of its own that it and its client have consulted with community members and local groups. The company cited meetings between Greenfield and members of the environmental justice group Rise St. James, including the group’s founder, Sharon Lavigne. Ramboll’s letter claimed that Rise St. James “expressed support for Greenfield and its engagement approach.”

But when contacted on Friday, Lavigne told ProPublica that she said no such thing.

“I am not in favor of it. I oppose it,” Lavigne told ProPublica. “I don’t know how the writing got changed around to say that I support the grain elevator.”

When asked about the inconsistency, a Greenfield spokesperson told ProProPublica in an email, “There was an error in the characterization which has been corrected, and we’ve apologized to Rise St. James for the error.”

Greenfield added that the response by the Corps and the community to the new report “helps to make a good project even better. In areas where more information will help the Corps understand what we've proposed, we'll provide it.”

The Greenfield grain facility has been the target of sustained pushback from nearby communities, civil and human rights groups and historic preservation organizations, as well as from other federal agencies, including the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which oversees federal preservation policy. The land where the development is planned sits beside the Whitney Plantation Museum, which serves as a memorial to people who were enslaved in Louisiana. One plot of land down the river is another unusually well preserved plantation designated as a National Historic Landmark.

The cane field where Greenfield wants to build its grain elevator is seen through nearby trees. The Whitney Plantation is visible in the far distance. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

The Corps is also asking questions about the impact that the Greenfield development will have on existing communities. In its letter, the Corps asks Greenfield to more rigorously account for the grain facility’s likely impact on Wallace, a small, nearly all-Black rural community that sits directly beside the planned construction.

“Wallace will be directly impacted by the proposed action,” the letter said, adding that other federal agencies, including the National Park Service and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, have urged the Army Corps “to ensure that the community of Wallace is considered in the evaluation of the permit decision.”

Because the project would be built on federally protected waters, including wetlands and the Mississippi River, Greenfield had to apply for a permit from the Corps. Before it can grant the permit, the Corps has to enforce provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act.

“What we feel is that Greenfield intentionally ignored people in our community, that they just moved ahead without us,” said Joy Banner, who lives in Wallace and is the co-founder, along with her sister Jo Banner, of a group called the Descendants Project. The group supports communities whose members trace their ancestry to people enslaved in the region. “Now the Corps is backing that up,” she said. “The Corps is saying, ‘You did not talk to them about cumulative impacts, and the information that you provided is not consistent with the actual impact that a massive grain terminal would have.’ The story they offered is not adding up.”

In response to ProPublica’s reporting last year, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation raised concerns about Greenfield’s plans. In an interview, Sara Bronin, the agency’s incoming chair, said that federal agencies like the Corps need to hold developers and their consultants accountable when they don’t follow the law.

“There should be an alignment between environmental justice, equity and historic preservation,” Bronin said. “Especially in communities that have lacked power, that have been underrepresented in our histories, we must be more cognizant about and motivated to address the historical injustices that people still feel very deeply today.”

by Kyle Hopkins and Emily Goodykoontz, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Since Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson took office in July 2021, he and his administration have been criticized for their words and their deeds. Top officials have been fired or have resigned. Lawsuits have been filed against the city, and complaints have been filed with the office of the city’s ombudsman, who told city prosecutors that employees are worried about being spied on.

Bronson was narrowly elected on a wave of support from conservative voters who opposed COVID-19 mandates and were frustrated with the city’s ongoing homelessness crisis.

The previous mayor, Ethan Berkowitz, resigned less than a year earlier after a television news reporter revealed he had texted her a photo of his naked backside. Berkowitz, a Democrat who was unable to seek reelection because of term limits, acknowledged his “unacceptable personal conduct” in messaging the reporter.

Here’s a timeline of some of the controversies and accusations that have hit the seat of government in Alaska’s largest city since Bronson’s election.

Bronson has declined all recent interview requests and has not responded to questions, citing potential litigation from his former municipal manager, who claims she was fired because of raising whistleblower concerns. Bronson’s adviser Larry Baker did not respond to questions.

Another of the mayor’s executives, human resources director Niki Tshibaka, resigned Monday as this story was being prepared for publication.

September 2021 Comparing Mask Mandates to the Holocaust Christine Hill cuts out Stars of David before an Anchorage Assembly meeting where the body heard public testimony about a proposed mask mandate on Sept. 29, 2021. Hill, who is opposed to a mask mandate, said she wore a star as a comparison to the oppression and genocide of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

During a COVID-19 surge that prompted the state to enact crisis standards of care at hospitals, the Anchorage Assembly debated whether to pass legislation requiring masks in public spaces. Opponents of the mandate, including many Bronson supporters, wore yellow Stars of David pinned to their chests to compare mandatory mask wearing to the oppression of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.

Bronson, who pledged not to enact any COVID-19 mandates, defended the use of the stars.

“We’ve referenced the Star of David quite a bit here tonight, but there was a formal message that came out within Jewish culture about that and the message was, ‘never again.’ That’s an ethos. And that’s what that star really means is, ‘We will not forget, this will never happen again.’ And I think us borrowing that from them is actually a credit to them,” Bronson said.

The next day he apologized.

October 2021 Stopping Fluoride Treatments of Water

While touring a water treatment plant, Bronson abruptly ordered workers to shut off fluoridation of Anchorage’s water supply despite a city law that requires fluoride in the water. When asked about the shutoff, a Bronson spokesperson falsely said the event didn’t happen before saying a few days later that it did, indeed, occur. The shutoff lasted about five hours.

The mayor’s office contended that Bronson did not violate the city code because the fluoride levels in drinking water did not significantly change while it was off. Administration officials also said that the utility’s manager had asked the mayor to shut it off — which the manager denied in a public statement to the Assembly and in an email to the city manager.

Fluoride has been added to city water to prevent tooth decay since the 1950s. Unsubstantiated claims about potential dangers of fluoride have circulated for decades and prompted waves of debate before the Anchorage Assembly in the 1990s. Bronson said he made the order because utility workers told him they were experiencing health issues related to the substance.

A business manager for the union representing the workers said it had received no such complaints from members.

May 2022 “I’m With Judy”

Bronson fired the director of the Anchorage Office of Equal Opportunity as she began investigating claims that the mayor’s pick to run the city libraries had made racist statements and other derogatory comments.

The library’s deputy director, Judy Eledge, was accused of telling an employee that, “If it weren’t for the white man and his oil, the natives would still be living in caves,” calling books about drag queens “filth” and saying that movements like Black Lives Matter are “killing libraries in this country.”

Library employees said they felt they couldn’t bring their complaints about her remarks to Bronson’s director of human resources, Niki Tshibaka, as both Tshibaka and Eledge are political allies of the mayor. Tshibaka was blocked from investigating complaints from library employees after wearing an “I’m with Judy” T-shirt to a library advisory board meeting. The mayor’s office and Tshibaka did not answer questions about the matter at the time. A spokesperson said only that the administration “complied” with recommendations from the city ombudsman to pull Tshibaka from involvement with library personnel complaints and hiring.

Tshibaka resigned on Monday, citing “an increasingly toxic, hostile, and demoralizing work environment.”

The former Office of Equal Opportunity director, Heather MacAlpine, has filed a lawsuit accusing the mayor of wrongful firing and violation of whistleblower protections. The city answered the complaint in July, denying that Eledge made racist statements and denying that MacAlpine was fired for acting as a whistleblower.

June 2022 Moving Homeless People

At the end of June, Bronson shuttered the city’s COVID-19 emergency mass homeless shelter inside a sports arena and moved homeless residents to a far-flung campground in Northeast Anchorage.

Bronson refused to call the city’s sanctioned homeless campground an official part of Anchorage’s homelessness response. The administration provided no food and no supportive services. Nonprofits, service providers and volunteers scrambled to meet basic needs at Centennial Park Campground.

Black bears began raiding campsites regularly. Wildlife officials shot and killed multiple bears there.

A female black bear and two cubs look for food inside a tent in June 2022 at Centennial Park in Anchorage. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

Advocates for homeless people decried the conditions as “deplorable.” Some Assembly members and community leaders called the situation a “humanitarian crisis.”

A city law requires Anchorage to set up emergency winter shelter once frigid temperatures arrive. So, at the end of September, the city moved people living in Centennial back into the arena.

August 2022 Health Director’s False Resume Joe Gerace, then the director of the Anchorage Health Department, conducts a press conference in December 2021. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

The mayor’s pick to run the city Health Department suddenly quit just before Alaska Public Media revealed he had lied and exaggerated much of his resume.

Joe Gerace falsely claimed to be a physician’s assistant who held two master’s degrees and a high-ranking post within the Alaska National Guard.

Several people who said they had worked under Gerace, volunteered with him or worked in the Health Department had tried to tell the Bronson administration that his background didn’t add up. Tshibaka, the human resources director, at one point accused the employees of “character assassination” and apologized to Gerace for “disparagement of your sterling character.”

Two women raised concerns about Gerace’s apparently fabricated resume during a closed-door Assembly meeting, which the mayor attended, according to Alaska Public Media. The Assembly at that meeting voted to confirm Gerace as director.

In September, Gerace acknowledged to Alaska Public Media that he “took some liberties” regarding his work history and military service.

The state filed a lawsuit against Gerace in December, claiming he owes more than $61,000 after fraudulently claiming to be a high-ranking former U.S. military officer. As a result, Gerace was assigned a high rank within the official state militia and was overpaid, the lawsuit asserts. Gerace wrote in an email on Monday to the Daily News and ProPublica that he has made a settlement offer to the state in hopes of avoiding “a costly trial for both parties.”

Gerace wrote in the email that he has not formally been served with the complaint and was unable to comment further, although he added that others within the militia also were awarded ranks above their prior military service.

In his resignation letter to the mayor on Monday, Tshibaka wrote that he was “directed to vet and onboard” Gerace within a single day. He did not say who gave him that direction.

September 2022 Spending Millions on Construction Without Approval

The Bronson administration began $4.9 million in construction work on a homeless shelter and resource center project without approval from the Assembly, leaving the future of the unfinished project in question.

Former City Manager Amy Demboski, fired by Bronson in December, claimed in an 11-page letter to city leaders that the mayor and adviser Larry Baker, in knowing violation of Anchorage law, pressured a subordinate city executive to sign off on the work. Demboski alleged that Bronson expected that the subordinate would “take the fall” for the decision.

Demboski said she immediately sent the construction work contract to the Assembly for proper consideration after discovering that work had already begun.

A construction site for the East Anchorage homeless navigation center and shelter in October 2022. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

A Bronson official publicly conceded to the Assembly that the administration had made an “error” by starting construction without Assembly approval. The Assembly later voted to pull the plug on the homeless shelter.

City lawyers say Anchorage is on the hook for the millions in construction work. If the city can’t pay, it will likely face a lawsuit.

February 2022-January 2023 Sexism, a Hostile Work Environment and Penis-Shaped Cookies

City Hall employees said in interviews that Purchasing Director Rachelle Alger twice brought penis-shaped cookies to distribute at City Hall.

Demboski claims that when she reported the issue to the mayor and Tshibaka, they took no apparent action. Alger did not respond to a phone message and emailed questions. Tshibaka also did not respond.

More generally, Demboski said in her letter to the city that the mayor encouraged and condoned behavior that created a hostile work environment, and that blatant sexism is tolerated in City Hall. The mayor treated women differently than men and chastised Demboski for reprimanding a man, she claimed.

“You raised your voice while showing her your hands held at different heights to indicate that because this subordinate is a man and Demboski is a woman — the male employee is ‘up here’ and Ms. Demboski is ‘down there,’” according to her letter of complaint.

Bronson has refused to answer questions about Demboski’s claims. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office in a statement said that the acting city attorney advised the mayor not to discuss issues relating to “potential litigation.”

December 2022-January 2023 Fear of Spying, Surveillance Cameras

According to the Anchorage ombudsman, multiple City Hall employees said they were afraid to make complaints because an executive had been talking openly about reviewing surveillance footage within the building.

The ombudsman, Darrel Hess, on Jan. 19 sent a memo to the mayor and the Assembly chairperson saying he had referred the matter to the city prosecutor, citing his belief that “there may have been a breach of duty, misconduct, or illegal activity.”

“Employees have stated that they are hesitant to visit our office because they are afraid that access to our office is being monitored,” Hess said in the memo.

The deputy chief of staff, Brice Wilbanks, resigned the same week. His attorneys sent a letter of their own to the city, attempting to rescind the resignation and accusing the ombudsman of acting inappropriately — even though the ombudsman never publicly accused Wilbanks by name of spying and intimidation. Wilbanks’ attorneys claimed he had been denied due process. Wilbanks did not respond to requests for comment, and his attorney declined to comment.

by Kyle Hopkins and Emily Goodykoontz, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In August 2021, two city of Anchorage officials toured the wood-paneled halls of the Golden Lion Hotel, known for the 200-pound taxidermied lion that once stood among the teal lounge chairs in its lobby.

At the time, Anchorage was seeing a soaring number of overdoses. The city faced a deadline to use proceeds from a utility sale to launch a new treatment center and needed a place to put it. The hotel, built in the 1970s, had 85 rooms, including suites that might house visiting doctors. The ballrooms could serve as meeting areas or host group therapy sessions. There was even an old salon that could be used for job training.

Best of all, the city already owned the building. A previous mayor had bought it as part of a plan to overhaul homeless services in Alaska’s largest city.

But the city’s new mayor, Dave Bronson, had ridden a wave of support from voters frustrated by COVID-19 mandates and those opposed to the city’s approach to homelessness. Among his supporters were people who lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the Golden Lion, and Bronson promised on the campaign trail to sell the building.

Municipal Real Estate Director Christina Hendrickson and Operations and Maintenance Director Saxton Shearer held out hope that they could make a case for using the hotel based on savings to the public, according to a letter Hendrickson later sent to the Anchorage Assembly. After visiting the hotel that August day, they began working on a proposal.

The next day, Shearer appeared at Hendrickson’s office, alarmed, she said in an interview. “He sits at my desk and closes the door.”

Shearer had been at City Hall for a meeting on another matter and excitedly told the mayor’s good friend and top adviser, Larry Baker, about the potential to transform the Golden Lion into a treatment center run by the Salvation Army, according to Hendrickson’s letter.

Hendrickson said Shearer told her that Baker said the project was a no-go. Baker “told him not only ‘no,’ but ‘hell no, that’s not happening,’” Hendrickson said in an interview.

“He didn’t want a treatment center in his neighborhood,” she said.

The hotel remains empty. It became neither a shelter nor a treatment center, though Bronson recently reversed himself and said the hotel would be used for housing.

Baker’s role in the Golden Lion decision and other actions taken by the Bronson administration have been at the center of a burgeoning scandal at Anchorage City Hall, in which numerous top officials have been fired or resigned. Hendrickson was fired in September 2021, two days after delivering a whistleblower complaint to the city Assembly accusing the mayor of violating the city code. She has filed a lawsuit accusing the city of retaliation.

The city has denied that Bronson fired Hendrickson for acting as a whistleblower, and it said in an answer to the lawsuit that she had been insubordinate and that “the decision to terminate Hendrickson was made prior to the Mayor’s office learning of her ‘whistleblower’ complaint to the Assembly.”

Municipal Manager Amy Demboski was fired in December, and she subsequently wrote an 11-page letter to the city accusing the mayor and his administration, including Baker, of corruption, illegal contracting and blatant sexism. Bronson has never publicly said why Demboski was fired.

Demboski, Hendrickson and other City Hall employees speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs allege that the mayor allowed Baker to further his self-interests using the power of City Hall. Among the allegations is that Baker and the mayor attempted to use their influence to protect a man accused of domestic violence and pressured Shearer to sign off on millions of dollars of construction work in violation of city code.

Bronson and Baker are so close that the mayor boasted to employees that he personally drove to Baker’s home with a gun to help with a trespassing call on Nov. 26. The mayor’s office later asked the Police Department to review 911 dispatch tapes of the incident to see why police didn’t respond sooner.

Since a December interview about her firing, Demboski has declined to speak to reporters and has not answered questions about her letter; Shearer did not respond to requests for comment. Baker initially referred questions to a spokesperson for the mayor and has not responded to phone calls, texts or emailed questions.

Bronson declined to be interviewed and did not answer specific questions about Baker and the accusations involving his top adviser. The mayor, through a spokesperson, instead sent reporters a statement on Jan. 10:

“Larry Baker was asked to join the Administration on a contract basis due to his vast background in both the executive and legislative branches of our government. Mr. Baker has served as an Anchorage Assembly member, state legislator, and Chief of Staff under former Mayor Dan Sullivan. There are very few people who have this amount of experience. The Mayor thinks that having this historical perspective is invaluable.”

Since receiving Demboski’s letter, Bronson has refused to talk about Baker, the domestic violence cases or any of the accusations leveled by his former municipal manager. Through a spokesperson, he has said that the acting city attorney advised him not to comment on “potential litigation.”

The questions have thrown Anchorage City Hall into turmoil for the second time in recent years. In October 2020, then-Mayor Ethan Berkowitz resigned after a television news reporter revealed he had texted her a photo of his naked backside. Berkowitz acknowledged his “unacceptable personal conduct” in messaging the reporter. At the time, he was the top elected Democrat in Alaska.

What’s happening at City Hall is affecting the city’s operations, insiders say. In one example, the city Finance Department, hobbled by vacancies, is asking the Assembly for an extra $2 million to hire contractors to help with routine bookkeeping. The department had operated without a permanent chief financial officer for months, until a new CFO was confirmed in January. Many departments are working under acting supervisors, including the Law Department, which hasn’t had a permanent city attorney since June.

The mayor’s human resources director resigned Monday as this story was being prepared for publication.

“I can no longer continue to serve in what has become an increasingly toxic, hostile, and demoralizing work environment,” he wrote.

A Lifetime in Business and Politics

Baker, now 80, has played many roles in Anchorage over the years. He opened the first Burger King franchises in Alaska in 1975 and ran them until his business declared bankruptcy in 2003. Worried that a rival burger chain owner might run for city office, he ran for the Anchorage Assembly himself and served five years before an unsuccessful run for mayor. He was a state legislator and, for six years, chief of staff to former Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan. (Not to be confused with the Alaska U.S. senator with the same name.)

For decades, Baker has lived in a Midtown neighborhood known as Geneva Woods. A collection of houses built in the late 1960s and early 1970s — old by the standards of the 49th state — the subdivision is also home to a former Assembly chairman who helped run an independent expenditure group for Bronson, as well as a former Republican mayor, a retired president of one of the largest oil companies in Alaska and an owner of state’s biggest shopping mall.

Baker’s home is a few hundred yards from the Golden Lion.

Some of the homeowners became alarmed in June 2020 when they learned of a proposal by then-Mayor Berkowitz, a Democrat, to buy the nearby Golden Lion and turn it into a substance abuse treatment center.

The city had recently sold its publicly owned power utility. As part of the sale, the municipality agreed to spend $15 million of the proceeds to create an addiction services center. In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic had created new urgency among service providers to house hundreds of residents, with drug and alcohol treatment considered a crucial step in reducing homelessness.

Baker and five others in August 2020 formed a nonprofit called Alaskans for Real Cures to Homelessness, which opposed the plan. Baker served as a director.

Berkowitz’s resignation in October 2020 created a leadership opening. Enter Bronson, a former U.S. Air Force and commercial pilot whose campaign drew momentum from a backlash against city leadership.

When Bronson won the election in May 2021, he chose Baker to co-chair his transition team.

Until recently, Baker had his own office on the top floor of Anchorage City Hall. But he isn’t a city employee.

Under Bronson, the city has awarded Baker three $29,500 contracts to work for the mayor as a “policy adviser.” In each of the contracts, the city signed the agreements after Baker had already started working and took the unusual step of removing an indemnity clause that would have made Baker legally liable for his work.

As a result, any lawsuit settlements or judgments against the city of Anchorage, based on Baker’s actions on behalf of the mayor, would be paid by the public rather than Baker himself. Working as a contractor, instead of an employee, could also allow Baker to argue he is not subject to the city ethics code, which says “a public servant shall place the public interest above any financial or private interest when taking official action.”

For Bronson, who had no experience in municipal government, Baker brings an understanding of its inner workings. Where Bronson fought all-or-nothing battles with the progressive Assembly, Baker worked behind the scenes as a peacemaker. City Hall executives say the two men talk every day.

“Unlike Bronson, he knows he needs to get along with people and relationships matter,” said Assembly member Austin Quinn-Davidson, who filled in as mayor for several months after Berkowitz resigned.

