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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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by Duaa Eldeib

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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.)

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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

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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.

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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.

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With gratitude,

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

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

On a chilly November morning in 2019, Lutrice Williams, a patient at a state-run mental health center in southern Illinois, was surprised by a visit from a sheriff’s deputy. He served Williams a summons ordering her to report to criminal court on a felony battery charge.

Williams has been diagnosed with an intellectual disability, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and her personal story consists of one upheaval after another. At age 23, in a state of crisis, Williams had sought help at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center. She’d never been charged with a crime before. But four months before the deputy showed up, a Choate employee who claimed Williams had forcefully shoved her asked her employer to pursue charges against the patient.

“You have a job to deal with people with mental health problems,” Williams said she thought at the time. “Why are you charging me?”

Williams, records show, is far from the only patient to have faced criminal charges.

By scouring courthouse and police records, reporters with Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica discovered at least 40 felony charges filed against 29 patients since 2015 in two of the four downstate counties where the state operates a residential facility. (Reporters did not identify any charges at two of the four facilities.)

Of the 29 patients charged, 22 were receiving care at Choate. The facility, which treats people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and mental illnesses, has been the subject of a monthslong investigation by the news organizations.

The charges against patients contrast sharply with the way the facility and police agencies have handled employees who are accused of mistreating and abusing patients. In some of those cases, staff who faced serious abuse allegations experienced few consequences because colleagues refused to cooperate in investigations — or actively worked to derail them.

“Everybody [at Choate] was always fighting everybody. Residents, staff, everybody.”

—Lutrice Williams, Choate patient who was charge with aggravated battery

At the same time, the institution and its employees sought charges against patients even as watchdogs say it failed to provide legally required services, such as individualized therapy for people with traumatic histories and poor coping mechanisms. What’s more, Choate carried out its own investigations against patients under its care, and prosecutors used those investigations to press charges even in cases when the patients denied the allegations against them and there were no other witnesses.

The charges in all but one of the 40 cases were elevated from misdemeanors to felonies based on legal technicalities allowed under Illinois law — that the altercations happened at a “public place” or that the victim was a medical professional — rather than the seriousness of the acts.

The accusations included hitting, pushing, hair pulling and, in one case, throwing soiled underwear at an employee. Some patients faced multiple charges over several years. Many of the patients who were charged had legal guardians, meaning that a court had previously found them unable to handle their own affairs. Among this group was one patient whose mental function was at the level of a preschooler, court records show. Some of the young adults who faced charges had experienced physical or sexual abuse as children and had only recently aged out of the foster care system, court records show.

Reporters spoke with seven legal experts and advocates for people with developmental disabilities and mental illness who said they were alarmed that so many patients had been charged at a single facility, especially one set up to help people with complex needs and behavioral issues. Except in extreme cases, they said, patients in crisis should not be charged.

Leigh Ann Davis, who oversees the National Center on Criminal Justice and Disability at The Arc, one of the nation’s largest advocacy organizations for people with disabilities, said she’d never heard of such a large number of patients at a single facility facing charges in her 26 years in the field. Although there’s a dearth of data on the subject, she said, the numbers are “deeply concerning.”

“This is such an invisible population in the criminal justice system and this situation really showcases that,” she said.

Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

The Illinois Department of Human Services does not track patient arrests at its facilities. During an interview with reporters, one senior official said she hadn’t been aware of the volume of patients who had faced charges at Choate.

She also said she didn’t know the facility security staff had been conducting investigations and determining whether patients had committed felonies that were then referred to the state’s attorney. She called the practice “highly inappropriate.” In a statement, an IDHS spokesperson said that upon learning about this, the agency “acted immediately to ensure that this practice has stopped.” The statement said that Choate itself “does not pursue criminal charges against residents and instead works to provide them with the appropriate treatment.”

The statement also said that staff members who are injured on the job by a patient do have the right to pursue charges on their own by filing a complaint with a law enforcement agency or the state’s attorney and “IDHS cannot infringe on that right,” the statement said. “When staff chooses to exercise that right, it is then the decision of the local state’s attorney and law enforcement as to how investigations proceed and whether to pursue charges and IDHS fully cooperates in all cases.”

Tyler Edmonds, who was the state’s attorney when most of the patients were charged, is no longer in that role. He declined comment to a reporter, saying it would violate judicial ethics because he’s now a judge in Union County, where the courthouse continues to hear cases about Choate. Tyler Tripp, who was the defense attorney for many of the charged patients, including Williams, and who took over as state’s attorney in 2020, said that each charging decision he makes is dependent upon the unique facts of the case and strength of available evidence. With regards to Choate patients accused of crimes, Tripp said he does take into consideration the fact that individuals are already in a facility receiving treatment and how this could impact their criminal intent, among other considerations. Court records show he has filed charges against two patients.

Patients Untreated for Years

For many patients, Choate is an option of last resort when family or supervised community homes are no longer able to provide the level of care they need.

That’s how it was for Williams, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side. She was born with fetal alcohol syndrome; her father was seldom in the picture, and her mother lost custody of her when she was a baby. Her adopted mom died unexpectedly when Williams was 16.

Overwhelmed by the loss, she began acting out and skipping school. She tried living with other family members, but they found her behaviors too difficult to manage. Then she reentered the foster care system, according to medical records she provided to a reporter.

After she aged out, Williams spent five years at a supervised community home for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Chicago. She wanted nothing more than to live a normal life, and she experienced some successes. She graduated from high school at 21 and held an office job, answering phones, filing paperwork and cleaning.

Williams, who recently turned 30, has kind eyes that turn up at the edges when she smiles, and she can be exceedingly sweet. But her feelings, she said, are like a layer of raw skin — and the slightest bump against it can send her flying into fits of rage.

Lutrice Williams (Courtesy of Lutrice Williams)

“It’s like I black out until I calm down again,” she said.

In the year before she arrived at Choate, she’d been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment on four occasions for aggression and homicidal threats to staff at her community home. She had refused to take her medications and attempted to run away on multiple occasions, her medical records show.

After an incident in November 2015, staff said she couldn’t return. She spent nearly four months at the hospital while her treatment team looked for places for her to live.

Eventually, they suggested she try Choate — located at the opposite end of the state in rural southern Illinois. Williams was skeptical, but when she spoke with Choate staff by phone, they sounded nice and told her she’d get the help she needed there, Williams recalled.

She arrived on the grounds of the wooded campus in March 2016, having traveled some 350 miles in the back of an ambulance.

“When I got there, it was a whole different story,” she said.

Williams said she felt she didn’t receive the level of talk therapy she needed to address the trauma she’d endured in her life. She said some staff members were dismissive and rude, and that she was physically abused.

She is named as the victim in a felony case against an employee accused of whipping her with a belt in 2020, court records show; two colleagues reported the alleged abuse to authorities. The employee, whose employment with Choate ended after he was charged, has pleaded not guilty, and his jury trial is scheduled for early next year.

