ProPublica

by Ash Ngu and Andrea Suozzo

In 1990, Congress passed a law recognizing the unequal treatment of Native American remains and set up a process for tribes to request their return from museums and other institutions that had them. The law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA, sought to address this human rights issue by giving Indigenous peoples a way to reclaim their dead.

But 33 years after the law’s passage, at least half of the remains of more than 210,000 Native Americans have yet to be returned. Tribes have struggled to reclaim them in part because of a lack of federal funding for repatriation and because institutions face little to no consequences for violating the law or dragging their feet.

Our database allows you to search for information on the roughly 600 federally funded institutions that reported having such remains to the Department of the Interior. While the data is self-reported, it is a starting point for understanding the damage done by generations of Americans who stole, collected and displayed the remains and possessions of the continent’s Indigenous peoples — and the work done by tribes and institutions to repatriate those Native ancestors since.

Search for institutions holding Native American remains and tribes seeking to reclaim them on our repatriation database.

by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News

As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.

ProPublica this year is investigating the failure of NAGPRA to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums. Our reporting, in partnership with NBC News, has found that a small group of institutions and government bodies has played an outsized role in the law’s failure.

Sign up for ProPublica’s Repatriation Project newsletter to get the stories in this series as soon as they publish and learn more about our reporting.

Ten institutions hold about half of the Native American remains that have not been returned to tribes. These include old and prestigious museums with collections taken from ancestral lands not long after the U.S. government forcibly removed Native Americans from them, as well as state-run institutions that amassed their collections from earthen burial mounds that had protected the dead for hundreds of years. Two are arms of the U.S. government: the Interior Department, which administers the law, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest federally owned utility.

An Interior Department spokesperson said it complies with its legal obligations and that its bureaus (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management) are not required to begin the repatriation of “culturally unidentifiable human remains” unless a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization makes a formal request.

Tennessee Valley Authority Archaeologist and Tribal Liaison Marianne Shuler said the agency is committed to “partnering with federally recognized tribes as we work through the NAGPRA process.”

The law required institutions to publicly report their holdings and to consult with federally recognized tribes to determine which tribes human remains and objects should be repatriated to. Institutions were meant to consider cultural connections, including oral traditions as well as geographical, biological and archaeological links.

Yet many institutions have interpreted the definition of “cultural affiliation” so narrowly that they’ve been able to dismiss tribes’ connections to ancestors and keep remains and funerary objects. Throughout the 1990s, institutions including the Ohio History Connection and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville thwarted the repatriation process by categorizing everything in their collections that might be subject to the law as “culturally unidentifiable.”

Ohio History Connection’s director of American Indian relations, Alex Wesaw, who is also a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, said that the institution’s original designation of so many collections as culturally unidentifiable may have “been used as a means to keep people on shelves for research and for other things that our institution just doesn’t allow anymore.”

In a statement provided to ProPublica, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville spokesperson said that the university is “actively building relationships with and consulting with Tribal communities.”

ProPublica found that the American Museum of Natural History has not returned some human remains taken from the Southwest, arguing that they are too old to determine which tribes — among dozens in the region — would be the correct ones to repatriate to. In the Midwest, the Illinois State Museum for decades refused to establish a cultural affiliation for Native American human remains that predated the arrival of Europeans in the region in 1673, citing no reliable written records during what archaeologists called the “pre-contact” or “prehistoric” period.

Walter Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, testifies at a congressional hearing in July 1989 on the issue of repatriation. At the time, Echo-Hawk said, “Desecration and expropriation of Native graves, dead bodies and associated burial goods is clearly the most grisly and frightening problem confronting American Indians today.” (Ed Lallo/Getty Images)

The American Museum of Natural History declined to comment for this story.

In a statement, Illinois State Museum Curator of Anthropology Brooke Morgan said that “archaeological and historical lines of evidence were privileged in determining cultural affiliation” in the mid-1990s, and that “a theoretical line was drawn in 1673.” Morgan attributed the museum’s past approach to a weakness of the law that she said did not encourage multiple tribes to collectively claim cultural affiliation, a practice she said is common today.

As of last month, about 200 institutions — including the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology and the nonprofit Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois — had repatriated none of the remains of more than 14,000 Native Americans in their collections. Some institutions with no recorded repatriations possess the remains of a single individual; others have as many as a couple thousand.

A University of Kentucky spokesperson told ProPublica the William S. Webb Museum “is committed to repatriating all Native American ancestral remains and funerary belongings, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony to Native nations” and that the institution has recently committed $800,000 toward future efforts.

Jason L. King, the executive director of the Center for American Archeology, said that the institution has complied with the law: “To date, no tribes have requested repatriation of remains or objects from the CAA.”

When the federal repatriation law passed in 1990, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would take 10 years to repatriate all covered objects and remains to Native American tribes. Today, many tribal historic preservation officers and NAGPRA professionals characterize that estimate as laughable, given that Congress has never fully funded the federal office tasked with overseeing the law and administering consultation and repatriation grants. Author Chip Colwell, a former curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, estimates repatriation will take at least another 70 years to complete. But the Interior Department, now led by the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, is seeking changes to regulations that would push institutions to complete repatriation within three years. Some who work on repatriation for institutions and tribes have raised concerns about the feasibility of this timeline.

Our investigation included an analysis of records from more than 600 institutions; interviews with more than 100 tribal leaders, museum professionals and others; and the review of nearly 30 years of transcripts from the federal committee that hears disputes related to the law.

D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts, said institutions that don’t want to repatriate often claim there’s inadequate evidence to link ancestral human remains to any living people.

Gould said “one of the faults with the law” is that institutions, and not tribes, have the final say on whether their collections are considered culturally related to the tribes seeking repatriation. “Institutions take advantage of it,” she said.

View other stories in The Repatriation Project series here.

1. Amassing Remains

Some of the nation’s most prestigious museums continue to hold vast collections of remains and funerary objects that could be returned under NAGPRA.

Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, University of California, Berkeley and the Field Museum in Chicago each hold the remains of more than 1,000 Native Americans. Their earliest collections date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when their curators sought to amass encyclopedic collections of human remains.

Many anthropologists from that time justified large-scale collecting as a way to preserve evidence of what they wrongly believed was an extinct race of “Moundbuilders” — one that predated and was unrelated to Native Americans. Later, after that theory proved to be false, archaeologists still excavated gravesites under a different racist justification: Many scientists who embraced the U.S. eugenics movement used plundered craniums for studies that argued Native Americans were inferior to white people based on their skull sizes.

These colonialist myths were also used to justify the U.S. government’s brutality toward Native Americans and fuel much of the racism that they continue to face today.

“Native Americans have always been the object of study instead of real people.” —Shannon O’Loughlin, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

“Native Americans have always been the object of study instead of real people,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

As the new field of archaeology gained momentum in the 1870s, the Smithsonian Institution struck a deal with U.S. Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to pay each of his soldiers up to $500 — or roughly $14,000 in 2022 dollars — for items such as clothing, weapons and everyday tools sent back to Washington.

“We are desirous of procuring large numbers of complete equipments in the way of dress, ornament, weapons of war” and “in fact everything bearing upon the life and character of the Indians,” Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, wrote to Sherman on May 22, 1873.

The Smithsonian Institution today holds in storage the remains of roughly 10,000 people, more than any other U.S. museum. However, it reports its repatriation progress under a different law, the National Museum of the American Indian Act. And it does not publicly share information about what it has yet to repatriate with the same detail that NAGPRA requires of institutions it covers. Instead, the Smithsonian shares its inventory lists with tribes, two spokespeople told ProPublica.

Frederic Ward Putnam, who was appointed curator of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1875, commissioned and funded excavations that would become some of the earliest collections at Harvard, the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum. He also helped establish the anthropology department and museum at UC Berkeley — which holds more human remains taken from Native American gravesites than any other U.S. institution that must comply with NAGPRA.

For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Putnam commissioned the self-taught archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead to lead excavations in southern Ohio to take human remains and “relics” for display. Much of what Moorehead unearthed from Ohio’s Ross and Warren counties became founding collections of the Field Museum.

A few years after Moorehead’s excavations, the American Museum of Natural History co-sponsored rival expeditions to the Southwest; items were looted from New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and shipped by train to New York. They remain premiere collections of the institution.

As of last month the Field Museum has returned to tribes legal control of 28% of the remains of 1,830 Native Americans it has reported to the National Park Service, which administers the law and keeps inventory data. It still holds at least 1,300 Native American remains.

In a statement, the Field Museum said that data from the park service is out of date. (The museum publishes separate data on its repatriation website that it says is frequently updated and more accurate.) A spokesperson told ProPublica that “all Native American human remains under NAGPRA are available for return.”

The museum has acknowledged that Moorehead’s excavations would not meet today’s standards. But the museum continues to benefit from those collections. Between 2003 and 2005, it accepted $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve its North American Ethnographic and Archaeological collection — including the material excavated by Moorehead — for future use by anthropologists and other researchers. That’s nearly four times more than it received in grants from the National Park Service during the same period to support its repatriation efforts under NAGPRA.

In a statement, the museum said it has the responsibility to care for its collections and that the $400,000 grant was “used for improved stewardship of objects in our care as well as organizing information to better understand provenance and to make records more publicly accessible.”

Records show the Field Museum has categorized all of its collections excavated by Moorehead as culturally unidentifiable. The museum said that in 1995, it notified tribes with historical ties to southern Ohio about those collections but did not receive any requests for repatriation or disposition. Helen Robbins, the museum’s director of repatriation, said that formally linking specific tribes with those sites is challenging, but that it may be possible after consultations with tribes.

The museum’s president and CEO, Julian Siggers, has criticized proposals intended to speed up repatriation. In March 2022, Siggers wrote to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that if new regulations empowered tribes to request repatriations on the basis of geographical ties to collections rather than cultural ties, museums such as the Field would need more time and money to comply. ProPublica found that the Field Museum has received more federal money to comply with NAGPRA than any other institution in the country.

Robbins said that among the institution’s challenges to repatriation is a lack of funding and staff. “That being said,” added Robbins, “we recognize that much of this work has taken too long.”

View the data here.

2. Excavating Burial Mounds

From the 1890s through the 1930s, archaeologists carried out large-scale excavations of burial mounds throughout the Midwest and Southeast, regions where federal policy had forcibly pushed tribes from their land. Of the 10 institutions that hold the most human remains in the country, seven are in regions that were inhabited by Indigenous people with mound building cultures, ProPublica found.

Among them are the Ohio History Connection, the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Illinois State Museum.

Archaeological research suggests that the oldest burial mounds were built roughly 11,000 years ago and that the practice lasted through the 1400s. The oral histories of many present-day tribes link their ancestors to earthen mounds. Their structures and purposes vary, but many include spaces for communal gatherings and platforms for homes and for burying the dead. But some institutions have argued these histories aren’t adequate proof that today’s tribes are the rightful stewards of the human remains and funerary objects removed from the mounds, which therefore should stay in museums.

Like national institutions, local museums likewise make liberal use of the “culturally unidentifiable” designation to resist returning remains. For example, in 1998 the Ohio Historical Society (now Ohio History Connection) categorized its entire collection, which today includes more than 7,100 human remains, as “culturally unidentifiable.” It has made available for return the remains of 17 Native Americans, representing 0.2% of the human remains in its collections.

“It’s tough for folks who worked in the field their entire career and who are coming at it more from a colonial perspective — that what you would find in the ground is yours,” said Wesaw of previous generations’ practices. “That’s not the case anymore. That’s not how we operate.”

For decades, Indigenous people in Ohio have protested the museum’s decisions, claiming in public meetings of the federal committee that oversees how the law is implemented that their oral histories trace back to mound-building cultures. As one commenter, Jean McCoard of the Native American Alliance of Ohio, pointed out in 1997, there are no federally recognized tribes in Ohio because they were forcibly removed. As a result, McCoard argued, archaeologists in the state have been allowed to disassociate ancestral human remains from living people without much opposition. Since the early 1990s, the Native American Alliance of Ohio has advocated for the reburial of all human remains held by Ohio History Connection. It has yet to happen.

Wesaw said that the museum is starting to engage more with tribes to return their ancestors and belongings. Every other month, the museum’s NAGPRA specialist— a newly created position that is fully dedicated to its repatriation work — convenes virtual meetings with leaders from many of the roughly 45 tribes with ancestral ties to Ohio.

“Since 1885, there have been a number of archaeologists that have made their careers on the backs of our ancestors pulled out of the ground or mounds. It’s really, truly heartbreaking when you think about that.” —Alex Wesaw, director of American Indian Relations at Ohio History Connection and a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians

But, Wesaw said, the challenges run deep.

“It’s an old museum,” said Wesaw. “Since 1885, there have been a number of archaeologists that have made their careers on the backs of our ancestors pulled out of the ground or mounds. It’s really, truly heartbreaking when you think about that.”

Moreover, ProPublica’s investigation found that some collections were amassed with the help of federal funding. The vast majority of NAGPRA collections held by the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology are from excavations funded by the federal government under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration from the late 1930s into the 1940s. Kentucky’s rural and impoverished counties held burial mounds, and Washington funded excavations of 48 sites in at least 12 counties to create jobs for the unemployed.

More than 80% of the Webb Museum’s holdings that are subject to return under federal law originated from WPA excavations. The museum, which in 1996 designated every one of its collections as “culturally unidentifiable,” has yet to repatriate any of the roughly 4,500 human remains it has reported to the federal government. However, the museum has recently hired its first NAGPRA coordinator and renewed consultations with tribal nations after decades of avoiding repatriation. A spokesperson told ProPublica that one ongoing repatriation project at the museum will lead to the return of about 15% of the human remains in its collections.

In a statement, a museum spokesperson said that “we recognize the pain caused by past practices” and that the institution plans to commit more resources toward repatriation.

The University of Kentucky recently told ProPublica that it plans to spend more than $800,000 between 2023 and 2025 on repatriation, including the hiring of three more museum staff positions.

3. Establishing Connections to Tribes

In 2010, the Interior Department implemented a new rule that provided a way for institutions to return remains and items without establishing a cultural affiliation between present-day tribes and their ancestors. But, ProPublica found, some institutions have resisted doing so.

Experts say a lack of funding from Congress to the National NAGPRA Program has hampered enforcement of the law. The National Park Service was only recently able to fund one full-time staff position dedicated to investigating claims that institutions are not complying with the law; allegations can range from withholding information from tribes about collections, to not responding to consultation requests, to refusing to repatriate. Previously, the program relied on a part-time investigator.

Moreover, institutions that have violated the law have faced only minuscule fines, and some are not fined at all even after the Interior Department has found wrongdoing. Since 1990, the Interior Department has collected only $59,111.34 from 20 institutions for which it had substantiated allegations. That leaves tribal nations to shoulder the financial and emotional burden of the repatriation work.

The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a tribe in California, pressured UC Berkeley for years to repatriate more than a thousand ancestral remains, according to the tribe’s attorney. It finally happened in 2018 following a decade-long campaign that involved costly legal wrangling and travel back and forth to Berkeley by the tribes’ leaders.

“​​To me, there’s no money, there’s no dollar amount, on the work to be done. But the fact is, not every tribe has the same infrastructure and funding that others have,” said Nakia Zavalla, the cultural director for the tribe. “I really feel for those tribes that don’t have the funding, and they’re relying just on federal funds.”

A UC Berkeley spokesperson declined to comment on its interactions with the Santa Ynez Chumash, saying the school wants to prioritize communication with the tribe.

The University of Alabama Museums is among the institutions that have forced tribes into lengthy disputes over repatriation.

In June 2021, seven tribal nations indigenous to what is now the southeastern United States collectively asked the university to return the remains of nearly 6,000 of their ancestors. Their ancestors had been among more than 10,000 whose remains were unearthed by anthropologists and archaeologists between the 1930s and the 1980s from the second-largest mound site in the country. The site, colonially known as Moundville, was an important cultural and trade hub for Muskogean-speaking people between about 1050 and 1650.

An aerial photograph shows the Moundville site circa the 1930s (Alabama Department of Archives and History)

Tribes had tried for more than a decade to repatriate Moundville ancestors, but the university had claimed they were all “culturally unidentifiable.” Emails between university and tribal leaders in 2018 show that when the university finally agreed to begin repatriation, it insisted that before it could return the human remains it needed to re-inventory its entire Moundville collection — a process it said would take five years. The “re-inventory” would entail photographing and CT scanning human remains to collect data for future studies, which the tribes opposed.

“Our elders tell us that the Muskogean-speaking tribes are related to each other. We have a shared history of colonization and a shared history of rebuilding from it.” —Ian Thompson, tribal historic preservation officer with the Choctaw Nation

In October 2021, leaders from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Chickasaw Nation, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and Seminole Tribe of Florida brought the issue to the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, which can recommend a finding of cultural affiliation that is not legally binding. (Disputes over these findings are relatively rare.) The tribal leaders submitted a 117-page document detailing how Muskogean-speaking tribes are related and how their shared history can be traced back to the Moundville area long before the arrival of Europeans.

“Our elders tell us that the Muskogean-speaking tribes are related to each other. We have a shared history of colonization and a shared history of rebuilding from it,” Ian Thompson, a tribal historic preservation officer with the Choctaw Nation, told the NAGPRA review committee in 2021.

The tribes eventually forced the largest repatriation in NAGPRA’s history. Last year, the university agreed to return the remains of 10,245 ancestors.

In a statement, a University of Alabama Museums spokesperson said, “To honor and preserve historical and cultural heritage, the proper care of artifacts and ancestral remains of Muskogean-speaking peoples has been and will continue to be imperative to UA.” The university declined to comment further “out of respect for the tribes,” but added that “we look forward to continuing our productive work” with them.

The University of Alabama Museums still holds the remains of more than 2,900 Native Americans.

4. Changing Institutional Will

Many tribal and museum leaders say they are optimistic that a new generation of archaeologists, as well as museum and institutional leaders, want to better comply with the law.

At the University of Oklahoma, for instance, new archaeology department hires were shocked to learn about their predecessors’ failures. Marc Levine, associate curator of archaeology at the university’s Sam Noble Museum, said that when he arrived in 2013, there was more than enough evidence to begin repatriation, but his predecessors hadn’t prioritized the work. Through collaboration with tribal nations, Levine has compiled evidence that would allow thousands of human remains to be repatriated — and NAGPRA work isn’t technically part of his job description. The university has no full-time NAGPRA coordinator. Still, Levine estimates that at the current pace, repatriating the university’s holdings could take another decade.

“You either want to do the right thing or you don’t. It’s an issue of dignity at this point.” —D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts

Prominent institutions such as Harvard have issued public apologies in recent years for past collection practices, even as criticism continues over their failure to complete the work of repatriation. (Harvard did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

Other institutions under fire, such as UC Berkeley, have publicly pledged to prioritize repatriation. And the Society for American Archaeology, a professional organization that argued in a 1986 policy statement that “all human remains should receive appropriate scientific study,” now recommends archaeologists obtain consent from descendant communities before conducting studies.

In October, the Biden administration proposed regulations that would eliminate “culturally unidentifiable” as a designation for human remains, among other changes. Perhaps most significantly, the regulations would direct institutions to defer to tribal nations’ knowledge of their customs, traditions and histories when making repatriation decisions.

But for people who have been doing the work since its passage, NAGPRA was never complicated.

“You either want to do the right thing or you don’t,” said Brown University’s Gould.

She added: “It’s an issue of dignity at this point.”

Opening slideshow images: Works Progress Administration workers excavate a Native American burial mound in Kentucky (University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center); an 1891 excavation at the site of the Hopewell Mounds in Ohio (Field Museum Archives via University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities Ohio Hopewell Digitization Project); an archaeological expedition at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (American Museum of Natural History Library); a crew at a 1938 WPA excavation at a site known as Chiggerville in Kentucky in 1938 (William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, University of Kentucky).

Illustrations by Weshoyot Alvitre for ProPublica.

Institution images: The American Museum of Natural History (Ben Hider/Getty Images), Harvard University (Daderot via Wikimedia), University of California, Berkeley (Justin Katigbak for ProPublica), Illinois State Museum (Mike Linksvayer/Flickr), University of Tennessee, Knoxville (sframephoto/Getty), Indiana University (Susan Vineyard/Getty)

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

Asia Fields and Brooke Stephenson contributed reporting.

Update, January 12, 2023: This story has been updated to include a statement from the University of Alabama Museums.

by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica, and Will Fitzgibbon, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

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

The story started in a bustling port city in West Africa, where a prominent Lebanese businessman was accused by the U.S. government of funneling money to the terrorist group Hezbollah.

In sanctioning Ibrahim Taher, the Treasury Department made a rare reference in the eighth paragraph of a press release to an obscure and largely unregulated diplomatic arrangement that allows private citizens in their home countries to represent the economic and cultural interests of foreign governments. In exchange for their service, these honorary consuls receive some of the same coveted legal protections and privileges provided to career diplomats, including the ability to move bags across borders without inspection.

The centuries-old arrangement is now used by a majority of the world’s governments — big and small, rich and poor — including those in Africa, where the Treasury said Taher levied his honorary consul credentials to travel with “minimal” scrutiny as a financier of the terrorist organization. Taher has denied the government’s allegations.

In 2022, ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in collaboration with dozens of media partners, investigated this shadowy world, finding corrupt, violent and dangerous consuls — including accused terrorist financiers and Kremlin loyalists — who have threatened the rule of law in the United States and abroad.

The governments of seven countries have so far announced reforms, investigations or other changes. That includes Latvia, which last month launched an investigation into an honorary consul after revelations of domestic violence, and Jordan, which ended the appointment of a long-serving honorary consul whose prior arrest in a corruption scandal was described in the ProPublica and ICIJ investigation.

All told, the news organizations’ investigation identified at least 500 current or former consuls who have been accused of crimes or embroiled in controversies.

Here are nine key documents used by the reporters to produce the first comprehensive account of exploitation by consuls and breakdowns in the system that empowers them.

Kremlin-Backed Political Party Registration (Montenegro)

In December 2017, Russia’s then-honorary consul in Montenegro, Boro Djukic, signed a registration document to form a hard-line, Kremlin-backed political party that sought to force the country’s withdrawal from NATO. Djukic’s aggressive role in Montenegro’s politics drew criticism because honorary consuls are supposed to be benign representatives of foreign governments, championing cultural and economic ties. Djukic lost his post in 2018 after about four years as consul. He could not be reached for comment; he previously defended his tenure as an honorary consul.

Court Records (Egypt)

Though no longer an honorary consul, Ladislav Otakar Skakal in 2017 smuggled more than 21,000 Egyptian antiquities, including coins, pots and a wooden coffin, in a diplomatic container to the Italian port city of Salerno, according to court records. The container, Egypt’s public prosecution office said in court records obtained by ProPublica and ICIJ, ensured “that it would not be opened or searched by the specialized employees of the Egyptian Customs Authority.” Italian authorities searched the container and discovered the relics only after a paperwork mistake. Skakal, who had been appointed an honorary consul by Italy, was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison. He is believed to be in Italy and could not be reached for comment.

Court Records (Guinea)

Last year, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned two prominent businessmen in Guinea, including Taher, for allegedly financing Hezbollah. Among other things, the U.S. government accused the men of traveling in 2020 to Lebanon on a special flight with a “large amount of money” that they claimed was for COVID-19 relief. The coronavirus had been used before as a cover for transferring funds from Guinea to Hezbollah, authorities said. Prosecutors in Guinea opened an investigation but later closed the inquiry without filing charges, according to court records. Both businessmen have denied wrongdoing.

Police Records (Spain)

In 2019, as part of a wider drug trafficking probe, police in Spain filed a memorandum to a judge referencing three honorary consuls suspected of laundering money for an accused drug trafficker. “Consuls act completely autonomously and are not controlled by the State they represent. … The Spanish government has no chance of intervening in their affairs,” investigators wrote. Authorities included a diagram of suspected money flows. The report was obtained by El Periodico and shared with ProPublica and ICIJ. The consuls, who deny wrongdoing, have not been charged.

Transcript of Undercover Operation (U.S. and Ghana)

In 2012, international arms broker Faouzi Jaber told undercover informants pretending to seek missiles and grenades for use against American forces that he could help them obtain honorary consul appointments. Jaber said he could make them a “consul in your country,” according to a transcript of the conversation recorded by U.S. investigators and described in a subsequent indictment. Jaber was extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty in 2017 to conspiring to support a terrorist group and was sentenced to prison. Jaber said he was under the influence of drugs at the time and had made a “once-in-a-lifetime mistake.”

Archival Records (Europe)

In 1927, Gustavo Guerrero, an expert on diplomatic privileges, recommended that honorary consuls “should no longer exist,” according to a 1926 report to the League of Nations as it debated the first-ever international agreement on consuls. Archived records show that most countries at the time objected to the recommendation. Almost a century later, honorary consuls remain popular agents of diplomacy.

Public Records Request (El Salvador)

El Salvador, like dozens of other countries, does not publish information about its honorary consuls. Reporters obtained the names of honorary consuls appointed by El Salvador through a public records request to the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

U.S. Army Archives

Terrorist groups and leaders of corrupt regimes have long leveraged honorary consuls as agents of disruption. In 1946, the U.S. Army published a report on German intelligence during and after World War II. German spies were “usually built into the diplomatic staff accredited to a neutral government, their leaders being camouflaged as honorary consuls or other functionaries,” the report said.

Intelligence Report (North Macedonia)

In a 2017 report, intelligence authorities in North Macedonia named two honorary consulates as “bases” for Russian espionage aimed at creating conflict in the Balkans. “The honorary consulates in Bitola and Ohrid represent intelligence bases from which the politics of RF [Russian Federation] are implemented in the Republic of Macedonia,” the report noted. The two honorary consuls who oversaw those offices have denied wrongdoing.

Reporting was contributed by Benedikt Strunz, Jan Strozyk, Jesús Albalat, Akoumba Diallo, Hala Nasreddine, Saska Cvetkovska, Dejan Milovic, Jimmy Alvarado and Maggie Michael.

by Peter Elkind

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

After six years of failed efforts by the IRS, Justice Department and lawmakers, new legislation is expected to prevent the worst abuses of a tax-avoidance scheme that has cost the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars. Tucked into the massive, $1.7 trillion government spending bill signed into law by President Joe Biden on Dec. 29, a provision in the law seems poised to accomplish what thousands of audits, threats of hefty penalties and criminal prosecutions could not: shutting down a booming business in “syndicated conservation easements,” which exploit a charitable tax break that Congress established to preserve open land.

Under standard conservation easements, landowners give up development rights for their acreage, often an appealing, bucolic space. In return, they receive a charitable deduction equal to the property’s development value, and the public benefits by the preservation of the land, which in some cases is made available as a park.

But as ProPublica first described in 2017, aggressive promoters built a lucrative industry through “syndicated” deals. These promoters snatched up idle land (a long-vacant golf course near a trailer park, in one example examined by ProPublica) and hired an appraiser willing to claim that it had huge, previously unrecognized development value — perhaps for luxury vacation homes or a solar farm — which they contended made it worth many times its purchase price. The promoters then sold stakes in a massive conservation easement deduction to rich investors, who made a quick profit by claiming charitable write-offs that were four to six times their investment. The promoters reaped millions in fees.

The new measure will limit taxpayers’ deduction to two and a half times their investment. That will effectively eliminate the profits that drive syndicated deals while allowing traditional conservation easements to continue. “I don’t know how the industry moves forward after the new law,” said Sean Akins, an attorney with Covington & Burling who represents multiple syndication promoters.

The path to the new law was lengthy and winding. For years, syndicated easements seemed impervious to attempts to rein them in. Since late 2016, the IRS has attempted to stymie the deals, branding them as “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The agency has challenged $21 billion in deductions claimed by 28,000 syndicated-easement investors, pursued scores of tax court cases and collaborated with the Justice Department in targeting top promoters with criminal charges and civil lawsuits.

Prominent lawmakers from both parties weighed in against the abuse and, starting in 2017, introduced legislation, called the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act, to halt the practice. According to estimates by Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, applying these limits to deals struck since December 2016, when the IRS first branded the practice improper, would generate an additional $12.5 billion for the U.S. Treasury through 2031.

The syndicators fought back so furiously and so effectively over multiple years that ProPublica published not one, but two stories describing how bulletproof the industry seemed. The promoters and their investors were undaunted by IRS threats. Syndication partnerships were so profitable that they set aside special “audit reserves” of as much as $1 million to do battle with the agency in tax court. Syndication firms and their newly formed Washington trade group, called the Partnership for Conservation, or P4C, spent more than $11 million, by ProPublica’s calculations, on lobbyists to protect their business before Congress. At one point, they went on the attack, seeking to strip the IRS of funds used to enforce the December 2016 notice that flagged profit-making syndicated deals as abusive and required participants to file forms reporting their involvement to the IRS.