“I like him,” she said of Baker. “I think he relies on that, which is smart. People sort of trusting him or liking him as a person to get things done.”

“Not an Honest Communication”

Baker’s most public role was to help decide where to place shelters, housing and services for homeless people.

Unhoused people had fewer options for emergency shelters after Bronson closed the city’s main low-barrier entry, the Sullivan Sports Arena, for three months last summer and moved homeless people to a campsite that attracted black bears.

All the while, the Golden Lion remained vacant.

In August, the Bronson administration arranged to meet with the regional director for the state Department of Transportation at Baker’s office to discuss a highway project that had been planned for more than a decade and happened to be located right next to the Golden Lion.

Bronson’s chief of staff asked DOT to write a letter describing the status of the project and how it might impact the hotel. The final draft of the letter included a key sentence that Bronson used to justify denying the treatment center: that the highway work would likely result in a total “take” of the hotel property. It was signed by Wolfgang Junge, the DOT’s central region director.

What he meant, Junge said in an interview, was that because the road project would gobble up some of the hotel’s parking spots, it would likely no longer be viable as a commercial hotel, which would affect its resale value.

But that’s not how Bronson framed the letter in a Sept. 8 news release suggesting the building was doomed to be condemned by the highway project.

“Based off of this new information from the DOT&PF to eventually take the Golden Lion Hotel property, it does not make sense to set up a treatment facility in a location that will be taken away,” Bronson said.

Junge said that the mayor’s description of his letter was not accurate.

“The way the (Bronson) administration communicated to the assembly was not, it was not an honest communication,” he said. “If my letter was weaponized or used as a pawn somehow in trying to achieve an outcome of an administration, that’s a choice that the administration used.”

In addition, in her letter, Demoboski said Baker and the mayor pressured Shearer, the maintenance and operations director, to sign off on up to $4.9 million in construction work on a mass homeless shelter and navigation center without Assembly approval. Demboski alleges that sidestepping the approval process amounted to a “knowing violation” of city law. (A navigation center provides low-barrier access to a variety of resources and homeless services, like case management, health care, food and housing programs.)

Bronson and Baker assumed that if the illegal activity was discovered, Shearer would “take the fall” as the subordinate city worker, she claims.

According to Demboski, Bronson said that the city couldn’t wait for the proper approvals to start pouring concrete on the project, and that “we can’t stop once the pour is started.”

The administration green-lit millions in construction work over the summer under what was initially a $50,000 contract. In October, a Bronson official conceded the administration had made an “error.”

The Assembly later rejected Bronson’s belated request for approval of the contract upgrade, citing doubts about the project and the administration’s competence. That, essentially, left the partially constructed project dead.

Now the city must pay millions for a project that may never be finished or risk a lawsuit, city attorneys say.

A Business Partner Accused of Domestic Violence

Though Baker and Bronson are close political allies, Baker’s closest business associate is Brandon Spoerhase. Baker and Spoerhase together created a trio of limited liability companies in 2015. All are named BSI for Baker Spoerhase Investments.

When the companies were created, Baker had just finished working as chief of staff to Sullivan, the mayor at the time. Spoerhase had been working for several years as a commercial real estate broker and had been named one of state’s “Top Forty Under 40” by the Alaska Journal of Commerce. Sullivan had appointed Spoerhase to the influential city planning and zoning commission.

Baker and Spoerhase were partners in BSI Commercial Real Estate, according to cached versions of the company website. (The website went dark in January as reporters asked for interviews with Baker and Spoerhase.)

Demboski alleges that with the mayor’s “support and blessing,” Baker tried to get the city attorney to drop domestic violence charges filed against Spoerhase. The victim in the cases was a member of the mayor’s own executive team at City Hall.

Spoerhase was accused of kicking in the bedroom door of a woman he’d been dating in June 2019. The victim, Kolby Hickel, described the night in a request for a protective order. (She has given the Daily News permission to use her name given it was already in the public record.)

Hickel woke that night to Spoerhase hitting her in the face “with a piece of processed game beef stick,” city prosecutors later wrote in a probable cause statement charging Spoerhase with misdemeanor assault and criminal mischief. Spoerhase grabbed Hickel’s wrist and tried to stop her from walking to another room, the charges said.

At a hearing at which she requested a restraining order, Hickel said she went back to her room and locked the door.

“He said, ‘I’m going to kick it in’ and he did,” she testified. “He broke the door and the hardware. And the inside of the door frame.”

A judge granted Hickel the long-term protective order on July 19, 2019. Spoerhase was charged with violating that order six days later.

All told, Spoerhase was charged in three separate city cases of domestic violence and one state case of felony first-degree stalking. (In Anchorage, city prosecutors typically file misdemeanor charges while felonies are charged by the state.)

After one arrest, Baker paid his partner’s bail using the name Larry Willis, according to the receipt filed in state court. He later acknowledged using this name when paying the bail but said Willis is his middle name and disputed that it was an alias.

All four criminal cases were pending against Spoerhase when Bronson announced Baker would be the co-chair of the mayoral transition team.

Since then, one city case has been dismissed entirely. Spoerhase pleaded no contest to criminal mischief (for kicking in the bedroom door) and to violating a protective order, in an agreement with city prosecutors to resolve the two remaining cases. Prosecutors dropped four other charges: counts of violating conditions of release, unlawful contact, stalking and misdemeanor assault.

The state felony first-degree stalking case against Spoerhase is awaiting trial.

Hickel, Spoerhase and his current attorney, Michael Branson, have all declined to comment, citing the ongoing felony case.

Around late May or early June of 2021, Municipal Attorney Patrick Bergt first told Demboski that Baker had asked him to dismiss the pending criminal charges against Spoerhase, according to Demboski’s letter to the city.

“Patrick Bergt ... reported to Ms. Demoboski that he was approached by Baker — both during the transition and after the administration took office — to get these charges dismissed,” Demboski wrote. “Mr. Bergt came to Ms. Demboski expressing shock and discomfort about Mr. Baker’s request.”

According to emails obtained through a public records request to the city, the municipal attorney sent or received at least 88 pages of emails related to the Spoerhase cases between September 2021 and February 2022. It’s unclear what most of the emails said. The city redacted all but 19 pages of the messages, including 14 separate emails between the city attorney and prosecutors on his staff who were handling the Spoerhase cases.

The few unredacted emails show a back-and-forth between Bergt and Spoerhase’s defense lawyer that appears to start mid-conversation, in which the defense attorney sends the city attorney pages of court documents outlining the charges against Baker’s business partner. Bergt responded to one of the emails by asking for a copy of the felony indictment in the state’s case against Spoerhase.

Bergt declined to say whether Baker pressured him to drop or reduce the city charges against Spoerhase, citing concerns that he could break legal rules protecting confidential communications between attorneys and clients.

In his first public statement about Demboski’s claims, Bergt provided a written statement last week.

“I can assure the public that at no time during my tenure as Municipal Attorney did I direct or attempt to influence criminal prosecutions for unethical or improper purpose,” he said. “I took very seriously my ethical obligation to my client — the Municipality of Anchorage — and always acted in its best interest.”

Demboski wrote that Baker also had tried to prevent her from hiring Hickel, the victim in Spoerhase’s cases. It didn’t work, Demboski wrote, and the new mayor announced Hickel as his new director of enterprise services.

City Hall employees said Bronson was well aware Spoerhase was awaiting trial and talked openly about the cases. Bronson said he knew he might one day be forced to “choose” between Hickel, his new executive, and Spoerhase, the business partner of his friend and adviser.

The conflict triggered a confrontation among the crowd at Bronson’s inauguration day celebration. In an email to an Office of Victims’ Rights attorney, Hickel wrote that Spoerhase appeared at the event on her first day on the job despite court orders to stay away from Hickel at all times.

“(Spoerhase) saw me, smirked, looked over at me, stood around for a few minutes and then engaged in conversation with Larry Baker,” Hickel wrote that night in the email.

Hickel said a friend asked Spoerhase to leave the event. After initially protesting, he departed, she wrote to the Office of Victims’ Rights. (The office is an agency of the state Legislature that provides legal services to crime victims and advocated for Hickel in the cases.) No charges were filed.

In October, Spoerhase was quietly appointed to a city advisory committee created by the mayor, despite his pending trial on the felony stalking charge. The mayor was aware of the appointment, according to the chairman, and Spoerhase remained on the committee until the Daily News began asking questions about it the week of Jan. 9, when he resigned.

“It’s Almost Magical to Behold”

Bronson once told a city Rotary Club that the best thing about coming to City Hall each day was watching his hand-picked team at work.

“We’ve got young, we’ve got old, and they work together,” Bronson said. “We’ve got a 21-year-old who’s virtually a genius and I watch him and Larry (Baker) work together day in and day out and it’s almost magical to behold.”

“And I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t run the city. Amy Demboski runs the city.”

Now, key pillars of Bronson’s team are either gone or threatening to sue him. Other executives and City Hall staff are actively seeking new jobs while attempting to stay out of the fray. All asked for anonymity, saying they feared retaliation if they spoke on the record.

After Demboski went public with her allegations, the city ombudsman warned that one of Bronson’s staff might have been spying on employees to see who was talking to investigators and referred the accusation to prosecutors for investigation. The ombudsman described the complaints city staff had lodged against a Bronson executive in a public memo.

Bronson’s young “genius,” Deputy Chief of Staff Brice Wilbanks, who is now 23, resigned in mid-January — as multiple City Hall workers alleged he had spoken openly about reviewing surveillance footage to see who might be whistleblowing to the ombudsman or Assembly members.

After quitting, Wilbanks immediately tried to rescind his resignation and demanded paid administrative leave in a letter from his lawyers. The letter accused the ombudsman of acting inappropriately and of denying Wilbanks due process and violating confidentiality — even though the ombudsman never publicly named Wilbanks as the accused executive.

At the time, Wilbanks did not respond to interview requests and one of his attorneys declined to comment. His attorneys did not return another phone call and request for comment on Thursday.

The city’s acting municipal attorney gave the mayor her letter of resignation on Jan. 23.

Many City Hall workers have continued to describe an ongoing atmosphere of low morale, fear and suspicion in the top levels of Anchorage government.

The ombudsman, Darrel Hess, said he is investigating six or seven open cases lodged by current and former employees. He also said that between November and the end of January, he’d received 12 to 14 complaints from current and former city employees, all raising a variety of concerns. Some made allegations of purposeful violations of the city code by staff. But by far, the most common concern raised by complainants is a hostile work environment — in unusually high numbers, he said.

Hess has been the ombudsman for 10 years.

“I would say in the last year, we’ve seen more allegations of a hostile work environment than the other nine years put together,” he said.

As Hess spoke to a Daily News reporter last week, he glanced at his email inbox and said, “As we’re speaking, I just got an email from a municipal employee alleging a hostile work environment.”

“I’d better respond to it,” he said.

by Lizzie Presser

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Last month, Washington state Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, a Democrat, introduced a first-of-its-kind bill aimed at providing attorneys for parents who are facing hidden foster care, the subject of a ProPublica-New York Times Magazine investigation in December 2021. The story documented how, across the country, caseworkers who have not petitioned a court persuade parents to send their children to live in another home, often by threatening a foster placement if they refuse. The Washington bill unanimously passed out of the House Committee on Human Services, Youth and Early Learning on Friday.

The ProPublica-New York Times Magazine story exposed a shadow foster care system in which parents and their children have little or no legal protections. Caseworkers investigating allegations of mistreatment sometimes coerce parents to place their children with a relative, friend or family. Child welfare departments then often skirt their responsibility to keep families together or to monitor the informal arrangements, saving money in the process; the hidden system strips parents of access to free lawyers, judicial oversight and court-mandated services to attempt to reunite families.

The investigation focused on Cherokee County, North Carolina, and it revealed how children who had been diverted into hidden foster care there had suffered extreme consequences, like homelessness and alleged sexual abuse. Without any court oversight or access to legal representation, parents struggled to appeal the informal placements and reunify with their children.

The Washington state bill would provide parents with the option to consult by phone or videoconference with legal representation, through the Office of Public Defense, when the Department of Children, Youth and Families suggests a “voluntary placement agreement” to move a child to another home for up to 90 days. If after that consultation the parents request to have an attorney assigned to them, the Office of Public Defense would provide one. The state would roll out the program gradually, with full implementation by 2026.

The bill originated among the Keeping Families Together coalition, a group composed of child welfare stakeholders and activists. The coalition decided to focus its advocacy on providing pre-petition counsel because members wanted parents to be protected in the early stages of child welfare cases, when they often believe they have little choice but to comply with caseworkers’ requests in order to avoid a dependency hearing.

Between 2017 and 2021, an average of 538 children in Washington were removed from their homes through voluntary placement agreements each year. In about 35% of those cases, they were never returned home, according to data from the Department of Children, Youth and Families.

“Why wouldn’t parents be informed and why wouldn’t they be able to have counsel?” asked Shrounda Selivanoff, who leads Keeping Families Together and also directs public policy at Children’s Home Society of Washington. “That seems like the obvious step.”

This past summer, Keeping Families Together brought the idea to Ortiz-Self, who introduced the bill on Jan. 13. “Parents are at their most vulnerable when they are being asked to enter a voluntary placement agreement,” said Ortiz-Self, who, as a school counselor and mental health counselor, has witnessed the effects of family separation. “This seemed like a critical gap that needed to be fixed.”

Ortiz-Self is optimistic that the bill will continue to appeal to representatives across party lines as it makes its way through the House and the Senate. It is still unclear, though, how legislators will decide to allocate state funds this session and whether pre-petition counsel will be deemed a budget priority. The cost of the proposed legislation has yet to be assessed.

John Pollock, the coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, which works to ensure that parents are not deprived of their rights in child welfare cases, believes that the effort in Washington, if successful, could have countrywide implications. “This bill is unparalleled,” he said. “When you get one like this that a state passes, it can really help push change forward in other states.”

New recommendations around hidden foster care are also being considered at the national level. The Hidden Foster Care Working Group, a coalition advocating for hidden foster care reform, sent the ProPublica-New York Times Magazine article, along with other research and scholarship, to the federal Children’s Bureau, an office of the Administration for Children and Families, ahead of a meeting with the bureau this October. The working group shared its own statement of principles, which also recommends free counsel for parents.

At the meeting, Commissioner Aysha Schomburg, who heads the bureau, said that her team would release new guidance around hidden foster care to state agencies across the country, according to two participants. The Children’s Bureau has not provided additional information on the guidance it plans to issue or on whether it will include recommendations for due process for parents. The bureau did not return multiple requests for comment.

by Brett Murphy

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On Wednesday, RowVaughn Wells joined the grim sorority of Black mothers who have buried their children after deadly police encounters and then pleaded for those deaths to spur reform. Parents of other victims were in attendance at the funeral — along with Vice President Kamala Harris and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Tyre Nichols, 29, was blocks away from Wells’ home when five Memphis, Tennessee, police officers pummeled him after a short foot chase in early January. He died three days later in the hospital, his face a mash of swollen flesh. The officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder.

The scene, captured on body camera and security video, was similar in many ways to the other encounters that Americans have seen for years — from Rodney King to George Floyd — before taking to the streets in protest. The situation had escalated from a traffic stop. The responding officers shouted conflicting commands that Nichols, an unarmed Black man, tried to obey. They tased and pepper sprayed him repeatedly before laying into him with their fists, feet and a metal baton. Most of this wasn’t mentioned in the initial report.

As he lay on the ground, trying to shield his face from the blows, Nichols called out for his mom. Floyd had begged for his mom too.

“No mother, no mother, no mother, should go through what I’m going through right now,” Wells told reporters during a press conference the day after Nichols died. She said she believed her son was sent from God to marshal police reform. Her attorney called on lawmakers to once again try to pass sweeping police reform laws like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which stalled in the Senate two years ago.

Wells now finds herself addressing the country in a gantlet of interviews and public appearances that could go on for months or even years. In other cases, parents in her position have learned, their time with the microphone can be fleeting.

Mona Hardin, whose son Ronald Greene died after a police chase outside Monroe, Louisiana, in 2019, is a veteran in the ranks of mothers who have calcified themselves and turned to activism, lobbying and media appearances.

For two years, Louisiana State Police leaders told Hardin that her son had died in a car crash. Then, in 2021, The Associated Press published videos showing troopers beating and dragging Greene across the ground. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded, blood splashed on his skin and clothes. “I beat the ever-living fuck out of him,” one officer said. Greene stopped breathing soon after.

I first met Hardin, a diminutive woman with a nonetheless commanding presence, while reporting on whistleblower retaliation in Louisiana law enforcement. Hardin was marching alongside another mother, whose son had also died in police custody, during a protest in downtown Baton Rouge. Hardin refers to their families as casualties in a “national genocide.”

On Tuesday, Hardin and I spoke on the phone about what’s happened since then, the ethics of watching police brutality videos and why some cases garner breathless media coverage while others — including Greene’s — seem to fade from the public eye. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the meetings you’ve been having after you heard about the Nichols case. Who are you talking to?

These are the other families, and their kids were also killed by police. We call and check on each other. These meetings are for all the families to get together and we talk about individual cases. It’s basically how we help each other heal. There are a lot of families still looking for help. They have yet to have anyone looking at their situations. People are pissed and everyone’s trying to keep it under control.

We let each other know there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. Each family has been thrown into this. We give each other suggestions for emotional healing, where to go to — programs that help. We help them dig for help, wherever they’re at.

This sounds like a full-time job. Do you think you have a responsibility to be in these conversations?

It’s a must. I went back and forth with my own therapist. A lot of times you come out of these situations shallow on the other end. With the families, we all know: There’s no describing the pain. We can finish each other’s sentences. The connection is there because of the grief that we share identically, the sorrow, the heartaches, the sleepless nights. Our families, what our families go through. It’s not just the mothers and fathers. It’s the sisters and brothers too.

Did you watch the videos from Memphis?

Yes I did. I had to stop at one point. But out of respect for him — and for what they did to him — I had to go back and see it and finish it. I’m still struggling with a lot of others.

It’s just like with Ronnie: The lawyers told us we don’t have to see the video. While we were there, down the hallway, we could hear Ronnie’s screams on the tape. We were just in the other room. After more than an hour, a lawyer came in and said, “Do you want to?” I told my daughter that we have to. And I’m glad I did.

Why are you glad you did?

I had to see him take his final breaths. I was literally in a trance, when I think of it. My eyes get wide. I’m staring at the walls right now just to focus. It was horrific. He didn’t stand a chance. He did not stand a chance.

On the video in Memphis, one of the officers can be heard saying something like, “He was going for your gun.” That kind of thing seems common. The initial press release was also very similar to the one after George Floyd was killed. [At the funeral, Nichols’ stepfather called it “lies, deceit, trying to cover it up.”]

That stands out. They’re all repetitive. When you look at all the cases, you just skim over the press releases and police statements because you already know what you’re going to read. Instantly you know if this is a cover-up. They’re trying to justify what they have done and what they're about to do.

I can say for Ronnie it would have just stayed that way. [Louisiana State Police initially said he had died in a car crash.] If it wasn’t for the videos and the whistleblowers, my God, I would have gone to my grave grief-stricken thinking that Ronnie crashed into a tree and died. That’s what I would have thought if they were successful.

Nichols’ family has invoked Emmett Till, a case that became infamous because of the open casket picture. What do you think of the idea that there is a responsibility — The New York Times called it a civic duty — to watch these videos?

It's suggested that those who are emotionally drained should not burden themselves more. Do what your body tells you. We have families that have to heal.

But for me, oh hell yeah. The outside public needs to see this; what’s happening with state-condoned killings; how people vote; how they see the officers; how everything unfolds. Without the videos, testimony from whistleblowers, it will stay buried.

When we first met, you chose your words carefully. Now, I’ve noticed, a little less so. Is there a person that you feel like you’re supposed to be? How do you navigate that role as it’s changing?

They told us we had checks and balances with the law firms that represent us. But with all this public relations, my question is, where’s Ronnie’s case? I saw slowly that the PR was not really for him — the one who was beat up and killed. I think the corruption is all over with a lot of other entities I never saw coming.

What do you mean by that?

They keep saying, “We’re right here.” Then another year passes. Then it’s, “Now’s not the time.” Another year passes. “Now’s not the time.” And another year passes. All I can tell you is that the anger and the anxiety when you last saw me, I’m 1,000 times beyond that now.

Yesterday I had a call with Troy Carter [Democratic congressman from Louisiana] and he invited me to the White House to meet with Biden.