Williams said there wasn’t much to do at Choate, and residents spent much of their days watching TV.

“It’s a lot of downtime,” she said. “That’s where I think a lot of the behaviors came from. Everybody was always fighting everybody. Residents, staff, everybody.”

Williams’ criticisms of the institution’s shortcomings are echoed by oversight entities and advocacy organizations. In a 2009 report, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division found “many instances where individuals were receiving inappropriate or insufficient behavioral interventions” at Choate.

These shortcomings, the report concluded, led to an overreliance on the use of restraints by Choate staff to control patients, contributed to an unsafe environment and ultimately resulted in patients staying at Choate far longer than they should have, in violation of their constitutional rights.

More than a decade later, staff with a legal advocacy organization, Equip for Equality, conducted a review of programming at Choate and again found the facility falling short. Numerous residents at Choate and other similar state-run institutions “have significant trauma histories that do not appear to be adequately addressed,” the organization wrote in a September 2021 report to the Illinois Department of Human Services obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Stacey Aschemann, an Equip for Equality vice president, said in an interview that Choate residents aren’t offered the individualized therapy many of them need. And monitors with the organization have observed residents sitting around for much of the day with little to do. Aschemann said that this lack of effective treatment “negatively impacts an individual’s progress and personal safety” and that it contributes to a “chaotic and sometimes unsafe environment.”

Heidi Dalenberg, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said Choate and its staff have responded to the “consequences of its own failure of care” by arresting patients in need of help. “The end result is the person went in as someone with an illness needing treatment and exits as a ‘criminal,’” she said. “That is an abusive system.”

In previous reporting, IDHS acknowledged ongoing problems at Choate in patient care and safety and said that the shortcomings are the result of “longstanding, entrenched issues dating back decades.” The department said that the current administration, under Gov. JB Pritzker, has taken aggressive measures to resolve these issues. In a new statement, the department said its focus at Choate is on “providing quality care to residents and keeping staff and residents safe,” which includes working individually with residents to ensure they receive the appropriate treatment.

“The person went in as someone with an illness needing treatment and exits as a ‘criminal.’ That is an abusive system.”

—Heidi Dalenberg, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois

By the time Williams was charged, she had been a patient at Choate for more than three years. Displays of impulsive behavior were part of her history.

When she arrived, an evaluation of Williams identified verbal and physical aggression and the provoking of others as “areas of primary concern.” Her medical records stated she was admitted to Choate specifically to receive treatment to “stabilize her behavior” and moods.

The IDHS spokesperson said the agency could not disclose individual treatment plans, but said that both one-on-one and group therapy are available to Choate residents. Therapy needs, IDHS said, are “determined on a case-by-case basis.”

Other residents who faced charges while at Choate also had sought treatment because of their traumatic pasts or behaviors that stemmed from their disabilities. In March 2019, an employee accused a patient of pulling out a chunk of her hair when she told the patient that she couldn’t attend activities due to “staff shortages.” Nine months later, the patient was charged with felony battery. In a court-ordered fitness evaluation, an IDHS social worker wrote that the resident’s “maladaptive behavior” was driven by elements of her intellectual disability, including poor coping skills, lack of impulse control and low tolerance for frustration.

Another young woman who was charged while receiving care at Choate had been hospitalized dozens of times for unstable moods and psychosis while growing up in the foster care system. In November 2016, the patient told a nurse she didn’t feel well. When the nurse told her to wait to be seen while the nurse finished other work, the patient attacked her, though she wasn’t seriously injured, internal records obtained by reporters show. In August 2017, the patient pleaded guilty to felony aggravated battery.

A year later, staff found the patient dead in her room. An autopsy determined that she died by suicide while in Choate’s care, according to a coroner’s report obtained under the Freedem of Information Act.

Facility Staff Handle Investigations

Decisions on whether to pursue charges against patients for misconduct during the course of their treatment are largely left up to local officials. Reporters examined how these decisions were handled at four state-run facilities in southern Illinois.

Chester Mental Health Center, a maximum-security, state-run psychiatric hospital located about 55 miles northwest of Choate, serves the largest number of patients of the four — about 450 people annually. It primarily houses men with mental illnesses who were ordered by a court to receive treatment, including some who were accused of violent crimes. Reporters did not find any felony charges filed against patients since 2015 in Randolph County, where Chester is located.

Jeremy Walker, who was the state’s attorney in that county until late last year when he became a judge, said he didn’t pursue charges because patients would most likely be found unfit to stand trial. With a few exceptions, he said in an interview in October, it would be a “waste of time and resources” to bring them into criminal court when they were already confined to a secure facility for mental health treatment.

Alton Mental Health Center, located outside of St. Louis, serves a similar population to the one at Chester, but the smaller, medium-security hospital mostly houses women. Since 2015, prosecutors have filed 11 felony charges against seven patients at Alton. Most of these charges were filed in the past three years, though court hearings have been suspended so that patients’ treatment at Alton isn’t interrupted, a spokesperson for Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Haine said. IDHS, which also runs Alton, said the facility did not conduct the investigations against the patients there.

Chester Mental Health Center (Illinois Department of Human Services)

Reporters found no felony charges against patients at Murray Developmental Center, which serves patients with developmental disabilities. (The state’s attorney in Clinton County, where Murray is located in south-central Illinois, declined an interview).

But at Choate, it wasn’t only the number of residents taken to criminal court that alarmed advocates. The facility’s handling of residents’ alleged misconduct may have violated their civil rights, experts said.

When employees at Choate faced abuse allegations, Illinois State Police investigators were called to the scene. They notified the accused workers of their Miranda rights as well as their Garrity rights, which prohibit public employees from being compelled to incriminate themselves during an investigation by their employer.

When patients were accused, on the other hand, Choate handled the investigations internally. A Choate security officer questioned the patient and any witnesses. The accused patients were not read Miranda warnings and their guardians were not contacted.

In an interview, Steve Hartline, the longtime security chief at Choate who retired at the end of 2019, said his staff didn’t need to read Miranda warnings to patients because Choate’s security officers are civilian employees — not sworn law enforcement officers. The staff’s role, he said, was to conduct a “neutral” investigation and forward the interview reports to the state’s attorney’s office.

“We had no control over who was charged or who wasn’t charged,” Hartline said. “Everything was sent to the state’s attorney, and the state’s attorney made his discretionary call.” Hartline, who is also the longtime mayor of Anna, the town where Choate is located, stressed that he was not acting as a police officer, a job he held prior to coming to Choate. “We are not a criminal law enforcement entity. We don’t recommend any criminal charges or anything.”

But internal investigative records show that, in some cases, security officers’ reports sent to the state’s attorney’s office included their conclusions that the patients had committed felony battery. That’s what happened in Williams’ case.