The agency’s efforts did little to slow the volume of syndicated deals, according to congressional testimony by then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig in May 2022. He sounded a bit desperate when he told lawmakers: “We need congressional help.”

As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told ProPublica last June, “There is a tax shelter gold mine here, and they’re fighting very hard to protect it.” He added, “This is a textbook case of the power of lobbyists.”

By that point, the legislation targeting syndicated deals had been introduced, in one legislative chamber or another, eight times. A late-2021 strategy to include the syndication-killer language in Biden’s Build Back Better bill had unraveled at the hands of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democrat, who demanded that it be stripped out as a condition of her critical vote to win passage of the larger measure. (Sinema did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment at the time.)

The tide finally turned last summer — without attracting much notice at the time. During a June 22 Senate Finance Committee markup on retirement legislation, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., a longtime sponsor of the Integrity Act, identified the projected windfall from a clampdown on syndicated easements as a way to pay for a popular proposal enhancing benefits for disabled police, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs. That bipartisan legislation, months later, got added to the massive, must-pass government funding bill, where no single lawmaker had the power to strip it out.

A big concession sealed support for the deal: Daines and other backers agreed not to apply the law to transactions that date back to when the IRS flagged syndicated easements as abusive in 2016 (though the IRS can still pursue cases from back then). Instead the new limits apply only to transactions that occur after the law’s enactment. Along with a much smaller change exempting the measure from applying to historic buildings, this reduced the projected Treasury windfall to about $6.4 billion.

As the measure neared final passage in late December, Daines issued a statement: “It’s about time — for too long bad actors have abused the conservation easement program and ripped off the American people, but this fraud will now come to an end. I’m glad to have worked with my colleagues across the aisle to stop scam artists, promote true conservation, and save taxpayers billions of dollars.”

In an email to ProPublica, Rettig, whose term as IRS commissioner expired in November, called the new legislation “critical to the ongoing efforts of the IRS to stem the tide of abusive syndicated conservation easements.” He said the measure, combined with $80 billion in new funding for the resource-starved agency, “will hopefully allow the IRS compliance and taxpayer education efforts to catch up on abusive syndicated conservation easement transactions as well as other similarly important service and compliance functions.”

The IRS, in a separate statement to ProPublica, said “we are working to implement the recent legislation aimed at some of the most egregious syndication conservation easement transactions” as part of the agency’s “commitment and efforts to combat abusive conservation easement transactions and all other abusive transactions.”

P4C President Robert Ramsay, who has said the profit motive produces “tremendous opportunities” for conservation, attributed the measure’s passage to the IRS’ “ability to win a war of attrition.” Ramsay told ProPublica that the new limits will have “a broad chilling effect” on all land conservation, even though it targets only syndicated deals. He also said its “broad brush” provisions would do nothing to stop inflated easement deductions by wealthy individuals and family partnerships. Ramsay added that he expects the measure to prompt “a number” of syndication promoters to exit the business entirely.

Efforts to shut down the syndication business had been pushed by the Land Trust Alliance, a Washington trade association whose 950 members administer traditional conservation easements. Fearful that exploitation of the charitable tax break by “brazen” profiteers could jeopardize the conservation deduction altogether, the group had prodded the IRS to undertake its crackdown and spent more than $2.5 million on lobbyists since 2017. “We kept this about ending the abuse, rather than discard the incentive,” said Andrew Bowman, the organization’s CEO. “We were relentless in trying to defend the integrity of a very important tax incentive.”

Bowman marveled that none of the IRS’ traditional measures to combat abusive tax transactions had worked. “All that just wasn’t stopping it,” he told ProPublica. “Congress could see it had to act. No one else was going to be able to fix this problem. The incentive to do the deals is now gone.” He praised Daines for masterminding the strategy to pass the legislation, calling him “a true hero for private conservation.” (He also said ProPublica’s coverage “put out there for the public how egregious this abuse was.”) Bowman added: “It’s a great victory for conservation. It took longer than it should have, but we’re certainly thrilled with the outcome.”

by Sebastian Rotella

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

An exclusive news report dominated the headlines in Canada in recent weeks: Canadian intelligence had warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about a vast campaign of political interference by China. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service had learned that Chinese consulate officials in Toronto had covertly funded a network of at least 11 political candidates in federal elections in 2019, the report said. The Chinese operation had also targeted Canadian political figures and immigrant leaders seen as opponents of the regime in Beijing, subjecting them to surveillance, harassment and attacks in the media, the report said. Trudeau responded with promises of action, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they were investigating the alleged foreign interference. The Chinese foreign ministry denied the allegations.

Not surprisingly, the report’s author was Sam Cooper. An investigative journalist for Global News, a private Canadian media organization, the 48-year-old Cooper has done hard-hitting work about a surprisingly active criminal underworld rooted in a large diaspora from Hong Kong, a bastion of the mafias known as triads. His best-selling 2021 book, “Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West,” examines violent international gangs involved in drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and, most alarmingly, Chinese espionage and influence activity in Canada.

Cooper and other experts (including U.S. national security officials interviewed by ProPublica) say Canadian political leaders have ignored or minimized the extent of the threat from China. Cooper has received criticism from pro-Beijing figures in the Chinese-Canadian community and is fighting two defamation lawsuits from subjects of his coverage. But his reporting has drawn praise from national security officials, dissidents of Chinese origin and academics in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. It helped spur a governmental inquiry known as the Cullen Commission, which recently concluded that organized crime had laundered billions of dollars in the province of British Columbia. And the latest revelations of Chinese interference are having a potentially dramatic impact on the political debate in Canada.

ProPublica’s conversation with Cooper has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I wanted to ask you first, in terms of your background, how you got involved in this topic.

I went to University of Toronto. I ended up traveling to Japan for some post-university work and culture. And so I really became enamored and fascinated with East Asian culture.

As a young reporter in Vancouver, and also a young family guy, there were things that I noticed. I started to break ground on how influential money from Hong Kong and mainland China was in Vancouver real estate, how it appeared to be driving prices incredibly high in comparison to local incomes. And that led to finally understanding or digging into the underground casino and underground banking nodes and networks that have been feeding Vancouver.

I recognized pretty early there was a huge, high-level pushback on the reporting to dig into the roots of what I eventually found were extremely high-level tycoons from Hong Kong with triad connections [who] had been developing big portions of Vancouver since the 1980s. And this led to a lot of discoveries.

What's remarkable about the history of this issue in Canada in the past decades is that there’s this prophecy that is rejected or ignored. What was your assessment of Project Sidewinder [a Canadian intelligence report leaked in 1999 that warned of the threat from China-connected tycoons, gangsters and spies] when you were looking at this stuff?

Sidewinder, for let’s just call it the Western or Canadian mind, it was too much too early to understand what they were alleging and pointing to. It just was hard to believe. And so … I took the report with a grain of salt. I didn’t swallow it as truth. And there had been a huge pushback on that report from Ottawa, so I was cautious. But you’re absolutely right. This was basically raw intelligence, it was leaked. So people were able to point to a few flaws, or maybe even the odd overreach. But it is absolutely confirmed and true based on my current work, and my book, that the basic elements of what's alleged — that is, that Chinese intelligence and foreign influence operations use high-level gang bosses to both send money abroad and to corrupt Western societies — is absolutely true and confirmed.

In U.S. press and politics, there’s this ongoing focus on Mexico: drugs in Mexico, corruption in Mexico. There’s very little attention paid to national security issues related to Canada. If you read your book, one has to wonder why there hasn’t been more focus on Canada and the extent to which there is a crisis in Canada that just doesn’t get the attention it should in the United States.

Yeah, that’s right. In some ways, Canada makes the perfect host for very sophisticated, powerful, transnational organized crime that doesn’t typically hang bodies from overpasses. The level of sophistication of Asian organized crime is that people that would appear to be gentleman bankers or stockbrokers can be the leaders of transnational drug trafficking gangs. And further than that, people that are respected officials in the Chinese Communist Party at the end of the day are the handlers and bosses of these elite, transnational Asian gangs. Canada as a G-7 nation, as a banking economy that is tied in at the highest levels of respect with the other leading industrial nations, makes a perfect disguise and host for very sophisticated transnational crime.

There is concern in the U.S. government about some of these structural weaknesses in Canadian legislation and the Canadian law enforcement and judicial culture. You give the example that it takes seven months to get a warrant for a wiretap on Sinaloa cartel guys that would take a couple of days in the U.S. or Australia.

I, like many Canadians, you know, just have the innate sense that Canada’s such a stable, well-ordered, law-abiding society. And often that’s true. But what is missed by so many people is that the laws that … prevent overreach into the lives of law-abiding citizens have been exploited, really, by transnational gangs that have so much cover in Canada.

The perfect example of this is Tse Chi Lop, the Canadian citizen who I and others have reported was at the top of this network of networks of the highest triad bosses, The Company. I reported that there clearly are interconnections with Chinese state police and intelligence agencies. This man, this Canadian, was about to fly from Asia to Toronto. And I understand there was some sort of international police operation to divert his flight away from Canada because Australian and United States police did not have the trust that if Mr. Tse landed in Toronto he would be able to be prosecuted and extradited. The concerns there are that Canada’s legal system is just full of holes. It is much too difficult to prosecute powerful criminals. One of the other issues is the lack of an anti-racketeering law to deal with real organized crime. [ProPublica note: During an extradition hearing in the Netherlands last year, Tse told a judge he was innocent of drug trafficking charges.]

But another huge one … is a growing sense that elite capture, and even corruption, within [the] Canadian government, could be an inhibition to tackling people like Mr. Tse. The questions are: Do Mr. Tse and his network, in a roundabout or even a direct way, have hooks into people like Cameron Ortis, the former Canadian RCMP intelligence boss, who fell in a massive corruption case that I wrote about? Beyond Mr. Ortis, could powerful politicians be linked to powerful triad members or triad leaders in Canada? [ProPublica note: Ortis is awaiting trial and has not yet entered a plea, according to press reports. His attorney did not return a request for comment.]

Cooper’s notebook and book "Wilful Blindness" (Shelby Lisk, special to ProPublica) Your book really lays out your focus on organized crime and the casinos. And that underworld then takes you into the question of political influence and how aggressive the People’s Republic of China has been in political influence operations in Canada, with organized crime as a weapon in that. Why do you think that the PRC has been able to do that?

Australia has been … pretty much a perfect analogue of the PRC methods of infiltration and corruption. Australia and Canada [are] very similar societies. Australia and Canada were in the same dire straits in 2015 when, as we know, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping elevated his United Front [the Communist Party’s overseas influence arm] interference networks. But the response since 2015 has been very different. Australia rightly responded with foreign interference laws around 2017, 2018. And we’ve seen some very, very powerful people now implicated in investigations.

In contrast, in Canada, nothing has been done for the similar threat. We have a bipartisan Parliament group of senior officials with access to intelligence reports, sensitive reports, they make recommendations to government. For several years now, they’ve been asking the Liberal government to follow Australia’s example. And there has really been no change.

And what justification do opponents of something as basic as a foreign agent registration act give for opposing it?

I can't find a good justification. Unfortunately, I think we can look at news circumstances such as when Canadian parliamentarians were debating whether to declare China’s actions in Xinxiang a genocide in 2021. Some Canadian senators … went on the record saying that these kinds of discussions would fan anti-Asian racism.

I probed very deeply [former Canadian legislator] Kenny Chiu’s case. The evidence at the time came from what he told me himself, what I had heard about Canadian intelligence’s deep concerns with what happened to Kenny Chiu and others in the 2021 federal election. And also open source reports at the time that said that clearly Mandarin-language media, which is influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and WeChat networks, attacked Kenny first and foremost ahead of the 2021 election, smearing him as an anti-Asian racist. Again, this is a Hong Kong-born Canadian. They call him a racist because he suggested a foreign influence registry. He did not even name China in the bill. He lost his seat.

So that’s what I call a two-pronged attack on Canadian democracy. Beijing is seeking, I have reported, based on Canadian intelligence, to in corrupt ways fund and advance its interests in candidates. And it is seeking to attack Canadian members of Parliament that it would see as threats to Chinese Communist Party objectives.

The response to your latest reports about a Chinese political influence campaign in Canadian politics seems to be unprecedented.

We can see there’s a very robust debate now about what is lacking in Canada’s foreign interference laws. How deep could this corruption go? How aggressive are China’s actions? Could they turn elections in their favor? These questions are now being debated almost every day in Canada’s Parliament. And I can say we’ve never seen that level of attention before.

And in your case, personally, there must be some sense of vindication.

Now I have access to the intelligence that can’t be refuted that exactly what I was reporting was happening. And not only do I believe, I’ve been told my reporting has been [the] subject of counternarratives from Chinese espionage and intelligence networks who are very uncomfortable and angry about my reporting. So I don’t know that vindication is the word more than I just, I deeply believe, and I’m told by a lot of people, that really this could be precedent-setting historic work for helping us support Canada's democracy.

People in Canadian police and intelligence, and in other countries, those communities are starting to share information because they see that I’ve got it right, because they see that it’s making a difference in areas where it needs to make a difference.

And even more importantly, my sourcing comes from the communities that are most directly impacted by these networks: Chinese-Canadian, Hong Kong-Canadian, Taiwanese, Uighur communities. And certainly not to suggest that they’re victims without agency. They have great agency, they are some of the best sources to police and intelligence themselves.

And I would add that people inside United Front criminal networks are some of my best sources. And how could that be? Well, China rules by fear, and also inducements and greed. And there are people that could fall out of favor, and people that have consciences, and yet maybe we could say they’re trapped within those networks, that are very eager to share information. They don’t want to see criminal thugs holding a lot of power in the broad community or just in the Asian community in Canada.

by Lynzy Billing

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

In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the CIA-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

• At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or appeared to target people for no clear reason.
• A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty intelligence by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence-gathering services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
• The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians. He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. ... We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.”
• The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the CIA often joined them. The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”
• Military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new insurgent recruits. “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”
• Because the Zero Units operated under a CIA program, their actions were part of a “classified” war, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer for operations that went wrong. And U.S. responsibility for the raids was quietly muddied by a legal loophole that allows the CIA — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for their operations — to act without the same level of oversight as the American military.
• Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers said they don’t believe Congress was getting a complete picture of the CIA’s overseas operations. Lawyers representing whistleblowers said there is ample motivation to downplay to Congress the number of civilians killed or injured in such operations. By the time reports get to congressional oversight committees, one lawyer said, they’re “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.”
• U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long relied on night raids by forces like the 02 unit to fight insurgencies around the globe. The strategy has, again and again, drawn outrage for its reliance on sometimes flawed intelligence and civilian death count. In 1967, the CIA’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3% of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.
• Eyewitnesses, survivors and family members described how Zero Unit soldiers had stormed into their homes at night, killing loved ones** at more than 30 raid sites Billing visited. No Afghan or U.S officials returned to investigate. In one instance, a 22-year-old named Batour witnessed a raid that killed his two brothers. One was a teacher and the other a university student. He told Billing the Zero Unit strategy had actually made enemies of families like his. He and his brothers, he said, had supported the government and vowed never to join the Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure.
• Little in the way of explanation was ever provided to the relatives of the dead — or to their neighbors and friends — as to why these particular individuals were targeted and what crimes they were accused of. Families who sought answers from provincial officials about the raids were told nothing could be done because they were Zero Unit operations. “They have their own intelligence and they do their own operation,” one grieving family member remembered being told after his three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike and night raid. “The provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and some sugar” as compensation for the killings. At medical facilities, doctors told Billing they’d never been contacted by Afghan or U.S. investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured in the raids. Some of the injured later died, quietly boosting the casualty count.

In a statement, CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law — to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness.” She said any allegations of human rights abuses by a “foreign partner” are reviewed and, if valid, the CIA and “other elements of the U.S. government take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the relationship.” Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of the threat they posed to Taliban rule.”

The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about Zero Unit operations.

With a forensic pathologist, Billing drove hundreds of miles across some of the country’s most volatile areas — visiting the sites of more than 30 raids, interviewing witnesses, survivors, family members, doctors and village elders. To understand the program, she met secretly with two Zero Unit soldiers over the course of years, wrangled with Afghanistan’s former spy master in his heavily fortified home and traveled to a diner in the middle of America to meet with an Army Ranger who’d joined the units on operations.

She also conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former Afghan and American government officials, Afghan commanders, U.S military officials, American defense and security officials and former CIA intelligence officers, as well as U.S. lawmakers and former oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers, civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence analysts, representatives of human rights organizations, doctors, hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses and family members — some of whom are not named in the story for their safety.

While America’s war in Afghanistan may be over, there are lessons to be learned from what it left behind. Billing writes:

“The American government has scant basis for believing it has a full picture of the Zero Units’ performance. Again and again, I spoke with Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.

As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.

Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new country against some new threat.”

Read her full report here.

by Peter Elkind

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

To many people, the notion that cellphones or cell towers might present a health risk long ago receded into a realm somewhere between trivial concern and conspiracy theory. For decades, the wireless industry has dismissed such ideas as fearmongering, and federal regulators have maintained that cellphones pose no danger. But a growing body of scientific research is raising questions, with the stakes heightened by the ongoing deployment of hundreds of thousands of new transmitters in neighborhoods across America. ProPublica recently examined the issue in detail, finding that the chief government regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, relies on an exposure standard from 1996, when the Motorola StarTAC flip phone was cutting edge, and that the agency brushed aside a lengthy study by a different arm of the federal government that found that cellphone radiation caused rare cancers and DNA damage in lab animals. The newest generation of cellphone technology, known as 5G, remains largely untested.

Here’s what you need to know:

Do cellphones give off radiation?

Yes. Both cellphones and wireless transmitters (which are mounted on towers, street poles and rooftops) send and receive radio-frequency energy, called “nonionizing radiation.” The amount of this radiation absorbed by the human body depends on how close a person is to a phone and a cell transmitter, as well as the strength of the signal the phone needs to connect with a transmitter. Cellphones displaying fewer bars, which means their connection with a transmitter is weak, require stronger power to communicate and so produce more radiation. Wireless transmitters, for their part, emit radiation continually, but little of that is absorbed unless a person is very close to the transmitter.

What does the science say about this? Is it harmful?

That’s the multibillion-dollar question. Government-approved cellphones are required to keep radiation exposure well below levels that the FCC considers dangerous. Those safeguards, however, have not changed since 1996, and they focus exclusively on the unlikely prospect of “thermal” harm: the potential for overheating body tissue, as a microwave oven would. The government guidelines do not address other potential forms of harm.

But a growing body of research has found evidence of health risks even when people are exposed to radiation below the FCC limits. The array of possible harms ranges from effects on fertility and fetal development to associations with cancer. Some studies of people living near cell towers have also confirmed an array of health complaints, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, tinnitus and insomnia, from people identified as having “electromagnetic hypersensitivity.”

The most sensational — and hotly debated — health fear about wireless radiation is cancer. In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, cited troubling but uncertain evidence in classifying wireless radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” In 2018, a study by the federal government that was nearly two decades in the making found “clear evidence” that cellphone radiation caused cancer in lab animals. A major study in Italy produced similar results.

Do cellphones pose any special health risks for kids?

Some experts say they do, citing studies suggesting children’s thinner, smaller skulls and developing brains leave them more vulnerable to the effects of cellphone radiation. The American Academy of Pediatrics embraces this concern and has for years urged the FCC to revisit its radiation standards, saying they don’t adequately protect kids. More than 20 foreign governments, as well as the European Environment Agency, urge precautionary steps to limit wireless exposure, especially for children.

What about risks in pregnancy?

A Yale study found hyperactivity and reduced memory in mice exposed to cellphone radiation in the womb, consistent with human epidemiological research showing a rise in behavioral disorders among children who were exposed to cellphones in the womb. Dr. Hugh Taylor, the author of the mouse study and chair of the obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences department at the Yale School of Medicine, told ProPublica: “The evidence is really, really strong now that there is a causal relationship between cellphone radiation exposure and behavior issues in children.”

What does the U.S. government say about cellphone radiation?

The key federal agencies — the FCC and the Food and Drug Administration — have echoed the wireless industry and a number of other groups in rejecting evidence of any “nonthermal” human health risk, saying it remains unproven. The government websites also reject the claim that children face any special risk.

In 2019, during the administration of President Donald Trump, the FCC shut down a six-year review of its 1996 wireless-radiation safety standards. The agency rejected pleas to make the standards more stringent, saying it had seen no evidence its safeguards were “outdated or insufficient to protect human safety.” In 2021, however, a federal appeals court ordered the FCC to revisit the issue, saying the agency had ignored evidence of an array of noncancer harms to humans, animals and the environment, and that its decision to uphold its exposure standard failed to meet “even the low threshold of reasoned analysis.” The FCC has taken no formal action since then.

Why is the issue not resolved?

Determining wireless radiation’s health effects with certainty is difficult. Researchers cannot ethically subject people to endless hours of cellphone radiation to gauge the results. Scientists have to rely on alternatives such as animal studies or epidemiological research, where challenges include getting subjects to accurately recount their wireless use and pinpointing the specific causes of disease or harm. Many health effects of toxic exposure, especially cancer, take years or decades to appear. And the mechanisms of how wireless radiation could affect the body at the cellular level are poorly understood.

Research funding on the issue has also been scarce in the U.S., despite frequent calls for more study. Research (and researchers) raising health concerns have come under sharp attack from industry, and government regulators have remained skeptical. A key FDA official, for example, dismissed the relevance of the federal study that found “clear evidence” of cancer in lab animals, saying it wasn’t designed to test the safety of cellphone use in humans, even though his agency had commissioned the research for that reason.

Linda Birnbaum, who led the federal agency that conducted the cellphone study, said that while proof of harm remains elusive, what is known means that precautions are merited. “Do I see a smoking gun? Not per se,” she told ProPublica. “But do I see smoke? Absolutely. There’s enough data now to say that things can happen. … Protective policy is needed today. We really don’t need more science to know that we should be reducing exposures.”

If I’m concerned about the risk, are there precautions I can take to protect myself and my family?

Because exposure varies dramatically with your proximity to the source of the radiation, experts say a key to minimizing risk is increasing your distance from the phone. This means keeping any cellphone that’s turned on away from direct contact with your body. Don’t keep it in your bra, in your pocket or (especially if you’re pregnant) against your abdomen, they say. And instead of holding the phone against your head when you talk, use a speaker or wired earphones. (Wireless headsets, such as AirPods, also emit some radiation.) Try to avoid making calls when the phone is telling you the signal is weak because that boosts the radiation level. You can also limit exposure by simply reducing how much time you spend talking on your cellphone and texting instead, they say. Using an old-fashioned landline avoids the problem altogether.

by Daniel Golden

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

This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until May 3.

Jonathan Cox faced an agonizing decision. He was scheduled to teach two classes this past fall at the University of Central Florida that would explore colorblind racism, the concept that ostensibly race-neutral practices can have a discriminatory impact. The first, “Race and Social Media,” featured a unit on “racial ideology and color-blindness.” The second, “Race and Ethnicity,” included a reading on “the myth of a color-blind society.” An assistant sociology professor, Cox had taught both courses before; they typically drew 35 to 40 undergraduates apiece.

As recently as August 2021, Cox had doubted that the controversy over critical race theory — which posits, among other things, that racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structure — would hamstring his teaching. Asked on a podcast what instructors would do if, as anticipated, Florida restricted the teaching of CRT in higher education, he said that they would need to avoid certain buzzwords. “What many of us are looking at doing is just maybe shifting some of the language that we’re using.”

But a clash with state law seemed inevitable, once Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, proposed what he called the strongest legislation in the nation against “the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.” Last April, DeSantis signed the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop Woke Act,” into law. It bans teaching that one race or gender is morally superior to another and prohibits teachers from making students feel guilty for past discrimination by members of their race. And it specifically bars portraying racial colorblindness — which the law labels a virtue — as racist. A DeSantis spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, told me in an email that the law “protects the open exchange of ideas” (italics in the original) by prohibiting teachers from “forcing discriminatory concepts on students.”

Whatever one thinks of critical race theory, the state’s interference limits the freedom of professors who are experts in their fields to decide what to teach their students. Cox worried, not without reason, that the law effectively banned him from discussing his ideas in class, and that teaching the courses could cost him his livelihood. Cox, who is the only Black professor in the sociology department, will not be considered for tenure until this fall. His salary was his family’s only income while his wife stayed home with their baby.

A month before the fall 2022 semester was set to start, he scrapped both courses. Students scrambled to register for other classes. “It didn’t seem like it was worth the risk,” said Cox, who taught a graduate course on inequality and education instead. “I’m completely unprotected.” He added, “Somebody who’s not even in the class could come after me. Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator — next thing I know, I’m out of a job.”

Books in Cox’s office (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

Cox’s decision, along with another professor’s cancellation of a graduate course because of similar apprehension, created an unusual gap in the sociology curriculum at UCF, which, with almost 69,000 students, is Florida’s largest university.

Cox’s department chair, Elizabeth Mustaine, said she went along with the professors’ wishes because “I thought: ‘I’m not going to stress anyone out about this. It’s crazy.’” Still, she added, “it’s an absolute tragedy that classes like this get canceled.” Of the 39 courses offered this past fall by a department that specializes in the study of human society, none focused primarily on race.

In just over two years, critical race theory has gone from a largely obscure academic subject to a favorite bogeyman for Republican candidates. Activists such as Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, conceived of targeting CRT to foment a backlash against measures enacted following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. At that time, Rufo told me in an email, “school districts across the country suddenly started adopting ‘equity statements,’ hiring ‘diversity and inclusion’ bureaucrats, and injecting heavily partisan political content into the curriculum.” Black Lives Matter and the left were riding high, said Rufo, who denies that structural racism exists in America. In our email exchange, Rufo described “the fight against critical race theory” as “the most successful counterattack against BLM as a political movement. We shifted the terrain and fought on a vector the Left could not successfully mobilize against.”

The anti-CRT campaign quickly expanded from sloganeering to writing laws. Seven states, including Florida, have passed legislation aimed at restricting public colleges’ teaching or training related to critical race theory. Those laws face impediments. On Nov. 17, 2022, a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the higher-education provisions of Florida’s Individual Freedom Act. “The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark,” Judge Mark Walker wrote. The DeSantis administration filed a notice of appeal on Nov. 29 and is seeking to stay the injunction pending that appeal. The 11th Circuit, where most of the judges are Republican appointees, will hear the appeal, with briefs to be filed in the next few months and oral arguments potentially this coming summer.

Additionally, with DeSantis’ landslide reelection — after a campaign in which he repeatedly denounced “woke” education — and Republicans gaining a supermajority in both chambers of the state’s Legislature, they are likely to look for new ways to crack down on CRT and what they perceive as higher education’s leftist tilt. And at the federal level, conservatives are drafting a “potential suite of executive orders in 2024,” in case the next presidential election goes their way, to “disrupt the national network of left-wing ideological production and distribution,” according to Rufo.

It’s easy to dismiss the conservative crusade against critical race theory as political theater without real consequences. But most colleges and universities offer social science and humanities courses that address racial inequality and systemic racism, and the anti-CRT laws are already having repercussions for people who teach or take these classes in red states. Moreover, the push against CRT is hitting academia after decades of declines in the proportion of professors protected by tenure, meaning that most faculty members are not in positions secure enough to resist political pressure. Now, forced to consider whether they face any legal or career risk, some are canceling courses or watering down content, keeping quiet rather than sharing their expertise with students.

“When you implement a law like this, you’re asking professors to leave out things that clearly happen or have happened in the past,” Grace Castelin, a UCF undergraduate who plans to introduce a resolution in the student senate condemning the law, told me. “It’s making us more ignorant in this generation and generations to come.”

Fearful that legislators will retaliate by cutting their budgets, few top university administrators have publicly criticized the laws, which put institutions as well as individual teachers at risk. Indeed, UCF Provost Michael Johnson told faculty last July that the university would “have to take disciplinary action” against any faculty member who repeatedly violated the Individual Freedom Act because it couldn’t afford to lose a “catastrophic amount” — $32 million — in state funding linked to graduation rates and other metrics. (Johnson declined an interview request.)

Other states have left professors similarly undefended. In Tennessee, which passed a law much like Florida’s, the provost of the state university’s flagship Knoxville campus made clear to professors that the administration wouldn’t necessarily help them. If they were sued under the law, Provost John Zomchick told faculty, Tennessee’s Republican attorney general would decide whether the university would represent them in court. “People freaked out,” said Anne Langendorfer, a senior lecturer at UT Knoxville and the president of a union for campus workers at the state’s public universities.

A university spokesperson, Kerry Gardner, said that the attorney general makes the final decision in “any situation” where individuals are sued in their capacity as university employees. Administrators “wanted to be fully transparent about how the process works,” while assuring faculty that “we will take every step to defend them,” Gardner said. Zomchick, she added, “does not agree with the view of some faculty” that the law “infringes on the First Amendment or academic freedoms.”