What do you think about that invitation?

It’s another photo-op. But you have to take every opportunity that comes up. Biden called Tyre’s family and invited them. I’m not impressed with anybody until changes are made. I’m not impressed by the suits you wear or positions you hold. I’m pretty beat up and sickened by it. Everybody has a job but nobody takes their job seriously. Other than the reporters and whistleblowers and families and activists. Those are the only minds of determination I see. The resistance is from all those above.

Have you grown kind of cynical? I was with you in Washington when you met with the congressional committee right after the original Floyd bill failed. What’s happened since then?

I wouldn’t use the word cynical. I have to grab every grain I can. At the indictments, they were acting like it was a big deal. [In December, a grand jury indicted five officers involved in Greene’s death, with charges ranging from negligent homicide to malfeasance in office and obstruction of justice.] This shouldn’t be a big deal. This should have been done a while ago. I was so pissed I couldn’t even talk when the indictments came. It’s a murder and you end up with these piss-poor charges.

We still can’t trust no one. We’re not represented. Nobody is taking the death of my son seriously. This May will be four years since his death. And to still not know what will happen. The FBI investigations? Will they bring out all these top brass that were allowed to retire or promoted?

You mentioned that you watched RowVaughn Wells speak at the press conference the other day. What did you make of her statements?

When you see that mom up there, that’s us. Over and damn over again. She’s repeating what all of us have said. It’s so hurtful and heartbreaking. It’s another family that’s been added to the list. I’m glad that it got national attention — I am so glad — like they all should have been.

One thing she said that I identified with was: The only way I can move forward is knowing that God taking Tyre might make a difference in the world. That’s how she has to accept it. I feel that because the only way I can get past my anger was to know that God has Ronnie. God had to take you for a reason and maybe changes will happen behind this.

I had to put myself there, in that way of thinking, in order not to focus on the fact that my family has become a statistic. I can’t even think of my son as my son. Mentally I’ll shut down. It’s the same reason I cannot put his name in the past tense.

There is a sense of numbness in the communities to where this is what’s expected. It’s sickening that it takes another killing of a young black man to push the hands of fairness across the board and say OK this needs to stop. This mass genocide in communites of color. It takes another killing. How many more before we actually move the needle and make those changes?

Are you worried about becoming desensitized by going through the motions so often with these other families?

I don’t think desensitized is the word. In order to be focused, the numbness sets in. As me and the kids talk, we say, “Damn, I can’t believe we got through this.” We have to literally lean on each other. When one shuts down the other picks up. Desensitized might be a good word actually. But we always resurface.

I have to say, where are the officials at the White House? They’re the ones desensitized. Why doesn’t this bear enough meaning to make legislative changes. How can you uphold any part of the Constitution when this is going on? How can you address what’s wrong in other countries when this is happening here?

We’re waiting for change but change doesn’t come. I pray that Tyre Nichols will be the last and change comes from that.

Do you believe that it will?

I have to. I was hoping that the minute Ronnie hit the news. But it dropped to silence. Every time it was on the news and then not, my heart sank. There was no assistance. Absolutely nothing. And you know what, we still have absolutely nothing. We have a legal team but we are still left alone. We have absolutely nothing. No guidance. No reassurance. I hate that.

I’m just happy the Nichols family does. This is how it should happen; how she’s been received; how it went public immediately. Nothing should be under secrecy. If only we could have had that recognition.

So you see how the Memphis case was handed as a step forward for transparency?

Oh my gosh, yes. When people gather and stage protests, if that’s what you have to do, then do it, damn it. I agree with Tyre’s mom, though. We don’t want craziness. That’s not how we do things. Hell yeah we’re mad. We’re mad as hell.

When you meet Tyre’s mother in Washington, have you thought about what you might say to her?

I'm glad you brought that up. In the past, when we met each other, we just hug and hold and sort of just melt into each other. That’s how it was when I met with Katrina Mateen. [Mateen’s 15-year-old son was shot and killed by police in Gulfport, Mississippi, last October.] There are no words other than “I love you. I’m so sorry.”

How can you take it past that when it’s so indescribable, the pain? We identify. There’s a lot of hurt in that young mother to where you have to be careful. You have to be very, very gentle with that. I know I’ll hug her. I know I have to. That’s what we all do.

by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Free Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

JACKSON, Miss. — The freeze of early 2021 wasn’t the origin of Jackson, Mississippi’s water system collapse. But the winter storm introduced the country to Jackson’s aging and improperly maintained pipes and water plants, which failed and left residents without clean water for over a month.

The crisis surged back in the summer of 2022, leaving residents without clean water for two months and drawing comparisons to Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoning scandal, another banner example of America’s ruinous infrastructure systems. Here, as in Flint, the federal government stepped in: In November, the Department of Justice appointed a federal manager to take control of the beleaguered utility, and less than a month later, Congress approved $600 million exclusively for the city’s water system.

But the rescue effort is already running up against the realities of local politics, reflecting historic tensions between Jackson and the rest of the state. For decades, state and city leaders have clashed over who should control local spending, services and infrastructure. Now, both the federal manager and the city’s mayor are warning that state politicians are attempting to take over Jackson’s water system, along with hundreds of millions in federal funds meant for repairing it.

At the heart of the feud is Senate Bill 2889, introduced in mid-January by a lawmaker who says his only goal is to ensure the Mississippi capital’s water system is restored.

The legislation would create a new regional water-authority board to oversee the system’s water, sewer and drainage systems. The governor and lieutenant governor would appoint a majority of the board. Over the years, state leaders including the current governor, Tate Reeves, have expressed skepticism about whether Jackson is capable of managing its own affairs. Federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, have also questioned the city’s management of its water and wastewater systems.

The latest move in the Legislature worries the manager, Ted Henifin, who says a regional authority could allow improvements and debt relief to flow out of Jackson and into suburban utilities that join the entity. “I believe the $600+ million in federal funding has created a monster in the Mississippi Legislature,” Henifin told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica in a written statement last week. A federal judge appointed Henifin to the position of interim third-party manager in late November.

Ted Henifin was appointed by a federal judge to shepherd Jackson’s water system out of crisis. (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press)

Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba built on Henifin’s critique Monday. “It is a colonial power taking over our city. It is plantation politics. I have not been shy in the ways that I have referenced this,” he said.

The mayor highlighted a litany of other proposed legislation that together would give Mississippi authority over segments of Jackson’s police and court systems. He called the legislative proposals a “unified attack” against the city’s autonomy.

“It reminds me of apartheid,” he said. “They dictate our leadership, put a military force over us and we’re just supposed to pay taxes to the king.”

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. David Parker, R-Olive Branch, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, whose office helped design the measure, strongly denied that attempts to divert federal funds were behind the legislation. After the news organizations asked Parker about some critics’ concerns, he and Hosemann agreed that the state should recoup none of the federal funds, and Parker pledged to introduce an amendment that would explicitly prohibit the use of the funds outside Jackson’s city limits.

Henifin was unmoved, saying he was concerned that amendments could be overwritten later, and that a regional utility was the wrong solution for Jackson in any case.

“We Need an Arbitrator”

If the Senate bill becomes law, the Mississippi Capitol Region Utility Act would effectively give the state authority over Jackson’s water system once the federal manager’s authority lapses.

That’s because it would grant the governor power to appoint three of the nine members, and the lieutenant governor two, giving statewide leaders, who are white, majority control over water, wastewater and stormwater utilities in Jackson, whose population is 82% Black. The mayor would get four appointments, including one that he would have to select in “consultation” with the mayor of nearby Byram, majority Black, and another chosen with the mayor of Ridgeland, a demographically mixed suburb. The board would then elect a president to formally lead the new regional utility.

In an interview, Henifin said he believes Jackson’s system requires judicial and federal oversight to prevent the mismanagement of critical infrastructure funds, which he estimates would take years to properly spend.

“I think at the end of the day we need an arbitrator, and I think that’s a federal judge in this case.” He said he believes this oversight should be extended to protect the federal dollars, estimating that five years of some form of oversight should be sufficient to lock in the necessary contracts and investments.

He later said that legislative interference might threaten efforts to procure a contract to address the water system’s crucial staffing shortages because the prospect of a change in the water utility’s leadership while a long-term contract is still being executed could scare off large corporations.

Although Parker and Hosemann were complimentary of Henifin in interviews with the Mississippi Free Press, Henifin says neither of the parties involved has ever consulted him. Indeed, he said that Hosemann’s office rebuffed his attempt to set up a meeting. Hosemann acknowledged that he had not spoken with Henifin yet but said he intended to “shortly.”

“I Wanted to Be Very Sympathetic”

Parker said that although he lives 200 miles from Jackson, he did experience the city’s water crisis firsthand.

“I have a daughter that I live with during the legislative session,” he said. “I’ve spent numerous times walking down to the swimming pool and dipping water into a cooler, taking it back up to the toilet to flush. We live in an apartment complex that’s had to put portable facilities on the ground floor to allow people to go to the bathroom.”

“I wanted to be very sympathetic and compassionate to the feelings of the mayor and other people who have spent a long time trying to seek answers to this problem,” Parker said. “So in setting up a board that would be overseeing the water and sewer system, my idea was to give the mayor four appointments on a nine-member board.”

He said he believed the governor and lieutenant governor should appoint a majority of the board’s members because Mississippi’s failure to “provide the basic needs and services that our people deserve is reflected 100% back on the governor and the people in this building.”

Sen. David Parker, R-Olive Branch, introduced Senate Bill 2889. He said his only goal is to ensure the Mississippi capital’s water system is restored. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo)

Parker said he initially believed that residents in Ridgeland drew water from Jackson’s treatment plant. Though the facility itself is located in Ridgeland, reporters told Parker that Ridgeland does not currently receive water from Jackson’s water system; they also told him that parts of Ridgeland may use Jackson’s greater sewage system. He then suggested the bill may have included that city’s mayor in light of that fact.

He expressed surprise over Henifin’s comments and strongly denied any intent to divert money away from Jackson.

“There is no intent on my part to stack a board in any way, shape or form that would give preferential treatment to the fringe areas of the water authority,” he said. “My hope would be that if the majority of the water authority is within the city of Jackson, I would hope that the governor, lieutenant governor and mayor would put people on the board from those geographic areas.”

Parker said he intends to speak with Henifin as his bill makes its way through the Senate.

“Crafting something like this is an extreme challenge.”

The bill gives the surrounding municipalities a path to join the new capital water authority, transferring their assets and debts to it, a common feature of regional utilities.

The news organizations asked Parker if any part of SB 2889 prevented that regionalization from allowing federal funds to be dispersed to utilities outside Jackson. Parker said he would look into that question. A day later, Hosemann said he had agreed with Parker that they should address any gaps that might allow money to be spent outside of the authority itself.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann’s office helped craft SB 2889, which would allow the governor and lieutenant governor to appoint the majority of a newly created regional water-authority board. (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press) “It Is Plantation Politics”

Lumumba said the feud over spending the federal funds highlights the friction between the state’s majority-white leaders and the majority-Black capital city.

“It is plantation politics,” Lumumba said. “It’s consistent with this paternalistic relationship that the state of Mississippi believes that it maintains with the city of Jackson.”

Lumumba compared it to the 1% Sales Tax Commission, a system the Legislature designed to assert control over spending derived from a special sales tax Jackson maintains to fund infrastructure projects.

The mayor identified other bills as part of what he considers an assault on the city’s right to self-determination, including bills to expand the Capitol Police’s territory. Another bill would create an independent court system of unelected judges and prosecutors for that same area. Lawmakers said the legislation was needed to respond to a rise in crime rates.

“It’s all a unified attack,” he said.

In a response to additional inquiries, Hosemann’s Deputy Chief of Staff Leah Rupp Smith said they defer to Parker on the legislation but “share a desire with all parties to find a long-term solution,” and she said that a regional utility authority “has been viable in other parts of our state.” They said they planned to meet with Henifin the week after next.

Parker said his conversations with the mayor have been “productive and congenial.” He added that they “share an interest in ensuring all people served by the systems have access to safe and reliable water and wastewater services at a fair and reasonable cost.”

Lumumba called bills to transfer authority in Jackson to the state “plantation politics.” (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press)

In recent years, Lumumba has clashed repeatedly with Hosemann over Jackson’s autonomy. “The last time I met with him, he said that I needed to look at a possible relationship with the state of Mississippi, because ‘what did I think, that Biden was gonna write me a check?’”

“I recently told him I do, and he did,” the mayor said of Biden.

Senior reporter Kayode Crown of the Mississippi Free Press contributed reporting.

by Ash Ngu

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which pushed for museums, universities and other organizations that possessed Native American human remains to return them to Indigenous communities. But our reporting shows that many institutions still hold many of those remains in their collections. Last month, ProPublica published a database that allows you to search the repatriation records of these hundreds of institutions.

But the full story of repatriation goes beyond the numbers, as illustrated by our story about a state museum in Illinois that was built on Native American burial mounds.​​​​ This guide is for reporters who want to take a deeper dive on repatriation at institutions in their area.

Watch an Informational Webinar With Our Reporters. 1. Understand the Repatriation Process. Key terms

• Human remains: The physical remains of a person of Native American ancestry. Each inventory record lists the minimum number of individuals (MNI) represented by the remains. We’ve avoided referring to Native American remains as “collections” or “sets of remains” in our reporting, though the terms are commonly used. Instead, to highlight the humanity of the individuals, we have opted for phrases like “remains of Native Americans” or “ancestral remains.”
• Associated funerary objects (AFO): Items found with human remains that are also in an institution’s possession. Also consider using “funerary belongings.”
• Inventory: Item-by-item descriptions of human remains and associated funerary objects. The institution that holds them provides this list to the federal government and potentially affiliated tribes.
• Cultural affiliation: A shared group identity connecting a present-day tribe with an earlier group. The standard for establishing affiliation is a preponderance of evidence.
• Preponderance of evidence: A legal burden of proof that is met when something is more likely than not.
• Culturally unidentified: Remains and items for which no culturally affiliated tribe has been determined, according to the institution that holds them.
• Disposition: When culturally unidentified remains and associated funerary objects are transferred to tribal control through geographic affiliation instead of cultural affiliation.
• Notice of inventory completion: A notice published in the Federal Register when an institution determines that certain remains and funerary objects are culturally affiliated with one or more tribes, or will repatriate based on a geographical link.

More information is available on the NAGPRA site’s glossary page.

Read up on the law and regulations.

NAGPRA applies only to institutions that receive federal funds and have Native American human remains or cultural items. The law provides a process for consultation and repatriation.

The National NAGPRA Program, which operates under the Department of the Interior, helps administer the law. The program runs a website that provides useful resources on terminology; compliance; inventory records; the duties of the NAGPRA Review Committee, which monitors and reviews the implementation of the law; annual reports to Congress; enforcement; and more.

To understand the law’s goals and how it has been implemented, read the text of the act and the history of legislative intent. The Department of the Interior administers the law and has issued a series of regulations since 1990. Notably, in 2010 the department created a pathway for the return of remains and items whose cultural affiliation cannot be established. This year, the department is seeking to update the regulations to expedite the repatriation process.

To show what the law requires of institutions, the NAGPRA Community of Practice, a network of people who work on NAGPRA, created a flowchart and museum guide. The National Park Service also has an in-depth guide on NAGPRA compliance.

(National Park Service)

Repatriation can be requested by direct descendants, by federally recognized tribes and Alaska Native entities, or by Native Hawaiian organizations. Institutions are not required to consult with tribes that lack federal recognition. However, in some cases museums have chosen to consult directly with these tribes, or with a federally recognized tribe acting as an intermediary.

Institutions may repatriate Native American remains to multiple tribes. In these cases, the tribes often work together to determine what they’d like to do with the remains.

2. Dig Into the Data. Search the ProPublica NAGPRA database.

Our tool adds visuals and a search function to a data set maintained by the National Park Service that itemizes all the Native American human remains and associated funerary objects that roughly 600 institutions have reported to the federal government. The data set includes information on the state and county that remains and objects were taken from, which institutions hold them and whether they have been made available for return.

You can type the name of an institution, tribe or state into the search box, or click on counties in the national map to learn more. All institutions, tribes and states are listed at the bottom of the page.

State and county pages: If you want to start exploring geographically, each state has a page (e.g., California) that lists the institutions in the state that hold remains or items from anywhere in the country. The page also lists what institutions hold remains and items that were originally taken from that state. It also shows the percentage of remains each institution has made available for return and to which tribes. From the state pages, or from the map on the main page, you can drill down to county pages (e.g., Apache County, Arizona), which show the status of human remains originally taken from that county.

Sometimes institutions make conflicting decisions about human remains and items taken from the same area. State and county pages make it easy to identify these disagreements. For example, federal agencies have been generally more likely than museums to repatriate remains taken from the Southwest area. Further reporting could explain why some institutions have kept remains and objects while others have returned them.

Institution pages: The institution pages (e.g., University of Arizona) provide a summary of where the ancestral remains in an institution’s inventory were taken from and which remains the institution has not made available for return.

The timeline chart on these pages shows the institution’s progress since NAGPRA was passed and can identify important events in the institution’s history. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority did not start making remains available for return until the 2010s. Since then, a majority of the Native American remains in its possession have been made available for return. What changed? A critical government audit sparked reform.

Keep in mind that some institutions, like Stanford University, completed repatriations prior to NAGPRA’s passage. The data ProPublica published only reflects what institutions have reported since the law came into effect. We have no way to consistently track repatriations before that.

Tribe pages: ProPublica for the first time made the NAGPRA data set searchable by tribe (e.g., Chickasaw Nation). The pages show where Native American remains that have been made available for return to a tribe were taken from and which institutions returned them. They also include a list of institutions that may have ancestral remains taken from counties of interest to each tribe. This information can help NAGPRA coordinators identify tribes that should potentially be contacted about unrepatriated remains. Keep in mind that institutions may make remains available for return to multiple tribes and that the remains listed on tribes’ pages are not necessarily exclusive to one tribe.

Request inventory record data from the National NAGPRA Program.

The National NAGPRA Program has additional detail on specific inventories broken down by institution, state or county. This information can help reporters understand how remains were acquired and make comparisons between institutions. The level of detail that institutions provide varies. Due to concerns about looting, we decided not to publish specific information about the sites that remains were taken from, unless the site is already commonly known, like a national monument or state park.

Caveat and contextualize the data.

The data is self-reported by institutions. Institutions give a minimum estimate of how many Native Americans’ remains they hold, and they frequently adjust these numbers. Some institutions subject to NAGPRA have failed to report the remains in their possession. As a result, the numbers are best taken as low-end estimates.

The data can appear deceptively precise. When speaking generally about what an institution has, we recommend rounding numbers to the nearest tens or hundreds. For example, “The University of California, Berkeley reported still having the remains of at least 9,000 Native Americans” instead of 9,075.

Some institutions claim that all of the human remains subject to NAGPRA in their holdings are “available for return.” What they mean is that everything has the potential to be returned, pending a tribal claim, consultation, determination by the institution and publication of a notice detailing the list of tribes eligible to claim the remains. We use “made available for return” only for remains that have already been through that process, and the only step left is for the specified tribes to decide what they’ll do with the remains.

The physical transfer of remains can take time. Tribes might not have the money, space or capacity to complete this last step. Also, tribes sometimes establish agreements under which remains stay in the care of museums but legal control of them is transferred to the tribes.

That said, many of the remains described as “made available for return” have been physically returned. We’d like to say when physical return occurs, but the federal government doesn’t collect that data. If you contact an institution individually, it may share this information.

3. Gather Documents. Search the Federal Register for notices.

When an institution establishes a connection between tribes and remains, it must publish a list of the tribes eligible to make a repatriation claim. These notices are published in the Federal Register and are searchable. Try searching for “Notice of Inventory Completion,” followed by the name of the institution or tribe you’re interested in.

Tribes and institutions sometimes change their names, so the present-day name may not exactly match what’s listed in the notice.

Notices describe the Native American remains and associated funerary objects being made available for return. They contain information on which tribes were consulted, how the remains came to be in the institution’s possession, and who to contact at the institution. Occasionally, the evidence used to determine a cultural affiliation or disposition of the remains is also included.

Request records.

Other documents can aid in reporting on NAGPRA. Look for records that:

• Detail how the institution acquired the Native American remains and items reported in its inventory (also known as their provenance).
• Explain the behind-the-scenes decision-making on whether to repatriate and the evidence used.
• Show the quality of relations between the institution and tribes.