“This isn’t right. Why isn’t law enforcement doing these investigations?”

—Barry Smoot, former head of security at Choate

Natalie Barnes, the employee who said she was assaulted, returned to work about two weeks after the incident and filed a statement with Choate security. She said Williams had caused a “cervical strain” in her neck that had to be treated in an emergency room. “This writer would like Chief Hartline to move forward and press charges against Lutrice Williams,” she wrote.

The next day, a security officer visited Williams’ unit and questioned her about the incident, though the officer didn’t tell her it was because an employee wanted her to be charged. Williams told the security officer that Barnes had gotten into her personal space and ordered her to stop knocking on a fellow patient’s door, so she put her hand on Barnes’ chest and pushed her backwards.

Both Barnes and Williams told the security staff that no one else was present during the altercation.

Security ultimately sent the report, complete with Williams’ statements, to the state’s attorney with a finding that she had committed aggravated battery. Four months later, Williams was charged with that crime, which carries a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Barnes declined comment.

Williams was one of seven patients charged at Choate in 2019. In other years, from 2015 to the present, between one and eight patients were charged per year. The last patient was charged in early 2022.

When Barry Smoot took over as security chief in early 2020, he said he was surprised to learn that patients were being charged with felonies for what he said were relatively minor assaults on staff.

He was further alarmed to discover that Choate had been taking statements from patients that became the basis for criminal charges against them.

“This isn’t right. Why isn’t law enforcement doing these investigations?” Smoot recalled thinking at the time. “We shouldn’t be interviewing people when we are providing them with services. We shouldn’t be taking those cases for charges.”

Smoot, who has since retired, initiated a change in policy that now dictates that an employee who wants to press charges must take their case to a law enforcement agency, rather than internal Choate security staff.

Consequences of Being Charged

Most of the Choate patients who faced charges were initially found unfit to stand trial because they were unable to articulate the basics of court proceedings or participate in their own defense, which are minimal competency requirements under the law. They were ordered to undergo treatment to ready them to stand trial. But in numerous cases, IDHS mental health professionals determined that they were unlikely to gain fitness because of the severity of their disabilities.

That doesn’t mean the charges didn’t come with consequences.

Through a variety of legal mechanisms, patients were ordered into the custody of IDHS for treatment in a state facility, where some remained for years, even when the criminal charges against them were dismissed.

“This ain’t right and they shouldn’t be doing this. … I’d be more educated” and wouldn't accept the plea deal if she could do things over.

—Lutrice Williams, Choate patient who was charge with aggravated battery

Among those who were able to meet the fitness benchmark to face the charges against them, two were found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Findings of unfitness or not guilty by reason of insanity usually meant a transfer to a more secure hospital. Female patients at Choate with this status were typically transferred to Alton Mental Health’s forensic treatment program, located about 140 miles northwest of Choate. One of the patients who was charged with a felony at Choate was transferred to Alton, where she later faced four additional felony charges. The patient, according to court records, had a history of physical and sexual abuse as a child.

Williams, whose intellectual disability is in the mild range, was also initially found unfit to stand trial.

She was ordered into the state’s care at Choate, where she was already a patient. “They wanted to get rid of me,” she said; Williams would have gone to Alton, but transfers were halted during the pandemic, records show. Williams said she was given printouts to read about court terminology and tested again. Eventually, she was found fit to stand trial and her defense attorney urged her to accept a plea deal for misdemeanor battery.

Tripp, who was then Williams’ defense attorney and is now the state’s attorney, said he did raise questions about the investigation when he was arguing to reduce the charge against her. Tripp said that it is typical to see defendants plead to a lower-level offense to avoid the risk of felony conviction. “There’s an additional built-in credibility hurdle to clear in most cases that rely heavily on statements by those with mental health concerns,” Tripp said, which may make a jury less apt to believe a defendant’s version of events.

In August 2020, she was sentenced to 12 months of conditional discharge, which is a less restrictive alternative to court supervision.

She’s among four patients who were convicted. Three others received felony convictions.

Of all of the problems she said she faced at Choate, Williams is most frustrated by the fact that she was charged. If she could go back, Williams said, she wouldn’t accept the plea deal.

“This ain’t right and they shouldn’t be doing this,” Williams said. “At first, I didn’t know. I’d be more educated.”

Williams was discharged from Choate in November 2020 and is trying to stabilize her life. She has enrolled in college classes and is applying for jobs. But with every application she sends out, she worries that her criminal record will give the hiring manager pause.

And in some cases, it has. She provided the news organizations with a rejection letter from a temporary hiring agency showing she’d been disqualified for jobs because of the misdemeanor battery conviction. “Based on the enclosed background report,” said the letter from PeopleReady, “we have reservations about hiring you for the initial position offered.” The letter cited her Union County conviction from her time at Choate.

Williams said she called the clerk in Union County asking if she could get help having the conviction removed from her record. Expunging or sealing a case would require her to hire a private lawyer, Williams said they told her.

“I can’t afford a lawyer,” she said.

Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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On a crisp day this fall I drove southeast from Grand Junction, Colorado, into the Uncompahgre Valley, a rich basin of row crops and hayfields. A snow line hung like a bowl cut around the upper cliffs of the Grand Mesa, while in the valley some farmers were taking their last deliveries of water, sowing winter wheat and onions. I turned south at the farm town of Delta onto Route 348, a shoulder-less two-lane road lined with irrigation ditches and dent corn still hanging crisp on their browned stalks. The road crossed the Uncompahgre River, and it was thin, nearly dry.

The Uncompahgre Valley, stretching 34 miles from Delta through the town of Montrose, is, and always has been, an arid place. Most of the water comes from the Gunnison River, a major tributary of the Colorado, which courses out of the peaks of the Elk Range through the cavernous and sun-starved depths of the Black Canyon, one rocky and inaccessible valley to the east. In 1903, the federal government backed a plan hatched by Uncompahgre farmers to breach the ridge with an enormous tunnel and then in the 1960s to build one of Colorado’s largest reservoirs above the Black Canyon called Blue Mesa. Now that tunnel feeds a neural system of water: 782 miles worth of successively smaller canals and then dirt ditches, laterals and drains that turn 83,000 Western Colorado acres into farmland. Today, the farm association in this valley is one of the largest single users of Colorado River water outside of California.

I came to this place because the Colorado River system is in a state of collapse. It is a collapse hastened by climate change but also a crisis of management. In 1922, the seven states in the river basin signed a compact splitting the Colorado equally between its upper and lower halves; later, they promised additional water to Mexico, too. Near the middle, they put Lake Powell, a reserve for the northern states, and Lake Mead, a storage node for the south. Over time, as an overheating environment has collided with overuse, the lower half — primarily Arizona and California — has taken its water as if everything were normal, straining both the logic and the legal interpretations of the compact. They have also drawn extra releases from Lake Powell, effectively borrowing straight out of whatever meager reserves the Upper Basin has managed to save there.