With uncertain support from above, most full and associate professors at least enjoy the protection of tenure, which shields scholars whose insights or research are politically unpopular. Tenured professors can’t be fired without cause and a hearing by their peers. Other faculty typically work on contracts, which the university can decide not to renew without specifying a reason.

Some tenured professors in Florida have resisted anti-CRT pressure. The historian Robert Cassanello, the president of the UCF chapter of United Faculty of Florida, was comfortable becoming a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits contending that the Individual Freedom Act violates free speech. Cassanello, who keeps a life-size cutout of Karl Marx in his office window, told me that he’s less threatened by the law than his untenured colleagues are.

Robert Cassanello, a tenured professor, teaches history at the University of Central Florida and became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a state law that restricts the teaching of critical race theory. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

By contrast, Juan Salinas, an assistant sociology professor at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, declined to be a plaintiff. “For me to stick my name out, I didn’t feel comfortable,” Salinas said. “If I had tenure, I would be more active.”

But even having tenure didn’t feel like “adequate protection” to Scott Carter, the other UCF sociologist who scrapped a course on race in the fall semester. “It’s very sad for students,” Carter told me. “They won’t get the experience of hearing from scholars on contemporary race relations.”

Perhaps the surest indication that tenure helps safeguard critical race theory and other controversial curricula is that conservatives are trying to jettison it. In 2021, Georgia’s public-university system made firing tenured faculty easier. After the University of Texas’ faculty council adopted a resolution last February supporting professors’ right to teach critical race theory, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for abolishing tenure for new hires at the state’s public universities. Last April, DeSantis signed a bill authorizing reviews of tenured professors every five years.

The tenure divide has a racial dimension. At many state universities, tenured faculty are overwhelmingly white. Untenured faculty are more likely to be people of color. In the fall of 2018, 7.4% of full professors and 10.9% of associate professors — the two ranks most likely to be tenured — were Black or Hispanic, compared with 11.8% of assistant professors and 17% of instructors, lecturers and others, according to the American Association of University Professors. Women are also disproportionately concentrated in untenured positions.

Besides having less job security than their tenured colleagues, many untenured faculty have less say in which courses they teach. One visiting assistant professor of sociology at an Oklahoma university, who requested anonymity to speak about her workplace, specializes in gender research; her dissertation was on urban women’s experiences with menstrual practices in Kathmandu, Nepal. She wasn’t familiar with critical race theory. But after Oklahoma in 2021 banned “any orientation or requirement” in higher education “that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or a bias on the basis of race and sex,” she found herself assigned to teach a course on racial and ethnic relations.

“I have consistently seen this course taught by nontenured professors,” she told me. “That’s been the trend,” perhaps because of “tenured professors not wanting to do the dirty work.”

Universities themselves helped create the vulnerability that conservatives are exploiting, saving money — and, in the case of public institutions, offsetting budget cuts — by shifting to a less tenured teaching force. Tenured professors have declined from 39% of faculty in 1987, the earliest year for which comparable figures were available, to 24% in 2020, according to an AAUP analysis of federal data. There has been a corresponding increase in the proportion of what are known as contingent faculty, who aren’t tenured or on a path to it — instructors, lecturers, teaching faculty who don’t do research and adjuncts — from 47% in 1987 to 67% in 2020. The remaining 9% are tenure-track faculty like Cox. Two of Florida’s youngest public universities — Florida Gulf Coast University and Florida Polytechnic University, which opened in 1997 and 2014, respectively — do not currently grant tenure at all.

This past fall, Florida Gulf Coast’s social and behavioral sciences department offered one race-focused course, “Race and Culture.” The former FGCU sociologist Ted Thornhill had stirred conservative protests by teaching courses on “Racism and Law Enforcement” and “White Racism,” and by founding a Center for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Since Thornhill left in June 2022 for a tenure-track post in the Pacific Northwest, no one has been teaching those courses. (Another instructor is scheduled to teach “Racism and Law Enforcement” this summer.) The university refashioned the center to focus on “the Study of Race, Gender, Ethnicity and Culture,” dropping the word “critical.”

“I knew it had a short life expectancy,” Thornhill told me.

FGCU President Michael Martin said that the center was renamed not to appease conservatives but to encompass groups such as Latinos, Native Americans and Jews. Still, Martin acknowledged that academia has become “overly politicized,” and that Florida “has been out in front of some of this.”

In the past, when academic freedom was threatened, tenure proved to be one of its most effective defenses. During the McCarthy era, when tenured professors were accused of having Communist sympathies, “their institutions had to go through the motions of a formal investigation,” the historian Ellen Schrecker wrote in “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & the Universities.” “Non-tenured teachers had no such rights.” The Cornell physicist Philip Morrison, an ex-Communist who remained politically active, “could not be quietly dropped from the faculty” in the early 1950s, at the height of the Red Scare, because he had tenure, and he was eventually promoted to full professor.

The sociologist Shantel Buggs is hoping to become a rarity: a tenured Black woman in Florida State’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. In 2021, the college had one tenured Black woman. Overall, it had two tenured Black faculty and 59 white faculty.

Shantel Buggs is hoping to receive tenure at Florida State’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

The daughter of two Marines, Buggs was the first college graduate in her family. She has won teaching awards, published book chapters and articles in refereed journals, developed new courses and helped establish an anti-racism task force on campus. When UCF offered her a tenured associate professorship in 2021, Florida State gave her a raise to stay.

“Your work is powerful, timely, and extremely socially relevant, and you have quickly gained national recognition in your areas of expertise,” Buggs’ department chair at Florida State, Kathryn Tillman, wrote in 2021. Tillman also called her a “fantastic teacher and mentor.”

As the Individual Freedom legislation was being enacted, Buggs detected a subtle recalibration of her prospects. In April 2022, Buggs told me, Tillman urged her to take advantage of a COVID-19 extension and delay her candidacy for tenure by a year. Buggs protested. “I thought it was unfair that I be asked to wait to go up for promotion in this political climate because what I teach and what I research will place a target on me,” she said. But she agreed, she said, after Tillman expressed concern that higher-ups might deem her publication record insufficient for tenure. (Tillman told me via email that she can’t comment on personnel issues.)

One course that Buggs had developed and taught was “Critical Race Theory.” She last offered it in the spring of 2021. The following September, she learned that it was the only Florida State course listed on the Critical Race Training in Education website, which has been featured on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and describes CRT as a “radical ideology” that challenges “the very foundations” of American democracy. Buggs discovered that the website was a project of something called the Legal Insurrection Foundation.

The term “insurrection” alarmed her. Anxious that she might be trolled or harassed, Buggs was receptive in May 2022 to another Tillman request — to change the name of the course. Tillman told me that she and Buggs had discussed whether another title would help avoid “potential misperceptions about the course’s intent. Together, we agreed to give it a try.” The course, which Buggs plans to teach in the upcoming semester, was relisted as “Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.”

The purpose of the Critical Race Training in Education website is to “document what students can expect at a particular campus,” according to William Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and the president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Jacobson told me that, because he had criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, Cornell alumni petitioned to have him fired, a faculty statement denounced him and a student group called for boycotting his courses. “Considering what I have gone through, I am very sympathetic to left-leaning faculty who come under attack, but it also is clear that the overwhelming campus cancel culture is from the left towards the right, not the other way around,” he said.

A Florida State spokesperson told me critical race theory scholars should have no concern that their specialty will hurt their tenure chances. But Katrinell Davis, the director of the university’s African American Studies program and the only tenured Black woman in the college of social sciences, says she is “saddened” by Buggs’ predicament. “Her trajectory as a scholar may be impacted” by the Individual Freedom Act “and because of the doubts that might arise around the value of CRT,” Davis told me.

For her part, Buggs said she is open to leaving Florida for another state where she can teach critical race theory without legal consequences, but she doesn’t want to. “I have enjoyed working here,” she told me. “I’m a stubborn person. I don’t want to give DeSantis the satisfaction.”

Buggs also worries that the political climate is rubbing off on students. In the past year or two, Buggs said, some students have begun to “ding” her in evaluations as judgmental or biased. Last spring, one called her a “misandrist” — a man-hater. “Part of what pissed me off is, he got an A,” she said. She has added a disclaimer provided by the faculty union to her syllabi: “No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, viewpoint, or belief.”

Florida State University’s campus in Tallahassee (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

Other untenured teachers at Florida State are tweaking their pedagogy. When the doctoral candidate Taylor Darks taught a section of Buggs’ “Race and Minority Group Relations” course this past fall, she invited students to suggest questions for discussion — but told me that she generally weeded out queries that mentioned “white privilege.” And Tyler McCreary, an assistant geography professor, made what he calls a “strategic adjustment” in his fall 2022 honors course on environmental justice. For a class project on a pipeline in northern Canada that affects Indigenous people, McCreary told me he’s been “much more cautious of not just critiquing the development but making sure to include the company’s perspective.”

McCreary, who is up for tenure this year, has also shifted his teaching method from lecturing to class discussion. He wants to avoid complaints under another new Florida law that allows students to record professors’ lectures for evidence of political bias. The law doesn’t apply to class discussion, because students must consent to be recorded.

Parked one October afternoon on the Florida State campus was a minibus covered in graffiti of various political persuasions. One commentator had scrawled “Socialism Sucks,” only to have another cross out “Sucks” and replace it with “Is Sexy.” Outside, a field rep for Turning Point USA, a conservative campus network, invited passersby to a speech by the group’s founder, the talk show host Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, which has spent millions of dollars through its advocacy and political arms backing Donald Trump and candidates he endorsed, has what it calls a “watchlist” dedicated to “unmasking radical professors.”

Turning Point USA, a conservative campus network, had a minibus on campus that invited passersby to write whatever they wanted on it. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic) Florida State University students protest outside a Tallahassee speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

The minibus was intended to signify Kirk’s opposition to censorship. But when I asked him at his talk that night in Tallahassee’s civic center whether he supports laws restricting the teaching of critical race theory, he said he does, and that it’s not a free-speech issue. “It’s a matter of curriculum, right?” he said. “Should we teach the flat-Earth theory in physics, right? Should we teach bloodletting in biology? … There are some ideas that are so reprehensible and provably wrong, they shouldn’t be anywhere close to an academic environment.” (Kirk bridles at the very notion of systemic racism: In his talk, he referred to the aftermath of George Floyd’s death as “Floydapalooza, when we decided to destroy our entire country around a lie that America is systemically racist, which of course we’re not; we’re the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.”)

Kirk’s denial of systemic racism is at odds with the experience of students half a mile away, across the railroad tracks, at the public, historically Black Florida A&M University. Founded in 1887, and located since 1891 on a former plantation, FAMU has long been slighted by the state. When Nathan B. Young, the school’s president from 1901 to 1923, supplemented its agricultural and vocational programs with liberal arts, state officials feared that too much learning might make Black students dissatisfied with manual labor, and dismissed him. After World War II, hoping to avoid desegregating white law schools, Florida opened a law school at FAMU. In 1966, the state prohibited FAMU from enrolling a new law school class and transferred funding to Florida State, which wanted its own law school. FAMU’s law school reopened in 2002 in Orlando, where it wouldn’t compete with Florida State’s.

This past September, a group of FAMU students sued the state of Florida, accusing it of discriminating by underfunding FAMU compared with traditionally white schools. Among the disparities cited: In 2015, the state moved the almost $13 million budget for a joint FAMU-Florida State engineering college from FAMU’s general operating revenues to a separate line under Florida State’s authority. (A Florida State spokesperson said that presidents of both universities had agreed to the shift.) Also, the lawsuit says, linking funding to measures such as four-year graduation rates hurts FAMU and other universities that primarily serve low-income students.

In November, the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that the benchmarks used to determine funding are “wholly neutral,” and that the goal is to “reward institutions who have better student outcomes,” not to “diminish the performance of historically black institutions.”

In contrast to Florida State’s lush, impeccably maintained campus, FAMU’s shows signs of neglect, including cracked walkways and rusted pipes. Interviewed on campus, plaintiffs in the lawsuit described more indignities: beds with broken frames, a dormitory infested with rats and cockroaches, computers so old that current professors had used them when they were undergraduates.

One of those plaintiffs, FayeRachel Peterson, a first-year graduate student in chemistry, told me that some of the labs she worked in as a FAMU undergraduate lacked vital equipment. She and her classmates frequently had to finish their lab work at Florida State. “FAMU tries its best to give us what it can with what’s given to them,” she said. “What’s given to them is less than what’s given to others.”

Another student, Nyabi Stevens, a third-year psychology major, told me that the state’s treatment of FAMU illustrates the importance of discussions that the Individual Freedom Act is trying to silence. “That’s what the lawsuit is about — pointing out the systemic racism we see,” she said. “I came to an HBCU so I can learn about my history. I am very proud to be in the lawsuit and be a voice for people who don’t have a voice.”

First image: FayeRachel Peterson. Second image: Nyabi Stevens. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

UCF students who wanted to learn about critical race theory this past fall had few options. Not only had the three sociology courses been canceled, but an anthropology course on racism was nixed because not enough students signed up for it.

One course that did survive has “flown under the radar,” Christian Ravela, an associate humanities professor, told me. His 18 students learned “how colorblindness has become the dominant racial ideology” and examined the anti-CRT movement, including the Individual Freedom Act, he said. Ravela received tenure in 2022. If he hadn’t, “I would have been most likely to just request to cancel the course.”

The preliminary injunction against the Individual Freedom Act pleased untenured faculty who teach critical race theory, but it hardly allayed their concerns. “There is still an ongoing battle,” Jonathan Cox, the UCF professor, told me. “It seems just as likely that if a more conservative appeals judge reviews this, they will simply reinstate the law. Regardless, DeSantis and his conservative majority in the Florida Legislature will probably continue working to keep this law and others in place.”

After canceling his two fall courses on race, Cox has committed to teaching “Race and Ethnicity” in the semester that’s about to begin. His wife has returned to work, so the family could get by on her income if he were to lose his job. Beyond that, he said: “I just decided, ‘I’m not going to run from it.’ This is what I teach. This is what I study. There’s tremendous value in students learning about these things.”

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

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Eli Hager

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.

Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs is taking the state’s child protective services agency in a radically different direction in the wake of a ProPublica-NBC News investigation into the racial disparities that have plagued the child welfare system here.

This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work.

Stewart, who is the son of the longtime senior pastor of Phoenix’s most prominent Black church, will be the first Black leader of the department, replacing its current director, Mike Faust. Faust had been appointed by outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican.

Arizona’s child welfare system has long disproportionately investigated Black families. According to the ProPublica-NBC News investigation, which highlighted Stewart’s role, 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix faced a DCS investigation in just a recent five-year period. Faust said the department had made progress over that time, but the news organizations found that while the overall number of investigations has gone down, the racial disparity between white and Black families has only increased.

After leaving DCS, Stewart formed the community organization Our Sister Our Brother, which has fought the department for more equitable treatment of Black and also low-income parents.

Matthew Stewart (Screenshot from an NBC News interview)

This fall, he told ProPublica and NBC News that generational poverty and the resulting trauma within families, which in some cases can lead to parenting problems and in turn DCS investigations, have been “centuries in the making.” Are parents supposed to believe, he asked, that after the department takes custody of their children, “these things will be solved?”

“I simply don’t think DCS is the agency to do this,” he said.

Stewart will now run that very agency.

Stewart was not immediately available for an interview. But he said in a statement that he will strengthen the state’s partnerships with community organizations and hopes that under his team’s leadership, the department will “become a place for encouraging and facilitating community healing” in part by providing more resources to families in need.

In a separate statement, the governor-elect said that Stewart knows how to keep children safe based on his experience working at DCS, but also how to get families help and keep them united. “He is a leader who will ensure that we can continue to transform our public systems so they are responsive to the communities that we serve,” Hobbs said.

Child welfare experts in the state and families affected by the system praised Stewart’s selection, though some wondered how much change he could bring about even in DCS’ top position.

“Matthew Stewart has been singularly focused on keeping families safely together,” said Claire Louge, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Arizona, an organization that provides services and training to prevent child maltreatment. But, she pointed out, like all DCS directors he “will face the challenge of leading an agency that is perpetually criticized — either for removing children from their families too much or too little.”

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group, noted that “Arizona’s incredibly tough to fix.” He pointed to a previous Democratic governor of the state, Janet Napolitano, whose reform-minded pick to lead DCS’ forerunner agency couldn’t fix the system’s racial disproportionality two decades ago. “We’ll see how much times have changed,” Wexler said.

Tyra Smith, a Phoenix-area parent who has personal experience with the child welfare system and has worked directly with Stewart as a parent advocate, said she is hopeful about Stewart’s leadership but worries that when given a new role, people can change.

“I just don’t want to be forgotten about,” she said.

Stewart’s first order of business likely will be selecting new senior staff; he has been critical of several of DCS’ current top officials.

He also has expressed excitement about installing a new Cultural Brokers program that will ensure that a trusted community member of the same race is present when DCS caseworkers show up at a family’s door.

But Stewart will be partially hamstrung by the fact that the Legislature, still in Republican hands, is unlikely to adjust its anti-poverty agenda to get more economic assistance and support services to struggling families in order to prevent child maltreatment cases before they happen. Currently, Arizona spends a majority of its welfare budget not on direct assistance to low-income parents but on DCS investigations of them, as ProPublica reported in 2021.

Stewart also will have to focus on more than the racial disparity issue: DCS has been plagued by other scandals in recent years, as well as child fatalities. In one example, the outgoing director, Faust, was grilled by legislators about reports of violence and drug use in the state’s foster system, leading to one teenager at a group home being shot and killed.

But for the dozens of Black families across metro Phoenix who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News this year, there is finally a sense that someone who looks like them, who has actually interacted with them and who will listen to them is now in a position of power in a state where only two of 90 state legislators are Black. Many said in interviews that they know Stewart understands the constant, communitywide dread they feel, given that in Maricopa County, 63% of Black children will go through a DCS investigation by the time they turn 18.

After Hobbs defeated Kari Lake in the governor’s race, Stewart told ProPublica and NBC News that “I believe this will work to our benefit.” He noted that Hobbs’ background as a social worker might provide her with “a values frame and openness to change that will help guide her administration and choice of advisers.”

Stewart said he “can’t predict the future,” but “I am optimistic, and I believe it is never too soon for hope.”

by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica, and Will Fitzgibbon, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

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

In 1942, as Nazi Germany began to send hundreds of thousands of Jews to killing centers, Brazilian police swooped into a port city in the South American country and arrested a wealthy landowner.

To locals, he was Otto Uebele, a Brazilian manager of a prominent coffee trading company. He also served as honorary consul for Germany — and was an accused Nazi spy.

“One of the leaders of German espionage in South America,” Allied intelligence agents wrote in a secret document, later released by the CIA.

A local newspaper at the time called Uebele a man of “respectable appearance, who enjoyed the greatest prestige and influence in social and commercial circles.”

“Nobody,” the paper wrote, “could imagine him a spy. The fact went off like a bomb, such was the surprise.”

Historians have long chronicled the clandestine use of ambassadors and other professional diplomats by Nazi intelligence services. Far less attention has focused on the activities of honorary consuls, who for centuries have worked from their home countries to represent the interests of foreign governments.

ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists used declassified intelligence documents, media accounts and other reports to identify about 20 honorary consuls who were suspected of supporting the Third Reich through espionage and other illicit activities.

The consuls included a social hall vice president, a fertilizer merchant and a chemist. They largely lived and worked in neutral countries in Latin America, Europe and Africa, where Nazi Germany sought to cultivate allies or gain an advantage at critical ports and other strategic locations. A majority of the honorary consuls were appointed directly by Germany; some were named by other countries.

The use of honorary consuls by the Third Reich to cultivate power and influence is not a historical anomaly.

An ongoing investigation by ProPublica and ICIJ has exposed widespread exploitation of the largely unchecked honorary consul system, now embraced by most of the world’s governments. In exchange for their service, honorary consuls receive some of the same privileges and protections provided to career diplomats: They can move bags across borders without inspection and their offices and correspondence are protected from searches.

Terrorist groups and leaders of corrupt regimes have leveraged the volunteer diplomats as agents of disruption, part of a strategy to advance political and ideological agendas, the ProPublica and ICIJ investigation found.

Honorary consuls tied to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah have stood accused of moving drugs and money. The intelligence service in North Macedonia alleged that two honorary consuls appointed by the Kremlin allowed their offices to be used as Russian “intelligence bases.” Other honorary consuls have supported President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasions of Ukraine.

The names of honorary consuls suspected of supporting the Nazi regime appear in a series of declassified reports that describe a broader intelligence-gathering effort run out of German embassies.

Nazi spies were “usually built into the diplomatic staff accredited to a neutral government, their leaders being camouflaged as honorary consuls or other functionaries,” according to a 1946 U.S. Army report on German intelligence during the war.

(Declassified U.S. Army report)

In Brazil, Uebele was captured and imprisoned. The U.S. ambassador at the time told officials in Washington that Uebele had provided fuel for Nazi boats and helped supply submarines, archival records show.

“I am a consul and our espionage will have to be entrusted to the shadow of the consulate,” Uebele said, according to a transcript of an interview with another accused spy published in Brazilian media in 1949 under the headline “Diplomacy and Espionage in Hitler's Germany.”

Uebele was ultimately acquitted in Brazil after a lengthy legal case, but the government refused to return his seized property, according to one media report. He died in 1956.

“That is the way the Germans did things,” said Priscila F. Perazzo, a history professor at Universidade Municipal de São Caetano do Sul Municipal in Brazil and author of a book on wartime espionage that described Uebele. “The center of espionage in Brazil ran through rich and powerful men in the private sector with connections to the embassy.”

In Spain, Germany appointed as honorary consul onetime brewery manager Wilhelm Leissner, who also used the name Gustav Lenz. He reportedly oversaw a large spy network in Europe, intercepting communications and forwarding information to Berlin in a diplomatic pouch, declassified records show.

“He is officially described as ‘Honorary Attache’ to the Germany embassy, but is in reality the controller of a large network of officers, agents and sub-agents,” according to a 1942 declassified document titled “Enemy intelligence activity in Spain.”

(Declassified U.S. Army report)

In 1944, Leissner approved a payment to an American who had agreed to provide the Germans information about the Allied invasion of southern France, according to interrogation records in a U.S. military intelligence report.

The Germans “would have guys like that who would take care of certain regions. They’re the ones contacting other Germans and bringing other people into their espionage networks,” said historian David A. Messenger, who authored a book about Nazi spies in Spain. “A low-level diplomat has contacts in the Spanish governments, knows people in economics, people in industry.”

Records show Leissner was sent back to Germany in U.S. custody in 1946, but it is unclear what happened after that.

Elsewhere, at least two honorary consuls who worked for a well-known shipping company were suspected of providing intelligence from the coast of West Africa. In Argentina, a furrier who had served as honorary consul became one of the most notable spies in South America.

German espionage networks in Central and South America were a significant concern for the FBI, which by 1946 identified nearly 900 Nazi spies, according to the agency.

Honorary consuls supported Nazi Germany in other ways, archival records show. One in Sweden gave money to a Nazi party member and to the German “winter help” fund. Another in Spain was suspected in late 1945 of arranging to move jewels and a valuable collection of postage stamps out of Germany.

In 2005, Germany’s then-foreign minister called for an investigation of the Foreign Ministry, commissioning four historians. They found that the office, which had previously distanced itself from Nazi genocide, had been actively involved in the mass murder of Jews.

This year, Germany’s foreign minister publicly recognized the role that diplomats played during the Holocaust. The statements by Annalena Baerbock were made on the 80th anniversary of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, when high-ranking Nazi Party and German officials gathered in a Berlin suburb to plot what they called the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

“We remember the murdered Jewish women, men and children, and those who survived the Holocaust,” Baerbock said.

Foreign Ministry officials “who put themselves at the service of the crimes and genocide of the Nazi regime also bear responsibility for their suffering,” she said.

by Anjeanette Damon

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.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to churn, Medicare spending on testing for the virus continued to increase in 2022 and is outpacing the two prior years.

Through Oct. 31, Medicare had spent $2 billion on COVID-19 tests in 2022, an amount that will surpass last year’s total as claims are filed, according to new data provided to ProPublica by CareSet, a research organization that works to make the health care system more transparent.

That compares to $2 billion for all of 2021 and $1.5 billion in 2020, a recent analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General shows.

Fraud and overspending are contributing to the increases, experts say, because federal money for COVID-19 testing is not subject to some of the same financial and regulatory constraints as other tests covered by Medicare, the government insurance program for people 65 and older and the disabled.

The growing costs concern some of these experts, who say the need for financial incentives to expand the availability of testing has passed.

Early in the pandemic, testing was both critical to slowing the spread of the virus and in short supply. So the federal government enacted measures to make it more profitable to get in the COVID-19 testing business. Good for the duration of the public health emergency, which has not yet expired, the measures include a generous Medicare reimbursement rate, requirements for private insurance to cover testing — even compelling insurance plans to pay whatever cash price is demanded by out-of-network labs — and a hefty fund for testing those people who didn’t have insurance.

The measures succeeded in drawing new and existing labs into the COVID-19 business and helped ensure most people had access to testing, even if some faced excessive waits to get their results. But the incentives also attracted price-gougers, fraudsters and people with no experience in the laboratory business. The result was a chaotic approach that ranged from bungled testing programs and confusion over new requirements to outright fraud.

“It was an unprecedented wave of fraud,” said Michael Cohen, an operations officer with the HHS Inspector General, which investigates crimes involving federal health care programs.

This year, ProPublica detailed how one Chicago-based lab, Northshore Clinical, used political connections in Nevada to speed its licensing and generated tremendous volume through agreements with school districts, universities and local governments. The story also detailed questionable billing practices that one insurance expert described as fraudulent. A study of Northshore’s testing on the University of Nevada Reno campus found the company missed 96% of COVID-19 cases during December 2021.

The company submitted 600 pages of documentation to state regulators to support its claim that it fixed deficiencies noted by inspectors, but it ultimately asked the state to close its license and pulled out of Nevada before the investigation was finished. Northshore repeatedly declined to comment to ProPublica.

The OIG, which had been investigating Northshore in Illinois, expanded its probe to Nevada after ProPublica published its report.

Cohen said OIG investigators have faced challenges responding to the onslaught of suspected fraud — from a lack of additional resources to constantly evolving policies.

In April, the Department of Justice announced criminal charges against people in eight states who allegedly submitted more than $149 million in COVID-19 false billings to federal programs. The OIG has also performed analyses on Medicare data, including for a report released this month that found 378 labs had billed Medicare for expensive add-on tests at “questionably high levels” after testing individuals for COVID-19.

Attorneys general in a handful of states have taken action against labs for forging results, charging fees for “expedited results” that arrived days later and deceptive marketing practices.

Programs to pay for COVID-19 testing aren’t the only pandemic assistance funds that have attracted people seeking to profit. Paycheck Protection Program loans went to fake businesses or were spent on luxury goods instead of keeping people employed, ProPublica and other news outlets have reported. Expanded state unemployment programs also saw unprecedented fraud that a partial accounting estimates is $57.3 billion.

Tolerating some fraud is a necessary trade-off to attain legitimate public policy goals, said Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy. But once the incentives and loose regulations boosted the availability of testing, they could have been revised to prevent abuse and overspending, he argued.

“We were in a very different world in April 2020,” Adler said. “We needed to overpay because we needed more capacity. Once we scaled up, it was no longer necessary. We could’ve saved a lot of taxpayer money.”

According to the data provided by CareSet, more than 2,300 new labs have enrolled as Medicare providers since the pandemic began and have been billing for COVID-19 testing, evidence of the increased capacity generated by the federal measures.

Total Medicare spending on COVID-19 testing is a small fraction of the $4 trillion federal response to the pandemic. That figure includes not only testing and treatment but also direct support for individuals, businesses, schools and local governments. Adler said that may be why lawmakers haven’t revisited the incentives.

Still, testing — as funded by Medicare, private insurance and other federal assistance programs — was a lucrative corner of the pandemic response for many providers.

Labs with troubled operations reaped millions from Medicare, the CareSet data shows.

Northshore Clinical, for example, submitted $6.2 million in Medicare claims for COVID-19 testing between Jan. 1, 2021, and Nov. 30, 2022. Doctors Clinical Laboratory, which is facing lawsuits filed by attorneys general in three states, billed $252,000 in 2021. Doctors Clinical did not respond to requests for comment.

Curative Labs, one of the largest COVID-19 testing providers in the country, has billed Medicare $32 million for testing since Jan. 1, 2021. Curative, launched in California by a 25-year-old college dropout, tapped political connections to land a no-bid contract to test in Colorado’s nursing homes, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette. But the state’s decision to use Curative tests on individuals without symptoms — a use the tests had not been authorized for — led to unreliable results, as Colorado’s nursing home death rate was the highest in the nation, according to CPR News. The FDA later revoked authorization for Curative tests and the state canceled its contract with the company.