Records you can seek include:

• Original inventories or summaries of Native American remains and cultural items that institutions send to tribes. Copies are sent to the National NAGPRA Program.
• Excavation field notes. Many remains were removed in federally funded excavation projects or by academically oriented field schools in the 20th century, and both of those endeavors often produced significant archives.
• Loan files that document requests and transfers of Native American remains and objects between institutions, potentially for research purposes.
• Notes or internal email correspondence from NAGPRA staff, faculty, administrators, legal counsel, tribes or colleagues at other institutions.
• Materials and notes used during consultations. Institutions often prepare materials for their meetings with tribes and take notes.
• Recordings of consultations. During the pandemic, many meetings were held over Zoom and may have been recorded.
• Tribal claim documents. These may contain information that tribes do not want shared publicly because they are culturally sensitive or could aid looters.
• Determination records. These may explain the rationale behind determinations of cultural affiliation or disposition.
• NAGPRA Review Committee transcripts. Disputes are often brought before committee, and you can search for mentions of tribes, institutions or regions.
• Grant application materials. When institutions apply for NAGPRA or other government-funded grants, the application materials and statements supplied may provide insight into their budgets and intent. You can request these records from the agency that administers the grants.
• Historical documents, such as field notes and annual reports, that may not be online.
• Appraisal documents for objects.

Note that while freedom of information laws make it possible to request records from public institutions, private institutions’ records are much harder to obtain. In those cases, you may have luck by requesting records from amenable institutions or groups that have corresponded with or worked on consultations with them.

4. Talk to People With Experience.

The history of the taking and repatriation of Native American remains and cultural items varies by region. Familiarize yourself with the history of Indigenous peoples and institutions in your area. Talk to tribal and institutional representatives to understand how efforts to repatriate have proceeded since NAGPRA’s passage in 1990. There may have been several rounds of consultation between tribes and institutions. And when repatriation efforts stretch back 30-plus years, it may help your reporting to piece together a chronology of who represented each group.

Talk to representatives of tribal nations.

Learn the basics of repatriation before approaching sources. Be prepared to explain why you’re interested in reporting on this topic. Look up the tribe’s page on ProPublica’s NAGPRA database as a starting point to understand which institutions they may have consulted with already.

Tribes generally have designated NAGPRA specialists. Often, they are a tribal historic preservation officer or cultural director. Use these directories to find a point of contact:

• National NAGPRA Program Contacts Database
• National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers directory
• Tribal Leaders Directory: Department of the Interior
• Native Hawaiian Organization List: Department of the Interior

Reach out to tribal reps early, since they can be very busy. Know that tribes have different views on how best to repatriate. Tribes are not always ready to repatriate and don’t always want remains to be physically returned. Sometimes multiple tribes make competing claims that take time to sort out. Tribes may be open to respectfully conducted research.

Also, keep in mind that tribal leaders may not want to discuss repatriation and might not see news coverage as beneficial, especially if they’re in the middle of consulting with institutions and need to maintain those relationships. Repatriation can be a private issue in some cultures, and some do not have a cultural protocol for handing the dead.

Ask about successes and challenges the tribe has faced in their repatriation work. Have tribes had sufficient funding to pursue consultation and repatriation? What has been positive or negative about their experiences? Have institutions been proactive in reaching out to them and sharing information about ancestral remains and cultural objects in their collections?

It’s critical that both tribes and institutions have sufficient funding to work on consultations and repatriations. Many tribes and institutions don’t have a dedicated, paid staff member to work on NAGPRA issues, and even when that role exists, turnover can be high. Stable funding allows for long-term relationship-building between tribes and museums who often must engage with each other over years to complete the process.

Talk to museum representatives.

The number of people involved in NAGPRA work varies by institution. Some institutions have full-time NAGPRA coordinators, while others rely on individuals who have other responsibilities, often as professors or curators.

Some institutions list a NAGPRA contact on their websites. Otherwise, you can find out who to talk to by looking at the National NAGPRA contacts database. If the institution has published a notice in the Federal Register, those often include contact information, and you can find them with a “Notice of Inventory Completion” search as explained above.

Some questions we suggest asking:

• Is the data maintained by the National NAGPRA Program accurate? If the institution says the data is out of date or inaccurate, ask it to elaborate on specifically what is incorrect and to update its federal records.
• What efforts have been made to consult with tribes on remains that have yet to be repatriated? When did the museum last reach out to tribes? Some institutions say they have followed the law because they invited tribes to consult when the law was first passed and they didn’t get a response. That approach doesn’t match the spirit of the law. Some tribes have several dozen institutions holding human remains and objects that could potentially be repatriated to them, creating a burdensome workload for tribes.
• How were decisions about whether to repatriate made? Who have been the decision-makers?
• If an institution has not repatriated remains taken from a specific region or site, while others have, get in touch with the ones that did repatriate and ask why their determinations were different.
• How does the institution fund NAGPRA work? How many staff positions are dedicated to it?
• What is the institution’s policy on research, teaching, display, imaging and circulation of human remains and cultural items that are potentially subject to NAGPRA? NAGPRA does not prohibit these practices, but tribes often find them to be disrespectful.

Lastly, keep in mind that even if a museum is not listed in the database, it might have unreported Native American remains that are subject to NAGPRA. Small or private institutions that have received federal funding might not understand that they are subject to the law. In a 2021 article, Indian Country Today looked into whether institutions that had accepted stimulus funds may be subject to NAGPRA.

Talk to people involved with repatriation.

People have been working on repatriation for a long time, and it’s important to understand the variety of opinions on how to approach the issue. Perspectives on NAGPRA have been shared in academic publications dealing with fields such as law, museum and heritage studies, Native American studies, anthropology and archaeology.

The NAGPRA Community of Practice is a network dedicated to supporting the implementation of the law. The group offers training resources and holds meetings twice a month.

The NAGPRA Review Committee’s members are nominated by tribes and national museums or scientific organizations.

The National NAGPRA Program can be reached at NAGPRA_info@nps.gov.

Get in touch with us.

If you publish a story about repatriation using our data, let us know! You can contact our reporting team to share stories or ask questions at repatriation@propublica.org.

We have also solicited tips about repatriation from readers across the country. With the permission of those who wrote in, we may share tips with local newsrooms. If you are interested in being part of this effort, let us know by emailing us with the subject line “Interested in Tips.”

Help Us Investigate Museums’ Failure to Return Native American Human Remains and Cultural Items

by Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Can the federal government underwrite mortgages for homes in Hawaii on a spot where there may be buried bombs from World War II?

The answer depends on which federal program insures the loans. When it comes to the one for Native Hawaiians, the answer has been an emphatic no. But when it comes to more traditional mortgages for the general public, a different federal program has been saying yes.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported in November how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in late 2014 restricted some mortgage lending in a region of Hawaii’s Big Island known as the Waikoloa Maneuver Area, concerned that buried bombs still posed a danger to thousands of residents. Funds would flow again, officials said, once the military removed any unexploded devices and once the state deemed the land safe.

That policy effectively froze lending for many Native Hawaiians, who relied on HUD-backed loans to develop homesteads within a historic land trust, parts of which were located in an area with a potential for unexploded ordnance, known as the UXO zone.

But new documents and interviews show that the Federal Housing Administration, which is part of HUD, has insured loans for people seeking to buy homes on land outside of that trust but still within the UXO zone — long before officials declared any parcels there safe from unexploded ordnance.

The new revelations raise questions about federal policy and whether the HUD restrictions unfairly targeted Native Hawaiians — or put others at risk.

“I don’t understand why they would allow it for some properties but not for others,” said Eric Brundage, a former Army explosive ordnance disposal expert who has helped with recovery and detonation of UXO in the Waikoloa area. “That just doesn’t make sense to me.”

According to federal data, between 2015 and 2018, FHA insured 19 loans in a ZIP code with land in the heart of the UXO zone. That area contains no trust land. The ZIP code’s largest residential community, Waikoloa Village, is in a sector considered at higher risk for UXO danger than some of the Native parcels. As recently as 2018, workers were still finding evidence of possible explosives, unearthing nearly 370 pounds of munition debris — some on land that had been checked before. The state Health Department, which oversees remediation work, did not approve any parcels within this sector for residential use until 2019.

On paper, the FHA lending seemed to be at odds with HUD’s regulations for department investments at the time, which required all property for use in its programs to be free of contamination of all sorts. In a document on the Waikoloa Maneuver Area policy, the department said “the unmitigated presence of unexploded ordnance presents an unacceptable risk to the health and safety of occupants and conflicts with residential property use.”

In practice, though, HUD told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that its policy did not apply to the FHA loans. In an email to the news organizations, the department did not explain why, only noting that federal backing flows from two separate programs. FHA insures single-family mortgages offered to the general public while HUD runs a separate lending program for Native Hawaiians seeking to live on trust land. The latter entails “a different and more direct role” for the department because it has a “trust like relationship” with Native Hawaiians, a department spokesperson said.

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, said in a statement to the news organizations that he is concerned about the impact of the HUD policy on the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which oversees the Native trust. That department, he said, is now subject to “more onerous restrictions on building and financing than any other landowner in the state.” Schatz said he was working with federal and state agencies “to find a path forward to make it easier to finance and develop on Hawaiian Home Lands while continuing to keep people safe.”

HUD officials in Washington did not make anyone available to be interviewed for this story. Instead, they provided a written statement.

“HUD is committed to providing access to mortgage financing for our Native American and Native Hawaiian communities,” wrote Jason Pu, administrator of the department’s western region that includes Hawaii. “HUD is working with our partners in the federal government and the State of Hawaii to examine state and federal regulations and to ensure that further developments in the Waikoloa Maneuver Area are appropriate and safe.”

It’s unclear from federal data, which does not identify the exact location of the loans, whether any Native Hawaiians seeking to live on trust land benefited from FHA lending. When asked whether FHA insured any such loans, HUD did not answer directly, only saying that FHA “never ceased making available” insurance for mortgages on properties located on trust lands in the UXO zone, provided the loans complied with all “applicable requirements.” It did not specify those requirements, though it noted that lenders have the responsibility to “ensure compliance with state and local laws governing the subject property and the associated mortgage financing.”

Native beneficiaries and mortgage brokers told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that they had witnessed some cases in which FHA loans were unavailable to people on trust lands in the UXO zone. Shirley Gambill-De Rego, a Big Island mortgage manager, recalled one case in 2015 in which an FHA loan for a client was denied when the lender learned the property was in the Waikoloa Maneuver Area. The lender believed the UXO risk to be too great, she said.

As the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported in November, the cleanup effort on trust lands is years behind schedule, with hundreds of Native Hawaiians waiting to develop ancestral lands. The trust, created by Congress more than a century ago, was intended to return Native people — especially impoverished ones — to their ancestral lands, a kind of reparations for the harms of colonization. Anyone at least 50% Hawaiian can apply for a residential lease to buy or build on trust land. The responsibility for the delay rests, in part, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has been plagued by shoddy work and multiple regulatory disputes. The Corps previously said that it is “committed to getting the remediation done right to ensure these areas are safe,” and that every acre that goes through the process “is a success toward restoration of lands.”

But some members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation are losing patience.

Last month, U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, wrote to leaders of four federal and state agencies, including HUD, saying the problems highlighted by the Star-Advertiser/ProPublica reporting have made clear that implementing an interagency approach will be critical to ensuring lands become safely available for residential construction. Specifically, she called for a working group made up of HUD, the Corps, the state Department of Health and the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. That group, she said, should determine the necessary steps to clear and secure the land “as quickly as possible” to ensure the state and federal governments meet their obligation to provide safe, affordable housing options to beneficiaries of the Native Hawiian land trust.

“Today, there are more than 6,000 beneficiaries on Hawaii Island who are waiting for land, and for many of them, HUD financing will be the best or only option for building an affordable home,” Hirono wrote in her Jan. 11 letter.

Native Hawaiian leaders note that, so far, relatively few munitions have been found in Puukapu, the largest trust parcel in the UXO zone. Yet beneficiaries are still waiting on the Corps and state regulators to officially clear the area. Many have leases that flag their land as being located in a UXO zone.

Gambill-De Rego, the mortgage broker and a Puukapu beneficiary, said she has helped some beneficiaries whose older leases did not contain that flag but has had to tell many others that they can’t get mortgages until the UXO issue is resolved. “This is not fair at all,” she said.

Ian Lee Loy, a former member of the state commission that oversees the trust lands, noted that many Native Hawaiians have already waited years — and sometimes, decades — for the opportunity to establish homesteads on the Big Island. “Everything you’ve uncovered is shameful,” he said.

Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed data analysis.

by Duaa Eldeib

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A growing number of lawmakers across the country are calling for action following a ProPublica investigation that revealed the failures of federal agencies and health care providers to reduce the country’s stillbirth rate.

More than 20,000 pregnancies in the U.S. annually end in stillbirth — the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more — an alarming figure that exceeds infant mortality and is 15 times the number of babies who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, in 2020. As many as 1 in 4 stillbirths may be preventable, experts say; the figure is even higher as a baby’s due date draws closer.

“With the tremendous advances we’ve made in modern medicine, we should be doing everything we can to prevent Americans from experiencing stillbirth,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, said in a statement to ProPublica. “Yet recent reports and data clearly show that we are not living up to that promise in our nation.”

Merkley and other lawmakers have called for additional funding for stillbirth research, data and prevention. They highlighted the increased risk for mothers who have had a stillbirth to suffer complications or die during or soon after childbirth.

“It is absolutely unconscionable that hundreds of expectant and new moms are dying every year from preventable causes in this country. Equally as shocking is the high number of stillbirths that occur throughout the nation,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat. “No one should die from preventable causes, and I will continue to work to improve our health system so mothers can feel safe and supported.”

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, last year formed a stillbirth working group. In January, the group recommended that the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention support additional research on stillbirth causes, risk factors, data and prevention.

The national stillbirth rate in 2020 was 5.74 per 1,000 live births and fetal deaths, according to CDC data. Provisional data for 2021, the most recent available, puts the rate just slightly better at 5.68. Among wealthy countries, the U.S. ranks as one of the worst in reducing its stillbirth rate.

Stark racial disparities have compounded the crisis. Black women are more than twice as likely — and in some states around three times as likely — as white women to have a stillbirth, according to 2020 data from the CDC. That year, CDC data shows the national stillbirth rate for Black women was 10.3, compared with 4.7 for white women.

ProPublica told the story of Brooke Smith, a Black mother from New York who delivered her stillborn daughter after going to the hospital twice in the weeks leading up to her due date with concerns about her baby. Both times doctors sent her home.

“Brooke Smith’s pregnancy experience is heartbreaking and unacceptable, and I heard too many stories like hers while writing the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act,” said Rep. Lauren Underwood, an Illinois Democrat, playing off the word “omnibus” — a common term for legislation that packages several bills together. “Stillbirth deserves more awareness and resources.”

The “Momnibus” is a set of 12 bills aimed at reducing maternal mortality and health disparities. Underwood, who along with Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., supported stillbirth prevention legislation as co-chairs of the Black Maternal Health Caucus, said stillbirth will be a priority for the group this year. The caucus, she said, has focused on stillbirth since its creation in 2019.

In New York, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said in a statement to ProPublica that “Black mothers continue to face significant health care inequities and we must take action.”

Lawmakers had already been working on two key stillbirth bills last year, and though both faltered, they remain determined to see them pass. Gillibrand was one of several legislators who co-sponsored a bill introduced in the Senate in March that aimed to reduce stillbirth rates by funding data collection, awareness efforts, research and fetal autopsy training. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., expects to reintroduce the legislation. The stillbirth rate for Black women in New Jersey and New York is higher than the national average.

The bill was named after Autumn Joy, the stillborn daughter of New Jersey mother and maternal health advocate Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya. For more than a decade, Haine Vijayvergiya has advocated for policy changes to prevent stillbirth. The Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act would have been the most comprehensive federal stillbirth legislation ever.

“Eleven and a half years ago, I made a promise to Autumn. I promised her that I would protect others from ever knowing this kind of devastation,” she said. “And I cannot bear to think about what the future holds if we do not get SHINE passed one day soon.”

Lawmakers in December came close to passing another stillbirth bill, the Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act, which had been introduced by Merkley and Adams in March and achieved bipartisan support, including from Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, both Republicans. The legislation would have added stillbirth research and prevention to the list of activities approved for federal maternal health funding. Merkley, who plans to reintroduce the bill, said he remains “passionately committed” to passing it.

Emily Price, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Healthy Birth Day, championed the legislation. The group is best known for creating a “Count the Kicks” app that helps pregnant people track their baby’s movements and establish what is normal for them. Research shows that after 28 weeks, changes in fetal movement, including decreased activity or bursts of excessive fetal activity, are associated with an increased risk of stillbirth.

Price said she has never been more optimistic about the future of stillbirth prevention in America.

“I do believe that change is coming. It is slow because of how long stillbirth has been ignored in this country, how long it’s been so taboo, how long there has been a belief that babies just die,” she said. “But we know better now.”

ProPublica found that a lack of research, data and fetal autopsies were significant barriers to better understanding stillbirths. No federal agency has launched a national campaign to reduce the risk of stillbirth or adequately raise awareness about it.

A CDC spokesperson said that as the agency learns more about stillbirth, it will work to translate that knowledge into prevention efforts, including possible awareness campaigns.

ProPublica also revealed how a series of government decisions early on in the pandemic led to confusion, low vaccine uptake among pregnant people and allowed misinformation to flourish. Research shows unvaccinated women who contracted COVID-19 during pregnancy faced a higher risk of stillbirth, but pregnant people were excluded from initial clinical vaccine trials. The CDC contributed to the confusion with vague early messaging about whether pregnant people should get vaccinated and waiting eight months to specifically recommend the vaccine to pregnant people.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who early on had been monitoring the effects of the pandemic on pregnant people, reintroduced legislation in December that called on public health organizations to provide timely guidance to reduce health risks to mothers and babies during a pandemic and also to assess the impact of not including pregnant people in clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines. That bill stalled.

Warren said she would continue her efforts. “Failure to listen to women, particularly Black and brown women, when they say they’re experiencing pain can have grave consequences — from serious complications to maternal death to stillbirths,” she said.

Help Us Report on Stillbirths

by David Armstrong, Patrick Rucker and Maya Miller

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Also: Do you have experiences with health insurance denials? Please get in touch.

In May 2021, a nurse at UnitedHealthcare called a colleague to share some welcome news about a problem the two had been grappling with for weeks.

United provided the health insurance plan for students at Penn State University. It was a large and potentially lucrative account: lots of young, healthy students paying premiums in, not too many huge medical reimbursements going out.

But one student was costing United a lot of money. Christopher McNaughton suffered from a crippling case of ulcerative colitis — an ailment that caused him to develop severe arthritis, debilitating diarrhea, numbing fatigue and life-threatening blood clots. His medical bills were running nearly $2 million a year.

United had flagged McNaughton’s case as a “high dollar account,” and the company was reviewing whether it needed to keep paying for the expensive cocktail of drugs crafted by a Mayo Clinic specialist that had brought McNaughton’s disease under control after he’d been through years of misery.

On the 2021 phone call, which was recorded by the company, nurse Victoria Kavanaugh told her colleague that a doctor contracted by United to review the case had concluded that McNaughton’s treatment was “not medically necessary.” Her colleague, Dave Opperman, reacted to the news with a long laugh.

“I knew that was coming,” said Opperman, who heads up a United subsidiary that brokered the health insurance contract between United and Penn State. “I did too,” Kavanaugh replied.

UnitedHealthcare Employees Discuss the Denial of Chris McNaughton’s Claim

David Opperman is an insurance broker who works for UnitedHealthcare. Victoria Kavanaugh is a nurse for United. In this recorded phone call from 2021, the two express relief that a doctor has turned down Penn State student Chris McNaughton’s claim as “not medically necessary.”

Opperman then complained about McNaughton’s mother, whom he referred to as “this woman,” for “screaming and yelling” and “throwing tantrums” during calls with United.

The pair agreed that any appeal of the United doctor’s denial of the treatment would be a waste of the family’s time and money.

“We’re still gonna say no,” Opperman said.

More than 200 million Americans are covered by private health insurance. But data from state and federal regulators shows that insurers reject about 1 in 7 claims for treatment. Many people, faced with fighting insurance companies, simply give up: One study found that Americans file formal appeals on only 0.1% of claims denied by insurers under the Affordable Care Act.

Insurers have wide discretion in crafting what is covered by their policies, beyond some basic services mandated by federal and state law. They often deny claims for services that they deem not “medically necessary.”