This much has become a matter of great, vitriolic dispute. What is undeniable is that the river flows as a much-diminished version of its historical might. When the original compact gave each half the rights to 7.5 million acre-feet of water, the river is estimated to have flowed with as much as 18 million acre-feet each year. Over the 20th century, it averaged closer to 15. Over the past two decades, the flow has dropped to a little more than 12. In recent years, it has trickled at times with as little as 8.5. All the while the Lower Basin deliveries have remained roughly the same. And those reservoirs? They are fast becoming obsolete. Now the states must finally face the consequential question of which regions will make their sacrifice first. There are few places that reveal how difficult it will be to arrive at an answer than the Western Slope of Colorado.

In Montrose, I found the manager of the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, Steve Pope, in his office atop the squeaky stairs of the same Foursquare that the group had built at the turn of the last century. Pope, bald, with a trimmed white beard, sat amid stacks of plat maps and paper diagrams of the canals, surrounded by LCD screens with spreadsheets marking volumes of water and their destinations. On the wall, a historic map showed the farms, wedged between the Uncompahgre River and where it joins the Gunnison in Delta, before descending to their confluence with the Colorado in Grand Junction. “I’m sorry for the mess,” he said, plowing loose papers aside.

What Pope wanted to impress upon me most despite the enormousness of the infrastructure all around the valley was that in the Upper Basin of the Colorado River system, there are no mammoth dams that can simply be opened to meter out a steady release of water. Here, only natural precipitation and temperature dictate how much is available. Conservation isn’t a management decision, he said. It was forced upon them by the hydrological conditions of the moment. The average amount of water flowing in the system has dropped by nearly 20%. The snowpack melts and evaporates faster than it used to, and the rainfall is unpredictable. In fact, the Colorado River District, an influential water conservancy for the western part of the state, had described its negotiating position with the Lower Basin states by claiming Colorado has already conserved about 28% of its water by making do with the recent conditions brought by drought.

You get what you get, Pope tells me, and for 15 of the past 20 years, unlike the farmers in California and Arizona, the people in this valley have gotten less than what they are due. “We don’t have that luxury of just making a phone call and having water show up,” he said, not veiling his contempt for the Lower Basin states’ reliance on lakes Mead and Powell. “We’ve not been insulated from this climate change by having a big reservoir above our heads.”

He didn’t have to point further back than the previous winter. In 2021, the rain and snow fell heavily across the Rocky Mountains and the plateau of the Grand Mesa, almost as if it were normal times. Precipitation was 80% of average — not bad in the midst of an epochal drought. But little made it into the Colorado River. Instead, soils parched by the lack of rain and rising temperatures soaked up every ounce of moisture. By the time water reached the rivers around Montrose and then the gauges above Lake Powell, the flow was less than 30% of normal. The Upper Basin states used just 3.5 million acre-feet last year, less than half their legal right under the 1922 compact. The Lower Basin states took nearly their full amount, 7 million acre-feet.

All of this matters now not just because the river, an unwieldy network of human-controlled plumbing, is approaching a threshold where it could become inoperable, but because much of the recent legal basis for the system is about to dissolve. In 2026, the Interim Guidelines the states rely on, a Drought Contingency Plan and agreements with Mexico will all expire. At the very least, this will require new agreements. It also demands a new way of thinking that matches the reality of the heating climate and the scale of human need. But before that can happen, the states will need to restore something that has become even more scarce than the water: trust.

The northern states see California and Arizona reveling in profligate use, made possible by the anachronistic rules of the compact that effectively promise them water when others have none. It’s enabled by the mechanistic controls at the Hoover Dam, which releases the same steady flow no matter how little snow falls across the Rocky Mountains. California flood-irrigates alfalfa crops destined for cattle markets in the Middle East, while Arizona takes water it does not need and pumps it underground to build up its own reserves. In 2018, an Arizona water agency admitted it was gaming the timing of its orders to avoid rations from the river (though it characterized the moves as smart use of the rules). In 2021, in a sign of the growing wariness, at least one Colorado water official alleged California was repeating the scheme. California water officials say this is a misunderstanding. Yet to this day, because California holds the most senior legal rights on the river, the state has avoided having a single gallon of reductions imposed on it.

By this spring, Lake Powell shrank to 24% of its capacity, its lowest levels since the reservoir filled in the 1960s. Cathedral-like sandstone canyons were resurrected, and sunlight reached the silt-clogged floors for the first time in generations. The Glen Canyon Dam itself towered more than 150 feet above the waterline. The water was just a few dozen feet above the last intake pipe that feeds the hydropower generators. If it dropped much lower, the system would no longer be able to produce the power it distributes across six states. After that, it would approach the point where no water at all could flow into the Grand Canyon and further downstream. All the savings that the Upper Basin states had banked there were as good as gone.

In Western Colorado, meanwhile, people have been suffering. South of the Uncompahgre Valley, the Ute Mountain Ute tribe subsists off agriculture, but over the past 12 months it has seen its water deliveries cut by 90%; the tribe laid off half of its farmworkers. McPhee Reservoir, near the town of Cortez, has teetered on failure, and other communities in Southwestern Colorado that also depend on it have been rationed to 10% of their normal water.

Across the Upper Basin, the small reservoirs that provide the region’s only buffer against bad years are also emptying out. Flaming Gorge, on the Wyoming-Utah border, is the largest, and it is 68% full. The second largest, Navajo Reservoir in New Mexico, is at 50% of its capacity. Blue Mesa Reservoir, on the Gunnison, is just 34% full. Each represents savings accounts that have been slowly pilfered to supplement Lake Powell as it declines, preserving the federal government’s ability to generate power there and obscuring the scope of the losses. Last summer, facing the latest emergency at the Glen Canyon Dam, the Department of Interior ordered huge releases from Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and other Upper Basin reservoirs. At Blue Mesa, the water levels dropped 8 feet in a matter of days, and boaters there were given a little more than a week to get their equipment off the water. Soon after, the reservoir’s marinas, which are vital to that part of Colorado’s summer economy, closed. They did not reopen in 2022.

Blue Mesa is one of Colorado’s largest reservoirs. (Susan Vineyard/Alamy)

As the Blue Mesa Reservoir was being emptied last fall, Steve Pope kept the Gunnison Tunnel open at its full capacity, diverting as much water as he possibly could. He says this was legal, well within his water rights and normal practice, and the state’s chief engineer agrees. Pope’s water is accounted for out of another reservoir higher in the system. But in the twin takings, it’s hard not to see the bare-knuckled competition between urgent needs. Over the past few years, as water has become scarcer and conservation more important, Uncompahgre Valley water diversions from the Gunnison River have remained steady and at times even increased. The growing season has gotten longer and the alternative sources, including the Uncompahgre River, less reliable. And Pope leans more than ever on the Gunnison to maintain his 3,500 shareholders’ supply. “Oh, we are taking it,” he told me, “and there’s still just not enough.”