“During the pandemic, Curative provided millions of Americans with a safe, accessible and reliable way to test for the virus, including when it was extremely difficult to obtain a COVID-19 test,” a Curative spokesperson said. “Our teams deployed tests in an efficient manner, helping to prevent the spread of outbreaks in communities across the state of Colorado and throughout the country.”

The spokesperson also pointed to a Colorado legislative committee’s decision not to audit the procurement process as an exoneration of Curative’s operations in the state. The request for the audit failed in a tied vote along party lines after a state official testified she made the decision to use Curative based on the best science available at the time.

Nomi Health, a lab startup in Utah, launched troubled testing programs in five states, according to a USA Today investigation. The Salt Lake Tribune detailed significant problems with Nomi’s operations in Utah. The company has billed Medicare a total of $1.9 million in 2021 and 2022. Nomi has challenged USA Today’s findings.

“Nomi Health was one of the first partners to provide open accessible testing at scale on behalf of our partners,” Nomi’s co-founder and chief operations officer Joshua Walker said in a statement. “We remain one of the few providers in the markets we serve providing important access to this needed service.”

Walker said Nomi continues to provide free tests for uninsured individuals despite the end of the federal program that paid for those tests. “We still feel strongly that open and easy access is an important part of keeping our communities safe and helping to drive our economy forward.”

The OIG’s Cohen said the most common crime investigated by his agency was identity theft. Nefarious labs would snag Medicare beneficiaries’ information and use it to bill for services not provided or expensive and unnecessary add-on tests.

“They would take it all. ‘We need your Medicare number. We need your Social Security number. Oh, we need credit card information.’ People were giving up just tons of information because people were understandably clamoring for tests,” Cohen said.

Medicare wasn’t the only government program targeted for laboratory fraud.

Health care providers found quick access to money in the federal fund for testing people without insurance. The program, run by another federal agency, the Health Resources and Services Administration, was designed to get money out fast and with few restrictions. “Bad actors bled the program for as much as they could,” Cohen said.

The program was initially funded by Congress with $2 billion. It ended up paying out $11 billion in testing claims. Congress opted not to allocate any more money into it and HRSA stopped accepting claims in March 2022 — leaving many uninsured individuals on the hook for COVID-19 care.

An HHS official said safeguards against fraud were put in place and any providers caught abusing the program could be subject to enforcement measures.

“The COVID-19 Uninsured Program was designed to ensure that every person in the United States had access to COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccines — regardless of insurance status — and has been successful in getting care to the most vulnerable among us,” the official said.

As the pandemic has evolved, how people test for the virus has changed too. Now, instead of getting lab tests, many patients opt to use at-home rapid tests. And that has opened up another opportunity for fraud, experts say.

While the public health emergency is underway, Medicare is covering up to eight over-the-counter COVID-19 tests per member each month. Some providers are trying to design “subscription” services in which they mail eight tests every month whether the beneficiary needs them or not, Cohen said.

Indeed, the CareSet data shows a dramatic shift in spending for over-the-counter tests and away from PCR laboratory tests beginning in April.

And as investigators try to stay atop new scams, they’re busy investigating the old ones.

“We are still finding entities that defrauded us of just enormous amounts of money,” Cohen said.

How to Avoid Testing Scams

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services offers the following tips to protect yourself from COVID-19 testing scams:

• Be cautious of any COVID-19 testing site that requires your financial or medical information in order to receive a free test.
• Be mindful of advertisements for COVID-19 testing, treatments or other health care services on social media platforms. If you make an appointment for a COVID-19 test online, make sure the location is an approved testing site. Check official government websites for a list of approved COVID-19 testing sites.
• Be careful! Scammers are selling fake and unauthorized at-home COVID-19 test kits in exchange for your personal or medical information. Make sure to purchase FDA-approved COVID-19 test kits from legitimate providers.
• As volunteers go door to door to inform communities across the country about COVID-19 vaccines or other health care services, be sure to protect yourself from criminals who are seeking to commit fraud. Do not provide personal, medical or financial details to anyone in exchange for COVID-19 services. Obtain vaccinations from trusted providers.
• Be cautious of COVID-19 survey scams. Do not give your personal, medical or financial information to anyone claiming to offer money or gifts in exchange for your participation in a COVID-19 vaccine survey.
• Medicare or Medicaid beneficiaries should be cautious of unsolicited requests for their personal, medical and financial information. Federal health care programs will not call beneficiaries to offer COVID-19-related products, services or benefits reviews.
• Be suspicious of any unexpected calls or visitors offering COVID-19 tests or supplies. If you receive a suspicious call, hang up immediately.
• Do not respond to, or open links in, text messages about COVID-19 from unknown individuals.
• Do not give your personal or financial information to anyone claiming to offer HHS grants related to COVID-19.
• Be aware of scammers pretending to be COVID-19 contact tracers. Legitimate contact tracers will never ask for your medical or financial information or attempt to set up a COVID-19 test.

If you think you may have been a victim of a scam:

• If you’re a Medicare beneficiary, contact the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (800-MEDICARE) to report that your card or Medicare number may have been compromised (your state’s Senior Medicare Patrol can help with this process). If you’re a Medicaid enrollee, contact your state-administered Medicaid office. If you are enrolled in a private commercial insurance plan, contact its customer service department.
• Medicare or Medicaid enrollees can also report the fraud by contacting the HHS OIG hotline at 800-HHS-TIPS or online.
• If you believe your Social Security number may have been compromised, you can report the scam with the Social Security Administration.
• Contact your local authorities if you believe you’ve been scammed by a COVID-19 testing pop-up site.
• Other avenues to pursue include notifying the Federal Trade Commission about the scam.

by Eli Hager

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.

Every year, child protective services agencies across the nation investigate the family lives of roughly 3.5 million children, or about 1 out of every 20 American kids.

In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely.

Child welfare cases, that is, operate a lot like criminal ones.

Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents.

“You get more due process protections when facing a couple months in jail than you do when you’re facing losing your kids forever,” said Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Family Defense Clinic at Columbia Law School and an expert on civil liberties as they apply to child protective cases.

The right to remain silent, the right to a public jury trial, the right to face your accuser and so on are not recognized and enforced by the courts in the child welfare system, according to our interviews and a review of case law. Neither is the related ideal of “innocent until proven guilty” or the standard that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

A look at several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights reveals this disparity.

The Fourth Amendment, for example, says that citizens must be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and that a warrant to conduct a search should be based on “probable cause” that specific evidence will be found. Yet as ProPublica and NBC News reported this fall, child protective services agencies conduct millions of warrantless home searches every year, rifling through refrigerators and closets and inspecting children’s bodies without going to court first to say what they are looking for. (In New York City, child welfare workers obtain a warrant fewer than 94 times a year, on average, while conducting at least 56,000 searches annually.)

The Fifth Amendment, meanwhile, allows criminal defendants to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination, commonly called pleading the Fifth. But in a child welfare case, which is a civil proceeding, courts are legally permitted to assume the worst of a parent who has decided not to talk.

Then there’s the Sixth Amendment, which says that defendants have the right to a public trial by jury as well as the right to an attorney, among other protections. But if an accused parent in this system even gets a trial, it likely will not be public: Child welfare cases are heard in closed courtrooms in at least 30 states, according to a ProPublica survey of statutes.

Fewer than a dozen states offer the option of a jury trial in these cases.

As for a lawyer, while some states provide one for some types of child welfare hearings, the Supreme Court has found that even people facing permanent termination of their parental rights have no constitutional right to legal counsel — because they are ostensibly not at risk of losing their own physical liberty by going to jail.

Yet evidence gathered by CPS workers without a warrant can be passed to police and prosecutors for use in criminal prosecutions of parents, who may be locked up as a result, according to attorneys, caseworkers and police as well as cases we found in which this has happened.

Parents interviewed by ProPublica also felt that having a son or daughter taken from them forever is a far more severe punishment than spending time in prison, and therefore viewed these cases as equally deserving of due process.

Finally, double jeopardy, or prosecuting a person twice for the same offense, is also allowed in child welfare cases, even though it is otherwise prohibited by the Constitution. Some parents even have their rights to a newborn baby terminated because their rights to a previous child had been terminated, even if there hasn’t been any new allegation.

To be sure, constitutional rights are far from perfectly protected in the criminal justice system. Talk to public defenders and they will tell you that police routinely get away with unconstitutional home searches by using coercive tactics to avoid having to get a warrant, or by saying that something they found in a drawer was actually in “plain sight” and therefore could be collected without a warrant. The right to a trial in criminal court, too, is undermined by prosecutors dangling extreme prison sentences over defendants to get them to plead guilty before there’s a full hearing of the evidence; this plea bargaining process accounts for about 95% of felony convictions.

The right to an attorney in the criminal system is also hardly absolute, with underfunded public defender offices struggling to keep up with caseloads and lawyers facing rampant conflicts of interest.

Still, the rights themselves have been firmly upheld by the Supreme Court and other federal courts — and are therefore part of how police are trained — which is not true in child welfare.

Why Fewer Rights?

One clear reason for this mismatch in rights is that there was no formal child welfare system when the Constitution was written, so some amendments in the Bill of Rights were worded to apply only to criminal matters.

More broadly, child welfare proceedings occupy a nebulous space between criminal and civil justice.

In the very few instances when the Supreme Court or federal circuit courts have addressed whether such rights should apply in child protection investigations, the rulings have largely said that if law enforcement is involved (like a police officer with a badge and gun being in the room while a CPS worker is interviewing a child), the rights exist. Otherwise, maybe not.

This reflects, in part, the history of child welfare courts, which were set up to be “problem-solving” rather than adversarial — to serve kids rather than to litigate guilt. This was a progressive vision of a system where social services workers, families and judges would work together to improve the child’s situation, rather than a prosecutor-versus-defendant setup.

So when the 1960s brought a due process revolution in criminal justice — the Supreme Court institutionalizing the right to an attorney in Gideon v. Wainwright and the practice of being read your rights in Miranda v. Arizona — child welfare practitioners were not thinking in the same terms.

“We are a pathetic field, still in our infancy,” said Marty Guggenheim, a longtime New York University family law professor who in 1990 founded what was for years the only parental defense clinic in the nation. (There are now about a dozen, according to a ProPublica review of law school offerings and interviews with heads of clinics.)

The problem is perpetuated by law schools, where criminal and corporate defense are deemed essential but family defense is not, ProPublica’s reporting has found. In a review of the curricula of every Ivy League law program and a dozen major state schools around the U.S., almost none appear to provide a class that’s strictly about defending parents accused of child maltreatment. Many offer family law coursework, but it is focused on typically middle-class issues like divorce, custody and wills and trusts.

Zoe Russell, a Harvard Law School graduate who is going into the family defense field, said that the classes she was offered centered on families with money, and that to develop her understanding of her area of interest, she had to read the footnotes of academic papers and attend conferences of her own volition.

And then there’s the stigma, the idea that this kind of law — with children in potential danger — is morally dubious. (Russell notes that many lawyers who are skittish about her field will still defend clients accused of murder, or of serious white-collar crimes, types of work that she says she doesn’t judge but shouldn’t be seen as more valuable or important than her own.)

“I describe my upcoming job differently depending on who I’m talking to and their reaction,” she said. “This is an area that is trivialized, demeaned.”

What Is the Purpose of Rights?

When ProPublica and NBC News in October found that child welfare agents in New York were routinely conducting warrantless home searches, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services disagreed with some of the rhetorical framing of that reporting.

Perhaps most importantly, agency officials said that when caseworkers enter a home, it is not to conduct a “search” but rather an “evaluation” of the residence. Based on what the workers see, they can then connect families with services to provide food if the fridge is empty or window guards to keep kids safe.

But child welfare experts including Tarek Ismail, a law professor and civil rights attorney at the City University of New York School of Law, noted that what the Administration for Children’s Services does is “suspicion-based” and thus deserving of due process.

In other words, Ismail said, these are not building inspectors going to every apartment in a building and “evaluating” whether each one has a proper window guard so they can generally protect kids. Instead, these are investigators who have received a specific allegation of wrongdoing and are being sent to a specific apartment to look for evidence of it.

And these agents, along with the prosecutors who follow up on what they find, have the power to punish.

Some of this boils down to a question of language, said Guggenheim, who began his career five decades ago in a parallel field: juvenile justice.

Juvenile detention officials, Guggenheim said, often used terminology suggesting that in their line of work there were “no convictions, no prisons, no punishment at all.” Instead, he said, “there were juvenile delinquents, adjudications, placements, training schools.”

And as he worked on legal challenges to the solitary confinement of children in youth prisons, officials called such isolation cells “time-out rooms.”

But the Supreme Court, in a landmark case called In re Gault, ruled in 1967 that “it doesn’t matter what the system calls these things, what matters is the reality of what they are doing,” Guggenheim said.

This push to describe the harms of juvenile incarceration in clearer language, and to enumerate the rights that should therefore be provided to the kids facing it, helped bring about real reforms in that system.

Meanwhile, the child welfare field still leans on benevolent language and concepts such as “child welfare” instead of “family policing” (a phrase that activists have begun using recently); “caseworkers” instead of investigators or agents; and “court-appointed special advocates” filling the shoes of lawyers.

In turn, the rights that most U.S. citizens consider fundamental are hardly rights at all when it is a child protective services “caseworker” knocking on the door.

Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and Katie Campbell, ProPublica

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

April 2022, early spring Chinook season Last year’s tribal catch: 1,605,000 lbs (worst spring season in 22 years)

The salmon were late and the nets were empty.

Two weeks had passed since the Yakama Nation opened its ceremonial and subsistence spring fishing season on the Columbia River. Randy Settler and Sam George had spent $400 on gas for their boats, and had just two fish so far to give to their tribe for ceremonies.

This year’s salmon fishing was forecast to be better than last year’s. But it was the slowest start to a season that Settler could remember. It was also his first season without his mother, Mary Goudy-Settler, who died in October 2021.

Settler was sitting in the riverside house that used to be hers, reflecting on all that had been taken from his family, all his parents had done to claw back what they could. They had fought for their right to fish, a right the U.S. government promised to honor more than 150 years ago and then violated generation after generation through laws, policies and flat-out discrimination. He inherited that fight. Now, with climate change threatening the remaining salmon runs, he thinks about the legacy they left for him, the one he’ll pass down to his nephew, George, and to George’s 10-year-old daughter.

“Áwna sɨ́nwit UllaQut’.” His eyes welled up when he introduced himself by the Yakama name his mother gave him.

“But I’ve never claimed that name,” Settler, 67, later said.

The name, UllaQut’, translates to “frog.” It means more than that.

Mary Goudy-Settler and tribal elders bestowed it in a traditional ceremony when her son was 42, the same year he was elected to the governing council of their tribe.

It is a variant on the name of a famous war chief, one that Settler is tied to through his family’s lineage. To carry that name, he said, “you have to be a big deal in Indian Country.”

He has spent a lot of his life trying to live up to it.

How The Land Was Lost (1850s) Washington Territory governor Isaac Stevens and Columbia River tribes at the Walla Walla Council of 1855, where several treaties were signed (Washington State Historical Society)

A hundred years before Randy Settler was born, Native American tribes signed a series of treaties that ceded millions of acres to the United States. This was not done by choice. In 1855, the first governor of the Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, pressured tribal leaders to attend a treaty council and, according to witness accounts from the time, told his translator to “tell the chiefs if they don’t sign this treaty they will walk in blood knee-deep.”

The tribes did, however, hold on to the rights to fish, hunt and gather foods in their “usual and accustomed places.” But in the century that followed, state and federal governments ignored those agreements. The tribes — recognized today as the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation — would have to fight for their rights.

June 1855, spring Chinook season Estimated yearly catch: Over 10,000,000 lbs

Settler’s great-great-great-grandfather was one of the signers of the treaties.

Tuekakas, also known as Old Chief Joseph, chief of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce, had been an early adopter of Christianity among Native people and an advocate of peace with white settlers. He brought his sons with him to the treaty council: Young Joseph and Ollokot, the original Frog.

Ollokot, Settler's ancestor and namesake, in 1877 (U.S. Library of Congress)

But the chief’s faith in that peace was shaken when, a few years after the 1855 treaty, the U.S. government seized nearly all of the tribe’s remaining land. It claimed this was permitted under a new treaty that had been signed by other members of the Nez Perce.

Tuekakas refused to acknowledge the new treaty. He tore up the Bible he’d been given by missionaries, disavowed the government and gave his sons a warning: “When you go into council with a white man, always remember your country,” he told them. “Do not give it away. The white man will cheat you out of your home.”

After their father’s death, Ollokot’s older brother became the tribe’s recognized leader, later to achieve fame as Chief Joseph. Ollokot became a war chief. After their band of the Nez Perce refused to move to a smaller reservation, the U.S. Army hunted them down.

Ollokot led severely outnumbered Nez Perce warriors to many victories in battle, repeatedly fending off U.S. forces that pursued them for more than 1,000 miles as they fled toward safe haven in Canada.

U.S. troops finally overwhelmed the Nez Perce 40 miles from the Canadian border. There, at the Battle of Bear Paw on Sept. 30, 1877, Ollokot was killed.

His brother, the chief, surrendered within the week. The surviving Nez Perce weren’t allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest for another 10 years.

Across the Columbia Basin, tribes had been left with just a sliver of their lands. The treaties still protected their right to fish, but that was not to last.

How The Fish Were Lost (1900-1957) Dipnet fishing at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, around 1957 (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Even after they were forced onto reservations, Columbia River tribes continued to make use of their usual fishing grounds like Celilo Falls. Salmon remained the staple of their diet and their most valuable trade commodity.

But two threats were coming.

Commercial fishing was growing. And as it did, state governments spent several decades adopting laws that cut Native Americans out of the salmon harvest.

Then the federal government made plans to harness what it considered “the wasted power of the Columbia” by building dams to produce electricity and aid farming and shipping. Construction began in the 1930s, blocking off massive swaths of habitat and drastically altering the river. The dams preserved the lower river salmon prized by commercial and sport fishers, but sacrificed those upriver, where the tribes’ fishing rights were ensured by treaty.

In 1950, Congress authorized a new dam at Celilo Falls, the last great fishery, and the most sacred site, for Native tribes on the river.

March 1957, spring Chinook season Yearly catch at Celilo Falls (pre-dam): 1,894,000 lbs

In the run-up to dam construction, the federal government forced Native people out of fishing villages along the Columbia.

Alvin Settler and Mary Goudy-Settler were relocated to the Yakama’s inland reservation and told to try farming. But they weren’t farmers. They struggled to feed their four children and themselves.

Alvin knew The Dalles Dam would mean the destruction of Celilo, and the end of the way he and his family had always fished. He also needed money.

So he went to work building the dam.

Mary Goudy-Settler and Alvin Settler, with a nephew, in 1967 (Courtesy of Randy Settler and Marcella Settler-Kantjas)

“They did it for survival,” Randy said of his father and other relatives who helped build the dam.

Several years after the dam was completed, the Settlers returned to the river, even without Celilo, for the only life they knew: fishing.

They settled in a shanty village called Lone Pine, in the shadow of The Dalles Dam. It was one of 31 treaty fishing access sites the government offered tribes after damming and destroying their usual fishing grounds.

Watch video ➜

Randy remembers finding spearheads and beadwork in the dirt where he played and thinking about how old they might be.

The government forbade people from building permanent homes on those sites. So, on the banks of the river that had long ago made their families wealthy, the Settlers and their four kids made their home in a corrugated tin shed built for drying salmon.

“If the sun was out, we roasted. When it was cold, we froze,” Randy said.

Throughout Randy’s grade school years, they lived, cooked and slept in that one-room shed with no electricity and no running water.

He remembers showing up dirty to school, where he and the other kids from Lone Pine would be stripped down and showered off in the boiler room.

They drank river water, bathed in river water and lived off what they could catch, eating fish or selling it to afford fruit and potatoes.

“When we had fish, we could eat. When we didn’t have fish, we pretty much starved,” Settler said.

When boat hulls or engines needed repair, the family couldn’t buy food. Randy remembers an $1,800 boat repair bill that prompted him and his older brother, Carl, to learn how to work with fiberglass themselves. The youngest of four siblings, Randy began operating his own boat when he was 9.

His parents, along with fellow fishing families at the river, started getting more assertive about their rights to catch and sell fish, defying the many state regulations meant to limit their ability to do so.

“It was a war for survival,” Settler said.

The Fish Wars, as they are often known in the Northwest, were about to begin.

How The Fight Began (1960-1980s) Members of the Columbia River tribes including Mary Goudy-Settler, pictured in the article at right, fought for fishing access. (The Oregonian, 1966, and The Columbian, 1982)

As Native families on the river struggled to make a living, they watched non-Native commercial fishing crews harvest salmon in great numbers. Inspired by the civil rights movement, they set out to assert their rights.

Native Americans fished without state permission as acts of civil disobedience, They challenged state laws in court. They held “fish-ins” as public protests. In one famous incident, actor Marlon Brando was arrested for protesting with Puget Sound tribes.

Some made headlines and landed in jail — reviled at the time by mostly white sport fishers as troublemakers. David Sohappy of the Yakama Nation was imprisoned. Billy Frank Jr. of the Nisqually Indian Tribe and Janet McCloud of the Tulalip Tribes were arrested several times. Frank, Sohappy, McCloud and others would come to be regarded beyond Indian Country as civil rights pioneers.

April 1966, spring Chinook season Yearly catch: 294,000 lbs

On April 26, 1966, the headline of the morning Oregonian read, “Rifle-Toting Indians Go Fishing.”

Below it was a photo of a Native man, smiling with a 16-pound spring Chinook salmon, while his friend stood guard, one-handing a rifle pointed into the air.

They didn’t have state permits to fish, and they’d been getting harassed by non-Natives at the river and targeted by police. But they didn’t need state permission to fish, they said. They’d had the right since time immemorial, and the treaties said so.

The armed guards, Alvin Settler told the newspaper, seemed to be “the only way we can get justice.”

By the time Randy saw his dad in the paper, he was used to his parents being arrested for fishing. He was about 8 the first time he saw them dragged into a police car, and he cried.

Eventually, he’d get arrested, too.

Sometimes the police would stop by The Dalles Wahtonka High School to see if he was there. If he wasn’t, they knew to search along the river for his family.

More often than not, though, teenage Randy Settler was there in school, frequently asleep during first-period history. He’d spend all night setting nets and the early morning pulling them and trucking the catch over to his mom. When he got to school, he’d slip into the back of the classroom and nod off.

“I didn’t mind sleeping through manifest destiny,” he said.

The Settlers became one of the most aggressive commercial fishing families on the river. Alvin, who’d later become a tribal judge, taught himself the law and began to test the limits of the state’s authority over tribal fishing.

Mary Goudy-Settler and Alvin Settler took such a hard line on treaty rights, and racked up so many fishing violations, that one of the Yakama Nation’s council members tried to distance them from tribal government.

But they were building something.

Goudy-Settler told the Yakama Nation Review at the time that while tribal council was worried they’d jeopardize the tribe’s relationship with the state, “all I could think of was the despair of the Indians.”

How Rights Were Reclaimed (1969-1974) Mary Goudy-Settler in 1959 (Courtesy of Randy Settler and Marcella Settler-Kantjas)

In 1969, U.S. District Judge Robert Belloni ruled that Oregon had violated treaty rights by failing to ensure a “fair share” of the harvest for tribes. Critically, the ruling made tribes co-managers of salmon, including hatchery production.

Five years later came two more landmark cases. One was Settler v. Lameer, the case that grew out of the arrest of Alvin Settler and Mary Goudy-Settler for fishing without permits and using illegal gear. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that tribes had the right to regulate tribal fishing both on and off the reservation.

The other was the most famous ruling of the Fish Wars, the Boldt decision, which held that tribes had the right to half of all harvestable fish.

Tribal people had reestablished not just their right to fish, but a role in managing the river and its salmon. They had a chance to rebuild what they’d lost. But even with the courts on their side, they would face harassment by authorities for decades.

July 1978, Summer Chinook/sockeye season Yearly catch: 1,455,000 lbs

Salmon runs weren’t what they’d been before the dams, but there were still fish to catch, and Goudy-Settler knew how to make the most of it.

With money they’d saved, the Settlers bought property on the river near Stevenson, Washington, about 60 miles east of Portland, Oregon.

They built a home and a building for processing fish. Goudy-Settler started buying and selling salmon from up and down the river to supplement her family’s catch. Eventually, she became one of the biggest fish dealers on the river.

“Some people called themselves ‘fish hogs,’” said Sam George, who has fished for the Settlers since he was a boy and now helps run the family’s crew. “She was a true fish hog. She wanted it.”

She bought boats for Randy and Carl, and they hauled in as much fish as they could. And the Settlers would put kids like George to work cleaning fish or camping by the river late into the night to watch their nets for thieves.

She saw fish dealing as a way to help the tribe, and pulled in money from restaurants as far away as New York.

The police said she was a major salmon poacher. The state wanted to limit the tribes’ catch to protect salmon. The Settlers contended their share was insignificant compared to all the other threats to salmon.

In the summer of 1978, undercover agents from the Oregon State Police posed as buyers, and prosecutors alleged Goudy-Settler had illegally sold $381,000 worth of salmon caught outside the commercial season.

At home awaiting trial, she would lay on her bed for hours with a legal dictionary, trying to decipher case documents. She’d recently learned to read, with the help of her niece and a pile of Cosmopolitan magazines.

She decided to plead guilty, avoiding a public trial she thought she’d have no chance to win.

She was sentenced to 10 months in an Oregon prison. Inside, people kept asking her about her crime.

“What crime?” she’d ask them, according to a 1982 interview in The Columbian.

She and Alvin divorced during her imprisonment. Mary kept the family’s tribally registered fishing sites. Police kept watching.

In 1983, in the parking lot of an undisclosed Portland hotel, undercover police arrested Goudy-Settler and her sons, Carl and Randy Settler, for allegedly selling more than 600 pounds of illegal salmon.

“This fish should be swimming,” a newspaper account quoted an arresting officer as saying while he held one of the seized salmon.

Goudy-Settler was convicted later that year of selling fish without a state license.

Her appeal sat for nearly a decade after her attorney died. In the meantime, she stopped buying and dealing fish, and her family just sold what they could catch.

Settler lost her appeal in 1992, and she was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

Tribal leaders were outraged. Over the years, appreciation had grown for Mary Goudy-Settler and Alvin Settler, and the river tribes honored them for fighting to secure the right to fish for Randy’s generation and beyond.

When Randy took up the mantle, the fight had changed: It became about making sure there were still fish to catch.

How the Fight Turned to Salmon (1990-2000) Underwater viewing area at the Bonneville Dam (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)

By the time tribes reclaimed their access to salmon, more than 100 different populations had been driven extinct. Many others were on the brink. The 1990s saw 200 distinct populations listed as threatened or endangered. Attempts by Congress and others to keep salmon off the endangered list failed.

Fingers were pointed in all directions: at logging, farming, fishing, even hatcheries. Salmon advocates sued over federal hydropower operations in 1993. Then, in 1996, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identified another threat.

Stressed salmon populations, agency scientists said, “will most likely face more acute threats of extinction with the additional burden of significant anthropogenic climate changes.” In other words, time was running out for salmon recovery efforts.

The treaty tribes responded to the crisis by publishing their own recovery plan. “The Spirit of the Salmon” outlined practical steps to help the fish; it also declared that salmon had unselfishly sacrificed themselves for the physical and spiritual subsistence of humans, and that tribes, in return, “must now employ the depths of their hearts and the expanse of their minds to save the salmon.”

November 1997, end of fall Chinook/coho season Yearly catch: 814,000 lbs

Randy Settler routinely worked from 7 in the morning until midnight during his days on tribal council.

He’d waited a long time to be on it.

He first ran when he was 25. He didn’t get elected till 1997, when he was 42.

Settler had spent much of his youth — when he wasn’t fishing or getting arrested for it — chasing wins at Native basketball tournaments and the good times that came with them.

But he got serious about the fight for salmon.

“Every time I picked up the phone and had a conversation with him, I wound up with six more things I had to do,” Steve Parker, a longtime biologist for the Yakama Nation, recalled.

Randy Settler at The Dalles Dam on the Columbia (Katie Campbell/ProPublica)

Settler was outspoken and unconventional. He recalled leaping onto a table during one meeting to make a point. As a negotiating tactic, he said, he once told a National Marine Fisheries Service official that he’d put an “Indian curse” on him. He cut deals to get the tribe funding, even when it meant working with known enemies of Indian Country, like Sen. Slade Gorton, the Washington Republican who as state attorney general had argued against tribal treaty rights and sovereignty.

“A force of nature,” Charles Hudson, the former government affairs director for the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, said of Settler.

He fought hard because it was a dire time for salmon.

Many populations had cratered to their lowest levels ever in the 1990s. Tribes began the work of resuscitating salmon runs with habitat improvements and hatcheries they’d specially designed to aid wild fish.