When United refused to pay for McNaughton's treatment for that reason, his family did something unusual. They fought back with a lawsuit, which uncovered a trove of materials, including internal emails and tape-recorded exchanges among company employees. Those records offer an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at how one of America's leading health care insurers relentlessly fought to reduce spending on care, even as its profits rose to record levels.

As United reviewed McNaughton’s treatment, he and his family were often in the dark about what was happening or their rights. Meanwhile, United employees misrepresented critical findings and ignored warnings from doctors about the risks of altering McNaughton’s drug plan.

At one point, court records show, United inaccurately reported to Penn State and the family that McNaughton’s doctor had agreed to lower the doses of his medication. Another time, a doctor paid by United concluded that denying payments for McNaughton’s treatment could put his health at risk, but the company buried his report and did not consider its findings. The insurer did, however, consider a report submitted by a company doctor who rubber-stamped the recommendation of a United nurse to reject paying for the treatment.

United declined to answer specific questions about the case, even after McNaughton signed a release provided by the insurer to allow it to discuss details of his interactions with the company. United noted that it ultimately paid for all of McNaughton’s treatments. In a written response, United spokesperson Maria Gordon Shydlo wrote that the company’s guiding concern was McNaughton’s well-being.

“Mr. McNaughton’s treatment involves medication dosages that far exceed FDA guidelines,” the statement said. “In cases like this, we review treatment plans based on current clinical guidelines to help ensure patient safety.”

But the records reviewed by ProPublica show that United had another, equally urgent goal in dealing with McNaughton. In emails, officials calculated what McNaughton was costing them to keep his crippling disease at bay and how much they would save if they forced him to undergo a cheaper treatment that had already failed him. As the family pressed the company to back down, first through Penn State and then through a lawsuit, the United officials handling the case bristled.

“This is just unbelievable,” Kavanaugh said of McNaughton’s family in one call to discuss his case. ”They’re just really pushing the envelope, and I’m surprised, like I don’t even know what to say.”

The Same Meal Every Day

McNaughton on the Penn State campus, where he first enrolled in 2020 (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica)

Now 31, McNaughton grew up in State College, Pennsylvania, just blocks from the Penn State campus. Both of his parents are faculty members at the university.

In the winter of 2014, McNaughton was halfway through his junior year at Bard College in New York. At 6 feet, 4 inches tall, he was a guard on the basketball team and had started most of the team’s games since the start of his sophomore year. He was majoring in psychology.

When McNaughton returned to school after the winter holiday break, he started to experience frequent bouts of bloody diarrhea. After just a few days on campus, he went home to State College, where doctors diagnosed him with a severe case of ulcerative colitis.

A chronic inflammatory bowel disease that causes swelling and ulcers in the digestive tract, ulcerative colitis has no cure, and ongoing treatment is needed to alleviate symptoms and prevent serious health complications. The majority of cases produce mild to moderate symptoms. McNaughton’s case was severe.

Treatments for ulcerative colitis include steroids and special drugs known as biologics that work to reduce inflammation in the large intestine.

McNaughton, however, failed to get meaningful relief from the drugs his doctors initially prescribed. He was experiencing bloody diarrhea up to 20 times a day, with such severe stomach pain that he spent much of his day curled up on a couch. He had little appetite and lost 50 pounds. Severe anemia left him fatigued. He suffered from other conditions related to his colitis, including crippling arthritis. He was hospitalized several times to treat dangerous blood clots.

For two years, in an effort to help alleviate his symptoms, he ate the same meals every day: Rice Chex cereal and scrambled eggs for breakfast, a cup of white rice with plain chicken breast for lunch and a similar meal for dinner, occasionally swapping in tilapia.

McNaughton at his home in State College, Pennsylvania. When he fell ill with ulcerative colitis he was forced to stop playing college basketball. (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica)

His hometown doctors referred him to a specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, who tried unsuccessfully to bring his disease under control. That doctor ended up referring McNaughton to Dr. Edward Loftus Jr. at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, which has been ranked as the best gastroenterology hospital in the country every year since 1990 by U.S. News & World Report.

For his first visit with Loftus in May 2015, McNaughton and his mother, Janice Light, charted hospitals along the 900-mile drive from Pennsylvania to Minnesota in case they needed medical help along the way.

Mornings were the hardest. McNaughton often spent several hours in the bathroom at the start of the day. To prepare for his meeting with Loftus, he set his alarm for 3:30 a.m. so he could be ready for the 7:30 a.m. appointment. Even with that preparation, he had to stop twice to use a bathroom on the five-minute walk from the hotel to the clinic. When they met, Loftus looked at McNaughton and told him that he appeared incapacitated. It was, he told the student, as if McNaughton were chained to the bathroom, with no outside life. He had not been able to return to school and spent most days indoors, managing his symptoms as best he could.

McNaughton had tried a number of medications by this point, none of which worked. This pattern would repeat itself during the first couple of years that Loftus treated him.

In addition to trying to find a treatment that would bring McNaughton’s colitis into remission, Loftus wanted to wean him off the steroid prednisone, which he had been taking since his initial diagnosis in 2014. The drug is commonly prescribed to colitis patients to control inflammation, but prolonged use can lead to severe side effects including cataracts, osteoporosis, increased risk of infection and fatigue. McNaughton also experienced “moon face,” a side effect caused by the shifting of fat deposits that results in the face becoming puffy and rounder.

In 2018, Loftus and McNaughton decided to try an unusual regimen. Many patients with inflammatory bowel diseases like colitis take a single biologic drug as treatment. Whereas traditional drugs are chemically synthesized, biologics are manufactured in living systems, such as plant or animal cells. A year’s supply of an individual biologic drug can cost up to $500,000. They are often given through infusions in a medical facility, which adds to the cost.

McNaughton receives an infusion of medication to treat his ulcerative colitis at a medical facility in State College. After initially paying for his treatment, UnitedHealthcare began rejecting his insurance claims. (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica.)

McNaughton had tried individual biologics, and then two in combination, without much success. He and Loftus then agreed to try two biologic drugs together at doses well above those recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Prescribing drugs for purposes other than what they are approved for or at higher doses than those approved by the FDA is a common practice in medicine referred to as off-label prescribing. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimates 1 in 5 prescriptions written today are for off-label uses.

There are drawbacks to the practice. Since some uses and doses of particular drugs have not been extensively studied, the risks and efficacy of using them off-label are not well known. Also, some drug manufacturers have improperly pushed off-label usage of their products to boost sales despite little or no evidence to support their use in those situations. Like many leading experts and researchers in his field, Loftus has been paid to do consulting related to the biologic drugs taken by McNaughton. The payments related to those drugs have ranged from a total of $1,440 in 2020 to $51,235 in 2018. Loftus said much of his work with pharmaceutical companies was related to conducting clinical trials on new drugs.

In cases of off-label prescribing, patients are depending upon their doctor’s expertise and experience with the drug.“In this case, I was comfortable that the potential benefits to Chris outweighed the risks,” Loftus said.

There was evidence that the treatment plan for McNaughton might work, including studies that had found dual biologic therapy to be efficacious and safe. The two drugs he takes, Entyvio and Remicade, have the same purpose — to reduce inflammation in the large intestine — but each works differently in the body. Remicade, marketed by Janssen Biotech, targets a protein that causes inflammation. Entyvio, made by Takeda Pharmaceuticals, works by preventing an excess of white blood cells from entering into the gastrointestinal tract.

As for any suggestion by United doctors that his treatment plan for McNaughton was out of bounds or dangerous, Loftus said “my treatment of Chris was not clinically inappropriate — as was shown by Chris’ positive outcome.”

The unusual high-dose combination of two biologic drugs produced a remarkable change in McNaughton. He no longer had blood in his stool, and his trips to the bathroom were cut from 20 times a day to three or four. He was able to eat different foods and put on weight. He had more energy. He tapered off prednisone.

“If you told me in 2015 that I would be living like this, I would have asked where do I sign up,” McNaughton said of the change he experienced with the new drug regimen.

When he first started the new treatment, McNaughton was covered under his family’s plan, and all his bills were paid. McNaughton enrolled at the university in 2020. Before switching to United’s plan for students, McNaughton and his parents consulted with a health advocacy service offered to faculty members. A benefits specialist assured them the drugs taken by McNaughton would be covered by United.

McNaughton receiving infusions of medicine used to treat his ulcerative colitis (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica)

McNaughton joined the student plan in July 2020, and his infusions that month and the following month were paid for by United. In September, the insurer indicated payment on his claims was “pending,” something it did for his other claims that came in during the rest of the year.

McNaughton and his family were worried. They called United to make sure there wasn’t a problem; the insurer told them, they said, that it only needed to check his medical records. When the family called again, United told them it had the documentation needed, they said. United, in a court filing last year, said it received two calls from the family and each time indicated that all of the necessary medical records had not yet been received.

In January 2021, McNaughton received a new explanation of benefits for the prior months. All of the claims for his care, beginning in September, were no longer “pending.” They were stamped “DENIED.” The total outstanding bill for his treatment was $807,086.

When McNaughton’s mother reached a United customer service representative the next day to ask why bills that had been paid in the summer were being denied for the fall, the representative told her the account was being reviewed because of “a high dollar amount on the claims,” according to a recording of the call.

Misrepresentations

McNaughton, center, at his home in State College with parents David McNaughton, left, and Janice Light, right. (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica)

With United refusing to pay, the family was terrified of being stuck with medical bills that would bankrupt them and deprive McNaugton of treatment that they considered miraculous.

They turned to Penn State for help. Light and McNaughton’s father, David, hoped their position as faculty members would make the school more willing to intervene on their behalf.

“After more than 30 years on faculty, my husband and I know that this is not how Penn State would want its students to be treated,” Light wrote to a school official in February 2021.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Penn State spokesperson Lisa Powers wrote that “supporting the health and well-being of our students is always of primary importance” and that “our hearts go out to any student and family impacted by a serious medical condition.” The university, she wrote, does “not comment on students’ individual circumstances or disclose information from their records.” McNaughton offered to grant Penn State whatever permissions it needed to speak about his case with ProPublica. The school, however, wrote that it would not comment “even if confidentiality has been waived.”

The family appealed to school administrators. Because the effectiveness of biologics wanes in some patients if doses are skipped, McNaughton and his parents were worried about even a delay in treatment. His doctor wrote that if he missed scheduled infusions of the drugs, there was “a high likelihood they would no longer be effective.”

During a conference call arranged by Penn State officials on March 5, 2021, United agreed to pay for McNaughton’s care through the end of the plan year that August. Penn State immediately notified the family of the “wonderful news” while also apologizing for “the stress this has caused Chris and your family.”

Behind the scenes, McNaughton’s review had “gone all the way to the top” at United’s student health plan division, Kavanaugh, the nurse, said in a recorded conversation.

Victoria Kavanaugh Complains to a United Contractor That McNaughton’s Coverage Request Is “Insane”

McNaughton had been on the treatment for three years and it had put his disease in remission with no side effects.

The family’s relief was short-lived. A month later, United started another review of McNaughton’s care, overseen by Kavanaugh, to determine if it would pay for the treatment in the upcoming plan year.

The nurse sent the McNaughton case to a company called Medical Review Institute of America. Insurers often turn to companies like MRIoA to review coverage decisions involving expensive treatments or specialized care.

Kavanaugh, who was assigned to a special investigations unit at United, let her feelings about the matter be known in a recorded telephone call with a representative of MRIoA.

“This school apparently is a big client of ours,” she said. She then shared her opinion of McNaughton’s treatment. “Really this is a case of a kid who’s getting a drug way too much, like too much of a dose,” Kavanaugh said. She said it was “insane that they would even think that this is reasonable” and “to be honest with you, they’re awfully pushy considering that we are paying through the end of this school year.”

Victoria Kavanaugh Describes Penn State as a “Big Account for Us”

On a call with an outside contractor, the United nurse claimed McNaughton was on a higher dose of medication than the FDA approved, which is a common practice known as “off-label prescribing.”

MRIoA sent the case to Dr. Vikas Pabby, a gastroenterologist at UCLA Health and a professor at the university’s medical school. His May 2021 review of McNaughton’s case was just one of more than 300 Pabby did for MRIoA that month, for which he was paid $23,000 in total, according to a log of his work produced in the lawsuit.

In a May 4, 2021 report, Pabby concluded McNaughton’s treatment was not medically necessary, because United’s policies for the two drugs taken by McNaughton did not support using them in combination.

Insurers spell out what services they cover in plan policies, lengthy documents that can be confusing and difficult to understand. Many policies, such as McNaughton’s, contain a provision that treatments and procedures must be “medically necessary” in order to be covered. The definition of medically necessary differs by plan. Some don’t even define the term. McNaughton’s policy contains a five-part definition, including that the treatment must be “in accordance with the standards of good medical policy” and “the most appropriate supply or level of service which can be safely provided.”

Behind the scenes at United, Opperman and Kavanaugh agreed that if McNaughton were to appeal Pabby’s decision, the insurer would simply rule against him. “I just think it’s a waste of money and time to appeal and send it to another one when we know we’re gonna get the same answer,” Opperman said, according to a recording in court files. At Opperman’s urging, United decided to skip the usual appeals process and arrange for Pabby to have a so-called “peer-to-peer” discussion with Loftus, the Mayo physician treating McNaughton. Such a conversation, in which a patient’s doctor talks with an insurance company’s doctor to advocate for the prescribed treatment, usually only occurs after a customer has appealed a denial and the appeal has been rejected.

When Kavanaugh called Loftus’ office to set up a conversation with Pabby, she explained it was an urgent matter and had been requested by McNaughton. “You know I’ve just gotten to know Christopher,” she explained, although she had never spoken with him. “We’re trying to advocate and help and get this peer-to-peer set up.”

McNaughton, meanwhile, had no idea at the time that a United doctor had decided his treatment was unnecessary and that the insurer was trying to set up a phone call with his physician.

In the peer-to-peer conversation, Loftus told Pabby that McNaughton had “a very complicated case” and that lower doses had not worked for him, according to an internal MRIoA memo.

Following his conversation with Loftus, Pabby created a second report for United. He recommended the insurer pay for both drugs, but at reduced doses. He added new language saying that the safety of using both drugs at the higher levels “is not established.”

When Kavanaugh shared the May 12 decision from Pabby with others at United, her boss responded with an email calling it “great news.”

Then Opperman sent an email that puzzled the McNaughtons.

In it, Opperman claimed that Loftus and Pabby had agreed that McNaughton should be on significantly lower doses of both drugs. He said Loftus “will work with the patient to start titrating them down” — or reducing the dosage — “to a normal dose range.” Opperman wrote that United would cover McNaughton’s treatment in the coming year, but only at the reduced doses. Opperman did not respond to emails and phone messages seeking comment.

McNaughton didn’t believe a word of it. He had already tried and failed treatment with those drugs at lower doses, and it was Loftus who had upped the doses, leading to his remission from severe colitis.

The only thing that made sense to McNaughton was that the treatment United said it would now pay for was dramatically cheaper — saving the company at least hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — than his prescribed treatment because it sliced the size of the doses by more than half.

When the family contacted Loftus for an explanation, they were outraged by what they heard. Loftus told them that he had never recommended lowering the dosage. In a letter, Loftus wrote that changing McNaughton’s treatment “would have serious detrimental effects on both his short term and long term health and could potentially involve life threatening complications. This would ultimately incur far greater medical costs. Chris was on the doses suggested by United Healthcare before, and they were not at all effective.”

It would not be until the lawsuit that it would become clear how Loftus’ conversations had been so seriously misrepresented.

Under questioning by McNaughton’s lawyers, Kavanaugh acknowledged that she was the source of the incorrect claim that McNaughton’s doctor had agreed to a change in treatment.

“I incorrectly made an assumption that they had come to some sort of agreement,” she said in a deposition last August. “It was my first peer-to-peer. I did not realize that that simply does not occur.”

Kavanaugh did not respond to emails and telephone messages seeking comment.

When the McNaughtons first learned of Opperman’s inaccurate report of the phone call with Loftus, it unnerved them. They started to question if their case would be fairly reviewed.

“When we got the denial and they lied about what Dr. Loftus said, it just hit me that none of this matters,” McNaughton said. “They will just say or do anything to get rid of me. It delegitimized the entire review process. When I got that denial, I was crushed.”

A Buried Report

While the family tried to sort out the inaccurate report, United continued putting the McNaughton case in front of more company doctors.

On May 21, 2021, United sent the case to one of its own doctors, Dr. Nady Cates, for an additional review. The review was marked “escalated issue.” Cates is a United medical director, a title used by many insurers for physicians who review cases. It is work he has been doing as an employee of health insurers since 1989 and at United since 2010. He has not practiced medicine since the early 1990s.

Cates, in a deposition, said he stopped seeing patients because of the long hours involved and because “AIDS was coming around then. I was seeing a lot of military folks who had venereal diseases, and I guess I was concerned about being exposed.” He transitioned to reviewing paperwork for the insurance industry, he said, because “I guess I was a chicken.”

When he had practiced, Cates said, he hadn’t treated patients with ulcerative colitis and had referred those cases to a gastroenterologist.

He said his review of McNaughton’s case primarily involved reading a United nurse’s recommendation to deny his care and making sure “that there wasn't a decimal place that was out of line.” He said he copied and pasted the nurse’s recommendation and typed “agree” on his review of McNaughton’s case.

Dr. Nady Cates, a United Medical Director, Explains That He Copied and Pasted the Text of His Decision to Deny McNaughton’s Care

In the deposition, Cates tells McNaughton’s lawyer that he copied the recommendation of Pamela Banister, a nurse for United, rather than writing his own decision.

Watch video ➜

Cates said that he does about a hundred reviews a week. He said that in his reviews he typically checks to see if any medications are prescribed in accordance with the insurer’s guidelines, and if not, he denies it. United’s policies, he said, prevented him from considering that McNaughton had failed other treatments or that Loftus was a leading expert in his field.

“You are giving zero weight to the treating doctor’s opinion on the necessity of the treatment regimen?” a lawyer asked Cates in his deposition. He responded, “Yeah.”

Attempts to contact Cates for comment were unsuccessful.

At the same time Cates was looking at McNaughton’s case, yet another review was underway at MRIoA. United said it sent the case back to MRIoA after the insurer received the letter from Loftus warning of the life-threatening complications that might occur if the dosages were reduced.

On May 24, 2021, the new report requested by MRIoA arrived. It came to a completely different conclusion than all of the previous reviews.

Dr. Nitin Kumar, a gastroenterologist in Illinois, concluded that McNaughton’s established treatment plan was not only medically necessary and appropriate but that lowering his doses “can result in a lack of effective therapy of Ulcerative Colitis, with complications of uncontrolled disease (including dysplasia leading to colorectal cancer), flare, hospitalization, need for surgery, and toxic megacolon.”

Unlike other doctors who produced reports for United, Kumar discussed the harm that McNaughton might suffer if United required him to change his treatment. “His disease is significantly severe, with diagnosis at a young age,” Kumar wrote. “He has failed every biologic medication class recommended by guidelines. Therefore, guidelines can no longer be applied in this case.” He cited six studies of patients using two biologic drugs together and wrote that they revealed no significant safety issues and found the therapy to be “broadly successful.”

When Kavanaugh learned of Kumar’s report, she quickly moved to quash it and get the case returned to Pabby, according to her deposition.

In a recorded telephone call, Kavanaugh told an MRIoA representative that “I had asked that this go back through Dr. Pabby, and it went through a different doctor and they had a much different result.” After further discussion, the MRIoA representative agreed to send the case back to Pabby. “I appreciate that,” Kavanaugh replied. “I just want to make sure, because, I mean, it’s obviously a very different result than what we’ve been getting on this case.”

MRIoA case notes show that at 7:04 a.m. on May 25, 2021, Pabby was assigned to take a look at the case for the third time. At 7:27 a.m., the notes indicate, Pabby again rejected McNaughton’s treatment plan. While noting it was “difficult to control” McNaughton’s ulcerative colitis, Pabby added that his doses “far exceed what is approved by literature” and that the “safety of the requested doses is not supported by literature.”

In a deposition, Kavanaugh said that after she opened the Kumar report and read that he was supporting McNaughton’s current treatment plan, she immediately spoke to her supervisor, who told her to call MRIoA and have the case sent back to Pabby for review.