On June 14, Camille Touton, the commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Interior division that runs Western water infrastructure, testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and delivered a stunning ultimatum: Western states had 60 days to figure out how to conserve as much as 4 million acre-feet of “additional” water from the Colorado River or the federal government would, acting unilaterally, do it for them. The West’s system of water rights, which guarantees the greatest amount of water to the settlers who arrived in the West and claimed it first, has been a sacrosanct pillar of law and states’ rights both — and so her statement came as a shock.

Would the department impose restrictions “without regard to river priority?” Mark Kelly,, the Democratic senator from Arizona, asked her.

“Yes,” Touton responded.

For Colorado, this was tantamount to a declaration of war. “The feds have no ability to restrict our state decree and privately owned ditches,” the general manager of the Colorado River District, Andy Mueller, told me. “They can’t go after that.” Mueller watches over much of the state.Pope faces different stakes. His system depends on the tunnel, a federal project, and his water rights are technically leased from the Bureau of Reclamation, too. Touton’s threat raised the possibility that she could shut the Uncompahgre Valley’s water off. Even if it was legal, the demands seemed fundamentally unfair to Pope. “The first steps need to come in the Lower Basin,” he insisted.

Each state retreated to its corners, where they remain. The 60-day deadline came and went, with no commitments toward any specific reductions in water use and no consequences. The Bureau of Reclamation has since set a new deadline: Jan. 31. Touton, who has publicly said little since her testimony to Congress, declined to be interviewed for this story. In October, California finally offered a plan to surrender roughly 9% of the water it used, albeit with expensive conditions. Some Colorado officials dismissed the gesture as a non-starter. Ever since, Colorado has become more defiant, enacting policies that seem aimed at defending the water the state already has — perhaps even its right to use more.

For one, Colorado has long had to contend with the inefficiencies that come with a “use it or lose it” culture. State water law threatens to confiscate water rights that don’t get utilized, so landowners have long maximized the water they put on their fields just to prove up their long-term standing in the system. This same reflexive instinct is now evident among policymakers and water managers across the state, as they seek to establish the baseline for where negotiated cuts might begin. Would cuts be imposed by the federal government based on Pope’s full allocation of water or on the lesser amount with which he’s been forced to make do? Would the proportion be adjusted down in a year with no snow? “We don’t have a starting point,” he told me. And so the higher the use now, the more affordable the conservation later.

Colorado and other Upper Basin states have also long hid behind the complexity of accurately accounting for their water among infinite tributaries and interconnected soils. The state’s ranchers like to say their water is recycled five times over, because water poured over fields in one place invariably seeps underground down to the next. In the Uncompahgre Valley, it can take months for the land at its tail to dry out after ditches that flood the head of the valley are turned off. The measure of what’s been consumed and what has transpired from plants or been absorbed by soils is frustratingly elusive. That, too, leaves the final number open to argument and interpretation.

A houseboat on Lake Powell in Arizona. By this spring, the lake shrank to 24% of its capacity, its lowest levels since the reservoir filled in the 1960s. (Rick Wilking/Reuters)

All the while, the Upper Basin states are all attempting to store more water within their boundaries. Colorado has at least 10 new dams and reservoirs either being built or planned. Across the Upper Basin, an additional 15 projects are being considered, including Utah’s audacious $2.4 billion plan to run a new pipeline from Lake Powell, which would allow it to transport something closer to its full legal right to Colorado River water to its growing southern cities. Some of these projects are aimed at securing existing water and making its timing more predictable. But they are also part of the Upper Colorado River Commission’s vision to expand the Upper Basin states’ Colorado River usage to 5.4 million acre-feet a year by 2060.

It is fair to say few people in the state are trying hard to send more of their water downstream. In our conversation, Mueller would not offer any specific conservation savings Colorado might make. The state’s chief engineer and director of its Division of Water Resources, Kevin Rein, who oversees water rights, made a similar sentiment clear to the Colorado River District board last July. “There’s nothing telling me that I should encourage people to conserve,” Rein said. “It’s a public resource. It’s a property right. It’s part of our economy.”

In November, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis proposed the creation of a new state task force that would help him capture every drop of water it can before it crosses the state line. It would direct money and staff to make Colorado’s water governance more sophisticated, defensive and influential.

I called Polis’ chief water confidante, Rebecca Mitchell, who is also the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the state’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. If the mood was set by the idea that California was taking too much from the river, Mitchell thought that it had shifted now to a more personal grievance — they are taking from us.

Last month, Mitchell flew to California for a tour of its large irrigation districts. She stood beside a wide canal brimming with more water than ever flows through the Uncompahgre River, and the executive of the farming company beside her explained that he uses whatever he wants because he holds the highest priority rights to the water. She thought about the Ute Mountain Ute communities and the ranchers of Cortez: “It was like: ‘Wouldn’t we love to be able to count on something? Wouldn’t we love to be feel so entitled that no matter what, we get what we get?’” she told me.

What if Touton followed through, curtailing Colorado’s water? I asked. Mitchell’s voice steadied, and then she essentially leveled a threat. “We would be very responsive. I’m not saying that in a positive way,” she said. “I think everybody that’s about to go through pain wants others to feel pain also.”

Here’s the terrible truth: There is no such thing as a return to normal on the Colorado River, or to anything that resembles the volumes of water its users are accustomed to taking from it. With each degree Celsius of warming to come, modelers estimate that the river’s flow will decrease further, by an additional 9%. At current rates of global warming, the basin is likely to sustain at least an additional 18% drop in its water supplies over the next several decades, if not far more. Pain, as Mitchell puts it, is inevitable.

The thing about 4 million acre-feet of cuts is that it’s merely the amount already gone, an adjustment that should have been made 20 years ago. Colorado’s argument makes sense on paper and perhaps through the lens of fairness. But the motivation behind the decades of delay was to protect against the very argument that is unfolding now — that the reductions should be split equally, and that they may one day be imposed against the Upper Basin’s will. It was to preserve the northern states’ inalienable birthright to growth, the promise made to them 100 years ago. At some point, though, circumstances change, and a century-old promise, unfulfilled, might no longer be worth much at all. Meanwhile, the politics of holding out are colliding with climate change in a terrifying crash, because while the parties fight, the supply continues to dwindle.

Recently, Brad Udall, a leading and longtime analyst of the Colorado River and now a senior water and climate scientist at Colorado State University, teamed with colleagues to game out what they thought it would take to bring the river and the twin reservoirs of Mead and Powell into balance. Their findings, published in July in the journal Science, show that stability could be within reach but will require sacrifice.