Then, in 2001, a major drought hit the Columbia River Basin, reducing the river’s flow and threatening the survival of young salmon making their way to the ocean. Settler feared the greatest die-off for migrating salmon in his lifetime.

During that drought, he argued publicly with the head of the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal seller of hydroelectric power, over its plans to suspend salmon protections to maximize power production.

That marked just one of many disputes over the federal government’s actions toward salmon and tribes. Settler summed up the tribal position in his testimony before Congress at the time.

Fish runs are in terrible condition, he told them: “The United States is not living up to its commitments in the Treaty of 1855.”

How Recovery Failed (2000s-present) Randy Settler’s crew sets a gillnet at one of the family fishing sites that he inherited from his mother. (Katie Campbell/ProPublica)

The government spends more than $100 million every year to remake streams in the Columbia River Basin into better salmon habitat.

But scientists say most of that has been spent on projects that are too scattershot and small-scale to actually increase salmon numbers. For at least two decades, that habitat work has been used to justify degradation from the many dams on the river. Problems of excessively warm and stagnant water in the Columbia have been left largely unabated, despite numerous lawsuits against the federal government.

“It simply is not clear that habitat restoration as currently practiced can be effective enough to be successful,” a group of 15 scientists wrote in 2015. Little has changed since then.

Though salmon runs seemed to be recovering in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the upward trend didn’t last. In the late 2010s, some populations fell to near the levels that had triggered their endangered listings years before. Tribal biologists determined the trajectory of many wild Snake River Chinook populations would lead to extinction in a matter of years.

Year to year, salmon runs fluctuate. But because of climate change, federal scientists predict, ocean survival for salmon could decline as much as 90% over the next 40 years.

April 2022, spring Chinook season Yearly catch forecast: 3,050,000 lbs

About an hour east of Portland, the Stanley Rock fish camp is a ramshackle collection of boats, trailers and a fish-cleaning station, easily missed from the interstate.

Randy, his nephew Sam George, and George’s daughter Aiyana make this their home for much of the year because Stanley Rock is near where they are allowed to fish, according to tribal law and custom. It’s just the three of them in camp for the spring season, when they catch fish for the tribe’s ceremonies.

“What about school?” Randy teased Aiyana one day.

She looked to her dad. She had skipped school to be fishing that day, just as Randy had done so many times.

“She’s exercising her treaty right,” her dad said.

Settler wonders what will be left to catch in Aiyana’s lifetime.

“When she gets to my age, if she’s sitting in the same place, will she be able to look out on this river and say, ‘Boy, I want my first salmon’? You know, that’s something that I think about,” Settler said.

Watch video ➜

Sam George is worried too, knowing the water keeps getting warmer. The 2022 run would eventually pick up, and by recent standards it ended up a good year for spring Chinook. But even in good years now, the runs are too small for the tribe to open up a spring commercial season. George has been lining up other work, helping a developer friend build strip malls.

The day after Aiyana skipped school, Settler and George drifted in with the morning’s catch to find her waiting on the dock.

“Good day today! We caught one fish,” George said to her from the boat. “Pull me in.”

Settler headed up the dock and pulled out his phone to call the Yakama tribal council about how to salvage the poor start to the season. It has been 20 years since he served on the council. He’s spent the intervening time working on salmon policy for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and the federal Pacific Salmon Commission.

Settler nursed a cigarette and worked the phone, leaning against a plastic storage bin big enough to hold 1,000 pounds of fish. He watched as George tossed that morning’s salmon into the icy slush, and he and Aiyana took a seat on the tailgate.

“I’m surprised we got a fish!” Aiyana said to her father.

“You’re surprised?” he said. “What do you mean you’re surprised?”

“Because this spring we haven’t got any!” she said. ”Are we gonna eat it?”

“No,” he said, “it’s for the longhouse, baby.”

“Aww,” she moaned.

After a while, Settler rummaged through a fresh food box delivery from a local nonprofit. He pulled out a bright orange vacuum-sealed piece of Alaskan sockeye and walked it over to his nephew. George's mother is Settler's cousin, which makes him a nephew in Native terms. With none of their own catch to eat, Settler was eager to cook the salmon for lunch.

“Look how good that looks,” he said, holding up the packaged filet for them to see. “Wild-caught.”

George smiled and shook his head.

“It’s not Native-caught,” he said.

Aiyana laughed at her dad and kicked her legs out over the tailgate. Her pink boots swung back and forth above a license plate commemorating the Yakama Nation Treaty of 1855.

A New Promise Chinook salmon spawn in a stream of the upper Sandy River, which is a tributary of the Columbia. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)

Less than a week after taking office, President Joe Biden issued a memorandum stating that supporting tribes, honoring their sovereignty and fulfilling the nation’s treaty obligations would be priorities for his administration.

Then, in March, the White House convened a consultation with Columbia River tribes, which demanded accountability for the harm the federal government has caused to the river, its ecology and its first residents.

“The Tribal leaders,” the White House said in a statement, “made clear that they want more than words.”

The White House also took an unusual step: It proposed specifics. It said it would consider removing four dams on the lower Snake River in southeastern Washington, funding the reintroduction of salmon into areas where they’re currently blocked and greatly increasing funding in hatcheries and habitat restoration, while giving states and tribes more authority over that work.

As a result, litigation over Columbia River dams is on hold. And while elected officials in Washington have stopped short of endorsing removal, NOAA broke decades of precedent this year and called breaching the four Snake River dams “essential” for salmon recovery.

Negotiations between the administration, salmon advocates and tribes are ongoing.

November 2022, offseason

The Celilo Village longhouse filled up by breakfast. People poured in from around the region for the day’s ceremonies.

They came to memorialize Randy Settler’s mother and to hold a naming ceremony for his nephew, George. It is tradition to hold naming ceremonies during memorials. This reflects the life cycle of the salmon, which return to their home streams to die and give life to the next generation.

The ceremony opened with drumming, songs and dance. Then, one by one, members of the tribe began to rise and share stories about Mary Goudy-Settler. They thanked her for the fight.

First image: Sam George receives his Indian name, Tookikun, at the Celilo Longhouse. Second image: Aiyana George and family members watch as her dad receives his new name. (Katie Campbell/ProPublica)

They talked of the great struggle to come for salmon in the next generation, and of keeping Mary’s warrior spirit alive.

Randy and his sister, Marcella, called upon members of their tribe to come forward and receive a gift in her honor.

When Aiyana’s turn came, they called her forward and handed her a keepsake shawl, necklace and yarn belt of their mother’s.

About the Catch Numbers

Yearly tribal catch tallies reflect best available estimates for harvest of all salmon species throughout the entirety of the year by treaty tribes in the Columbia River Basin. Estimates for 2021 and 2022 are sourced from Columbia River Compact reports via the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Estimates from before 2000 come from a joint Oregon and Washington status report for Columbia River fish runs, 1938-2000. The treaty-era estimate is based on the work of Craig, Joseph A., and Robert L. Hacker of NOAA Fisheries, as well as C. C. Meengs and R.T. Lackey of Oregon State University.

George’s naming ceremony followed later that afternoon. He was given the name Tookikun, after one of his ancestors. He, too, called members of his tribe forward to exchange gifts: blankets for some, salmon for others, a captain’s mirror for his Uncle Randy. Tribal elders said they gave George a new name to recognize the larger role he’s grown into as a provider of fish for the tribe. He will continue the work of his Uncle Randy to feed the longhouse, and then he, too, will pass it on.

George had said more than once that he didn’t need a name, that he was happy to sit in the back of the ceremony and watch. But he woke up the next day feeling a little different — a good energy.

He’s excited for Aiyana to feel that.

“We have to find her a name,” George said. “She wants hers, too.”

Aiyana George with her dad, Sam, at the end of a long day of fishing on the Columbia River (Katie Campbell/ProPublica)

Help Us Understand Pacific Northwest Salmon and Treaty Rights

by Sophia Kovatch

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

Here’s what we’ll go through in this guide:

• Why Should You Research a Nonprofit Before You Donate?
• How to Find Out Where Charity Money Goes
• How to Evaluate a Nonprofit’s Effectiveness
• Questions to Ask Yourself Before Donating to a Nonprofit

Why Should You Research a Nonprofit Before You Donate?

In general, nonprofit organizations exist to further a social cause or provide a public benefit.

While many do, some don’t live up to the values and mission they claim.

How nonprofits spend their money may be different than what you expect. For instance, ProPublica has reported on how the Red Cross built just six homes after raising millions for Haiti disaster relief, how St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital keeps billions of dollars in reserves and how a nonprofit college spent more on marketing than financial aid.

Since nonprofits are required to file a document called a Form 990 with the IRS every year, you can check out a nonprofit’s finances for yourself with a few online resources. By taking the time to evaluate the charity before you donate, you can see how effective your donation will be and get peace of mind knowing it’s more likely that the organization effectively spends your donation and does what it says.

How to Find Out Where Charity Money Goes

Any organization with tax-exempt status that takes in over $50,000 per year has to file a Form 990. The annual report shows how a nonprofit spends its money.

Once the IRS makes the Form 990s public, you can find it in ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, a Form 990 lookup tool. Search for a nonprofit by name or browse by state or type.

As of December 2022, the IRS is delayed in releasing nearly half a million tax records stretching back to 2020, according to a ProPublica review. That makes it difficult to see how charities are faring in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even when the IRS isn’t backlogged, Form 990s don’t provide insight into an organization’s current finances because the documents are typically filed many months after the end of an organization’s fiscal year. For larger organizations such as hospital systems, the wait can be even longer.

To find the most recent tax form for the charities you want to donate to, you can try looking on their websites or reaching out to the organizations to ask for it. Nonprofits are required to share their Form 990 upon request, but not every organization complies.

Form 990s are long and complex documents, but there are a few key things you can look for when researching a charity before you donate. Nonprofit Explorer summarizes these items and also provides the original Form 990 so you can examine it more closely.

IRS Status

Most nonprofits are so-called 501(c)(3) organizations — a reference to the portion of the IRS code that deems those organizations as exempt from certain federal and state taxes. Donations to those organizations are tax-deductible.

But not every nonprofit is a 501(c)(3). The IRS lists many types of nonprofit organizations, and not all of them have the same rules.

Some well-known nonprofit organizations are actually 501(c)(4)s, or “social welfare organizations,” according to the IRS. Donations to 501(c)(4) organizations generally are not tax-deductible, but the group can participate more freely in lobbying and advocacy. Many community-based groups and advocacy groups are categorized as 501(c)(4)s.

Some nonprofits are structured so you can donate to either a 501(c)(3) or a 501(c)(4). For example, you can donate to the ACLU, a 501(c)(4), to support its lobbying and advocacy activities, but you won’t be able to deduct it on your taxes. Or, you can make a tax-deductible donation to the ACLU Foundation, a 501(c)(3), to support litigation and public education initiatives.

If getting the tax deduction is important to you, confirm the nonprofit’s IRS tax status before donating.

You can find a charity’s IRS status in Box I of Form 990.

Program Spending

Most people donate to a nonprofit to support a specific program or service. If that’s the case for you, you’ll want to make sure the program you care about is prioritized when the organization budgets its money.

Understanding how nonprofits allocate money across programs is a good way to see how your donation will be spent. It’s also smart to figure out whether the organization made any recent major changes to its programs or mission.

You can find program spending information in Part III of Form 990. Some nonprofits include program descriptions in supplemental information at the end of the document.

Professional Fundraising

Fundraising is a critical source of cash for most nonprofits, and it’s common to have staff members who work on raising enough money for the organization to carry out its mission.

It’s not a problem for nonprofits to spend some money on their fundraising efforts. But it can be a problem when charities spend far more on professional fundraising than on the programs themselves.

You can see how much a nonprofit spends on professional fundraising in Part I, Line 16a of Form 990.

Executive Compensation

Nonprofits are required to disclose the names and salaries of the five highest-paid employees as well as other key staff and board members. Executive salaries at nonprofits are often heavily scrutinized, in part because of this public disclosure.

Like professional fundraising fees, a higher-than-expected number isn’t necessarily a problem. Nonprofits often compete for employees with for-profit companies, and so many try to pay what they believe to be market rates. High executive salaries can be an issue if they are disproportionate to program spending or aren’t comparable with organizations of similar size and complexity.

You can find executive compensation data in Part VII of Form 990.

Other Items to Look For on a Form 990

Program spending, fundraising fees and executive compensation are three key ways to assess a nonprofit. But you can dive even deeper into nonprofit finances if you know where to look on a Form 990.

Here’s where to find other nonprofit financial information that might interest you:

Employees and Voting Members

• Number of employees: Part V, Line 2a
• Number of voting members in governing body: Part VI, Line 1a
• Number of independent voting members: Part VI, Line 1b
• Individuals with over $100,000 in compensation: Part VII, Line 2

Ad Expenses

• Amount spent on advertising and promotion: Part IX, Line 12a

Lobbying Activities

• Participation in lobbying activities: Part IV, Line 4; Schedule C, Part II
• Fees for lobbying services: Part IX, Line 11d

Business Relationship Disclosures

• Business relationships of board members and their families: Part IV, Line 28; Schedule L, Part IV

Other Financial Health Metrics

• Total functional expenses: Part IX, Line 25a
• Total assets, beginning of year: Part X, Line 16a
• Total assets, end of year: Part X, Line 16b
• Net gain or loss on sale of assets: Part VIII, Line 7d
• Total liabilities, beginning of year: Part X, Line 26a
• Total liabilities, end of year: Part X, Line 26b
• Investment income: Part VIII, Line 3
• Total program service revenue: Part VIII, Line 2g

How to Evaluate a Nonprofit’s Effectiveness

Understanding where a nonprofit’s money goes is only part of evaluating an organization. It’s also important to understand the impact of the dollars spent on programs and services.

Check the nonprofit’s website and social media for information about its impact. Many nonprofits will release newsletters or impact statements about the work they’ve accomplished. You might also find testimonials from people they’ve helped in the past.

You can also use a charity review site to get additional information. Free online resources like Charity Navigator and BBB Wise Giving Alliance aggregate ratings and reviews for nonprofit organizations. They’re all a little different, but they generally rate nonprofits on transparency, finances and effectiveness.

Other Questions to Ask Before Donating to a Nonprofit

Here is a quick list of questions to ask yourself before you make a donation to a nonprofit:

• Do you believe in the organization’s mission?
• Does the nonprofit seem to live up to its mission? How do you know?
• Can you find clear information about the impact of its work?
• Does it spend the bulk of its money on programs?
• Does it have a religious or political affiliation? If so, do you mind?
• Is the website secure and up to date?
• Is there anything about the nonprofit that concerns you?

by Brett Murphy

This story contains audio clips of 911 calls where people in distress describe traumatic deaths in sometimes graphic detail. It also mentions a suicide attempt.

Text STORY to 917-905-1223 to get the next installment in this series as soon as it publishes. Standard messaging rates apply.

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

Opening image: From left, Riley Spitler, Kathy Carpenter and Russ Faria. All were charged with or convicted of murder after their call for help was used as evidence against them. And all three were either released or acquitted of those charges.

Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. “I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like,” he once said.

Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.

So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.

Prosecutors know it’s junk science too. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions.

A photo posted on Facebook by the Moraine, Ohio, police department when announcing the retirement of Deputy Chief Tracy Harpster. (Moraine Police Department via Facebook)

In 2016, Missouri prosecutor Leah Askey wrote Harpster an effusive email, bluntly detailing how she skirted legal rules to exploit his methods against unwitting defendants.

“Of course this line of research is not ‘recognized’ as a science in our state,” Askey wrote, explaining that she had sidestepped hearings that would have been required to assess the method’s legitimacy. She said she disguised 911 call analysis in court by “getting creative … without calling it ‘science.’”

“I was confident that if a jury could hear this information and this research,” she added, “they would be as convinced as I was of the defendant's guilt.”

What Askey didn’t say in her endorsement was this: She had once tried using Harpster’s methods against Russ Faria, a man wrongfully convicted of killing his wife. At trial, Askey played a recording of Faria’s frantic 911 call for the jury and put a dispatch supervisor on the stand to testify that it sounded staged. Lawyers objected but the judge let the testimony in. Faria was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

After he successfully appealed, Askey prosecuted him again — and again called the supervisor to testify about all the reasons she thought Faria was guilty based on his word choice and demeanor during the 911 call. It was Harpster’s “analytical class,” the supervisor said, that taught her “to evaluate a call to see what the outcome would be.”

This judge wouldn’t allow her to continue and cut the testimony short. Faria was acquitted. He’d spent three and a half years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

None of this bothered Harpster, who needed fresh kudos to repackage as marketing material and for a chapter in an upcoming book. “We don’t have to say it was overturned,” he told Askey when soliciting the endorsement. “Hook me up. … Make it sing!”

Russ Faria was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife after he called 911 to report her death. “For somebody to come up there to say I was faking just because they listened to the phone call,” he said, “I was really kind of appalled.” (Greg Kahn, special to ProPublica)

Junk science in the justice system is nothing new. But unvarnished correspondence about how prosecutors wield it is hard to come by. It can be next to impossible to see how law enforcement — in league with paid, self-styled “experts” — spreads new, often unproven methods. The system is at its most opaque when prosecutors know evidence is unfit for court but choose to game the rules, hoping judges and juries will believe it and vote to convict.

People like Faria, defense lawyers and sometimes even the judges are blindsided. “I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else,” Faria told me.

Askey, who now goes by Leah Chaney and is no longer a prosecutor, did not answer questions about the case other than to say she didn’t know about Harpster’s work until after Faria’s first trial. She has denied allegations of misconduct in other media interviews.

I first stumbled on 911 call analysis while reporting on a police department in northern Louisiana. At the time, it didn’t sound plausible even as a one-off gambit, let alone something pervasive that law enforcement nationwide had embraced as legitimate.

I was wrong. People who call 911 don’t know it, but detectives and prosecutors are listening in, ready to assign guilt based on the words they hear. For the past decade, Harpster has traveled the country quietly sowing his methods into the justice system case by case, city by city, charging up to $3,500 for his eight-hour class, which is typically paid for with tax dollars. Hundreds in law enforcement have bought into the obscure program and I had a rare opportunity to track, in real time, how the chief architect was selling it.

Harpster makes some astonishing claims in his promotional flyers. He says he has personally consulted in more than 1,500 homicide investigations nationwide. He promises that his training will let 911 operators know if they are talking to a murderer, give detectives a new way to identify suspects, and arm prosecutors with evidence they can exploit at trial.

Listen to critical moments in Riley Spitler’s 911 call and read the lead detective’s analysis.

The program has little online presence. Searches for 911 call analysis in national court dockets come up virtually empty too. A public defender in Virginia said, “I have never heard of any of that claptrap in my jurisdiction.” Dozens of other defense attorneys had similar reactions. One thought the premise sounded as arbitrary as medieval trials by fire, when those suspected of crimes were judged by how well they could walk over burning coals or hold hot irons.

Could it be true that Harpster, a man with no scientific background and next to no previous homicide investigation experience, had successfully sold the modern equivalent to law enforcement across the U.S. almost without notice?

First, I put together a list of agencies that had recently hosted him. In the months that followed, I sent more than 80 open records requests and interviewed some 120 people. Thousands of emails, police reports and other documents led to a web of thousands more in new states. When agencies refused to turn over public records, ProPublica’s lawyers threatened litigation and in one case sued.

Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

I followed the paper trail Harpster left as he traveled the country, working law enforcement’s back channels. A story unfolded about a credulous, at times reckless, justice system functioning as an open market for junk science. Those responsible for ensuring honest police work and fair trials — from training boards to the judiciary — have instead helped 911 call analysis metastasize. It became clear that almost no one had bothered to ask even basic questions about the program.

Outside of law enforcement circles, Harpster is elusive. He tries to keep his methods secret and doesn’t let outsiders sit in on his classes or look at his data. “The more civilians who know about it,” he told me once, “the more who will try to get away with murder.”

In reality, people have been wrongfully accused and convicted of murder after someone misinterpreted their call for help, while those who used 911 call analysis against them face little or no consequences. I documented more than 100 cases in 26 states where Harpster’s methods played a pivotal role in arrests, prosecutions and convictions — likely a fraction of the actual figure.

All of it began in an unexpected place.

II.

In the winter of 2004, Harpster walked into the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He was one of dozens of local police officers from around the country who’d been invited to attend a 10-week training course called the National Academy. He listened to a lecture there given by an agent named Susan Adams, who the bureau had hired in the ’80s to teach interview and statement-analysis techniques.

Harpster was rapt. Then 43, he had spent most of his career with the Moraine, Ohio, police department. Moraine, population 6,500, is an unlikely crucible for a newfangled homicide investigative method, and Harpster is an unlikely figure to be the one who forged it. The city averages less than one murder a year.

Harpster had scant involvement in homicide investigations, according to his personnel file. The file shows a decorated career with commendations for good deeds like volunteering with underprivileged kids and organizing a Christmas food and gift drive for a family in need. He was once officer of the year, and he never took a single sick day.

After he left the FBI Academy that winter, Harpster enrolled at the University of Cincinnati to pursue a graduate degree in criminal justice. For his master’s thesis, he collected 100 recordings of 911 calls — half of the callers had been found guilty of something and the other half hadn’t. Harpster believed he could analyze these calls for clues. In his thesis’ acknowledgments, he said he wouldn’t have started the project without Adams, “the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

Based on patterns he heard in the tapes, Harpster said he was able to identify certain indicators that correlated with guilt and others with innocence. For instance, “Huh?” in response to a dispatcher’s question is an indicator of guilt in Harpster’s system. So is an isolated “please.” He identified 20 such indicators and then counted how often they appeared in his sample of guilty calls.

Using that same sample of recordings, Harpster, Adams and an FBI behavioral scientist named John Jarvis set out to publish a study in 2008. But even before their work was published in a peer-reviewed journal as an “exploratory analysis” — a common qualifier meant to invite more research — police departments around the country learned about it.

That’s because the FBI sent a version of the study directly to them in a bulletin, which was not labeled exploratory. It included contact information for Harpster and Adams. The publication, which the bureau says typically has a readership of 200,000 but is not supposed to be an endorsement, had immediate impact. “It was required reading by our detective and communications personnel,” a police chief in Illinois told Harpster.

Law enforcement around the country received this FBI bulletin featuring 911 call analysis. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

A sheriff’s sergeant in Colorado also read the FBI bulletin and, weeks later, asked Adams to analyze a 911 tape from a widow suspected of killing her husband. She and Harpster wrote a report of their findings.

The widow said the word “blood,” for example, and that’s a guilty indicator. (“Bleeding,” however, is not.) She said “somebody” at different points, which shows a lack of commitment. “Witnesses to a crime scene should be able to report their observations clearly,” Harpster and Adams wrote. She was inappropriately polite because she said “I’m sorry” and “thank you.” She interrupted herself, which “wastes valuable time and may add confusion.” She tried to divert attention by saying, “God, who would do this?" Harpster and Adams commented: “This is a curious and unexpected question.”

Their report became part of the police record — along with a significant amount of other evidence — and the prosecutor, Rich Tuttle, echoed their findings during trial. The widow was convicted of murder. Tuttle recently told me that he “did not directly use” 911 call analysis during trial because no witnesses testified about it.

But Tuttle once emailed Harpster about the impact his methods had. "We found your evaluation of the 911 call in this matter to be extremely insightful and helpful to our investigation and prosecution of the case,” Tuttle wrote.

The seeds were planted.

III.

For more than 12 years, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency helped 911 call analysis grow unabated. FBI officials at a charity fundraiser have even auctioned a copy of the book Harpster and Adams wrote about it. Harpster says he has presented his material at the FBI National Academy. He frequently trades on the FBI name, and others cite the affiliation when spreading word about 911 call analysis.

Then, in a 2020 study, experts from the bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit finally tried to see whether the methods had any actual merit. They tested Harpster’s guilty indicators against a sample of emergency calls, mostly from military bases, to try to replicate what they called “groundbreaking 911 call analysis research.”

Instead, they ended up warning against using that research to bring actual cases. The indicators were so inconsistent, the experts said, that some went “in the opposite direction of what was previously found."

This fall, a separate group of FBI experts in the same unit tested Harpster’s model, this time in missing child cases. Again, their findings contradicted his, so much so that they said applying 911 call analysis in real life “may exacerbate bias.”

Academic researchers at Villanova and James Madison universities have come to similar conclusions. Every study, five in total, clashed with Harpster’s. The verdict: There was no scientific evidence that 911 call analysis worked.

The FBI, which declined to comment for this article, published some of the dissent in another law enforcement bulletin. But the reversal has gone largely unnoticed. John Bailey, a police sergeant in Pennsylvania, was among the first to tap Harpster and Adams for help after learning about their technique from the FBI. He believed in it so much that he planned to have Harpster testify in front of a grand jury. (That didn’t ultimately happen.)

I recently called Bailey, now a judge, to ask if he knew about the FBI’s more recent studies undercutting the work it had once promoted. He did not. “This is how it originated — at the FBI Academy,” he said. “You telling me that makes me scratch my head.”

Jarvis, one of the original co-authors from the FBI, told me he hasn’t spoken to Harpster since they published their study. He said he advised Harpster and Adams at the time that more research needed to back up what they’d found.

Jarvis said he was uncomfortable with the method’s use in real cases. He was even more surprised that prosecutors have bought in. “I don’t see where that work rises to the level of success by the scientific community,” he said. “There’s no definitive answer as to whether this is useful.”

Adams left the bureau and is now a private communications consultant. She recently wrote me an email defending Harpster and their work together. As proof of Harpster’s qualifications, Adams cited all the times he has been invited to speak about the program and claimed they’ve analyzed hundreds of 911 tapes.

No single indicator can be used to determine the likelihood of innocence or guilt, Adams said. “Instead, our study examined indicators in combination, just as 911 call analysis should be used in combination with case facts to uncover the truth.”

But the more records I saw, the less true that seemed.

IV.

It was easy to miss, a decades-old mystery solved by local police that made national headlines for a day before vanishing to the recesses of the internet. It’s the type of story that goes on to inspire “true crime” shows, always with a neat, satisfying ending. And the FBI was right in the middle of it.

This spring, U.S. marshals followed Jade Benning, a 48-year-old mother of three with jet-black hair, as she picked up her youngest son from school in Austin, Texas. Benning sold vintage clothing in town, drove a red 1969 Camaro and owned a menagerie of rescue pets. After she left the school’s parking lot, the marshals pulled her over and told her she was under arrest for a murder that happened 26 years ago.

In the small hours of Jan. 4, 1996, Benning twice called 911 and said a burglar broke into her Santa Ana, California, apartment, stabbed her boyfriend to death and slashed her hand before running off into the night. A neighbor reported that they had seen someone fleeing the area around that time. But officers didn’t find a murder weapon and the case went cold. Years went by. Benning moved states and started a family.

After Benning’s arrest this spring, the Santa Ana Police Department posted an Instagram video of officers in suits walking a handcuffed Benning through a parking garage. The post included a vague statement: A cold case detective named Michael Gibbons had solved the murder. After receiving an anonymous letter, he “conducted extensive follow-up” and consulted forensic experts, the department said.

The Santa Ana Police Department said on Instagram that Jade Benning was arrested after “forensic testing was completed, as well as consulting with forensic experts.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Benning, who has pleaded not guilty, sent her kids to live with their grandmother part time while headlines circulated about their mother’s arrest.

The police department and district attorney’s office haven’t explained who those experts are or what evidence Gibbons had discovered. Gibbons and the agencies did not respond to interview requests and the agencies refused to release records I asked for.

But Gibbons told someone. Days after the arrest, he sent an email to Harpster, thanking him for analyzing Benning’s 911 calls. “It significantly helped our district attorney to realize the indicators of guilt in the phone calls,” Gibbons wrote, “as well as suggestions on how to introduce the 911 calls to the jury during trial.” He alluded to other forensic experts but said Harpster’s consultation was “instrumental in swaying the prosecutor to file charges.”

Gibbons said he didn’t just find out about Harpster by chance: The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit recommended him. Gibbons’ email came two years after the bureau’s own experts in that same division first publicly warned law enforcement not to use 911 call analysis in actual cases.

V.

Junk science can catch fire in the legal system once so-called experts are allowed to take the stand in a single trial. Prosecutors and judges in future cases cite the previous appearance as precedent. But 911 call analysis was vexing because it didn’t look like Harpster had ever actually testified.

In 2009, Harpster learned about a double homicide in Woodbury County, Iowa, from a television documentary. He offered his services to the lead detective, saying he knew the defendant was guilty “solely upon his analysis of the defendant’s 911 call,” an assistant prosecutor for the county, Jill Esteves, noted later in an email.

Esteves’ office bought it. Prosecutors there tapped Harpster to consult and testify as an expert on a different case soon after, emails show. Harpster said he had a better idea. In surprisingly blunt language, Esteves spelled out her interpretation.

“He knows there will be a great legal hurdle getting the research admitted,” she wrote in an email to a colleague in another county, who also wanted Harpster to testify. “He doesn’t want a legal precedent prohibiting the admission of his research.” Earlier in 2009, a judge in Alabama had blocked Harpster from taking the stand because there were no other studies supporting his work.