Kavanaugh said she didn’t save a copy of the Kumar report, nor did she forward it to anyone at United or to officials at Penn State who had been inquiring about the McNaughton case. “I didn’t because it shouldn’t have existed,” she said. “It should have gone back to Dr. Pabby.”

When asked if the Kumar report caused her any concerns given his warning that McNaughton risked cancer or hospitalization if his regimen were changed, Kavanaugh said she didn’t read his full report. “I saw that it was not the correct doctor, I saw the initial outcome and I was asked to send it back,” she said. Kavanaugh added, “I have a lot of empathy for this member, but it needed to go back to the peer-to-peer reviewer.”

In a court filing, United said Kavanaugh was correct in insisting that Pabby conduct the review and that MRIoA confirmed that Pabby should have been the one doing the review.

The Kumar report was not provided to McNaughton when his lawyer, Jonathan Gesk, first asked United and MRIoA for any reviews of the case. Gesk discovered it by accident when he was listening to a recorded telephone call produced by United in which Kavanaugh mentioned a report number Gesk had not heard before. He then called MRIoA, which confirmed the report existed and eventually provided it to him.

Pabby asked ProPublica to direct any questions about his involvement in the matter to MRIoA. The company did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the case.

A Sense of Hopelessness

McNaughton on the Penn State campus (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica)

When McNaughton enrolled at Penn State in 2020, it brought a sense of normalcy that he had lost when he was first diagnosed with colitis. He still needed monthly hours-long infusions and suffered occasional flare-ups and symptoms, but he was attending classes in person and living a life similar to the one he had before his diagnosis.

It was a striking contrast to the previous six years, which he had spent largely confined to his parents’ house in State College. The frequent bouts of diarrhea made it difficult to go out. He didn’t talk much to friends and spent as much time as he could studying potential treatments and reviewing ongoing clinical trials. He tried to keep up with the occasional online course, but his disease made it difficult to make any real progress toward a degree.

United, in correspondence with McNaughton, noted that its review of his care was “not a treatment decision. Treatment decisions are made between you and your physician.” But by threatening not to pay for his medications, or only to pay for a different regimen, McNaughton said, United was in fact attempting to dictate his treatment. From his perspective, the insurer was playing doctor, making decisions without ever examining him or even speaking to him.

The idea of changing his treatment or stopping it altogether caused constant worry for McNaughton, exacerbating his colitis and triggering physical symptoms, according to his doctors. Those included a large ulcer on his leg and welts under his skin on his thighs and shin that made his leg muscles stiff and painful to the point where he couldn’t bend his leg or walk properly. There were daily migraines and severe stomach pain. “I was consumed with this situation,” McNaughton said. “My path was unconventional, but I was proud of myself for fighting back and finishing school and getting my life back on track. I thought they were singling me out. My biggest fear was going back to the hell.”

McNaughton said he contemplated suicide on several occasions, dreading a return to a life where he was housebound or hospitalized.

If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

McNaughton and his parents talked about him possibly moving to Canada where his grandmother lived and seeking treatment there under the nation’s government health plan.

Loftus connected McNaughton with a psychologist who specializes in helping patients with chronic digestive diseases.

The psychologist, Tiffany Taft, said McNaughton was not an unusual case. About 1 in 3 patients with diseases like colitis suffer from medical trauma or PTSD related to it, she said, often the result of issues related to getting appropriate treatment approved by insurers.

“You get into hopelessness,” she said of the depression that accompanies fighting with insurance companies over care. “They feel like ‘I can’t fix that. I am screwed.’ When you can’t control things with what an insurance company is doing, anxiety, PTSD and depression get mixed together.”

In the case of McNaughton, Taft said, he was being treated by one of the best gastroenterologists in the world, was doing well with his treatment and then was suddenly notified he might be on the hook for nearly a million dollars in medical charges without access to his medications. “It sends you immediately into panic about all these horrific things that could happen,” Taft said. The physical and mental symptoms McNaughton suffered after his care was threatened were “triggered” by the stress he experienced, she said.

In early June 2021, United informed McNaughton in a letter that it would not cover the cost of his treatment regimen in the next academic year, starting in August. The insurer said it would only pay for a treatment plan that called for a significant reduction in the doses of the drugs he took.

United wrote that the decision came after his “records have been reviewed three times and the medical reviewers have concluded that the medication as prescribed does not meet the Medical Necessity requirement of the plan.”

In August 2021, McNaughton filed a federal lawsuit accusing United of acting in bad faith and unreasonably making treatment decisions based on financial concerns and not what was the best and most effective treatment. It claims United had a duty to find information that supported McNaughton’s claim for treatment rather than looking for ways to deny coverage.

United, in a court filing, said it did not breach any duty it owed to McNaughton and acted in good faith. On Sept. 20, 2021, a month after filing the lawsuit, and with United again balking at paying for his treatment, McNaughton asked a judge to grant a temporary restraining order requiring United to pay for his care. With the looming threat of a court hearing on the motion, United quickly agreed to cover the cost of McNaughton’s treatment through the end of the 2021-2022 academic year. It also dropped a demand requiring McNaughton to settle the matter as a condition of the insurer paying for his treatment as prescribed by Loftus, according to an email sent by United’s lawyer.

The Cost of Treatment

An order form for medications given to McNaughton (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica)

It is not surprising that insurers are carefully scrutinizing the care of patients treated with biologics, which are among the most expensive medications on the market. Biologics are considered specialty drugs, a class that includes the best-selling Humira, used to treat arthritis. Specialty drug spending in the U.S. is expected to reach $505 billion in 2023, according to an estimate from Optum, United’s health services division. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit that analyzes the value of drugs, found in 2020 that the biologic drugs used to treat patients like McNaughton are often effective but overpriced for their therapeutic benefit. To be judged cost-effective by ICER, the biologics should sell at a steep discount to their current market price, the panel found.

A panel convened by ICER to review its analysis cautioned that insurance coverage “should be structured to prevent situations in which patients are forced to choose a treatment approach on the basis of cost.” ICER also found examples where insurance company policies failed to keep pace with updates to clinical practice guidelines based on emerging research.

United officials did not make the cost of treatment an issue when discussing McNaughton’s care with Penn State administrators or the family.

Bill Truxal, the president of UnitedHealthcare StudentResources, the company’s student health plan division, told a Penn State official that the insurer wanted the “best for the student” and it had “nothing to do with cost,” according to notes the official took of the conversation.

Behind the scenes, however, the price of McNaughton’s care was front and center at United.

In one email, Opperman asked about the cost difference if the insurer insisted on only paying for greatly reduced doses of the biologic drugs. Kavanaugh responded that the insurer had paid $1.1 million in claims for McNaughton’s care as of the middle of May 2021. If the reduced doses had been in place, the amount would have been cut to $260,218, she wrote.

United was keeping close tabs on McNaughton at the highest levels of the company. On Aug. 2, 2021, Opperman notified Truxal and a United lawyer that McNaughton “has just purchased the plan again for the 21-22 school year.”

A month later, Kavanaugh shared another calculation with United executives showing that the insurer spent over $1.7 million on McNaughton in the prior plan year.

United officials strategized about how to best explain why it was reviewing McNaughton’s drug regimen, according to an internal email. They pointed to a justification often used by health insurers when denying claims. “As the cost of healthcare continues to climb to soaring heights, it has been determined that a judicious review of these drugs should be included” in order to “make healthcare more affordable for our members,” Kavanaugh offered as a potential talking point in an April 23, 2021, email.

Three days later, UnitedHealth Group filed an annual statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosing its pay for top executives in the prior year. Then-CEO David Wichmann was paid $17.9 million in salary and other compensation in 2020. Wichmann retired early the following year, and his total compensation that year exceeded $140 million, according to calculations in a compensation database maintained by the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. The newspaper said the amount was the most paid to an executive in the state since it started tracking pay more than two decades ago. About $110 million of that total came from Wichmann exercising stock options accumulated during his stewardship.

The McNaughtons were well aware of the financial situation at United. They looked at publicly available financial results and annual reports. Last year, United reported a profit of $20.1 billion on revenues of $324.2 billion.

When discussing the case with Penn State, Light said, she told university administrators that United could pay for a year of her son’s treatment using just minutes’ worth of profit.

“Betrayed”

McNaughton looks out a window at his home in State College. (Nate Smallwood, special to ProPublica)

McNaughton has been able to continue receiving his infusions for now, anyway. In October, United notified him it was once again reviewing his care, although the insurer quickly reversed course when his lawyer intervened. United, in a court filing, said the review was a mistake and that it had erred in putting McNaughton’s claims into pending status.

McNaughton said he is fortunate his parents were employed at the same school he was attending, which was critical in getting the attention of administrators there. But that help had its limits.

In June 2021, just a week after United told McNaughton it would not cover his treatment plan in the upcoming plan year, Penn State essentially walked away from the matter.

In an email to the McNaughtons and United, Penn State Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Andrea Dowhower wrote that administrators “have observed an unfortunate breakdown in communication” between McNaughton and his family and the university health insurance plan, “which appears from our perspective to have resulted in a standstill between the two parties.” While she proposed some potential steps to help settle the matter, she wrote that “Penn State’s role in this process is as a resource for students like Chris who, for whatever reason, have experienced difficulty navigating the complex world of health insurance.” The university’s role “is limited,” she wrote, and the school “simply must leave” the issue of the best treatment for McNaughton to “the appropriate health care professionals.”

In a statement, a Penn State spokesperson wrote that “as a third party in this arrangement, the University’s role is limited and Penn State officials can only help a student manage an issue based on information that a student/family, medical personnel, and/or insurance provider give — with the hope that all information is accurate and that the lines of communication remain open between the insured and the insurer.”

Penn State declined to provide financial information about the plan. However, the university and United share at least one tie that they have not publicly disclosed.

When the McNaughtons first reached out to the university for help, they were referred to the school’s student health insurance coordinator. The official, Heather Klinger, wrote in an email to the family in February 2021 that “I appreciate your trusting me to resolve this for you.”

In April 2022, United began paying Klinger’s salary, an arrangement which is not noted on the university website. Klinger appears in the online staff directory on the Penn State University Health Services webpage, and has a university phone number, a university address and a Penn State email listed as her contact. The school said she has maintained a part-time status with the university to allow her to access relevant data systems at both the university and United.

The university said students “benefit” from having a United employee to handle questions about insurance coverage and that the arrangement is “not uncommon” for student health plans.

The family was dismayed to learn that Klinger was now a full-time employee of United.

“We did feel betrayed,” Light said. Klinger did not respond to an email seeking comment.

McNaughton’s fight to maintain his treatment regimen has come at a cost of time, debilitating stress and depression. “My biggest fear is realizing I might have to do this every year of my life,” he said.

McNaughton said one motivation for his lawsuit was to expose how insurers like United make decisions about what care they will pay for and what they will not. The case remains pending, a court docket shows.

He has been accepted to Penn State’s law school. He hopes to become a health care lawyer working for patients who find themselves in situations similar to his.

He plans to reenroll in the United health care plan when he starts school next fall.

Do You Have Insights Into Health Insurance Denials? Help Us Report on the System.

Update, Feb. 10, 2023: On Feb. 9, lawyers representing UnitedHealthcare and Christopher McNaughton filed a joint stipulation of dismissal in federal court as part of an agreement to settle the lawsuit brought by McNaughton. United did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for McNaughton said he could not discuss the terms of the settlement.

Doris Burke and Lexi Churchill contributed research.

by Megan Rose

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In 2016, Congress passed a law that was supposed to make the military justice system more transparent, instructing the U.S. military’s six branches to give the public broader access to court records. Seven years later, the Department of Defense has finally issued guidelines for how the services should comply with the law, but they fall far short of the transparency lawmakers intended.

Caroline Krass, general counsel for the Defense Department, told officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and Space Force in a memorandum last month that they could mostly continue doing what they have been for years: keep many court records secret from the public.

In their 2016 law, lawmakers had envisioned a military justice system that operated much like federal courts, where the public has real-time electronic access to dockets, records and filings. Concerned about fairness and secrecy in the military system, Congress wanted the public to have similar access to records for courts-martial to allow for more scrutiny of how the military handles criminal cases, particularly sexual assault.

The law calls for the “timely” release of court records “at all stages of the military justice system ... including pretrial, trial, post-trial, and appellate processes.”

The newly released Pentagon guidance, however, does little to make the system more open. The guidance tells the services they do not have to make any records public until after a trial ends. It gives the military the discretion to suppress key trial information. And in cases where the defendant is found not guilty, the directive appears to be even more sweeping: The military services will be allowed to keep the entire record secret permanently.

The Pentagon did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the new guidance. A Navy prosecutor argued in a court filing last year that the military cannot act like its counterparts in federal court because the military system doesn’t have a clerk of court and needs to be “fluid and mobile.”

Despite the 2016 law, which required consistent standards across the military, the Pentagon for years let the individual services decide how to comply with the law, and public access to court-martial records remained extremely limited.

Frank Rosenblatt, vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said even before the new guidance was issued, the spirit of the law wasn’t met. Leaving access decisions “to the discretion of military officials really is a default towards secrecy,” he said.

In September, ProPublica sued the Navy for refusing to provide nearly all of the court records in a high-profile arson case. The Navy prosecuted a sailor for allegedly setting the USS Bonhomme Richard on fire. In 2020, the amphibious assault ship burned for more than four days and was destroyed, a more than $1 billion loss. A ProPublica investigation showed there was little evidence of the sailor’s guilt, and Seaman Recruit Ryan Mays was found not guilty at his court-martial.

ProPublica’s lawsuit was successful in getting the Navy to release hundreds of pages of court-martial documents in the Mays case. The suit also challenges the Navy’s overall policy for withholding records and is ongoing. The lawsuit could end up questioning Krass’ new directive as well for not following the 2016 law or abiding by the First Amendment and judicial rulings that grant timely access to court records.

ProPublica’s lawsuit appears to have spurred the new Pentagon guidance. ProPublica, along with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and other media organizations, also wrote a letter to Krass requesting she outline standards for the military to follow. The National Institute of Military Justice supported ProPublica’s lawsuit and wrote a separate letter to Krass.

However, nothing in the new policy would force the Navy or the other services to release similar court records in the future.

The guidance allows the military to withhold records when public access and scrutiny is often most important: leading up to and during a court-martial. Under the new policy, the military doesn’t have to make records public until after a verdict is reached and the trial record is certified. The guidance says the services can take up to 45 days after certification to release any documents.

That arbitrary time frame is out of step with how every other court is run, Rosenblatt said. After a trial is over, “the newsworthiness is gone,” he said.

Even then, only a limited part of the trial record has to be produced. The services do not have to provide transcripts or recordings of court sessions or any evidence entered as exhibits, according to the Pentagon guidance. And the Pentagon does not consider any preliminary hearing documents to be part of the trial record.

In the military, there is a proceeding called an Article 32 hearing to decide whether there is enough evidence for a trial. Under the new guidance, the military won’t have to put these hearings on the docket, so the public won’t even know they are happening.

Records from Article 32 and other preliminary hearings tell the public a lot about whether the system is just. That’s where citizens can review and assess what cases the military are deciding to prosecute, Rosenblatt said.

In Mays’ case, for example, the judge who presided over the Article 32 hearing recommended that the Navy drop its case against him for lack of evidence. The Navy ignored that recommendation and moved forward with the prosecution. The service then refused to make that recommendation public.

The new Pentagon guidance also allows the military to permanently seal the trial record if the defendant is found not guilty. This could also prevent an assessment of fairness. For example, if a general is accused of sexual assault and found not guilty, the military doesn’t have to release any court records about the case, and the public would not be able to scrutinize how the case of a high-ranking officer was handled.

The new guidelines make one change in favor of transparency. The military will no longer use Freedom of Information Act exemptions to justify redacting information from court records. FOIA law is not used to withhold or redact court records in any other court in the country, and it was inappropriately applied in military courts, Rosenblatt said.

For example, in the Mays case, the Navy cited FOIA to redact the names of witnesses who testified in open court at trial.

Krass’ new guidance says that the 2016 law makes access to courts-martial records “distinct from the right” to federal records granted under FOIA. Instead the federal Privacy Act, which regulates how the government can collect and release information about private individuals, should guide “which information and documents from the military justice system are to be made accessible to the public.”

Although Rosenblatt said eliminating FOIA from the military judicial process was progress, the Privacy Act also doesn’t belong in the equation. The guidance also leaves how to interpret the Privacy Act and release of documents up to the services.

“The Privacy Act,” Rosenblatt said, “is increasingly being weaponized to shield what’s going on in the military justice system from the public.”

by Logan Jaffe

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was first published as part of ProPublica’s Repatriation Project newsletter, which follows our ongoing investigation into whether U.S. institutions are returning Native American ancestral remains. Sign up to get updates as they publish and learn more about our reporting.

When William Dickson moved to Fulton County, Illinois, from Kentucky in 1833, he purchased a beautiful piece of land overlooking the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers. The federal Indian Removal Act of 1830 had exiled most Native American tribes from the state under the threat of genocide, and Illinois would soon have no tribally held land.

The people of Fulton County, as described an 1879 history of the area, were proud of what they saw as accomplishments of the “Anglo Saxon” race:

“They transformed the wigwams into cities; dotted the knolls with school-houses and churches; replaced the buffalo, deer, elk, and wolf, which had been driven further westward, with domestic animals; erected factories, built railroads, and reared a refined, enlightened and cultured people.”

Still buried throughout much of Fulton County, according to archaeologists’ estimates, were at least 3,000 grave mounds and remnants of villages that belonged to Indigenous people and their ancestors.

So when Dickson prepared his property to plant an orchard in the 1860s, he inadvertently unearthed human remains. His grandson, Thomas, later unearthed more human remains and objects while building his house nearby. Years later, in 1927, Thomas’ son, Don, turned the burial mounds into a public spectacle — and his livelihood.

“I grew up with this knowledge,” Don F. Dickson told an audience of Illinois State Academy of Science members in May 1947. “The burials were in my backyard. I liked those people.”

Dickson, a chiropractor, and his family excavated at least 234 burials and opened the site to the public. While most amateurs, archaeologists and anthropologists of the time fully disinterred and disarticulated human remains during excavations, Dickson chose to leave the burials as he found them in the ground. The novelty of seeing the dead in situ helped make the site a popular Illinois tourist attraction billed as Dickson’s Mound Builders Tomb, or what’s known today as Dickson Mounds Museum.

Inside a canvas tent lay the remains of what Dickson and newspaper reporters believed was an extinct race of people. A 1927 article from one local paper promoted the exhibit under the headline “Excavations in Illinois Reveal Race That Lived and Died Before Indians.” Dickson benefited from the promotion; tens of thousands of people visited the private museum in the late 1920s. By charging 50 cents for admission, the Dickson family made their living.

What visitors learned from the “museum” was the story that the Dicksons wanted to tell. In the remains of two adults placed side by side, their faces turned to face a baby that lay between them, Don Dickson saw a primitive, but loving, family. He speculated about relationships, social hierarchies and the purposes of various possessions. He and his family members served as the tour guides and public interpreters of the site. He rearranged objects to make the burials more dramatic; he removed the mandibles of some people to display them alongside the mandibles of various animals. Many bones and belongings were broken; some were stolen.

The state of Illinois purchased the site from Dickson in 1945 and then hired the Dicksons to run it; Don Dickson continued to interpret the site for the public until his death in 1964.

Don Dickson (Illinois Digital Archive, Illinois State Library)

A few years later, the state built a large, new museum and adopted Dickson’s open-air exhibit as a permanent wing of the facility. Over the years, the burial exhibit saw various interpretations by museum staff, including the addition of audio and multicolored spotlights. Viewmaster reels and postcards were sold in the gift shop.

I learned of the exhibit when I started investigating why the state museum held so many human remains, and I quickly realized that memories of it are not uncommon among a generation of Illinoisans slightly older than I am. An archivist assisting me with research in the Illinois State Archives told me that he was among many Illinois students in the 1970s who had visited the museum on field trips, and he remembered it, simply, as “spooky.”

In 1990, a long movement for Native American rights led to the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a federal law intended to enable tribal nations to reclaim their ancestors, funerary objects and sacred items from institutions.

Staff at the Dickson Mounds Museum and its parent institution, the Illinois State Museum, had been monitoring the bill and others like it for years and had anticipated changes in public sentiment around the display of open graves.

To try to head off controversy, museum leaders decided to close the burial exhibit. Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson had agreed with the museum’s decision. But when news of the exhibit’s planned closure broke, the public outcry and political pressure that ensued forced Thompson to reconsider his decision. At the heart of his dilemma was the question of whether the exhibit was educational or entertainment, and whether the offense it caused to Native Americans outweighed the potential benefits of public education and tourism. Ultimately, Thompson reversed course.