If the Upper Basin states limited their claim to 4 million acre-feet, or 53% of their due under the original compact, and the Lower Basin states and Mexico increased their maximum emergency cuts by an additional 45%, the two big reservoirs will stay at roughly their current levels for the next several decades. If the basins could commit to massive reductions below even 2021 levels for the Upper Basin and to more than doubling the most ambitious conservation goals for the south, the reservoirs could once again begin to grow, providing the emergency buffer and the promise of economic stability for 40 million Americans that was originally intended. Still, by 2060, they would only be approximately 45% full.

Any of the scenarios involve cuts that would slice to the bone. Plus, there’s still the enormous challenge of how to incorporate Native tribes, which also hold huge water rights but continue to be largely left out of negotiations. What to do next? Israel provides one compelling example. After decades of fighting over the meager trickles of the Jordan River and the oversubscription of a pipeline from the Sea of Galilee, Israel went back to the drawing board on its irrigated crops. It made drip irrigation standard, built desalination plants to supply water for its industry and cities, and reused that water again and again; today, 86% of the country’s municipal wastewater is recycled, and Israel and its farmers have an adequate supply. That would cost a lot across the scale and reach of a region like the Western United States. But to save the infrastructure and culture that produces 80% of this country’s winter vegetables and is a hub of the nation’s food system for 333 million people? It might be worth it.

A different course was charted by Australia, which recoiled against a devastating millennium drought that ended 13 years ago. It jettisoned its coveted system of water rights, breaking free of history and prior appropriation similar to the system of first-come-first-served the American West relies on. That left it with a large pool of free water and political room to invent a new method of allocating it that better matched the needs in a modern, more populous and more urban Australia and better matched the reality of the environment.

In America, too, prior appropriation, as legally and culturally revered as it is, may have become more cumbersome and obstructive than it needs to be. Western water rights, according to Newsha Ajami, a leading expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the former director of the urban water policy program at Stanford University, were set up by people measuring with sticks and buckets, long before anyone had ever even considered climate change. Today, they largely serve powerful legacy interests and, because they must be used to be maintained, tend to dissuade conservation. “It’s kind of very archaic,” she said. “The water rights system would be the first thing I would just dismantle or revisit in a very different way.”

This is probably not going to happen, Ajami said. “It could be seen as political suicide.” But that doesn’t make it the wrong solution. In fact, what’s best for the Colorado, for the Western United States, for the whole country might be a combination of what Israel and Australia mapped out. Deploy the full extent of the technology that is available to eliminate waste and maximize efficiency. Prioritize which crops and uses are “beneficial” in a way that attaches the true value of the resource to the societal benefit produced from using it. Grow California and Arizona’s crops in the wintertime but not in the summer heat. And rewrite the system of water allocation as equitably as possible so that it ensures the modern population of the West has the resources it needs while the nation’s growers produce what they can.

What would that look like in Colorado? It might turn the system upside down. Lawsuits could fly. The biggest, wealthiest ranches with the oldest water rights stand to lose a lot. The Lower and Upper Basin states, though, could all divide the water in the river proportionately, each taking a percentage of what flowed. The users would, if not benefit, at least equally and predictably share the misery. Pope’s irrigation district and the smallholder farmers who depend on it would likely get something closer to what they need and, combined with new irrigation equipment subsidized by the government, could produce what they want. It wouldn’t be pretty. But something there would survive.

The alternative is worse. The water goes away or gets bought up or both. The land of Western Colorado dries up, and the economies around it shrivel. Montrose, with little left to offer, boards up its windows, consolidates its schools as people move away, and the few who remain have less. Until one day, there is nothing left at all.

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Correction

Dec. 23, 2022: This story originally misspelled the surname of the commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. She is Camille Touton, not Touten.

by Andrea Suozzo

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As Americans scramble to make their year-end charitable contributions, they may have to do so without a key tool for understanding how those charities spend their money: their most recent tax forms.

According to a ProPublica review of public IRS data, which powers our Nonprofit Explorer database, the agency is behind on releasing nearly half a million tax records, known as Form 990s, for tax-exempt organizations. The delays, which began two years ago, are stymying access to key financial information that governments, the public and grantmakers use to evaluate the nation’s tax-exempt companies.

The gap in reporting has become so profound that state charitable enforcement officers are sounding the alarm. In November, the National Association of State Charity Officials sent a letter urging the IRS to address backlogged 990 data releases.

“For charity regulators, the Form 990 series not only helps ensure transparency and accountability, but also provides vital information for state investigations into potential fraud and misuse of charitable resources,” the organization wrote. “It is critical that the availability of that data be timely.”

The filings, which tax-exempt organizations must submit annually, detail how organizations have carried out their public-interest mission and disclose executive pay, as well as grantmaking and fundraising activities.

These documents provide insight into a key sector of the U.S. economy, one that employs more than 12 million Americans.

“It’s a big aspect of our economy,” said Carl Malamud, a technologist whose organization, Public.Resource.Org, brought a lawsuit in 2015 that originally prompted the IRS to release the 990 data. “It’s one of the major sectors, and without those Form 990s, you can’t have an efficient market.”

Nonprofit organizations perform many core social service roles in the U.S., including medical institutions like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, disaster relief organizations like the Red Cross, aid networks like Feeding America and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, as well as advocacy organizations like the National Rifle Association or the American Civil Liberties Union.

The filings can help people assess the operations of an organization before making a financial donation. And they can help regulators and journalists to uncover wrongdoing like misuse of funds at the Trump Foundation or a bribery and kickback scheme at a major operator of New York City homeless shelters.

“This is having an impact on nonprofits, fundraising, donors ... and charity regulators,” said Cinthia Schuman Ottinger of the Aspen Institute, who coordinates a group of practitioners who work with nonprofit tax data (ProPublica is a part of this group). “The whole ecosystem suffers when there are delays of this kind.”

Michael Thatcher, the CEO of Charity Navigator, said the end of the year is a crucial time for charitable giving.

“Now’s when people really need it and want it,” said Thatcher of the information disclosed in 990 filings. His company uses the data to provide ratings that help potential donors vet organizations.

And, he said, “it’s not just the donors that are upset by this.” Many organizations want their latest information out there as well, especially if their finances have improved or they’ve done significant work in recent years. “They want to show that to the world, and guess what, when you go to Charity Navigator, you’re seeing two-year-old information.”

Many of the missing filings could help shed light on how organizations — and the nonprofit sector as a whole — have fared during tumultuous years marked by a pandemic, economic upheaval and large infusions of federal relief dollars.

Courtney Aladro, a charity regulator for the Massachusetts attorney general and NASCO board member, said that regulators across the country use the IRS repository of documents to confirm or corroborate the information that charities submit to their states. Recent holdups make it harder to access that information, and the delays ramped up just as the agency would typically be releasing filings that shed light on how organizations operated in 2020 and 2021.