So instead of testifying himself, Harpster began to teach others how to analyze 911 calls. His pupils are prosecutors, detectives, coroners and dispatchers. They are now the ambassadors who could present his work in court while Harpster himself is insulated from scrutiny. “No cross examination when you lecture,” Esteves quipped.

When I asked Esteves about this, she didn’t respond. But a colleague in her office, Mark Campbell, defended 911 call analysis. “Tracy Harpster’s work in analyzing 911 calls is new,” he wrote in an email, “but the need for attorneys, judges and juries to evaluate what witnesses say to determine their credibility is as old as the trial court system.” Campbell said he didn’t know of other studies in the field but that wasn’t relevant because much of 911 call analysis is similar to exercising common sense, “no different than what attorneys and judges have been pointing out since witnesses have been used.”

As Adams faded into the background, Harpster took their work on tour, from Florida to Alaska, to university lecture halls and international homicide conferences, city police academies and statewide coroners’ seminars. The extended curriculum is a two-day, 16-hour course that includes basic and advanced training.

Harpster has a motto he likes to say during his lectures: Police have but one master, the truth. A detective from Wisconsin told him that he’d hung the slogan up on his office wall.

In class, there’s a projector screen with the course title: “Is the caller the killer?” The bold, red font looks like dripping blood. He walks attendees through the indicators of guilt on a checklist that he and Adams invented called the COPS Scale, for Considering Offender Probability in Statements. It’s a one-page worksheet that they copyrighted. “COPS Scale don’t lie,” Harpster has told students, “boys do.”

Then the students listen to real 911 tapes, marking indicators on the sheet as they go. He displays two options on the screen, also in bold, red font: “guilty” or “innocent.”

VI.

Figuring out what his students went on to do with the training took some reverse engineering. There’s no list of 911 call analysis appearances and no way to easily search local court records. Police departments don’t track it either.

But Harpster does. Former students send him endorsements describing how they’ve used 911 call analysis in real cases. Then he repurposes those as marketing material when emailing law enforcement in other cities and states. It’s a feedback loop.

In emails, Harpster pitches both the curriculum and himself. “This training is unique and nobody else is doing it,” he told a local police training board in Illinois, “because I’m the only one who has done the research.”

He claims that 1 in 3 people who call 911 to report a death are actually murderers. No law enforcement officials in the records I’ve seen have questioned this figure, and many departments repeat it when promoting the training internally. In his thesis, Harpster originally said this number was 1 in 5 and attributed the figure to an unpublished study by a now-dead detective and professor in Washington state. I found nothing to support either statistic.

Harpster makes himself available day and night to take phone calls from police and prosecutors looking to validate a hunch or strategize for trial. He once hosted a former student from Florida at his lakeside vacation house in Michigan, where he claimed on his Facebook page that they “solved a murder.” Last year, a detective called him for input while standing over someone’s body at a crime scene.

Police often email him 911 tapes for consultations — men and women wailing on the phone as they plead with the dispatcher to save a loved one. Sometimes it’s a parent holding a dead child. In one case, Harpster listened to an Ohio mother’s desperate call for help and then wrote back, simply, “Call me. … DIRTY!!!!” The mother was not charged.

His methods have now surfaced in at least 26 states, where many students embrace him like an oracle. They write in emails and course evaluations that his training is the best they’ve ever attended. They laud the “science” and send Harpster tales of arrests, prosecutions and convictions that they attribute at least in part to his program.

A group of North Dakota dispatchers listened to a 911 tape the day after Harpster’s class and decided the caller “didn’t seem to be appropriately shocked or upset” on the phone when reporting a homicide. One jumped up and down, shouting, “He’s guilty. He did it!!”

A police chief in Michigan said Harpster’s class paid off immediately after a man called 911 and said he had just found his mother and sister dead. “He made the mistake of saying ‘I need help,’” the chief explained.

A detective in Washington state, Marty Garland, told Harpster that a young mother had called 911 in November 2018 after her infant stopped breathing in his sleep. There was nothing suspicious at the scene and no detectives were dispatched, Garland wrote. Three separate pathologists were unable to rule the death a homicide based on the physical evidence. (One of those pathologists, hired by police, changed his conclusion to death by smothering after learning about some of the mother’s statements, which were related to him by police.)

But Garland had recently taken Harpster’s class and listened to a tape of the call. He noticed problems “from literally the first word by the ‘distraught mother.’” She had said “hi” to the dispatcher, which is considered a guilty indicator because it’s too polite. Garland shared his findings with a supervisor, who recategorized the baby’s death as suspicious. Harpster also consulted on the case.

Prosecutors charged the mother with second-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. She took a plea deal — without admitting guilt — that resulted in a manslaughter conviction and she served about two years. “We would never have known the truth,” Garland wrote to Harpster, “if it hadn’t been for your book and your excellent training.”

This theme came up often in the records: Harpster and his acolytes position 911 call analysis in the no man’s land between intent and accident. With little physical evidence, they can claim, under the guise of science, to know that a suspect lied on the phone. Once murder is on the table, the accused may feel they have no choice but to plead to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence.

When I called Garland to ask about the case, he told me, “I can’t talk about it.”

VII.

Harpster is at once fiercely proud of his program and at the same time possessive of the data behind it. In today’s research community, it’s standard practice to follow the scientific method and share data. But he has refused those who ask.

Harpster once explained to a prosecutor one of the reasons he insists on secrecy: He thinks academics try to steal his work and claim it as their own to make money. “It never works out for them,” he wrote in an email, “because unless you have actually analyzed ALL the data, you will have no idea what the heck you are doing.”

His original study was based on just 100 emergency calls. Almost two-thirds of the calls came from Ohio and two-thirds of the callers were white. Experts told me that’s nowhere near enough data to draw conclusions from because that sample fails to account for who a 911 caller is and how that might affect the way they speak: their race, upbringing, geography, dialect, education. Not to mention that some callers may have autism or otherwise be neurodivergent, which could also affect their speech patterns. “So many things would weigh into this,” said Dr. Arthur Kleinman, a professor of anthropology and psychiatry at Harvard University.

Harpster and his co-authors also didn’t try to validate their model with separate data before publishing the study. In other words, they tested their list of guilty indicators on the same set of data they’d used to build it. Statisticians call that “double dipping.”

The experts said all of this isn’t necessarily dangerous as long as the methods stay academic, and studying 911 calls may very well be a worthwhile pursuit. “But you simply wouldn’t want to use highly exploratory work like this to inform practice without more evidence, even in a low-stakes situation,” said Michael Frank, a psychologist at Stanford University who is writing a book on statistical methods. “Let alone in high-stakes criminal justice situations.”

A team of researchers from Arizona State University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice recently received a federal grant to study 1,000 911 calls. In their grant application, they wrote about the potential danger of misinterpreting witness statements given “the countless accounts of how this presumed guilt can start a chain reaction of confirmation bias.”

In September, they asked Harpster for his data. He responded: “We never forward the data.”

The team at ASU is looking into whether police are any better at identifying liars on the phone than the rest of us might be. “We think there’s no normal way to act on a 911 call,” said the lead investigator, Jessica Salerno, a social psychologist at ASU. Given the gamut of human emotion, she explained, anyone claiming to know the right and wrong way to speak during an emergency has seen too much television.

Like most of the experts I talked to, Salerno didn’t know that Harpster’s model had already been adopted by police and prosecutors across the country. She didn’t know people were being arrested and charged because of it.

“If this were to get out,” Salerno said, “I feel like no one would ever call 911 again.”

VIII.

Harpster’s supporters say it’s easy to cast shade from the ivory tower.

When Jason Kiddey was a young detective in Fremont, Ohio, he saw Harpster speak at the state’s training academy. “I latched on to just about every word he said,” Kiddey told me. He was so impressed that he reached out to Harpster to tell him.

It was late 2012 and Kiddey had just finished interrogating a widower, Jason Risenburg, for almost six hours before Risenburg admitted to giving his wife the methadone that had killed her. “I also did what you asked and told him about the 911 call analysis and he just looked at me like I had no clue what I was talking about,” Kiddey wrote in an email to Harpster. “After throwing down the handout you gave me, he cracked. …… True story!”

Jason Kiddey, a detective in Fremont, Ohio, took Harpster’s course and used 911 call analysis against a widower accused of killing his wife. He defends the program as an investigative tool. (Greg Kahn, special to ProPublica)

Before the interrogation took place, Kiddey’s only evidence was that 911 tape, he told me. Prosecutors charged Risenburg with murder and he took a plea deal for manslaughter. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison, where he remains today. “Because of your training,” Kiddey wrote to Harpster in another email, “a man is sitting in prison for killing his wife.”

He now considers Harpster a mentor and says 911 call analysis is a good tool to reveal clues. “I don’t weigh my case on that,” Kiddey said. “It’s a building block.”

In a phone call last July, Harpster defended his program with pride. It was clear from talking with him that he believes deeply in its value and is sure that he has helped bring killers to justice and offer peace to grieving families. “It’s my life’s work,” he told me.

Harpster said critics don’t understand his methods or how to use them. He said he helps defense attorneys and prosecutors alike and “the research is designed to find the truth wherever it goes.”

Excerpt of Jason Risenburg’s 911 Call

Before interrogating Risenburg about the death of his wife, detective Jason Kiddey had no evidence other than this 911 tape. During that interrogation, Kiddey showed Risenburg an analysis of the call. “After throwing down the handout you gave me,” Kiddey told Harpster, “He cracked.” Risenburg was charged with murder, but he took a plea deal for manslaughter.

Harpster also believes that he’s the final authority on the subject, which makes him wary of scrutiny. I asked to sit in on one of his classes. No, he said, that’s out of the question. They’re only for law enforcement. During the height of the pandemic, Harpster told police he didn’t want to host virtual classes because he feared his course materials would leak out.

There’s also the book he and Adams co-wrote, currently listed on Amazon. “It’s really a textbook for law enforcement,” he said. “But it doesn’t help law enforcement if everybody out there uses it to defeat law enforcement.”

“I don’t want murderers to get away with killing babies,” he told me.

We agreed to talk again soon.

IX.

On a cold, clear night in February 2014, Kathy Carpenter sped from a secluded house in the Rocky Mountains and toward the police station in downtown Aspen. She clutched the wheel with one hand and a cellphone with the other. “OK my, my, my friend had a — I found my friend in the closet and she’s dead,” Carpenter told a 911 dispatcher between wails.

Her friend Nancy Pfister, a ski resort heiress and philanthropist, had been bludgeoned to death. Local police asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to help find out who did it. Kirby Lewis, agent in charge with CBI and one of Harpster’s earliest students, stepped in to analyze Carpenter’s call.

This is what he noted in a report: Carpenter said “help me”; she interrupted herself; she didn’t immediately answer when the dispatcher asked for the address. She provided “extraneous information” about Pfister’s dog. When the dispatcher asked if a defibrillator was in the house, Carpenter paused before saying, “Is there what?”

Excerpt of Kathy Carpenter’s 911 Call

Almost everything Carpenter said — and didn’t say — was evidence of deception, according to the state police agent who analyzed her call.

Lewis found 39 guilty indicators and zero indicators of innocence. Carpenter was arrested eight days later. Newspapers and television stations published the 56-year-old’s mugshot.

She spent three months in jail before someone else confessed to the crime.

Even when people weren’t convicted, some have faced irreparable harm after others decided they chose the wrong words on the phone. Carpenter recently told me the ordeal ruined her life. She lost her job as a bank teller, along with all of her savings and her home. Her car was repossessed. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She had to move in with her mother across the state and now disguises herself in public. People still call her a murderer, she said. “I just want to go into solitude and just hide.”

Kathy Carpenter found her friend’s body and called 911, distraught. An officer trained in 911 call analysis said he found 39 indicators of guilt in what she said. Carpenter was arrested and charged with murder before someone else confessed to the crime. (Greg Kahn, special to ProPublica)

Lewis didn’t respond to questions or interview requests and CBI declined to comment. His email correspondence and resume suggest he’s a true believer in 911 call analysis, part of a cohort of former students who have become boosters of the program.

Lewis has said analyses of 911 calls shouldn’t be considered evidence but rather a suggestion of what a caller knows — an “investigative lead.” That may explain why the Carpenter case didn’t dampen his faith in the program. Since Carpenter was released from jail, Lewis has performed more than two dozen analyses of 911 calls for other departments in Colorado.

He also still trades notes with Harpster over email. Their correspondence shows the lengths some powerful officials have gone to set aside their own better judgment to pursue convictions. In one exchange, Harpster told Lewis that he had spent two hours on the phone with some officers and a prosecutor in Indiana. After the meeting, the prosecutor remarked that Harpster’s ideas sounded like “voodoo magic.”

“Flash forward a year,” Harpster wrote, “that same prosecutor called me up to see if I would testify in the case.”

X.

A document filed away in a Michigan appeals court was the first sign that some judges — the supposed gatekeepers of the justice system — have accepted 911 call analysis as actual expert testimony at trial.

One night in early December 2014, Riley Spitler, a scrawny 16-year-old from the suburbs, was playing with a gun when he accidentally shot his older brother, Patrick. Riley’s call for help was nearly incoherent. Two dispatchers tried to calm him down. “I think I killed him,” he screamed. “Oh my God my life is over.” In shock, he couldn’t figure out how to open the glass front door from the inside so he shattered it with his hand.

Riley’s parents met him at the hospital and told him Patrick was dead. Riley sobbed so loudly the nurses could hear him down the hallway. In the days that followed, he told social workers he wouldn’t ever forgive himself, according to notes on their conversations. “I should be dead,” Riley said. “He should be alive.”

Police arrested Riley on murder charges — not manslaughter, which comes with a much lower possible prison sentence. The day after his arrest, Riley tried to kill himself in jail.

At Riley’s trial in 2016, prosecutors painted him as a drug-dealing, gun-toting teen who resented his popular brother so much that he murdered him and then started lying about it the moment he called 911. A detective who assisted on the case, Joseph Merritt, had taken Harpster’s course four years earlier. Since then, Merritt said in court, he’s applied the methods in 4 out of every 5 cases — more than 100 times. Prosecutors told the judge that Merritt should be able to testify as an expert about the guilty indicators he had identified in Riley’s call that night.

Riley Spitler said on a 911 call that he’d accidentally shot his brother, Patrick. Riley was later tried on murder charges. (J. Scott Park/Jackson Citizen Patriot-Mlive.com via AP)

For instance, when the dispatcher asked, “What happened that he got shot?” Riley responded, “What hap— What do you mean?” This, Merritt wrote in an email to prosecutors, was an attempt to resist the dispatcher. Saying things like “my life is over” showed that he was concerned with himself and not his brother. “Very ‘me’ focused,” Merritt wrote. Riley said again and again that he thought his brother was dead. This is considered to be another guilty indicator known as “acceptance of death.”

Excerpt of Riley Spitler’s 911 Call

Sixteen-year-old Riley, in a frantic call, told two dispatchers that he’d accidentally shot his brother in the chest. A detective trained by Harpster noted an array of “indicators of guilt” throughout the call, some of which he later testified about during Riley’s trial.

Like most states, Michigan courts’ rules for evidence — adopted from the Daubert standard, which was named after a Supreme Court decision issued almost 30 years ago — say trial judges are responsible for making sure expert testimony has a reliable foundation.

Prosecutors in Lyon County, Nevada, once wanted a detective trained by Harpster to testify about the 911 call analysis used against a man accused of shooting his wife. The judge wouldn’t allow it. “I don’t see any reliable methodology or science,” he said. “I’m not going to let you say that it’s more likely that someone who is guilty or innocent or is more suspicious or less suspicious.”

The judge in Riley’s case, a former prosecutor named John McBain, was more credulous. He let Merritt testify as an expert and accepted 911 call analysis on its face. McBain explained his reasoning: Harpster’s course is recognized by the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards. This, McBain said, was proof of 911 call analysis’ value.

Joe Kempa, the commission’s acting deputy executive director, told me his agency does not technically certify or accredit courses — it just funds them. There is little review of the curriculum, he said, because the agency approves up to 10 courses a day from too many fields to count. Accrediting each would be too hard. As long as a course is “in the genre of policing” without posing an obvious health threat, it will likely be approved for state funds, he said.

Riley was convicted of second-degree murder. McBain sentenced him to 20 to 40 years in prison. McBain’s office didn’t respond to multiple interview requests.

Riley Spitler accidentally shot and killed his brother in 2014. Police and prosecutors pursued murder charges, in part because of what he said on the 911 call. (Greg Kahn, special to ProPublica)

Riley appealed on the grounds that Merritt’s testimony about the 911 call and other statement analysis techniques never should have been admitted. “This case is about junk science,” Riley’s attorney argued in court records, “used to convict a 16-year-old of murder.” The appellate judges threw out the murder conviction. Riley was resentenced for manslaughter and then released from prison in 2020.

Across the country, trial judges seldom restrict expert testimony brought in by prosecutors, the National Academy of Sciences found after reviewing publicly available federal rulings in 2009. The Daubert standard is applied unevenly because many judges don’t know how to spot sound science, the academy found. As one of the country’s leading experts put it later: “The justice system may be institutionally incapable of applying Daubert in criminal cases.”

Today, Riley is 24. He’s married with a newborn. He has a real estate license. He packed on pounds of muscle in prison and most people in town don’t recognize him anymore. Riley likes it that way.

After he was convicted, he felt despondent about both his brother’s death and how the outside world saw him. “People made me feel like a monster,” Riley told me. He replayed the trial over and over in his head, including Merritt’s testimony. He spent hours in the prison library studying Michigan’s rules on evidence standards.

Riley says McBain should have known 911 call analysis didn’t meet those standards. “It’s just insane that a judge wouldn’t be the wiser to that,” he said. “But that’s our system.”

After he learned of the public records requests I had sent to his department, Merritt called me. I told him about the story I was reporting and he said he’s not allowed to comment on the case. He didn’t respond to other interview requests later. The chief prosecutor in the county didn’t respond to my messages either.

In 2018 — one year after Riley’s conviction was overturned — Merritt took Harpster’s course again.

XI.

“It’s kind of like a human lie detector test.” That’s how a prosecutor in Michigan described 911 call analysis in a 2016 email exchange, acknowledging that he knew the COPS Scale wouldn’t be admissible in most jurisdictions. The question, then, was how to get the method into trial without litigating the science behind it or teeing up an appeal.

In chains of emails, they described a playbook to overcome this: First, identify law enforcement witnesses who have taken Harpster’s course. Then tell them how to testify about the guilty indicators by broadly referencing training and experience. As Esteves, the prosecutor in Iowa, put it in an email: “Have them testify why this 911 call is inconsistent with an innocent caller, consistent with someone with a guilty mind.”

Next, prime jurors during jury selection and opening arguments about how a normal person should and shouldn’t react in an emergency. Give them a transcript of the 911 call and then play the audio. “When they hear it,” a prosecutor in Louisiana once told Harpster, “it will be like a Dr. Phil ‘a-ha’ moment.” Finally, remind jurors about the indicators during closing arguments. “Reinforce all the incriminating sections of the call,” another prosecutor wrote, “omissions, lack of emotion, over emotion, failure to act appropriately.”

“Juries love it, it’s easy for them to understand,” Harpster once explained to a prosecutor, “unlike DNA which puts them to sleep.”

Phil Dixon, a career defense attorney who trains lawyers at the University of North Carolina’s School of Government, told me this is what makes 911 call analysis so pernicious: It can look very much like regular opinion testimony from a witness. But when prosecutors cross the line and intentionally circumvent court rules for evidence standards, he said, that’s cause for concern. He called it “attempting to clothe expert opinion in the guise of lay testimony.”

In many places, when prosecutors don’t introduce witnesses as experts, they also don’t have to disclose discovery material like consultations with Harpster or any analysis of the 911 tape. Without those disclosures, defense attorneys are caught off guard during trial. It also helps explain how 911 call analysis has spread far and wide almost undetected.

The former chief trial attorney in Macomb County, Michigan, told Harpster that she won convictions against parents in two separate child death cases partly thanks to him. In one case, she said she put a dispatcher, who’d been trained by Harpster, on the stand to testify. “This dispatcher had gained the tools and the knowledge from your class to make a HUGE impact on the prosecution of my child death case!” she wrote. Describing another case, the prosecutor said: “I used many of your points in my closing argument to show the guilt of the defendant and got a guilty verdict!”

Another prosecutor in Ohio said he huddled up with other local prosecutors who had taken the training course and listened to a 911 tape. “All of us finding it to be dirty, I called upon Tracy Harpster,” she wrote, explaining how Harpster helped prepare them for juror examinations and questions for witnesses about the 911 call. “We were able to direct the jury to the parts of the call that indicated a guilty party,” the prosecutor wrote. “Eventually we secured a guilty verdict.”

Both prosecutors either declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.

“This is unconscionable,” David Faigman, dean of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, told me. As a leading authority on the legal standards for evidence, he’s usually one of the first to learn about new junk science. But even he didn’t know how some prosecutors were leveraging 911 call analysis. “There are so many things wrong with this,” Faigman said, “it’s hard to know where to begin.”

Former federal prosecutor Miriam Krinsky, who is now the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, said these prosecutors are supposed to be “ministers of justice” and should have known better. “We need to be very careful about things such as this.”

It’s not an accident that some prosecutors would put stock in the program. The Ohio Supreme Court has approved Harpster’s course for continuing education credits multiple times. That adds to its legitimacy because prosecutors need those credits to remain in good standing.

In 2018, Harpster emailed a local prosecutor, Nancy Moore, and asked her to sponsor his course by sending in the application forms with her signature, along with his resume and some class information.

About a week later, the court approved the program. Lyn Tolan, the court’s public information director, told me it’s the responsibility of the sponsor — not the court — to evaluate programs that the court approves. She said she was unaware of the independent studies of 911 calls. I asked what steps court officials took to find that information. Tolan repeated, “We rely on the sponsor for that.”

Moore didn’t respond to interview requests. She is now the state’s deputy inspector general. At least 20 Ohio prosecutors attended the training she sponsored for Harpster in 2018. One of them became a federal prosecutor.

Another is now a judge.

XII.

Time and again, many of those who host Harpster have not asked even basic questions about the program — or apparently done a cursory internet search for the man who helped create it. If they had, they’d have found his Facebook page.

On it, Harpster has openly espoused misogynistic, transphobic, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant views. He has called peaceful protesters “filthy scum,” and several posts have been flagged as false information. Ironically, he’s also singled out the government agency that launched his work. “The FBI is corrupt,” he wrote once.

Tracy Harpster has a history of posting inflammatory content on Facebook. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

Soon after the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, Harpster shared a meme with Floyd’s face on a $20 bill that said “Treasury Department will honor George Floyd by placing his portrait on the counterfeit $20.” Floyd was originally accused of trying to use a counterfeit bill before he was murdered by a police officer.

Since fall 2021, Harpster has been temporarily banned from posting on Facebook at least twice for breaking the site’s rules. One suspension was for sharing a video of someone accidentally shooting themselves and the reason for the other is unclear.

All the while, he has maintained a steady stream of training sessions, often at police conferences. Those conferences, I discovered, appear to be one of the most efficient platforms for spreading junk science. Harpster spoke at more than 130 between 2006 and 2017, according to his resume.

One weekend in October 2019, he addressed more than 100 Arizona police officers and prosecutors at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. They worked at some of the most powerful agencies in the state, including a local FBI office and the state attorney general’s office.

Casey Rucker, then a detective with the Flagstaff Police Department, was also vice president of the Arizona Homicide Investigators Association, which organized the event. Rucker coordinated an appearance by Harpster where he presented his material. He was paid $1,750.

Rucker also sponsored the seminar for education credits with the state’s Peace Officers Standards and Training Board. It’s another mark of legitimacy. The board told me that it didn’t review the program’s qualifications and instead left that up to Rucker and his home agency in Flagstaff. “Each chief or sheriff has the ability to decide the training needed by the men and women in their organization,” Matt Giordano, executive director of the board, told me in an email.

Flagstaff police asked Harpster for a course outline and presentation slides, but it’s unclear what other steps the department took to evaluate the curriculum. The department’s legal adviser said Rucker believes he discussed the sponsorship with a former supervisor to get approval. Rucker is now retired and didn’t respond to interview requests.

The conference had swift impact. At least three attendees reached out to Harpster afterwards, including a cold case detective who credited him with single-handedly changing the direction of a murder investigation.

Nathan Moffat, president of the association that put on the conference, said the extent of his vetting was talking to other groups that had sponsored Harpster previously. He said the reviews were good: Audiences found Harpster entertaining and well-informed.

Moffat, who is also a career detective, told me he’s personally never used 911 call analysis and distanced himself and the association from the program. “The only normal reaction is to not expect any specific reaction,” he said. “If someone tried testifying as an expert after the class, that’s mortifying.”

XIII.

Since we first spoke by phone back in July, Harpster had been dodging me. He said in a text that he was on vacation and wouldn’t be available to sit for an interview for months.

ProPublica was getting closer to publishing a story about Jessica Logan, a young mother in Illinois convicted of murdering her baby after Harpster’s methods were used against her. And I wanted to make sure Harpster had every chance to address what I'd found since we last spoke.

In chatting with detectives, Harpster occasionally mentions his vacation house on a lake in Michigan. So I searched lakeside property records and found a deed with his name on it. There was an address.

On a beautiful Saturday over Labor Day weekend, I drove about four hours north from Detroit to a bucolic neighborhood near the bridge to the Upper Peninsula. After I’d taken a few wrong turns, some neighbors pointed me down a dirt road that looked more like an ATV trail. It opened to a grass clearing with a crystal lake and cedar trees on the other side. Families were barbecuing along the shore. Boats motored by. I walked to the closest house and knocked.

Harpster opened the screen door. He’s a brawny guy with thick arms and a tight, white goatee. His head is cleanshaven now where there were once dark curls. I’d seen pictures of him before on his Facebook page, holding fish or posing alongside students of his program. He likes to get beers with them after class.

On my list of things to talk about were his relationship with law enforcement, with the FBI and with Adams; his emails with prosecutors; judges like McBain; the scientists and their problems with his data; the conferences and the many agencies that have given him the rubber stamp over the years; and the money he’s made off all of it.

Most importantly, there was Russ Faria, Jade Benning, Riley Spitler, Kathy Carpenter and 100 other similar cases I’d found around the country. Did he know these names?

In my six months of reporting, nobody had been willing to take responsibility for inviting 911 call analysis into the justice system or for the repercussions that followed. It seemed the buck didn’t stop anywhere. But it had started here, with him.

After I introduced myself, Harpster shook his head solemnly and said there would be no discussion. “I’m disappointed you would show up here unannounced,” Harpster told me before closing the door. “I’m on vacation.”

Three days later, he taught a 911 call analysis course in Texas.

Public Defenders and Defense Attorneys: Help ProPublica Report on Criminal Justice

To get notified when the next installment in this series publishes, text STORY to 917-905-1223. Standard messaging rates apply.

Kirsten Berg contributed reporting.

by Duaa Eldeib

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.

Lying on her living room sofa, her head cradled just under her husband’s shoulder, Brooke Smith pulled out a pen and began marking up her medical records.

Paging through the documents, she read a narrative that did not match her experience, one in which she said doctors failed to heed her concerns and nurses misrepresented what she told them. In anticipation of giving birth to her first child in the spring of 2014, Brooke had twice gone to the hospital in the weeks leading up to her due date because she hadn’t felt the baby kick, her medical records show. And twice doctors had sent her back home.

Brooke, a Black singer-songwriter who has worked as a New York City elementary school teaching assistant, has kept her medical records as a reminder of all that unfolded and all that she believes could have been prevented.

After that second hospital admission, and following some testing, she was diagnosed with “false labor” and discharged, records show, though she was 39 weeks and 3 days pregnant and insisted that her baby’s movements had slowed. 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. The risk of delivering a stillborn child also continues to rise at or after 40 weeks.

Six days later, she and her husband, Colin, met friends for breakfast. Brooke, then 33, had pancakes with whipped cream, the kind of sugary meal that usually prompted kicks from her baby within minutes. When the baby didn’t move, she told her husband they needed to return to the hospital for a third time.

Her due date had come and gone; this time she wasn’t leaving until doctors delivered her baby.

But at the hospital they learned their baby, a girl they had named Kennedy Grey, had died in Brooke’s womb. She would have to deliver their stillborn daughter.

The doctor, the same one who had been on call during her second hospital admission less than a week before, asked her when she last felt the baby move. Brooke said she had felt rapid, almost violent kicking two days earlier, followed by wave-like movements. The doctor, Brooke said, told her that she should have come in earlier.

“If they would have listened to me earlier, I would have delivered a living baby,” Brooke said recently. “But if you’re a Black woman, you get dismissed because it’s like, ‘What are you complaining about now?’”