“This never has been treated as a carnival sideshow,” Thompson said. “It is an educational exhibit that respects the lives of people who made a civilization here hundreds of years ago. It will remain so.”

Among Thompson’s most vocal opponents was Michael Haney, an activist of Seminole and Sioux heritage. Haney had helped gather crowds of protestors at the museum and had responded to the governor’s decision to keep the exhibit open by calling it racist. But in addition to making many pointed public comments, which included referring to Fulton County residents as “country bumpkins,” he expressed the deep hurt caused by the Dicksons and those who supported keeping the exhibit open in a way that continues to resonate:

“If you want to know about Indians, ask living Indians,” Haney said at a public hearing in 1990. “Don’t desecrate our graves.”

A protest against the museum’s exposed burial sites in the early 1990s (Illinois Digital Archive, Illinois State Library)

For perhaps the first time, some local residents and others paying attention to the issue were forced to confront the notion that, by advocating to keep the exhibit open, they were complicit in the erasure of Indigenous people from the story the museum was telling about them.

The controversy lasted for more than two years.

The exhibit eventually closed in 1992. Contractors installed cedar flooring over the open graves to shield them from public view. Museum officials today say that no one has seen the graves in 30 years.

At ProPublica, my colleagues and I have spent the last 18 months trying to understand why so many of the nation’s top museums and universities still have thousands of human remains in their collections even though the law to push for repatriation passed more than 30 years ago. The Illinois State Museum and Dickson Mounds Museum, for example, together hold the remains of more than 7,000 Native Americans.

But a new generation of museum leadership sees an opportunity to rewrite the story the Dicksons wanted visitors to learn, and returning remains to tribal nations is part of that. Dickson Mounds Museum is now led by a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, whose members are descendents of more than a dozen tribes that were forcibly removed from the state in the 1700s and 1800s.

“My ancestors put me here,” said Logan Pappenfort, interim director of Dickson Mounds Museum. “They came from Illinois, and it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to get them where they’re supposed to be again.”

by Sophia Kovatch, Pamela Colloff and Brett Murphy

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It’s been decades since the intersection of forensic science and criminal justice first became a pop culture phenomenon, popularized by countless TV shows, movies and books. But the public’s growing awareness of forensic techniques obscures a far more complex field that’s chock full of bogus science — and the people who champion it, often for profit.

For years, ProPublica has reported on these dubious techniques as they’ve wormed their way into every corner of our real-life criminal justice system.

So, what’s legitimate forensic science and what’s junk? Let’s start with the basics.

What Is Junk Science?

Junk science refers to any theory or method presented as scientific fact without sufficient research or evidence to support it. Some types of junk science have virtually no supporting evidence, while others are oversimplifications of real but complex science findings.

Adding to the risk they pose to the justice system, many forms of junk science are very subjective and depend highly on individual interpretation.

How to Spot Junk Science in Forensics

When ProPublica has reported on junk science, we’ve found many common traits. They could include:

• It has limited or no scientific evidence or research supporting it.
• It is presented as absolutely certain or conclusive, with no mention of error rates.
• It relies on subjective criteria or interpretation.
• It oversimplifies a complex science.
• It takes just a few days to become an “expert.”

Examples of Junk Science in Forensics and Law Enforcement

Tracing the spread of junk science through the criminal justice system can be difficult. But ProPublica has followed forensic junk science in various forms for years.

911 Call Analysis

Police and prosecutors trained in 911 call analysis are taught they can spot a murderer on the phone by analyzing speech patterns, tone, pauses, word choice and even the grammar used during emergency calls. These are known as “guilty indicators,” according to the tenets of the program. A misplaced word, too long of a pause or a phrase of politeness could reveal a killer.

Analysis of 911 calls appears in the criminal justice system in lots of different ways. Some detectives say it’s a tool to help build a case or prepare to interrogate a suspect. They have used it to help extract confessions. Others present their analyses to prosecutors or enlist Tracy Harpster, the program’s creator and a retired deputy police chief from Ohio, to consult on cases.

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During Harpster’s career, he had almost no homicide investigation experience or scientific background. He developed the 911 call analysis technique based on a small study for his master’s thesis in 2006. After teaming up with the FBI to promote his findings nationwide, there was enough demand from law enforcement to create a full-fledged training curriculum.

Since the technique’s development, 911 call analysis has been used in investigations across the country. ProPublica documented more than 100 cases in 26 states where Harpster’s methods played a role in arrests, prosecutions and convictions — likely a fraction of the actual figure. In addition, Harpster says he has personally consulted in more than 1,500 homicide investigations nationwide.

Despite the seeming pervasiveness of the technique, researchers who have studied 911 calls have not been able to corroborate Harpster’s claims. A 2020 study from the FBI warned against using 911 call analysis to bring actual cases. A separate FBI study in 2022 said applying 911 analysis may actually increase bias. And academic studies from researchers at Villanova and James Madison universities came to similar conclusions.

Ultimately, five studies have not been able to find scientific evidence that 911 call analysis works.

In a 2022 interview, Harpster defended his program and noted that he has also helped defense attorneys argue for suspects’ innocence. He maintained that critics don’t understand the research or how to appropriately use it, a position he has repeated in correspondence with law enforcement officials for years. “The research is designed to find the truth wherever it goes,” Harpster said.

Example: ProPublica chronicled how 911 call analysis was used in the case of Jessica Logan, who was convicted of killing her baby after a detective trained by Harpster analyzed her call and then testified about it during trial.

Bloodstain-Pattern Analysis

Bloodstain-pattern analysis is a forensic discipline whose practitioners regard the drops, spatters and trails of blood at a crime scene as clues that can sometimes be used to reconstruct and even reverse-engineer the crime itself.

The reliability of bloodstain-pattern analysis has never been definitively proven or quantified, but largely due to the testimony of criminalist Herbert MacDonell, it was steadily admitted in court after court around the country in the 1970s and ’80s. MacDonell spent his career teaching weeklong “institutes” in bloodstain-pattern analysis at police departments around the country, training hundreds of officers who, in turn, trained hundreds more.

While there is no index that lists cases in which bloodstain-pattern analysis played a role, state appellate court rulings show that the technique has played a factor in felony cases across the country. Additionally, it has helped send innocent people to prison. From Oregon to Texas to New York, convictions that hinged on the testimony of a bloodstain-pattern analyst have been overturned and the defendants acquitted or the charges dropped.

In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.” More than a decade later, few peer-reviewed studies exist, and research that might determine the accuracy of analysts’ findings is close to nonexistent.

When MacDonell, who died in 2019, was asked whether he ever considered changing his course structure or certification process after seeing students give faulty testimony, MacDonell answered in the negative. “You can’t control someone else’s thinking,” he said. “The only thing you can do is go in and testify to the contrary.”

Example: ProPublica has also reported on how bloodstain-pattern analysis was used to convict Joe Bryan of killing his wife, Mickey.

Other Junk Science Examples

ProPublica’s reporting on junk science in forensics goes beyond bloodstain-pattern analysis and 911 call analysis. We’ve also covered:

• The pervasiveness of Scientific Content Analysis, or SCAN, a means of dissecting written suspect statements while looking for markers of deception.
• How the FBI used unproven photo analysis in its investigations for years.
• Why police and prosecutors kept using roadside drug tests with known high rates of false positives.

How Does Junk Science Spread in Forensics?

Junk science can spread a lot of different ways, but there are some common patterns in how it spreads across forensics and law enforcement.

Often, junk science originates when an individual devises a forensic technique based on minimal or narrow experience and data. For example, the original 911 call analysis training curriculum was based on a study of just 100 emergency calls, most of which came from a single state.

The creators of these techniques then put together curriculums and workshops targeting law enforcement at every level around the country. As more police officers take these courses, these techniques are employed more often in investigating crimes and interrogating suspects. When officers testify in court, the impact of junk forensic techniques makes its way into the justice system.

Other times, prosecutors call the creators and trainees of these forensic methods as expert witnesses, as was common with bloodstain-pattern analysis.

In the courtroom, it’s up to the judge to decide whether certain evidence is admissible. While judges are experts in the law, they aren’t necessarily experts in the scientific disciplines that make up forensics. Once a type of junk science is admitted in a case, other prosecutors and judges can use that as precedent to allow it in future cases too. In this way, new junk science methods like 911 call analysis can spread quickly through the justice system.

How Long Has Junk Science Been a Problem in Criminal Justice?

Forensic science has had a junk science problem for decades. In the 1980s and ’90s, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies used faulty microscopic hair comparison in hundreds of cases, only formally acknowledging the problematic science in 2015. Since at least the 1990s, law enforcement has used a written content analysis tool with no scientific backing to interpret witness and suspect statements.

The 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences, which reviewed the state of forensic science in the United States, found that a lot of forensic evidence “was admitted into criminal trials without any meaningful scientific validation, determination of error rates, or reliability testing to explain the limits of the discipline.” A 2016 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology found that despite efforts to fund forensic science research, there was still a major gap in understanding the scientific validity of many forensic methods.

In 2017, the Trump administration allowed the charter for the National Commission on Forensic Science to expire, further limiting the progress on validating forensic science methods. Since then, many forensic professionals have critiqued the junk science problems rampant in forensics and criminal justice.

by Alec MacGillis

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This story is exempt from ProPublica’s Creative Commons license until March 31, 2023.

Corey Winfield was 10 when he saw someone get shot for the first time. He and a friend were marching around with a drum in the Park Heights section of Northwest Baltimore, and a few older guys asked if they could use it; while they were doing so, someone came up and shot one of them in the back, paralyzing him. At 11, Corey found his first gun, in an alley near his school. He sold it to a friend’s older brother for $45 and used the money to buy lots of penny candy. At 13, he saw someone get killed for the first time — a friend, who was 14 — and that year he started selling drugs. After he was robbed a few times, he bought another gun. When he was 17, he was buying some drugs to sell when the dealers tried to rob him, so he shot one of them, killing him.

Winfield went to prison for nearly 20 years. Two weeks after his release, in 2006, his younger brother, Jujuan, who was 21, was shot to death outside the family’s house. For days, Winfield stalked the man he suspected of the murder; he might have killed him, but a police cruiser appeared as he was about to shoot. He went home, where he found his aunt Ruth, who had brought him up, sitting alone in the dark. She told him that she knew what he was up to. “Please stop, I don’t want to lose another baby,” she said to him. “I broke down and we cried on the sofa,” Winfield told me.

Winfield promised to give up guns, and soon he committed to getting others to stop shooting, too. Baltimore was building a “violence interrupter” program, modeled on one launched in Chicago, in which people who have criminal records and a history of street violence use their contacts and credibility to defuse tensions before anyone is shot. Winfield became one of the first outreach workers in the new program, Safe Streets, citing his willingness to eschew vengeance as proof that peace was possible. Jujuan’s death “opened my eyes up to the pain I was causing and had been causing for half my life,” he told me. “I was part of the mayhem and the destruction.” Soon after he joined, he helped a 19-year-old who wanted to stop selling drugs procure a copy of his birth certificate, so that he could get regular work. When the young man finally got the document, he started crying. “All my life, they told me my father didn’t know who I was,” he said. “But he signed my birth certificate, and that’s gotta mean he loved me.”

Many other cities also began adopting the interrupter model. It had intuitive appeal as a complement to policing: why not deploy people with neighborhood know-how and the motivation to redeem themselves? “There’s so many things that we could do and should be doing, outside of law enforcement, before things get to the point of needing to utilize the criminal justice system,” Monique Williams, a public health researcher who until recently led Louisville, Kentucky’s Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods, said.

There was resistance from police departments: The interrupters generally avoided cooperating with the cops, and some officers were wary of men whom they had arrested not so long ago. Some interrupters lapsed into drug dealing or other illegal activity. In Louisville, the Metro Council stopped funding the city’s three interrupter teams in 2019 after an interrupter was arrested for dealing methamphetamine (the charges were later dropped) and another worker was charged with raping a woman. (He was convicted of a related felony.) “There was not a lot of believing in the product from the Metro Council,” the leader of one team, Eddie Woods, told me. “So any excuse is a good excuse to pull the plug on it.”

In 2020, everything changed. Violence spiked across the country, with homicides rising by 30%, wiping out two decades of progress. Criminologists attributed the rise to a combination of the social disruption caused by the pandemic and the deterioration of police-community relations after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which led to less proactive policing and less cooperation from residents. After the presidential election, Joe Biden’s administration looked for ways to stem the violence without relying solely on traditional law enforcement, which had come under intense scrutiny on the left. In 2021, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which included funding that many cities are spending on “community violence intervention,” the catchall term for non-police approaches to reducing violent crime. In addition to interrupters, these measures include programs that detach young men from gangs, those which meet with shooting victims in hospitals to deter retaliation and those which offer young men employment and counseling in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

For years, these programs competed with one another for whatever scarce funding was available, passing from one short-lived pilot project to another. Now they are being showered with unprecedented resources: Louisville is getting $24 million; Baltimore will receive $50 million.

The funding has created an opportunity for community violence intervention to become a significant feature of the public safety landscape. But the challenges are still immense. The programs have only a few years to prove that they deserve lasting support after the federal money runs out. Public safety agencies that until recently consisted of a handful of people are having to expand rapidly to oversee millions in spending, building a new civic infrastructure in a matter of months. And the evidence for how well some of the programs work is mixed and sometimes elusive, not least because it’s hard to measure crimes that never happen. “The money creates a problem,” Eddie Woods said. “Everybody’s an intervention specialist now.”

Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist, spent seven years in the late 1980s and early ’90s at the World Health Organization, working to contain the HIV-AIDS epidemic in Central and East Africa. He had previously fought cholera in Somalia and a tuberculosis outbreak in San Francisco. When he returned to the United States in 1995, he went to Chicago to be near his parents. Deciding which cause to take on next, he settled on one of the leading drivers of mortality in the city: violence.

Gary Slutkin, the founder of Cure Violence (Jon Lowenstein/NOOR/Redux)

Chicago had about 900 homicides per year, and Slutkin found the debates about causes and solutions deeply unsatisfying. “I just began to ask people what they were doing about it, and nothing made sense to me,” he said. “It made no scientific sense. It had no logic. There was no theory other than ‘bad people.’” As he saw it, gun violence was an epidemic not unlike the diseases he had spent his career fighting. “It qualifies as a contagious disease, as it has characteristic signs and symptoms causing morbidity and mortality, and it’s contagious, as one event leads to another,” he told me.

Slutkin believed that it needed to be treated as an epidemic by using public health workers to reach those who were most infectious and susceptible. Those workers should be people who “have credibility and access to the population that you need to talk to,” he said. In Chicago, that entailed recruiting men with criminal histories to serve as outreach workers in neighborhoods experiencing high rates of violence.

In 2000, with the University of Illinois Chicago as his institutional base and initial funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Slutkin deployed a team of eight workers in West Garfield Park, one of the most violent neighborhoods in the city. Shootings there declined by 68%. Slutkin added teams in six more areas in the next couple of years, and within a year shootings in those areas decreased an average of 30%.

It was an impressive result, but homicide rates were falling all over the country, and other models of violence reduction were also seeing success. One was the “focused deterrence” model, pioneered by David Kennedy in Boston, which included group interventions, wherein teams of prosecutors, police officers and respected community figures met with young men deemed most likely to commit violent crimes and offered them social services, coupled with the threat of consequences if they engaged in further violence.

But Slutkin’s model — eventually called Cure Violence — got enough credit for reduced shootings that other cities began deploying interrupters, often hiring Cure Violence to train and guide them. Many city governments were leery of hiring people with serious criminal records, and the programs were often run by nonprofit groups that had looser restrictions.

When Baltimore launched Safe Streets, in 2007, its homicide rate was among the highest in the country. Dante Barksdale, a charismatic native of East Baltimore in his early 30s, helped lead the effort almost from the start. “I was tired of getting locked up, of getting robbed by police, of having to keep an eye out at all times,” Barksdale later wrote of his attraction to the program. “I wanted a regular job. And it seemed the universe had one in mind for me. My reputation as a hustler would help the Safe Streets mission, more than any amount of training could.”

Safe Streets put its first team in McElderry Park, on the east side. Barksdale, who was better known by his nickname, Tater, became a champion for the program as it expanded into three more neighborhoods in the next few years, a period during which homicides began falling sharply in Baltimore for the first time in decades. He joined Cure Violence staff from Chicago for training sessions around the country. Cobe Williams, Cure Violence’s training director, would drive around the Chicago housing projects with Barksdale. “That’s my guy,” Williams told people. “He is so committed to stopping the violence.”

Like many interrupters, Corey Winfield found it hard to avoid sliding back into illegal activity. By 2011, he was selling drugs on the side to supplement his Safe Streets wage, $13 an hour, with which he was supporting two daughters. His aunt Ruth chided him. Winfield told me, “She said: ‘Listen, you’re doing God’s work. You can’t do God’s work and still do the Devil’s work. God’s going to punish you.’” Two months later, he was arrested after giving a ride to a friend who was on the way to a robbery and sentenced to five years’ probation.

Winfield found it challenging to strike the balance demanded of a “credible messenger” — using the reputation gained from past brushes with the law to earn the trust of those who were still entrenched in the streets while avoiding such behavior himself. Sometimes, he told me, he was ostracized by friends who saw him wearing an orange Safe Streets T-shirt. “When I first put this shirt on, the whole city knew, and it was hard, but I didn’t take it off,” he said. “I would go up, like, ‘Yo, what’s up,’ and you walk away. I’m usually in, but now you all walk away, you leave. It’s hard on me.”

Winfield left the program for a few years and worked with an organization that served runaway youths. Then, in April 2015, a 25-year-old man from West Baltimore named Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while in police custody. Protests and rioting ensued, and gun violence in the city increased dramatically. The circumstances foreshadowed those in 2020: a surge in homicides that followed a death at police hands and a collapse in police-­community trust, which led to changes in police behavior, and calls for non-police approaches to public safety. Amid the spike in violence, Corey Winfield decided to rejoin Safe Streets.

Winfield, center, is flanked by Safe Streets workers outside the organization’s office in the Brooklyn section of South Baltimore. (Rahim Fortune for The New Yorker)

In his absence, Safe Streets had continued to struggle with the problem of workers falling back into crime: A site in West Baltimore had been suspended in 2013 after two of its workers were arrested, and in July 2015, an East Baltimore office closed after police found drugs and seven guns there and arrested two workers. But the program retained enough support that, in 2018, the mayor at the time, Catherine Pugh, who had moved control of the program from the Health Department to City Hall’s public ­safety office, expanded it from four sites to 10.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2018, I was in an East Baltimore church as Winfield told an audience drawn from several local congregations how violence interruption worked. Big Corey, as he is known, is 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighs 280 pounds, and his size is matched by a bright-eyed, magnetic charm. He sketched out a typical scenario: “Anita calls me and says: ‘Corey, my brother, I heard him talking, and they’re going to kill Lisa’s brother. Him and his buddies. ’Cause Lisa’s brother gets out of work at 3 in the morning and they’re going to get him.’ So I say, ‘OK,’ so I’m gonna get up at 2:30 and I’m gonna be out there so that when Anita’s brother jumps out on Lisa’s brother they’re going to see me. ‘Oh, it’s 3 in the morning. We ain’t doing this, right?’”

Winfield continued, “Now, we know for a fact that 3 o’clock in the morning the police ain’t around. The police don’t mean a damn thing when somebody is coming to get killed. But somebody coming with guns, if they see me, that level of respect is high.

“But once that respect leaves,” he added, alluding to his perceived independence from the police, “I’ll be lying beside Lisa’s brother. We cannot lose that, because that’s all we have. That makes us, the effectiveness we have.”

That year, a different model of community violence intervention was emerging. In Massachusetts, an organization called Roca, which had worked for years with high-risk young adults in gritty places like Chelsea, Lynn and Springfield, was trying a new approach, using behavioral-theory techniques to help participants control their emotions.

The approach tapped into a new neuro­scientific understanding of how trauma and harsh circumstances can keep people operating in survival mode — in their “bottom brain.” Roca believed that participants needed to acquire basic emotional self-regulation before they could advance to job training and other forms of support. “What we know changes behavior is people feeling safe, being able to manage their emotions and begin to heal their trauma,” Molly Baldwin, Roca’s founder, said. Instead of mediating conflicts, as Cure Violence does, Roca was seeking to make young people less likely to be drawn into conflict in the first place.