“Those are some pretty important years because of some of the difficulties over the last few years,” Aladro said. “The use and expenditure of COVID relief funds, for example. It’s pretty important for charity regulators and law enforcement to monitor that, and not having that information will make it more difficult.”

In a statement, the IRS said it is “making progress” and aims to resume posting the information soon. “This is an important tool, and the IRS is committed to keeping information up to date on the site to help taxpayers and others who use the data,” a spokesperson said. The agency noted that its organization search does show up-to-date information on whether a charity is currently eligible to receive tax deductible donations.

The agency began releasing machine-readable data files for Form 990s in 2015, after the lawsuit won by Malamud. In the years since, an ecosystem of tools and documentation has grown up around the 990 data sets, powering more advanced tools and resources for the public to inspect the finances and other operations of nonprofits.

The IRS posted the information on a monthly basis to a public Amazon storage account for years, but amid COVID-19-era staffing struggles, updates began to lag. Then, in November 2021, the IRS announced it would begin publishing the information on its own website. Since then, the agency has not just fallen further behind but even uploaded several hundred thousand nonpublic forms by accident not just once, but twice. Three months after the agency notified Congress of the first mistake, downloads for some 2021 and 2022 files reappeared on the IRS’ download page on Nov. 30. After this reporter notified the agency that the page still contained nonpublic documents, the files were removed once again. The agency blamed this second release on a contractor, Accenture Federal Services, which it said is responsible for posting the documents to the IRS website.

Neither Accenture Federal Services nor its parent company, Accenture, responded to a request for comment.

The IRS has not only taken heat for the disclosure of those forms, but also from Republicans who have attacked the agency over ProPublica’s use of tax information for a series of stories that showed how the wealthy avoid taxes.

The IRS has faced repeated budget cuts over the past decade, and it has struggled with backlogs in all types of tax returns since 2020. In a letter to Congress in June, the Treasury Department pointed to historic staffing shortages: “The IRS has been stretched thin at a time when its workforce, already depleted to 1970s levels, has been battling personal and familial health challenges posed by the pandemic.”

This year’s Inflation Reduction Act allocates $80 billion to the IRS over the next decade to boost enforcement, operations, taxpayer services and modernization of technical systems.

“We understand that there have been staffing shortages, the pandemic has caused problems, but we do have to wonder if the posting of 990 data to the public are being given the priority they deserve,” Schuman Ottinger said.

The delays have prompted private companies to try to collect this information on their own, doing an end run around the IRS’ unreliable systems. Both Charity Navigator and Candid, another platform that provides 990 information, have built systems for nonprofits to send their forms directly to the companies. So far the organizations that have done that are “in the hundreds, not the thousands,” Thatcher said.

The prolonged delays even drove one company to shut down. In September, Open990.org, which offered a nonprofit organization search tool and downloadable data sets for things like executive compensation and hospital finances, announced it was closing its doors. In its farewell message, the organization cited prolonged delays and inaccuracies in data released by the IRS.

David Borenstein, who was Open990’s chief technology officer, said as data releases and updates slowed, the small organization was receiving large volumes of complaints and requests to update or correct information, beyond what it could keep up with.

“The lack of data undercuts a critical accountability mechanism for organizations seeking tax exemption,” he wrote.

Borenstein said he doesn’t fault the IRS, though. “Their budget has been cut to the bone, and they are unable to perform many responsibilities that are vital to the national interest.”

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by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica; Will Fitzgibbon, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; and Eva Herscowitz, Emily Anderson Stern and Jordan Anderson, Medill Investigative Lab

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The deal to pay off the treasurer of Detroit was forged in a booth at a strip club named Bouzouki.

“You’re basically paying all these other guys. … You should be paying me,” the city’s treasurer told local business owner Robert Shumake that day in 2007 during a conversation that Shumake would later recount to federal prosecutors.

Shumake, a self-described community organizer and philanthropist, agreed to make payments to several officials who ran the city’s pension funds. The money was used, among other things, to cover gambling expenses, airline tickets and a day cruise to the Bahamas.

Robert Shumake (Illustration by Matt Rota for ProPublica and ICIJ)

In return, Shumake received a lucrative reward: Detroit steered millions of pension dollars to his investment company and paid him $1.2 million in fees. Prosecutors would later say it was “the worst possible deal for the pension systems.”

A series of city officials and businessmen were convicted in the sweeping scandal, but Shumake struck a deal in exchange for his testimony in 2011 and avoided prosecution.

Soon after, he landed another fortunate break. The southern African country of Botswana nominated him as an honorary consul in the United States, a diplomatic position that came with legal protections, travel benefits and political connections unavailable to most Americans.

The State Department approved the appointment, granting Shumake entry into the privileged world of international diplomacy. Honorary consuls, though not as prominent as ambassadors and other career diplomats, have for centuries worked from their home countries to represent foreign nations.

The department did not respond to questions about what steps, if any, it took to review Shumake’s background. Had officials done even a cursory internet search, they would have discovered that Shumake’s real estate broker’s license was suspended in 2002 and that he settled a bank fraud case in 2008, agreeing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Shumake was among at least 500 current and former honorary consuls in the United States and around the world who have been implicated in criminal investigations or other controversies — including scores named to their posts despite past convictions or other red flags, ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists disclosed in a series of stories this year.

Reports of exploitation, scandal and criminal behavior by the little-known volunteer diplomats have surfaced for years. But the vast majority of governments have failed to strengthen oversight or press to reform the international law that protects thousands of honorary consuls worldwide, a new review found.

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All told, the “Shadow Diplomats” investigation identified criminal or controversial consuls connected to at least 168 governments, including Russia, which has leveraged the system to install dozens of pro-Kremlin advocates on foreign soil as a soft-power strategy.

In the wake of the reporting, Paraguay, Finland, Brazil and other countries announced investigations of consuls and the system that empowers them. In some cases, government officials acknowledged not knowing how many consuls they had appointed or whether any had been convicted of crimes.

Experts in international diplomacy and national security say that more governments must demand change, examine nominees before they are approved and track their activities once they become consuls.

ProPublica and ICIJ identified more than 150 current and former consuls accused or convicted of tax evasion, fraud, bribery, corruption or money laundering. Nearly 60 were tied to drug or weapons offenses, at least 20 others to violent crimes and 10 to environmental abuses. Thirty honorary consuls have been sanctioned by the United States and other governments; nine have been linked to terrorist groups by law enforcement and governments. Once accused, dozens of consuls have invoked their status to avoid prosecution, police inquiries or fines.

“No one is checking them out,” said Bob Jarvis, an international law and constitutional law professor at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University who first examined the honorary consul system in the 1980s. “What are we doing? Who are these people?”

The United States does not appoint its own honorary consuls overseas but has for decades allowed foreign countries to appoint U.S. citizens as consuls in America. An estimated 1,100 were in place this year.