For Brooke, her experiences in the last weeks of her pregnancy, along with what she later discovered in her medical records, crystallized what researchers and medical experts have found: While many pregnant people say their doctors and nurses do not listen to them and their concerns are often dismissed, pregnant Black people face an even higher burden.

One 2019 study that looked at people’s experience during their pregnancy and childbirth lamented the “disturbing” number of patients who reported a health care provider ignored them, refused their request for help or failed to respond to such requests in a reasonable amount of time. The study found pregnant people of color were more than twice as likely as white people to report such “mistreatment.”

Another study looking at stillbirths that occurred later in pregnancy highlighted the “importance of listening to mothers’ concerns and symptoms,” including “a maternal gut instinct that something was wrong.”

Content Warning

Warning: This image shows a stillborn baby. The Smith family took photos of their daughter to preserve their memory of her.

Brooke Smith holds a photo of her stillborn daughter, Kennedy Grey. (Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica)

Every year more than 20,000 pregnancies in the U.S. end in stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. But not all stillbirths are inevitable. This year, ProPublica has reported on the U.S. stillbirth crisis, including the botched rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant people, the proliferation of misinformation, the failure to do enough to lower a stubbornly high national stillbirth rate and the lack of study of the causes of stillbirths.

Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells the story of how the U.S. health care system has failed Black mothers in particular. Black women overall are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth, according to 2020 CDC data, the most recent available. In some states, including South Carolina, Kansas and Tennessee, they are around three times as likely to deliver a stillborn baby.

In Arkansas and Mississippi, the stillbirth rate for Black women in 2020 topped 15 per 1,000 live births and fetal deaths; it was more than 11 in New Jersey and New York. The national stillbirth rate for Black women was 10.3 and for white women 4.7.

But drawing focus to Black stillbirths is a challenge in a country where stillbirths, in general, have been understudied, underfunded and received little public attention. In addition, the community of stillbirth researchers and advocates remains relatively small and overwhelmingly white.

Academic studies and national obstetric groups have explicitly identified racism as one of the factors that contribute to persistent health disparities. In 2020, in the wake of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists joined around two dozen obstetric and gynecologic health organizations to issue a statement expressing their commitment to “eliminating racism and racial inequities” that lead to disparities.

“Systemic and institutional racism are pervasive in our country and in our country’s health care institutions, including the fields of obstetrics and gynecology,” the statement reads.

Nneka Hall, a maternal health advocate and doula trainer who recently served on Massachusetts’ Special Commission on Racial Inequities in Maternal Health, said disparities are embedded in the health care system, including unequal rates of stillbirths and dying during pregnancy or soon after.

Black women face nearly three times the risk of maternal mortality than white women, according to CDC data. Even at higher educational levels, Black people die during pregnancy or childbirth at higher rates than their white counterparts, as do their babies. Pregnant people are also more likely to deliver prematurely if they are Black.

“It’s the Black experience,” said Hall, whose daughter Annaya was stillborn. “You’re told that you have to advocate for yourself, but when you’re in a melanated body and you advocate for yourself, it’s not taken seriously. If you raise your voice, you’re being abusive or abrasive. If you say you know something, you’re automatically shown that you don’t know as much as you think you know.”

For years, Dr. Ashanda Saint Jean has heard the stories of Black patients who, before they suffered the devastating loss of delivering a stillborn baby, said they tried to tell their doctors and nurses that something was wrong.

But they said they were dismissed by their medical team. Even shut down.

With each new story, Saint Jean asked the same question: Would they have been treated differently if they had not been Black? Far too often, she concluded, the answer was yes.

“Those are the stories I hear that break my heart,” she said.

Saint Jean, chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Health Alliance Hospitals of the Hudson Valley, said those patients, the very same ones who face an increased risk of stillbirth, are left feeling powerless.

“We know that this is certainly a public health crisis, and it should be a public health priority,” said Saint Jean, a diversity, equity and inclusive excellence adviser for ACOG and associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at New York Medical College.

The risk of a stillbirth increases along with the number of “significant life events” a pregnant person faces, including job loss, an inability to pay bills or the hospitalization of a close family member. Black people who are pregnant, research shows, are more likely than their white counterparts to report multiple stressful life incidents.

In 2020, a CDC report examining racial and ethnic disparities in stillbirths identified several factors that might be at play, including the patient’s health before pregnancy, socioeconomic status and access to quality health care, as well as stress, institutional bias and racism. The report found the “disparities suggest opportunities for prevention to reduce” the stillbirth rate.

A spokesperson for ACOG said that the group has been working for years to eliminate racial inequities through policy, training, guidance and advocacy. The group has publicly acknowledged the field’s disturbing history, including the fact that James Marion Sims, who’s known as the “father of gynecology,” conducted medical experiments on enslaved Black women.

Last year, the CDC launched a racism and health web portal, and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky declared racism a serious public health threat, saying in a statement that racism isn’t just discrimination but “the structural barriers” that influence how people live and work.

Dr. Terri Major-Kincade, a neonatologist and health equity expert in Texas, said it’s misguided to highlight disparities among different racial groups without recognizing the lingering effects of racism. She said racism, not race, is responsible for the disparities.

One recent modeling analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health determined lowered levels of segregation decreased the odds of stillbirth for Black people, but had no effect on stillbirths for white people. The researchers estimated decreasing segregation could prevent about 900 stillbirths a year for expectant Black parents.

“A dedicated provider is not going to outshine a system that’s compromised by years of structural bias,” Major-Kincade said. “The system is going to win every time.”

The first and easiest step, she said, is listening to pregnant Black women.

“We can’t prevent every stillbirth,” she said, “but we can sure prevent a lot if we listen.”

Eight years after her daughter was stillborn, Brooke still has days she can’t get out of bed. She replays in her mind how she begged her medical team to listen to her concerns about the baby’s lack of movement as she neared her due date. After nurses hooked her up to a monitor and the baby moved, someone on the staff told her that children often make “liars” out of their parents. Another time, Brooke said, they told her the baby was being “lazy.”

She witnessed the same mindset reflected in her medical records. She studied each line carefully, scribbling comments in the margins. When she reached the notes from her hospital admissions, she gasped and turned to her husband. “Can you believe this?” she asked him. A nurse had written that Brooke “reports she is very bad at monitoring and feeling” fetal movement, the records show.

“I never said I was bad at monitoring,” Brooke wrote at the time. “I mentioned that she doesn’t move the way they say she should.”

As a Black woman, Brooke knew all too well that racial disparities existed. She and her friends had traded stories of their own inequities and indignities. And she had felt the sting of doctors questioning her pain and office employees asking if she would be able to pay her medical bills.

When Brooke learned she was pregnant, she thought she could find a way around those disparities by going to what she called a hospital where women from the country club went. For each appointment, she drove nearly an hour each way from her home in Queens to Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

Back at home, she and Colin prepared for their daughter’s birth. They liked the name Kennedy Grey because it was unique and gender-neutral. In her nursery, they assembled her crib and picked out a bright pink sheet to match the pink letters of her name on her toy box. Brooke, who grew up in Brooklyn and planned to pass down her impeccable style to her daughter, filled a closet with billowy tulle dresses, cozy footed pajamas and tiny Converse infant booties.

And so, when they arrived at the hospital that final time and the doctor told them she couldn’t find Kennedy’s heartbeat, Brooke told her to check again. And again.

“We were in shock,” she said. “We didn’t scream. We didn’t cry. We didn’t believe it.”

Brooke and Colin Smith got matching K tattoos for their daughter Kennedy Grey, who was stillborn. (Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica)

Three separate ultrasounds did not detect a heartbeat, but Brooke and Colin held steadfast to their Christian faith. The doctor wrote in the medical records that Brooke and her family believed that “the fetus may be born alive and will require resuscitation.” Just maybe, Brooke recalled thinking, Kennedy’s heart rate was too faint for the machines to pick up.

After more than 12 hours of labor, Brooke delivered her daughter. When Kennedy was placed in her arms, Brooke gave her mouth-to-mouth. For years to come, she thought to herself, she would tell the story of how the doctor had said her baby was dead, but she was mistaken, and then Brooke would point to her beautiful daughter beside her.

An autopsy would later find signs in the baby’s lungs of deep gasps before she died, and her umbilical cord, which had a knot in it, was wrapped around her neck. The sudden burst of movement Brooke felt before her daughter died, research suggests, may have been a fetal seizure caused by the lack of oxygen.

“There’s a lot of self-blame and guilt,” said Brooke, her gentle brown eyes overshadowed by her dark-rimmed glasses. “Why didn’t I fight more? Why didn’t I say more? And then I try to come to a level of peace and say, ‘You trusted your medical providers.’ When we get medical care, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re putting our lives in these people’s hands.”

The Smiths sued the medical staff, the hospital and the hospital system, Northwell Health, making many of the allegations about her care. The medical providers denied wrongdoing. The lawsuit was dismissed after Brooke, who by then had a young son at home and was looking for new attorneys after her old ones withdrew from the case, missed a court date.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Northwell Health did not answer questions about Brooke’s care. The spokesperson extended the hospital system’s sympathies to Brooke and her family, adding, “We understand our responsibility to our patients who entrust their care with us.

“Northwell Health strives to provide the best possible care for each individual patient,” said the spokesperson. “At Northwell, we have ongoing performance improvement processes to continually evaluate our guidelines and treatments with the goal to provide optimal care for birthing people and their babies.”

Women of color have been fueling a growing underground movement creating maternal health programs that focus on equity and reproductive justice.

Kanika Harris is the director of maternal and child health at Black Women’s Health Imperative, a long-standing national nonprofit organization created for and by Black women focusing specifically on the health and wellness of Black women and girls.

Kanika Harris at a stillbirth prevention march in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15 (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

For years, Harris said, Black women were grateful to have been invited to discuss their ideas and explain the trauma they faced to researchers, health care leaders and government officials, but little changed. Building their own organizations not only fills a void left by the groups that have not met the needs of people of color, it also signals a commitment to celebrate and learn from a rich history of traditional and supportive practices in their communities.

Harris is separately working with another organization to establish a birth center in Detroit, which they say would become the first Black-led birth center in Michigan.

“We can’t wait for hospitals to figure it out,” said Harris, who lives in Washington, D.C. “We have to do this ourselves. My daughter can’t go through what I went through.”

In 2010, Harris delivered twins, a boy named Kodjo, who was stillborn, and a girl named Zindzi, who died a few days later. Both the fetal death report and the death certificate list Harris’ race as Black and her education as “8th grade or less.” At the time, Harris was preparing her doctoral dissertation in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan.

Sitting in the car after meeting with the pathologist who walked through Kennedy’s autopsy results, Brooke and Colin Smith decided to launch a nonprofit to raise awareness about stillbirth and help families who had experienced pregnancy or infant loss. A key part of empowering families, Brooke said, is educating them about stillbirths.

Like many parents, she and Colin didn’t know stillbirths still happened.

They both decided to go back to school to get bachelor’s degrees in social work, and they are now pursuing master’s degrees so they can continue supporting families.

Brooke’s grief has intensified as the years have passed, building from an initial shock to a feeling that rarely leaves her. It has taken her time to figure out how to resume the ordinary rhythms of life and navigate being around other children whose mothers were pregnant at the same time as her. She went to one child’s birthday party, but hasn’t been able to bring herself to attend others. On her and Colin’s wedding anniversary, they got matching “K” tattoos on their ring fingers.

In 2018, Eric Adams, then Brooklyn borough president and now mayor of New York City, officially commended the Smiths for their nonprofit work and proclaimed May 19 as Kennedy Grey Community Service Day.

As gratifying as the recognition is, she can’t help but feel disheartened that after years of advocacy to reduce stillbirths, substantial reform has yet to be achieved. It’s not enough to extend condolences for her loss, Brooke said. She wants change.

Sometimes she lies awake at night thinking about the few hours she was able to spend with Kennedy. She and Colin took pictures of their daughter, one of which is still the lock screen image on her phone. The nurses wrapped her in the leopard-print blanket they brought to take her home in and slipped her feet into her pink Converse booties. Brooke and Colin asked their family to film them with their daughter.

“It’s May 19, and this is our dear Ms. Kennedy Grey. We just wanted to have a video with our daughter,” an exhausted Brooke said into the camera. She sang a song she had composed for her. As her melodious voice carried through the room, Colin reached over and stroked Kennedy’s cheek. When it was his turn, he recited the nursery rhyme “This Little Piggy” as he squeezed Kennedy’s toes.

Brooke hadn’t shed a single tear in the hospital, not until the end, when she could no longer deny that her daughter had died. A nurse entered the room to take Kennedy away. She clutched Kennedy tighter.

“Don’t take my baby,” she wailed. “Don’t take my baby.”

It was the last time she would see her daughter.

Help Us Report on Stillbirths

by Jennifer Oldham for ProPublica, photography by Chet Strange, special to ProPublica

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.

Sheriff’s deputies driving 45 mph couldn’t outpace the flames. Dense smoke, swirling dust and flying plywood obscured the firestorm’s growth and direction, delaying evacuations.

Within minutes, landscaped islands in a Costco parking lot in Superior, Colorado, caught fire as structures became the inferno’s primary fuel. It consumed the Element Hotel, as well as part of a Tesla service center, a Target and the entire Sagamore neighborhood. Across a six-lane freeway, in the town of Louisville, flames rocketed through parks and climbed wooden fences, setting homes ablaze. They spread from one residence to the next in a mere eight minutes, reaching temperatures as high as 1,650 degrees.

First image: Two homes in Louisville, Colorado’s Centennial Heights neighborhood burned down in the Marshall Fire on Dec. 30, 2021. Second image: A flag is seen near the remains of a home and vehicles in Superior, Colorado, on Jan. 8, 2022. (First image: Marc Piscotty/Getty Images. Second image: Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images)

On Dec. 30, 2021, more than 35,000 people in Superior and Louisville, as well as unincorporated Boulder County, fled the fire — some so quickly they left barefoot and without their pets. Firefighters abandoned miles of hose in neighborhood driveways to escape.

The Marshall Fire, the most destructive in Colorado history, killed two people and incinerated 1,084 residences and seven businesses within hours. Financial losses are expected to top $2 billion.

The blaze showed that Colorado and much of the West face a fire threat unlike anything they have seen. No longer is the danger limited to homes adjacent to forests. Urban areas are threatened, too.

Yet despite previous warnings of this new threat, ProPublica found Colorado’s response hasn’t kept pace. Legislative efforts to make homes safer by requiring fire-resistant materials in their construction have been repeatedly stymied by developers and municipalities, while taxpayers shoulder the growing cost to put out the fires and rebuild in their aftermath.

The Marshall Fire Burned Grasslands to the West Before Consuming Neighborhoods and Shopping Centers in Boulder County Satellite imagery was taken in 2019, two years before the Marshall Fire, and obtained via NAIP. (Map by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Many residents are unaware they are now at risk because federal and state wildfire forecasts and maps also haven’t kept pace with the growing danger to their communities. Indeed, some wildland fire forecasts model urban areas as “non-burnable,” even though the Marshall Fire proved otherwise.

The disaster put an exclamation point on what scientists, planners and federal officials warned for years: Communities outside the traditional wildland-urban interface, or WUI, are now vulnerable as a changing climate, overgrown forests and explosive development across the West fuel ever-unpredictable fire behavior. Fire experts define the WUI, pronounced woo-ee, as areas where plants such as trees, shrubs and grasses are near, or mixed with, homes, power lines, businesses and other human development.

They now agree that instead of a threat confined to the WUI, the entire state, including areas far from forests, may be at risk of a conflagration.

“The Marshall Fire was a horrible, tragic event that served as a wake-up call for the rest of our state,” said state Rep. Lisa Cutter, a Democrat who represents mountain and foothill areas. “I don’t think we realized how much wildfire could impact communities that aren’t deep in the forest — it’s not something any of us are immune to.”

Unheeded Warnings

(Data Source: Colorado Forest Atlas. Map by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)

An early warning of the growing danger to suburban communities arrived in 2001. That year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies identified scores of Colorado municipalities adjacent to public lands as being at high risk of a wildland blaze-turned-urban conflagration. Some of these areas burned in the Marshall Fire.

A decade later, in 2012, another warning came, as an unprecedented weather-driven inferno, the Waldo Canyon Fire, destroyed several Colorado Springs neighborhoods.

Afterward, fire experts urged state lawmakers to adopt a model building code that communities in high-risk areas could enact. Such codes have been scientifically proven to reduce risk for residents and rescuers and to increase the odds structures will withstand a blaze by requiring fire-resistant materials on siding, roofs, decks and fences, along with mesh-covered vents that prevent embers from entering.

But lawmakers bowed to pressure from building and real estate lobbyists as well as municipal officials who demanded local control over private property.

Meanwhile, the number of new homes built in Colorado’s WUI — as defined by researchers several years ago — more than doubled between 1990 and 2020. And nationwide, the WUI is growing by 2 million acres a year. Homes in 70,000 communities worth $1.3 trillion are now within the path of a firestorm, according to a June report from the U.S. Fire Administration that featured photos of the Marshall Fire’s destruction.

Over 40,000 Residential Structures Were Built in the Areas Now Considered Wildland-Urban Interface in Boulder County Between 1990 and 2022 The location of each dot was determined by the geographic centroid of the parcel containing it. In rural areas, the dots may not reflect the exact location of the building. The WUI boundaries are from the 2017 Colorado Wildfire Risk Assessment, which are the most recent boundaries contained in the Colorado Forest Atlas. (Data Source: Boulder County Assessor’s Office. Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)

Watch video ➜

In the months that followed the Marshall Fire, there were again calls to consider a statewide building code. A last-minute amendment to a fire mitigation bill in May would have created a board to develop statewide building rules, but it was pulled after builders, real estate agents, municipalities and others opposed it.

It wasn’t the first time the state’s powerful building industry asserted its influence over policy. Whenever a wildfire bill comes to the state legislature, well-heeled lobbyists routinely represent the industry, records kept by the Colorado secretary of state show. The state’s culture of local control and the construction industry’s $25 billion annual contribution to the economy hampered lawmakers’ ability to find middle ground on a minimum statewide building code.

ProPublica’s review of legislation introduced from 2014 to 2022 found only 15 out of 77 wildfire-related bills focused primarily on helping homeowners mitigate their risk from fires. Most of the 15 proposals offered incentives to homeowners and communities through income tax deductions or grants — some of which required municipalities to raise matching funds — to clear vegetation around structures.

None called for mandatory building requirements in wildfire-prone areas, even as 15 of the 20 largest wildfires in state history have occurred since 2012.

The lack of uniform regulations has cost the Centennial State millions in federal grant money: The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied the state grants from the agency’s resilient infrastructure funds, which from fiscal 2020 to 2022 totaled $101 million.

Colorado remains one of only eight states without a minimum construction standard for homes.

Municipalities Weigh Prevention and Its Cost

Cherrywood Lane in Louisville. The Marshall Fire incinerated 550 homes and businesses in the city. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Developers have also influenced municipalities’ recent decisions, as homes decimated by the Marshall Fire are rebuilt in Boulder County, and the cities of Superior and Louisville located within it. The debate has reflected difficult tradeoffs between the cost of making homes more fire-resistant — particularly in an era of high inflation and unpredictable supply chains — and residents’ tolerance for risk.

Lawmakers in Louisville, where 550 homes and businesses burned, voted to remove a fire sprinkler requirement for homes, citing cost, despite evidence such systems reduce the risk of dying in a home fire by 80%. The City Council also voted to allow residents to choose whether to follow new energy efficiency requirements estimated to add $5,000 to $100,000 to the cost of a new home.

By contrast, in unincorporated Boulder County, which lost 157 homes to the Marshall Fire, commissioners in June voted to require fire-resistant materials on all new and renovated homes. Before the inferno, the eastern grasslands were exempt. (Mountain residents, who since 1989 have been required to follow mitigation practices, have seen the effectiveness of such codes: Eight out of 10 of their homes survived the Fourmile Canyon Fire in 2010.)

In Superior, which lost 378 structures, the Board of Trustees voted down a proposed citywide WUI building code in May. After residents of the leveled Sagamore neighborhood requested they revisit their decision, trustees reconsidered in July.

The financial pressures facing Superior officials and their constituents were evident as they considered whether to require fire-resistant materials solely for homes destroyed by the Marshall Fire or for the entire city.

“This is all a huge cost we cannot bear,” said Robert Lousberg, a resident who wants to rebuild several homes. “I understood this is a once-in-a-lifetime fire.”

Some neighbors disagreed.

“Sagamore burned down in less than an hour — one of my neighbors ended up in the hospital after trying to escape the fire on foot — that’s the main reason we need these codes, to slow the spread of fire,” Dan Cole said. “We have an opportunity to build a more fire-resistant neighborhood right now, and it would be foolish and short sighted not to take it.”

Builders estimated that costs for tempered-glass windows, fire-resistant siding and other materials could reach $5,500 to $30,000 per home. Procuring the materials and labor to install them could delay rebuilding.

Like residents, town trustees were divided about whether the cost outweighed safety benefits to residents and first responders should there be another conflagration.

“To me, it’s unconscionable to have people rebuilding in an unsafe manner,” said Trustee Laura Skladzinski, who did not seek reelection last month. “I would rather have residents pay $20,000 now. If they cannot afford it, how are they going to be able to afford it when their house burns down?”

Some noted that most residents didn’t have enough insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding their homes.

Trustee Neal Shah said the city should have adopted tougher codes after the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs, which prompted calls for a voluntary statewide building code that communities could institute requiring fire-resistant materials in homes.

“I fundamentally believe in WUI standards,” Shah said, “what I can’t solve is the math.”

The body voted 5-1 to institute the code, then added an opt-out clause for those rebuilding their residences.

Colorado Springs Fire Foreshadowed the Risks

Waldo Canyon Fire burns west of Colorado Springs on June 25, 2012. The city instituted tougher building requirements following the blaze. (Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

A decade before the Marshall Fire, a blaze was burning in the mountains above Colorado Springs on a 101-degree June day. That afternoon a thunderstorm caused a sudden shift in the wind, pushing a wall of burning debris out of the Rocky Mountain foothills into the state’s second-largest city.

Firefighters fled the 750-foot-high fire front — as tall as a 53-floor building — as it chewed through pine, pinyon and juniper dried by a record-hot spring. Sixty-mile-per-hour gusts peeled back the door on a fire truck. Fist-sized embers rained down on the city’s Mountain Shadows community. The fire incinerated 79 homes per hour, or 1.3 per minute, over 5 ½ hours, a report found.

The Waldo Canyon Fire killed two people. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

In the aftermath of the Waldo Canyon Fire, which destroyed 347 homes and killed two people, Colorado Springs drew lessons from which residences had survived and capitalized on fresh memories of burned neighborhoods to institute tougher building requirements.

Patty Johnson (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Standing recently in the shade of a still-scorched tree behind her home, Patty Johnson described how her house was relatively unscathed, even as eight of her neighbors lost their residences. She credited ignition-resistant materials, including stucco walls, siding, a composite deck and a concrete tile roof. Drought-resistant landscaping also helped. Her family sold the home in September to move into a smaller place in the city.

After-action reports found neighbors’ work clearing vegetation around homes helped firefighters save 82% of residences in the 28-square-mile burn area.

FEMA estimated that minimal expenditures to protect Colorado Springs neighborhoods had paid off. In Cedar Heights, $300,000 in mitigation had prevented about $77 million in losses.

“The Waldo Canyon Fire was shocking, but it could have been so much worse if the city of Colorado Springs had not spent decades getting ready,” said Molly Mowery, co-founder of the Community Wildfire Planning Center.

Even so, the fire reached 2,000 degrees and moved so fast it incinerated some homes with fire-resistant material and fire-proof safes inside.

Nevertheless, the city followed a 30-year pattern and took its lessons to heart to institute additional building requirements to fortify homes in wildfire-prone areas. Timing was everything, Mowery’s nonprofit concluded in a recently released analysis.

The city had done the same in 2002. With smoke still in the air following the Hayman Fire — which started about 35 miles northwest of the city and destroyed 600 structures — a coalition of fire officials, homeowners’ associations and local builders and roofing contractors devised rules that banned wood roofs on all new homes and repairs greater than 25% of the total roof area.

Similarly, after the Waldo Canyon Fire, as heavy machinery cleared charred neighborhoods, the city updated its code to increase the distance trees had to be from homes and require fire protection systems, ignition-resistant siding and decks, and double-paned windows for all new or reconstructed homes in hillside areas.

Fire officials used spatial technology to hone the city’s definition of the WUI. The tool identified a 32,655-acre area — one of the largest high-risk regions in the United States. The city recruited homeowners to educate neighbors in the threatened area about fire-resistant practices.

Ashley Whitworth (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Peer pressure worked, said Ashley Whitworth, wildfire mitigation program administrator at the Colorado Springs Fire Department. If a homeowner’s property is flagged red on the city’s online risk assessment map (denoting it needs work), neighbors reach out to learn why they haven’t completed mitigation.

Colorado Springs’ voters overwhelmingly approved the allocation of $20 million in city funds toward incentives to gird wildfire-prone properties.

Days after the vote in November 2021, the Marshall Fire unfolded 90 miles to the north across communities with little history of wildfire mitigation.

Scientists, some of whom lived in Boulder County and were evacuated, proclaimed it a “climate fire.” They cited the extreme weather that preceded it: Abnormally high levels of snow and rain in spring and summer had nurtured abundant 4-foot grasses that baked to a crisp during a historically dry fall. Chinook winds blasted the region for an unusual nine-hour period and propelled the firestorm. And even though there’s growing understanding that fire season is now year-round, no one believed a December blaze could ravage entire cities.

Boulder’s Precipitation in 2021 Was Dramatically Different Than Previous Years

Heavy rain in the spring and an unusually dry fall meant there was plenty of dry fuel for the fire.

Normal precipitation is based on the National Weather Service’s average precipitation data from 1991 to 2020. (Data Source: National Weather Service Denver-Boulder Forecast Office. Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)

While it began as a wildfire in grassland, once it reached nearby communities it transformed into an urban conflagration — the type of fire that destroyed Chicago in 1871 and San Francisco in 1906 and that until the early 20th century consumed more property than any other type of natural disaster.

“Was this a wildland fire or an urban fire?” Sterling Folden, deputy chief of the Mountain View Fire Protection District, asked during a July legislative committee meeting. “I had five fire trucks in the entire downtown of Superior — I had 20 blocks on fire — I usually have that many for one house on fire.”

Whitworth, of the Colorado Springs Fire Department, said there were more lessons to learn about the threat of wildfire.

“The Marshall Fire was a really big hit for people here because it happened in December and it happened just like that,” Whitworth said. “Everyone said to me, ‘It could happen here,’ and I said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’”

Is the Entire State Now Vulnerable to Wildfire?

With the 2023 legislative session days away, fire chiefs, county commissioners, scientists and planners are once again calling on Colorado lawmakers to institute statewide rules that mandate fire-resistant materials in high-risk areas.

Cutter, who will be sworn in as a state senator in January, is developing a bill that would require the state to create a WUI code board to write minimum fire-resistant building requirements. It’s patterned in part after the amendment that failed at the Capitol this spring.

Such laws save lives, said Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control. The 36-year fire service veteran cited studies from the nonprofit Fire Safety Research Institute and the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology showing that building codes work.

“Firefighters take extraordinary risk to protect lives and property,” he added. “If we start building communities and structures out of materials more resistive to fire, we are upping our odds of success — we’ve got to do something different and do it better.”

The insurance industry is also warning that if Colorado lawmakers and communities don’t reinforce homes against wildfire, mounting claims from blazes could put premiums out of reach for many. The industry supports a statewide building code.

“Unlike other disasters, wildfire is one of those risks there is much we can do from a mitigation standpoint to put odds at least in favor of that home surviving,” said Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

“We’ve got to get it done,” she added. “Colorado right now is at … a tipping point with concerns about keeping insurance here and keeping insurance available.”

But such rules won’t be adopted without a compromise among local control advocates, builders and fire officials.

Construction industry representatives who met with Cutter and Morgan recently said builders are wary of one-size-fits-all requirements imposed by the state. Together with the insurance industry and municipal governments, they have met the past few months seeking to influence the bill’s language.

“It’s important to make sure we match codes with risk,” said Ted Leighty, chief executive of the Colorado Association of Home Builders. His members “are not opposed to talking about what a code board might look like — if we were to adopt a model code that local governments could adopt to match their communities’ needs.”

The idea for such a board emerged after the Colorado Fire Commission received a letter from Gov. Jared Polis in July 2021.

The first-term Democrat, who was reelected in November, sent the missive following conflagrations in 2020 that exhibited unimaginable fire behavior: The 193,812-acre East Troublesome Fire traveled 25 miles overnight and incinerated 366 homes; and the 208,913-acre Cameron Peak Fire, which torched 461 structures, burned for four months despite firefighters’ efforts.