The approach gained traction in Chicago, under the leadership of Eddie Bocanegra. Like Corey Winfield, Bocanegra had committed a murder; in 1994, at the age of 18, he had avenged the shooting of two members of a gang he belonged to. He served nearly 15 years in prison; after his release, he joined Cure Violence. In 2011, he was among a handful of workers featured in “The Interrupters,” a documentary film about the organization. Bocanegra, a slightly built man with a goatee, stands out in the film for his soft-spoken, cerebral bearing. One scene shows him doing good deeds, like delivering flowers, on the anniversary of the murder he’d committed. “I’ve thought of hopefully one day going to my victim’s family and really just expressing to them how deeply sorry I am,” he says. “It’s just that, right now, I don’t think it’s still right.”

Soon after the documentary was released, Bocanegra quit Cure Violence. He was becoming increasingly aware of what the focus on intervention was leaving out. “How can I expect someone to put their guns down when their basic needs aren’t being addressed?” he said to me.

“How can I expect someone to put their guns down when their basic needs aren’t being addressed?” said Eddie Bocanegra, who served nearly 15 years in prison before getting involved in violence-prevention programs. (Sebastián Hidalgo for ProPublica)

He became an organizer with the Community Renewal Society, a social ­justice organization, while pursuing a master’s degree in social work at the University of Chicago. By 2013, the YMCA of Metro Chicago had hired him as its co-director of youth safety and violence prevention, working with some 400 teenagers, many of whom were involved in gangs. It was fulfilling work, but he was disturbed by the contrast between the investment that was made in the teenagers and the paltry efforts made on their behalf after they turned 18.

Homicide rates remained well below their historic highs in Chicago, as they did nationally — in 2015, the city registered only 468 murders. But, late that year, the city released a video of a police officer firing 16 shots at Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old armed with a knife, killing him. As in previous episodes of excessive police force, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, the video gave rise to protests, an erosion of police-community trust and a sharp rise in deadly violence. In 2016, there were 764 homicides in Chicago.

The city’s civic and business leaders committed $75 million for violence-prevention efforts. Much of the funding went to a new initiative called READI Chicago, which took a different approach from that of Cure Violence. READI identified several hundred men, mostly in their 20s, who were recruited by outreach workers and referrals upon release from incarceration. The men had, on average, between four and five felony arrests each, and 80% of them had been the victims of violence. The program provided them with 12 months of paid job training and employment plus cognitive-behavioral techniques. It was, by the standards of violence-prevention programs, an expensive undertaking — eventually, $25,000 per participant.

Eight years after Eddie Bocanegra completed his prison sentence for first-­degree murder, he was chosen to lead the initiative.

In Baltimore, the expansion of Safe Streets faced challenges. The city had to find nonprofit organizations to manage the sites and people to staff them. Cure Violence had stopped leading training sessions some years earlier, after the city grew lax about paying its bills. Meanwhile, the leadership of City Hall’s public ­safety office changed four times between 2017 and 2020.

Amid the disorder, several Safe Streets staff members left for jobs at a new anti-­violence effort in the city: Roca. In 2018, the Massachusetts organization had opened a branch in Baltimore, the hometown of its leader, Molly Baldwin. Instead of targeting certain areas — even after its expansion, Safe Streets still covered only 2.6 of the city’s 92 square miles — Roca focussed on some of the hardest-to-reach young men between the ages of 16 and 24, drawn from across the city. They were generally referred to Roca by the police or by juvenile services; Roca came into contact with some through making regular visits to the homes of victims of nonfatal shootings. Within several years, the organization was working with about 200 young men — applying cognitive-behavioral theory, putting some on job crews and simply maintaining contact with them through the organization’s practice of “relentless outreach.” “It’s the more long-term approach, the more meaningful, sustained behavior change that we’re looking for,” James “J.T.” Timpson, who left Safe Streets to join Roca in 2018, said. “While I believe that the intervention is extremely important, even intervention requires some type of follow-up. You can intervene today, but what happens tomorrow?”

A member of a Roca work crew picks up trash in Baltimore. (Rahim Fortune for The New Yorker)

In late December 2020, Baltimore’s new mayor, Brandon Scott, named as director of the public safety office his longtime friend Shantay Jackson, a former information technology manager who had embraced anti-violence activism after Freddie Gray’s death and after her stepson was gravely injured in a 2018 shooting. She had led a nonprofit group that got the contract to oversee one of the new Safe Streets sites — a site that then experienced serious troubles despite being in the least dangerous of the 10 locations. It shut down only a few months after opening, in 2019, a closure that Jackson attributed to concerns about the safety of the workers. (It was later reopened.)

A month after Jackson took over the public safety office, Dante Barksdale, the champion of Safe Streets, was paying a visit to the Douglass Homes, a public ­housing project in East Baltimore, on a Sunday morning. A gunman shot him in the head and body nine times, killing him.

Even in a city that had experienced more than 300 homicides for six years in a row, the killing of the admired leader of the best-known violence-prevention program — its “heart and soul,” according to Scott — was a big blow. “My heart is broken with the loss of my friend Dante Barksdale, a beloved leader in our community who committed his life to saving lives in Baltimore,” Scott said.

Six months later, another Safe Streets worker, Kenyell “Benny” Wilson, was shot in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Cherry Hill while driving to lunch and died after making his way to the hospital. Two people familiar with the case told me that Wilson, who was 44, had reprimanded a teenager for being rude to an elderly woman, and his colleagues suspected that this had prompted the shooting. “Tonight, our brother Kenyell Wilson became a victim of the gun violence he worked every day to prevent,” Scott said.

Six months after that, in January 2022, DaShawn McGrier, a newly hired Safe Streets worker in McElderry Park, the program’s first site, was on duty just after 7 p.m., standing with several other men, when a gunman drove up and started shooting, killing McGrier, who was 29, and two others and injuring a fourth man. Scott called the shooting a “horrific tragedy.”

Three deaths, in 13 months, in a program with fewer than 100 workers. It was exactly the dark scenario that Corey Winfield had sketched out four years earlier: The orange T-shirt no longer provided enough protection.

At what point did a program’s administrators need to decide that the work was simply too dangerous? “Three people lost their lives,” Joseph Richardson Jr., a University of Maryland ethnographer specializing in gun violence, said. “That’s not normal. To have three Safe Streets workers killed, we need to assess what’s going on.”

Roca underscored the safety of its workers, who were paid at least $60,000 a year, compared with the $45,000 that Safe Streets workers typically make. Roca was cautious about sending its staffers into areas when tensions were high, and, unlike Safe Streets, it maintained direct lines of communication with the police. “Are we really supposed to send another human being, not the police department, no equipment, in this day and age, when people are loaded up with automatic weapons?” Baldwin said. “To assume someone is going to listen to someone is to assume that they can access the thinking part of their brain.”

Roca’s offices in Baltimore include a space for people studying for their GED certification. (Rahim Fortune for The New Yorker)

Slutkin, the founder of Cure Violence, defended his approach. If violence interruption went awry, as it had in Baltimore, that was a sign that an individual program wasn’t following the model correctly, he said. “The difference is always whether they’re really doing it,” he went on. “Let’s say, in any given city, there’s three places that are getting results and four aren’t getting results. You can’t just keep not getting results for the whole year.” There are protocols for running an interrupter site, he said — from hiring the right people to reaching the right people on the street and keeping close track of outcomes.

Slutkin, who stepped down as the head of Cure Violence last year, referred to positive results in other cities, including Chicago and Philadelphia. But some experts have interpreted the results in these cities, and in others, as being more mixed. Jeff Butts, a sociologist at John Jay College who led a study in New York, told me that interrupter programs are fundamentally difficult to assess — it’s hard to know whether a decline in shootings in an area is due to the interrupters or to all the other factors at play. The assessments typically tally only the shootings within the narrow boundaries of interrupter zones, even though the interrupters’ work inevitably ranges farther afield.

Further complicating the research is that the approach varies so much from one site to another. “They live under the same banner, the same T-shirts, the same brand name, the same philosophy,” Butts said. “But they all insist on doing things their own way.”

To better gauge interrupters’ effectiveness, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland were in talks with Baltimore’s public ­safety office last year to conduct a comprehensive study of Safe Streets that would include field observations and interviews with workers and participants for nine months. But the qualitative component of the study fell through after city officials, citing costs, insisted that it run for fewer months. Richardson, of the University of Maryland, who would have led the field work, said that he plans to do a similar study in Washington, D.C., instead. “You can have all the numbers in the world,” he said, “but if you don’t understand how it plays out on the ground, without having that context you can’t really capture the effectiveness of the program.”

Programs such as Roca and READI Chicago are easier to assess because they work with a defined group of men whose outcomes can be tracked. A randomized controlled study of READI Chicago released last year found that men who had participated in its 18-month program were nearly two-thirds less likely to be arrested for a shooting and nearly one-fifth less likely to be shot than men with similar backgrounds who had not been offered a place.

Cure Violence leaders were quick to put READI Chicago’s results into context. Such programs help those who are fortunate enough to be enrolled, but what about all the other young men in the neighborhood? “You have programs like READI that maybe get 50 or 100 guys, and that’s what they’re working with,” Charlie Ransford, Cure Violence’s director of science and policy, said. “But what if some guys get released from prison and they’re not with them? What if a group of kids a few blocks over start getting into stuff and they’re not helping them? We’re community-based, they’re looking at individuals. We’re looking at the mass on a daily basis.” Helping some young men get on track was essential, he said, but insufficient. “You need Cure Violence as the head of the spear.”

Last winter, the competition suddenly took on broader ramifications. The Biden administration created a position within the Department of Justice to oversee the distribution of $250 million for community-violence-­intervention efforts, part of legislation passed in response to the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York. Three decades after Eddie Bocanegra’s murder conviction, and a decade after he left Cure Violence in search of a different approach, he was tasked with helping lead the federal government’s response to the biggest surge of violence since the early-’90s wave that he had been part of.

Many cities are using some of their new funding to start or expand teams founded on the Cure Violence model, among them Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; Philadelphia; St. Louis; Peoria, Illinois; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; and Wichita, Kansas.

In Louisville, the launch of five new Cure Violence teams is being led by a city agency that did not exist until less than a decade ago. After a high-­profile triple homicide in 2012, Mayor Greg Fischer created the Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods, which started out as essentially a one-man shop run by Anthony Smith, a community organizer. It now has 50 employees. Unlike many of its counterparts in other cities, in recent years the agency has been led by people with deep expertise in violence prevention: Monique Williams, who stepped down in October, is a public health researcher, and her successor, Paul Callanan, has worked as a probation officer and later led a gang-reduction initiative in Denver.

In collaboration with city and community leaders, they came up with a plan for the $15 million the office was getting, which included hiring case managers and funding two hospital-visitation programs and three of the five new interrupter teams. Separately, the city launched an effort based on David Kennedy’s focused deterrence, which, unlike Cure Violence, includes a major role for police and prosecutors.

Louisville was adopting a hybrid approach, bringing together focused deterrence, interrupters and long-term case management into a single ecosystem for violence reduction. Compared with Baltimore, where the city’s public ­safety office has presided over a falloff in cooperation between Safe Streets and Roca, Louisville has maintained a unified, citywide approach, with biweekly meetings to discuss specific incidents and individuals.

The sense of urgency is high in Louisville, where homicides nearly doubled in 2020, to 173, the most ever recorded. But Callanan told me that he is wary of the demand for quick action, fretting that federal deadlines for spending ARPA money — it must be committed by the end of 2024 — wouldn’t give cities time to build intervention efforts strong enough to justify continued local or state taxpayer support once the federal funding runs out in 2026. “We’re laying this expectation across the country that you can take a Cure Violence program and you can get it up and running in three months and you’re going to have these dramatic results,” he said. “The reality, historically, is it takes a long time to build these programs.”

The interrupter model, Callanan noted, had been created during the Chicago gang wars of the ’90s, before large gangs fractured into smaller crews and before social media upended communication. “We have the challenge today of taking these concepts and putting them into play in our communities where the dynamics have completely changed,” he told me.

This meant rethinking the profile of the ideal violence interrupter. Perhaps, he said, it was no longer necessarily the forty- or fiftysomething former gang member — “OG” — who would have commanded respect a couple of decades ago. Now, with social media, youths could find notoriety much more quickly. “You may have a 22-year-old with more clout than the 40-year-old guy who started a gang there,” Callanan said. “You may be hiring individuals based on a gang background or a historical background that is no longer relevant today to the groups that you’re dealing with.”

“It’s not about gang warfare anymore,” a former administrator of Safe Streets told me. “The problem is more impulsive crazy shit.” At a YMCA in Louisville, I met Demetrius McDowell, who had been hired by a new interrupter site in the Smoketown neighborhood run by the nonprofit group YouthBuild. McDowell had spent years selling heroin before shifting his focus to real estate, which drug proceeds had helped him accumulate, and to efforts to help boys and young men stay off the path he had taken.

Despite his age — 43 — McDowell was attuned to the swirl of online antagonism in the city. He described one of the most prevalent forms of social ­media provocation: Someone would livestream a video of himself supposedly on rival territory, and a rival would challenge him to reveal his location — to “drop a pin” — or otherwise be deemed a coward. “If you’re not tracking these things on their social network, you’ll never know what’s going on in the street,” McDowell told me. “That’s where I get all my information.”

McDowell lasted less than two months on the YouthBuild team. He clashed with its leaders over a wish to continue building his own youth group, which had a contract with the YMCA. He also bristled at the adherence to protocols that Cure Violence trainers and one of the team’s supervisors, a college graduate, demanded. “You need individuals who can relate to the community,” he said, “but you got college guys coming in telling you how he thinks you should do it. A college fellow is telling me that you ought to do it this way because studies say this or that. It has to be a feel thing. ... This educated guy has no type of experience. I’ll take experience over data anywhere that could be manipulated.”

With the new funding came ex­pectations that the programs institute standardized training, conform to established guidelines and collect copious data. But some of the interrupters viewed these demands as top-down cluelessness that undermined the organic nature of their work.

“We’ve had a couple that didn’t work out,” Lynn Rippy, YouthBuild’s director, said. “We got them in for a little bit and realized that, in terms of the intake of information and the way we want to do business, that wasn’t going to work for them. So it didn’t work for us.”

Last September, Eddie Bocanegra came to Baltimore to announce the distribution of the first $100 million of the Department of Justice funds he oversees. He made the announcement not at City Hall or at Safe Streets but at Roca, which was receiving $2 million. Of some 50 other recipients nationwide, relatively few were interrupter programs.

A month later, Bocanegra was back in the city for the annual conference of Cities United, a national violence-prevention network founded in 2011 by, among others, the former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and the former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and now led by Anthony Smith, the first director of Louisville’s public safety office. The two-day event drew hundreds of people from around the country, an indication that, thanks to the surge in federal funding, community violence intervention was experiencing a moment of arrival.

But, in a closed-door session with mayors and other top city officials, Bocanegra offered a cautionary note. The field, he said, “is so grossly underdeveloped. We continue to use two or three models from the 1990s and early 2000s. This field has evolved, social media and technology have evolved, gangs have evolved. There are pockets of promising evidence and good models, but, because of a lack of investment, we’re not seeing that return. If this was a board of directors running a Fortune 500 company, we’d ask ourselves some very serious questions about our investment.” There was an unjust element to the pressure to produce results: police departments had, after all, received exponentially more resources for decades, even as violence remained high in many cities. “There’s a lot of pressure to hurry up and reduce the violence,” Shani Buggs, an assistant professor of public health at UC Davis who briefly worked for the Baltimore city government, said. Community violence intervention, she told me, “should be seen as a core city function, as police are seen as a core city function. There’s never a question about whether they should get rid of the police department because violence hasn’t gone down.”

In Bocanegra’s remarks, he stressed that the field wasn’t doing enough to develop the workforce tasked with the actual intervention. Workers were not getting adequate support for the frequent traumas of the job and rarely gained the skills to advance from street work. “We’ve overlooked so much talent and potential,” he said. “We’re not building the field.”

The “credible messenger” approach meant shifting enormous emotional and physical risk onto people who had already been through a tremendous amount. The messengers were, in a sense, both the best and the worst people to do interrupter work. To address these concerns, some cities, including Baltimore, allocated part of their ARPA funds to provide counseling for their interrupters. Shantay Jackson, the head of Baltimore’s public safety office, said that the workers “are dealing with their own level of trauma, given their lived experiences, but also dealing with vicarious trauma as they do the work of interrupting violence every single day.”

In Baltimore, the new funding was increasing the pressure. “We need to learn as much as we can from the things that we’re rolling out, because in a ­couple of years we won’t have $50 million to throw at the problem,” Councilman Mark Conway, the chairman of the public safety committee, told me. “And when we make a decision about where we pare back, we’re going to need to look back at our data, we’re going to need to look back at our systems, and make some tough decisions about where we get the best bang for the buck.” Facing demands from the City Council to show how the public safety office was spending the money, Jackson released a breakdown — some was being given to nonprofit groups, some to the city’s launch of a focused-deterrence initiative and some to new staff positions, expanding the office from 15 to about 40.

A view of Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood, from the Safe Streets office led by Winfield (Rahim Fortune for The New Yorker)

At the same time, the public safety office was losing two of its main liaisons to Safe Streets, raising the risk of further drift. And, as reported by the Baltimore Banner, the office was delaying Roca’s contract to deliver services to young men involved in the focused-­deterrence initiative. The effort to build a unified violence-reduction ecosystem was foundering on turf battles and personal conflicts, though Jackson downplayed the tensions, saying that her office and Roca “continue to have conversations that I think have been very productive.”

One evening in early December, I was on my way to meet Corey Winfield when he told me that he would have to postpone: in the Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he was now the Safe Streets site director, a gang member had stolen a car from a member of another gang, and Winfield and his team were trying to get the car returned before anyone tried to avenge the theft.

It had been a tumultuous stretch for the Brooklyn site, which, like several others in the city, was now administered by Catholic Charities. In November, a former worker at the site had pleaded guilty to dealing fentanyl while he was employed by Safe Streets. The site, which was supposed to have seven workers, had only five. But Winfield was pleased about the progress of an interrupter he had recruited for another site, a 38-year-old man he had met in prison who had survived three shootings. Winfield also took pride in the food distribution that his site had undertaken during the pandemic and in his idea to begin distributing used purses and handbags filled with hygiene products to the many sex workers in the area.

A week later, I stopped by the Brooklyn Safe Streets office to see Winfield, but it appeared to be closed. I called him, and he told me that his aunt Ruth had just died of cancer. I went to the wake, at a church in West Baltimore, where I found Winfield in the lobby, being consoled by several Safe Streets workers wearing orange sweatshirts.

He told me that he had been there for an hour and a half and hadn’t been able to go in to see her. “I can face a firing squad and my heart will still be strong,” he said. “But I’ve not been in there yet. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

He also told me about another recent intervention. Three months earlier, a sex video involving high school students had surfaced online, angering a rival group of teenagers, who had beat up one participant, stealing his designer bag and sunglasses, then fired shots at a car belonging to another participant’s mother.

This was not in Winfield’s Safe Streets zone, but he went to help. He reached out to the mother of a member of the retaliating group, fearing that she might be a target, and, for several days, he accompanied her on the bus to work. “It’s how kids think now,” he said. “If they can’t get who they’re targeting, they’re going to get you.”

He also reached out to the father of one of the students in the video; the man was known to Winfield as a “shot caller,” someone who had the ability to arrange a killing or to defuse a conflict, and he had been making provocative comments about the episode online. At a 2 a.m. meeting on an abandoned block, arranged by the superiors in the crew that the father belonged to, Winfield urged him to de-escalate. “We were able to resolve it. That’s what we do out here,” Winfield said. “We squashed it. But nobody knows about those kinds of stories.”

Two weeks after the wake, a couple of miles west of the church, five high school students were shot outside a Popeyes across from their school at lunch. One of them, a 16-year-old, died. For Roca’s staff, it was a delicate situation — the murder victim was the younger brother of a Roca participant, and Roca leaders wanted to proceed strategically with their outreach to the other victims. Corey Winfield, in contrast, wanted to get involved immediately. He knew that retaliation was likely, and he wanted Safe Streets on the scene, figuring out who might seek vengeance. But the shooting was several miles from his site.

Winfield called me to voice his frustration. “We need to get on top of that now,” he said. “This is the real shit, right here. This needs to be handled right now. We don’t have a week or two. More kids are going to die.