Polis wrote that legislators in 2021 had failed to “address a critical piece of the wildfire puzzle in Colorado: land use planning, development and building resiliency in the wildland-urban interface.”

Instead, lawmakers focused on fire response, restoration of burned lands and voluntary mitigation by communities.

In answer to Polis’ missive, a little-known subcommittee, which included state, county and city fire officials, met between August 2021 and April. The 51-member group agreed it’s time to rethink which communities are prone to wildfire, offering a new definition of the WUI: The group concluded “almost the entire state of Colorado falls within the WUI,” according to minutes from a Feb. 10 meeting, “which could make a strong argument for adopting a minimum code.”

Fire officials also countered the long-held belief that communities favor local control over building requirements. They pointed to a 2019 law that established a minimum energy code that local jurisdictions must adopt when they update local building codes. About 86% of the state’s 5 million residents now live in a community that mandates such measures.

“There is minimal evidence that people voluntarily regulate themselves,” committee members concluded, according to minutes of their Feb. 28 meeting.

Rebuilding Like Before

Cherrywood Lane in Louisville (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

A report on the Marshall Fire released in October by the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control noted how wooden fences abutting grasslands had accelerated the blaze’s spread, leading flames from the grass directly to homes. Firefighters also described fence pickets flying past at 80 mph and landing to start new fires.

This month, as homes were being rebuilt on Cherrywood Lane in Louisville, in one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, evidence remained of first responders’ frantic efforts to cut down fences to prevent them from spreading flames to neighboring homes.

New homes are going up across the 9-square-mile burn zone. A recent drive through the area revealed many are being rebuilt with the same kinds of fences. With no building code dictating that the fences be made of fire-resistant materials, homeowners are using flammable materials that have been standard in the past, unaware it will again put them at risk in the next blaze.

Wooden fences such as these touch homes and grasslands in communities up and down the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains.

Rebuilding without ignition-resistant barriers leaves the homes vulnerable to the next climate-driven wildfire, said Morgan, the state fire chief.

This month, with snow on the ground and temperatures in the 40s, another blaze ignited not far from where the Marshall Fire burned. Thirty-five-mile-per-hour winds spread the flames and forced evacuations before the threat subsided.

“I’ve heard people say the Marshall Fire was just a fluke,” he said. “I would disagree — there are literally thousands of communities along the Front Range of the Rockies from Canada to New Mexico subject to these Chinook winds multiple times a year, and when the conditions are right this can happen.”

by Jennifer Oldham for ProPublica

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.

Among the tens of thousands of Coloradans who fled the state’s most destructive blaze a year ago were some of the nation’s foremost experts on fire behavior and natural disaster recovery.

Brad Wham, a disaster reconnaissance specialist, watched in horror on Dec. 30, 2021, as the Marshall Fire chewed through mulch on medians around him as he drove away from his Louisville home.

An engineer who has traveled to Japan and New Zealand to study earthquake damage to help communities prepare for future temblors, Wham returned to his own devastated city to find his home intact despite embers the size of dinner plates in his townhome’s window wells. Assured his place was safe, the University of Colorado assistant research professor jumped on his bike and pedaled into a snowstorm to start documenting the destruction.

He soon assembled a national team to discern how the region could rebuild to withstand the next conflagration. They joined a race by fire scientists to understand how global warming is changing such disasters, including how buildings themselves act as fuel during a wildfire.

The lessons have relevance beyond Colorado’s borders.

Some of America’s fastest-growing areas are in arid Western states prone to wildfires. About 1 in 3 homes are being built in areas that abut land with flammable vegetation — what scientists call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. And about 60 million homes are within a kilometer of areas that have burned at some point in the past 24 years, scientists found in a 2020 analysis. The study’s authors cautioned: “We’ve been living with wildfire risk that we haven’t fully understood.”

This destruction is intensifying as the West endures its worst drought in 1,200 years. About two-thirds of the 97,196 homes destroyed by wildfire between 2005 and June 2022 burned in the last five years.

A year after the Marshall Fire, authorities have yet to determine the cause.

The team co-led by Wham chose to study the fire because the grasslands where the blaze likely ignited are separate from the communities that burned — unlike other burn zones in the West where the torched homes mixed with wildlands, said Erica Fischer, a structural engineer and assistant professor at Oregon State University who was the research team’s other co-leader.

She added another draw was that “we’ve never seen this level of housing damage due to a grassland fire.”

To understand how the blaze unfolded and how residents and policymakers can address the growing threat, the group flew drones over 14 charred neighborhoods within the 9-square-mile burn zone. The interdisciplinary team’s work was published five months later and echoed past studies that pointed to ways fast-growing Western states could build more fire-resistant communities.

“It is possible that using different materials would have given people more time to evacuate,” Wham said in May, as he lifted his voice above the sound of an excavator removing chunks of foundation from a cul-de-sac on Cherrywood Lane. The street is nestled in one of seven hard-hit neighborhoods where researchers conducted their ground surveys. “And they could have led to slower burn rates, which would have helped firefighters and reduced the spread of the fire.”

Their findings offer policymakers a stark choice: design communities so firefighters can safely defend them from fast-moving wildfires, or leave residents and firefighters vulnerable to further losses.

“There were a number of communities that were abandoned by firefighters because they could not stop the spread of the fire and it wasn’t safe for them to be there,” Fischer said.

Fischer pointed to the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code and the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise USA program as examples of what works. Both were created about 20 years ago to educate homeowners and help fortify communities.

Twenty-six counties and about 186 sites, including communities, ranches and other areas, in Colorado participate in the voluntary Firewise USA mitigation program, which teaches homeowners how to gird their property to “withstand ember attacks.”

Wham and Fischer’s conclusions mirror evidence that prompted creation of such preventive codes and programs: Wooden fences, decking and vegetation within 5 to 30 feet of homes act as conduits for fire to move from house to house and should be replaced with fire resistant materials, such as steel, or removed altogether.

“Our building codes are designed to make sure structures are safe to get people out, they are not designed for property protection,” Fischer said. “We need to rethink how we are designing our communities and our buildings across all hazards.”

Wham and Fischer’s data is unique in that it shows how a relatively affluent community chooses to rebuild, Fischer said. Many homes destroyed by the conflagration were newer than those previously studied. And the area’s household income is nearly twice the national median; 2 out of 3 residents hold a college degree.

The team is continuing its field work, together with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to figure out how to most effectively mitigate fire risk in neighborhoods with homes closely spaced together. They’re studying satellite images to see which homes first caught fire and collecting data from the wreckage to draw their conclusions. The group will soon release information showing urban homeowners how to lessen their risk, Fischer said.

Similar studies are taking place across the West, as scientists learn more about how homes located in the WUI — where plants such as trees, shrubs and grasses are near, or mixed with, homes, power lines, businesses and other human development — act as fuel during a wildfire.

“Once a home in your community catches fire, your exposure to that hazard changes,” Fischer said. “Embers can travel up to 5 miles — think about how many homes are within 5 miles of your house — that’s a lot of people you are relying on to mitigate their property.”

by Annie Waldman, Aliyya Swaby and Anna Clark

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

They never got the help they needed with learning disabilities. Or they came to this country without the ability to read English. Or they graduated from schools that failed to teach them the most crucial skills.

For a number of sometimes overlapping reasons, 48 million American adults struggle to read basic English, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That may leave them unable to find and keep a decent job, navigate the signage on city streets, follow medical instructions and vote. They’re vulnerable to scams and face stigma and shame.

The main remedy available is adult education: free classes where they can improve their reading and earn a high school credential.

But the infrastructure for adult education is profoundly inadequate, a ProPublica investigation found — and, as the nation’s persistently low literacy rates reveal, the government’s efforts haven’t done enough to address the problem. About 500 counties across the nation are hot spots where nearly a third of adults struggle to read basic English. This contributes to disproportionate underemployment. In communities with lower literacy, there is often less economic investment, a smaller tax base and fewer resources to fund public services.

“It’s in our best interest to make sure that, regardless of why people didn’t get an education the first time around, that they get one now,” said Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, a senior fellow at the National Skills Coalition who focuses on adult education and workforce policy.

ProPublica interviewed experts, students and educators about some of the best ideas for improving adult education. While many experts have said that more money is critical to improving the national system, many states have developed innovations in spite of their limited funding. There are ways to help adults overcome low literacy, and making that help more widely accessible would solve larger problems, both for individuals and for their communities.

Give adults with the lowest literacy skills more attention.

Strict federal standards prompt states to push adult students to get a high school credential as fast as possible. Students who need more time can flounder in such a system. “It’s so hard to get students at the basic level. They are lacking so much,” said Andrew Strehlow, who directs adult education for Rankin County School District in Mississippi.

The expectation of steady academic gains can be challenging for adult students, particularly for those who have not learned in a classroom in more than a decade. “If you are reading at the sixth-grade level and someone said you have three months to pack in six years of high school because that’s the end of the program, realistically, how many will do it? None,” said Diane Renaud, who directs the St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center in Detroit. Research has shown that some programs even resort to pushing out struggling students from their classes.

Some programs have focused on providing students with more one-on-one support. The Las Vegas-Clark County Library District offers each student the chance to work with a coach who calls and encourages them as they work toward a high school credential. Jill Hersha, the library’s literacy services manager, said many of the program’s students had worked in the hospitality industry for years and lost their jobs. “But they hadn’t been in school in forever,” she said. Coaches help them define their goals and move forward, step by step.

Increase the availability and flexibility of classes, especially in rural areas.

ProPublica found that large swaths of the country lack adult education classes, and residents must travel dozens of miles to enroll in programs. In Mississippi, about 1 in 5 counties lacks a state-run program. In some parts of rural Nevada, people must take virtual classes or drive up to 70 miles, said Meachell LaSalle Walsh, who directs adult education at Great Basin College in Elko. Even in urban areas, inflexible class scheduling may make it difficult for people to attend.

To increase accessibility, some states have developed partnerships to ensure programming is available across vast areas. A decade ago, after a state report found its vast adult education system uncoordinated and fragmented, California reconfigured it into regional consortia that could better assess local needs and collaborate with community groups. In each of the 71 regions, local community colleges and school districts work together to align their teaching materials, collect data on students across programs and make sure they offer distinct services. The new structure helps ensure students can access programs, regardless of where they live. “The idea is to work together to meet the needs of the students and the workforce within that region,” said Carolyn Zachry, the state’s adult education director.

Train educators on how to work with adults with disabilities.

Experts estimate that as many as half of adult students have learning disabilities, which are sometimes undiagnosed. Many programs don’t have resources to work with these students. “They are horribly underserved,” said Monica McHale-Small, education director for the Learning Disabilities Association of America. Nationally, less than 5% of adult teachers are certified in special education, according to federal data. Last year, in the entire state of Tennessee, there was only one teacher for adults who was certified in special education.

Some states have developed centralized programs to show teachers how to work with adults with disabilities. Minnesota funds the Physical And Nonapparent Disability Assistance program, which gives workshops and consults with programs on best practices. “Individuals who have disabilities, especially the hidden disabilities, you wouldn’t know unless they disclosed it, and they may not have ever even been diagnosed,” said Wendy Sweeney, who manages the organization. “It’s important that we make sure the teachers have some strategies to work with a student in their class and help them with their learning.”

Invest more money in adult education programs.

The federal government provided about $675 million to states for adult education last year, a figure that has been stagnant for more than two decades, when adjusted for inflation. And while states are also required to contribute a minimum amount, ProPublica found large gaps in what they spend. Lower funding leads to smaller programs with less reach: Less than 3% of eligible adults receive services. “When there’s no awareness by these legislators at the state or federal level, they just don’t put the extra money in,” said Michele Diecuch, programs director at the nonprofit ProLiteracy.

This year, Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia introduced a bill to expand access and increase the federal adult education budget by $300 million over the next five years. The House passed the bill this spring, but it’s hung up in the Senate and unlikely to become law anytime soon. Some states have also increased their funding for adult education in recent years. After cutting more than a million dollars from adult education in 2021, Georgia chose to restore that money in its upcoming state budget. It also raised pay for full-time state employees by $5,000, which helps some but not all adult education teachers. State lawmakers often need a big push from advocates and educators to increase funding, said Sharon Bonney, chief executive officer of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education. “Talk to your governor about the value of the work that you do, because when governors understand that they’re much more likely to fund it,” she said.

Increase teacher pay and add more full-time teachers.

Most adult education teachers work part time or are volunteers, leading to high turnover and inconsistent instruction. In Tennessee, more than a third of staff teachers are uncertified, and more than 80% only work part time. (Uncertified teachers must take training modules on adult education, according to the state’s labor and workforce department.) Leslie Travis, adult education coordinator at the Tennessee College of Applied Technology in Athens, dreams about what she could do with more full-time teachers. “I could open a whole lot more classes,” she said. “I need to hire at least six teachers right now.” Travis landed on a less-than-ideal solution to avoid wait-listing students: crowding more than 25 students into classrooms. Similarly, in Nevada, almost all adult education teachers work part time and half of them are uncertified. “Even in Reno and Las Vegas, they’re having trouble staffing,” said Nancy Olsen, the state’s adult education programs supervisor.

Some states have found ways to provide teachers with professional development: Massachusetts and Minnesota have “train the trainer” programs, where experienced teachers train newer ones. In Arkansas, which commits a larger share of funding than other states, all teachers must be certified in education and full-time teachers must be specifically certified to teach adults or working toward a license — sharpening their ability to support nontraditional students. “It really makes a difference when you have teachers who have gone through training of how to teach adult learners of different levels,” said Arkansas’ adult education director, Trenia Miles.

Help students overcome barriers that inhibit them from attending class.

Since she dropped out of high school in 11th grade to care for her newborn daughter, Mississippi-native Rolonda McNair, 27, has long wanted to obtain a high school credential. “You’re not going to get a good paying job without having it,” she said. But between work and child care responsibilities, she could not set aside enough time to attend class. To restart her education this past summer, McNair had to stop working full time and move in with her mother, who could watch her children while she was in school. Many adult learners face similar barriers, from a lack of steady child care or transportation to job inflexibility. Educators are increasingly recognizing the importance of addressing these obstacles.

Mississippi has created the MIBEST initiative, providing some students with support like child care, transportation, food assistance, help with testing fees and career counseling. But the program relies on temporary philanthropic funding and mostly directs support to students who enter at the highest levels. “We have never had enough funding to offer that level of support to every single person,” said Nikitna Barnes, an assistant director at the Mississippi Community College Board, which oversees adult education for the state.

Pay adults to return to the classroom.

Kathryn Iski, 56, entered a Nashville, Tennessee, adult education program last year as a beginner in both reading and math. Iski, who did not attend school as a child, studied for months and progressed multiple grade levels in reading. But this June, she had to stop after her job at a Target deli required her to work overtime. After more than three months, she fell behind in her studies and had to work hard to catch up. Adult students like Iski often must skip classes when they conflict with work schedules. They may fall behind and take longer to achieve their goals.

Some of the most innovative programs combine adult education and actual jobs to encourage attendance; experts say these opportunities are rare because of insufficient federal and state funds. ProPublica’s story highlighted Detroit’s Skills for Life, which pays residents to return to school two days a week and pays them to work city jobs the other three days. Last year, in Georgia, DeKalb County’s sanitation department offered employees without high school diplomas an opportunity to take virtual classes on company time. The department also covered fees for credential exams. “We had 100% retention,” said Meghan McBride, who leads adult education at Georgia Piedmont Technical College and helped start the workplace program.

Open education programs to all students, regardless of immigration status.

A handful of states, including Arizona and Georgia, prevent adult education programs from using state funding to serve undocumented people. Arizona denies enrollment to hundreds of people each year because they did not provide evidence of citizenship or legal residence in the country, as required by a law passed by voters in 2006. In Georgia, which passed a law in 2010 requiring programs to verify that applicants are in the country legally, three federally funded groups that serve mainly immigrants and refugees are denied state funding because they allow undocumented students. Arizona’s Department of Education declined to comment on the policy’s impact on enrollment or programs. Georgia’s assistant commissioner of adult education, Cayanna Good, said undocumented immigrants without programs to serve them are falling through the cracks.

In these states, undocumented immigrants who want to learn English, obtain a high school credential or improve their reading skills have few choices, and even fewer that are free. This decision comes with a price, according to adult education expert Bergson-Shilcock. “The ‘price’ in this case is not only lost earnings and tax revenue from less-educated workers, but the human cost of creating a two-tiered society in which some people are explicitly being told that their lives and aspirations are not worth investing in,” she said. “The immediate cost of educating a person is far cheaper than the long-run social costs of not educating them.”

Weave together technical and academic instruction to prepare people for jobs.

In the 2000s, adult students in Washington were, at best, obtaining high school credentials, but they were not progressing to further education or jobs that paid a living wage. “We were hemorrhaging people up and down the pipeline,” said Will Durden, a state adult education director. The programs were poorly connected to college classes or work credential programs. “You’re spending all this time learning math that doesn’t seem relevant, that doesn’t seem like it’s going to help you get ahead in life,” he said. “So students drop out.”

Washington pioneered the I-BEST program, which allows adults without high school diplomas to pursue academic skills and job training at the same time. Two teachers — one providing reading and math skills, and the other job training — work in tandem, putting lessons into context and allowing adults to advance more quickly. Recent studies show I-BEST students were more likely to attain a technical credential than adult students who did not go through the program. It has been replicated in other places, including Mississippi.

The shuttered Gloster High School gym in Amite County, Mississippi (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica) Protect a right to literacy for school children.

Experts say the best way to improve literacy rates is to teach children to read proficiently before they become adults. Even though all state constitutions include a right to an education, the U.S. Constitution does not — although 170 other countries affirm that right in their constitutions. Without this commitment, children and their families have struggled to hold schools accountable for appalling proficiency rates.

In recent years, a handful of lawsuits have challenged whether children have a right to literacy. In 2016, a group of Detroit students sued the state, claiming its failure to provide an adequate education left a district serving almost exclusively low-income children of color struggling to read, in violation of the 14th Amendment. “Literacy is fundamental to participation in public and private life and is the core component in the American tradition of education,” plaintiffs said in their complaint.

A federal judge initially dismissed the case, agreeing with the state’s position that “access to literacy is not a fundamental right.” Two years later, in 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit reversed part of the ruling, declaring students should have a “fundamental right to a basic minimum education, meaning one that can provide them with a foundational level of literacy.” Michigan settled the case about a month later, promising $94 million for literacy programs in Detroit’s schools.

Students across the country are fighting to hold states accountable to their constitutional commitments. In California in 2017, students sued for a right to literacy, arguing that it was essential to a person’s ability to participate in democracy. They eventually settled with the state. Recent litigation in Minnesota and North Carolina has also argued for access to a quality education.

“There is no defense of a system that fails to teach kids how to read,” said Mark Rosenbaum, the attorney for students in both the Detroit and California cases. “You deny students access to literacy, it’s the most effective strategy you can develop to disenfranchise communities.”

by ProPublica’s Visual Storytelling Department

We seek to render the invisible visible and bring clarity to the intentionally complex.

We strive to capture the experiences of those hurt by broken systems and the dignity they display in the face of the most difficult circumstances.

We do this with photos, illustrations, animations, maps, graphics, videos, audio and more, so that in addition to reading, you can hear, see, grasp and, most importantly, feel the stories ProPublica tells.

Thank you for your time and engagement, and for the opportunity you’ve given us to illuminate life in 2022. Please enjoy this collection of our best visual work of the year.

Yoshi Sodeoka for "Why It’s Hard to Sanction Ransomware Groups"

Watch video ➜

Greg Kahn for "They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars." Sarah Blesener for "They Trusted Their Prenatal Test. They Didn’t Know the Industry Is an Unregulated 'Wild West.'" Stephanie Mei Ling for "For Black Families in Phoenix, Child Welfare Investigations Are a Constant Threat" Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Anna Donlan for "The Night Raids"

Watch video ➜

Devin Yalkin for "The Navy Accused Him of Arson. Its Own Investigation Showed Widespread Safety Failures." Matt Huynh for "Shielded From Public View, Misconduct by Corrections Staff in Illinois Prisons Received Scant Discipline" Shane Loeffler for "The Tragedy of North Birmingham"

Watch video ➜

Matthew Kam for "How Your Shadow Credit Score Could Decide Whether You Get an Apartment" and "When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord" Akasha Rabut for "She Warned the Grain Elevator Would Disrupt Sacred Black History. They Deleted Her Findings." Alex Bandoni for "The Tax Scam that Won’t Die," Vanessa Saba for "The Invisible Hand of Steve Twist" Erik Carter for "Inside the Government Fiasco That Nearly Closed the U.S. Air System"

Watch video ➜

Kathleen Flynn for "Air Monitors Alone Won’t Save Communities From Toxic Industrial Air Pollution," Joseph Ross for "The Polluter Just Got a Million-Dollar Fine. That Won’t Cure This Woman’s Rare Cancer." Bryan Tarnowski for "Louisiana Limits Solitary Confinement for Youth" Anuj Shrestha for "These Children Fled Afghanistan Without Their Families. They’re Stuck in U.S. Custody.," Hokyoung Kim for "Kidney Failure, Emergency Rooms and Medical Debt. The Unseen Costs of Food Poisoning." Lucas Waldron for "She Wanted an Abortion. A Judge Said She Wasn’t Mature Enough to Decide." September Dawn Bottoms for "What Happened to Rezwan" Mark Harris, Lena Groeger and Andrea Wise "Hell at Abbey Gate: Chaos, Confusion and Death in the Final Days of the War in Afghanistan"

Watch video ➜

Lucas Waldron for "Hell at Abbey Gate: Chaos, Confusion and Death in the Final Days of the War in Afghanistan"

Watch video ➜

Dominic Bodden for "A Push to Remove LGBTQ Books in One County Could Signal Rising Partisanship on School Boards" and Lisa Larson-Walker for "A Police Car Hit a Kid on Halloween 2019. The NYPD Is Quashing a Move to Punish the Officer." Ed Ou and Mauricio Rodríguez Pons for "A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making: John Boomer Song"

Watch video ➜

Tony Luong for "How Foreign Private Equity Hooked New England’s Fishing Industry" and "U.S. Senators Demand Federal Scrutiny of Private Equity’s Incursion Into Fishing" Katie Campbell and Tony Schick for "Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family’s Fight to Preserve a Way of Life"

Watch video ➜

Joan Wong for "Twice Accused of Sexual Assault, He Was Let Go by Army Commanders. He Attacked Again.," "He Was Accused of Sexual Assault, She of Using Drugs. The Military Dealt With Them Very Differently.," "How We Tracked Pretrial Confinement Rates in the U.S. Army and Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on the Military Justice System" Daniel Liévano for "San Francisco Rations Housing by Scoring Homeless People’s Trauma. By Design, Most Fail to Qualify.," Lisa Larson-Walker for "How a Billionaire’s 'Attack Philanthropy' Secretly Funded Climate Denialism and Right-Wing Causes" Holly Stapleton for "What’s Holding Up Vaccinations for Children Under 5?," Emiliano Ponzi for "St. Louis’ Murder Total Has Fallen, but Some Killings Went Uncounted" Alex Bandoni and Anna Donlan for "The Landlord & the Tenant"

Watch video ➜

Laila Milevski for "The Price Kids Pay: Schools and Police Punish Students With Costly Tickets for Minor Misbehavior" Stephanie Mei-Ling for "After a Stillbirth, an Autopsy Can Provide Answers. Too Few of Them Are Being Performed." and Whitney Curtis for "The State Took His Kids Three Times. And Three Times It Gave Them Back." Kitra Cahana for "These Foster Kids Need Mental Health Care. New Mexico Is Putting Them in Homeless Shelters" Liz Moughon and Gerardo Del Valle for "Residents at White Mesa Protest the Local Uranium Mill"

Watch video ➜

Haisam Hussein for "The U.S. Never Banned Asbestos. These Workers Are Paying the Price."

Watch video ➜

Haisam Hussein for "The U.S. Never Banned Asbestos. These Workers Are Paying the Price." Mauricio Rodriguez Pons for "What Is Radon? The Radioactive Gas Is Found in Homes Across the Country"

Watch video ➜

Rich-Joseph Facun for "The U.S. Never Banned Asbestos. These Workers Are Paying the Price." Matthieu Bourel for "Shackles and Solitary: Inside Louisiana’s Harshest Juvenile Lockup" Anson Chan for "How the FCC Shields Cellphone Companies From Safety Concerns"

Watch video ➜

Kate Copeland for "The City Where Investigations of Police Take So Long, Officers Kill Again Before Reviews Are Done" Hokyoung Kim for "Two Cities Took Different Approaches to Pandemic Court Closures. They Got Different Results." Stephanie Mei-Ling for "Police Need Warrants to Search Homes. Child Welfare Agents Almost Never Get One." Gerardo del Valle for "These 20 Churches Supported Political Candidates. Experts Say They Violated Federal Law."

Watch video ➜

Anonymous illustrator for "How a Chinese American Gangster Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels" David Kasnic for "What One Photographer Captured in Wisconsin’s Changing Election Climate" Ash Ngu for "America’s Highest Earners and Their Taxes Revealed"

Watch video ➜

Matt Rota for "The Global Threat of Rogue Diplomacy" Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski for "Shadow Diplomats Have Posed a Threat for Decades. The World’s Governments Looked the Other Way."

Watch video ➜

Lucas Waldron for "For Black Families in Phoenix, Child Welfare Investigations Are a Constant Threat"

Watch video ➜

Leland Foster for "Building the 'Big Lie': Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth" Michael Mapes for "Inside Google’s Quest to Digitize Troops’ Tissue Samples" Timo Lenzen for "A Return to Robo-Signing: JPMorgan Chase Has Unleashed a Lawsuit Blitz on Credit Card Customers" Lisa Larson-Walker for "Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why."

Watch video ➜

Jinhwa Jang for "Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire" Lucas Waldron and Laila Milevski for "The Hidden Fees Making Your Bananas, and Everything Else, Cost More"

Watch video ➜

Noah Jodice for "How to Vote: A Quick and Easy Guide" Mauricio Rodríguez Pons for "The Fight Against an Age-Old Effort to Block Americans From Voting"

Watch video ➜

Bianca Bagnarelli for "In San Francisco, Hundreds of Homes for the Homeless Sit Vacant" Kitra Cahana for "'The Human Psyche Was Not Built for This'" Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Lena Groeger for "How Jessica Logan’s Call for Help Became Evidence Against Her"

Watch video ➜

Jeff Frankl and Lucas Waldron for "How Jessica Logan’s Call for Help Became Evidence Against Her"

Watch video ➜

Christopher Smith for "Developers Found Graves in the Virginia Woods. Authorities Then Helped Erase the Historic Black Cemetery." Dadu Shin for "The Leader of New York’s 'City of the Dead' Cashes In. Again." Tara Anand for "Human Trafficking’s Newest Abuse: Forcing Victims Into Cyberscamming" Nash Weerasekera for "St. Louis Can Banish People From Entire Neighborhoods. Police Can Arrest Them if They Come Back." Rebecca Mock for "Lights Out: Profitable Utility Company Shut Off Electricity to Homes Hundreds of Thousands of Times"

Watch video ➜

Kristina Barker for "They Trusted Their Prenatal Test. They Didn’t Know the Industry Is an Unregulated 'Wild West.'" Holly Warburton for "They Trusted Their Prenatal Test. They Didn’t Know the Industry Is an Unregulated 'Wild West.'"

Watch video ➜

Braylen Dion for "The CDC Scientist Who Couldn’t Get Monkeypox Treatment" Eli Imadali for "'Another Place to Warehouse People': The State Where Halfway Houses Are a Revolving Door to Prison"

With gratitude,

Visual Storytelling Department

• Boyzell Hosey, senior editor, visual storytelling

Visuals

• Lisa Larson-Walker, art director
• Andrea Wise, visuals editor
• Alex Bandoni, visuals editor
• Jillian Kumagai, visuals editor
• Max Herman, temporary visuals editor

Graphics

• Lena V. Groeger, graphics director
• Lucas Waldron, graphics editor
• Anna Donlan, interactive story designer

Video

• Almudena Toral, executive producer
• Nadia Sussman, video journalist
• Katie Campbell, video journalist
• Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, video journalist
• Joe Singer, video editor
• Gerardo del Valle, video and film fellow
• Liz Moughon, video and film fellow

Design & Product

• David Sleight, senior director, design & product
• Allen Tan, editorial experience designer
• Jeff Frankl, editorial experience designer
• Mike Tigas, editorial systems engineer
• Frank Sharpe, senior product developer
• Jaya Subrahmanyan, product developer
• Emenike Godfreey-Igwe, associate product developer

News Apps

• Ken Schwencke, news apps editor
• Al Shaw, deputy editor
• Ash Ngu, news apps developer
• Andrea Suozzo, news apps developer
• Ruth Talbot, news apps developer
• Alec Glassford, news apps developer
• Nat Lash, news apps developer
• Sergio Hernandez, news apps developer

Additional design and development by Anna Donlan.