The State Department, responsible for approving consul nominations, noted years ago that the United States was “not in a position” to conduct background checks or analyze the qualifications or suitability of nominees on U.S. soil and instead entrusted foreign countries to review credentials.

Unlike some other countries, the United States has no code of conduct for honorary consuls. The State Department previously fought an effort by Congress to review whether diplomatic pouches, protected from searches under international law, had been used to move contraband. The department at the time said the measure would impact U.S. diplomats overseas.

In 2020, the department reached out to foreign embassies with a simple request: an updated list of their honorary consuls in the United States. The last time the department inquired was five years earlier, records show.

“You’re looking at a pretty large universe, so to engage in a detailed review for every nominee would be rather difficult,” Lawrence Dunham, former assistant chief of protocol at the State Department, said in an interview.

The State Department did not respond to specific questions about its oversight of consuls. In a statement, Cliff Seagroves, principal deputy director of the Office of Foreign Missions, said the department works to “protect the U.S. public from abuse of diplomatic privileges and immunities. This oversight includes the accreditation of honorary consuls and their performance of official duties in the United States. The Department has zero tolerance for evidence of inappropriate activity by any member of a foreign mission, including honorary consuls.”

The department did not respond to questions about the appointment of Shumake.

Shumake did not respond to questions about his activities before becoming consul. He has previously said he cooperated with the government in the pension case; Detroit’s former treasurer was sentenced in 2015 to 11 years in prison.

Shumake has also said he never sought to misrepresent his professional background. He has denied wrongdoing in the bank fraud probe.

Outside the United States, a small number of governments faced with scandals have adopted more stringent protocols for appointing and accepting honorary consuls.

Three years ago, the Canadian government launched a review after Syrian refugees in Montreal discovered newly approved honorary consul Waseem Ramli in a red Hummer fitted with an image of the Syrian flag and a picture of President Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed tens of thousands of civilians through airstrikes and chemical weapons.

“To us, that is not the Syrian flag. It represents horrors for us. It represents evil,” said Farouq Habib, a Syrian father of two who was granted asylum in Canada. “It was shocking for me to see it on the streets of Canada. How can Canada adopt someone … without any due diligence or vetting? It undermines the credibility of the system itself.”

Materials released by the Canadian government show Waseem Ramli’s Hummer and social media posts.

The Canadian government dismissed Ramli before his term began and reported that consuls appointed by 15 countries warranted closer scrutiny.

Ramli could not be reached for comment. At the time of his nomination, he said he would represent Syrians regardless of their political views.

“I need some [information] on what happened to let this one pass,” a Canadian official wrote at the time, according to emails released by the government. “Where did we ‘fail?’”

“The Honor System”

The honorary consul system was created with great promise centuries ago, when governments began to promote their cultural and economic interests in foreign countries by appointing prominent private citizens to serve as liaisons from their home countries. Under international law, when a foreign government nominates a consul, local governments must in turn approve the appointment.

Many consuls are diligent advocates, forging country-to-country alliances in the arts, industry, science and academia while drawing far less attention than ambassadors and other career diplomats.

But the perks of diplomacy have long attracted some dubious appointees. Honorary consuls receive legal immunity in matters involving their work. Their correspondence cannot be seized, and their offices and consular bags are protected from searches. Their status provides access to leaders of politics and industry.

In the United States, an honorary consul for Malaysia tried to use his diplomatic status to get out of a $10 traffic ticket in Portland, Oregon, taking a lawsuit to the state’s Court of Appeals in 1979 before he lost, court records show.

In Los Angeles in the 1990s, honorary consul Latchezar “Lucky” Christov conspired with lawyers, a firefighter, a police officer and a rabbi, among others, to help move tens of millions of dollars for a Colombian drug cartel.

To avoid unwanted attention, Christov planned to pick up drug money in a car with a diplomatic license plate, records show. He also held cash in his office on Wilshire Boulevard, where the sign over the door read: Consul Bulgaria.

An FBI special agent’s affidavit submitted to a federal court in 1994

Christov, whose exploits were later described in a report to Congress, pleaded guilty to laundering drug money. He died in 2015.

In 2005, an honorary consul representing the Czech Republic in Michigan and Ohio tried to avoid paying property taxes on a 16,000-square-foot home near Detroit with a six-car garage and elevator. He argued the property had been transferred to the Czech government.

“Does the embassy pay property taxes? Of course not! Does the consulate in New York pay property taxes? Of course not!” Thomas Prose was quoted as saying at the time. Local officials denied a tax exemption, and Prose resigned as honorary consul. Prose could not be reached for comment; he previously said he paid the taxes “out of goodwill.”

One of the more high-profile honorary consuls in the United States was Jill Kelley, who gained notoriety in 2012 for triggering an FBI investigation that ultimately exposed an extramarital affair between then-CIA Director David H. Petraeus and his biographer.

During the media coverage, Kelley reportedly called 911 to complain about trespassers. “I’m an honorary consul general … so they should not be able to cross my property,” she said.

Kelley, appointed consul by South Korea, lost her consul post that year. At the time, a New York businessman said she had sought millions of dollars to help him win a gas contract in South Korea.

“It’s not suitable to the status of honorary consul that (she) sought to be involved in commercial projects and peddle influence,” South Korea’s deputy foreign minister told the Seoul-based news agency Yonhap.

Kelley denied wrongdoing, telling ProPublica and ICIJ that she did not monetize her role as honorary consul. “I never made a dollar or capitalized from my work,” she said.

In response to questions, Kelley shared a copy of a 2013 civil lawsuit that she and her husband filed against the U.S. government, alleging their privacy was violated by the disclosure of “personal, private and confidential information” during the Petraeus scandal. The loss of her consulship deprived Kelley of “years of significant public service, social and financial opportunities,” according to the lawsuit, which she later dropped. Kelley declined to elaborate.

In recent years, more than 100 countries, including Russia, Guatemala, Liberia and Malta, have had consuls in the United States, State Department records show. France had the most: 53 as of March.

The State Department has several requirements, including that a consul is 21 or older, a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and holds no government position with duties that could conflict with the post.

A State Department memo to foreign embassies in 2003 noted that the U.S. government “trusts” foreign countries to completely review the credentials of nominees. Once consuls are in place, the memo said, they would remain accountable to the governments they represent.

“It’s on the honor system,” Dunham said.

He added that the United States can always refuse to accept honorary consul nominees or, later, remove them from their posts.

Efforts to strengthen oversight of diplomatic privilege over the years have been sporadic. In the 1980s, the State Department enacted a one-year moratorium on the appointments of new honorary consuls in response to concerns from Congress about the number of people in the U.S. with diplomatic protection.

Around the same time, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers sought to review whether diplomats were exploiting protections that allowed them to receive bags, boxes and containers in the United States without inspection. Under international law, diplomatic pouches are protected from scrutiny, even by X-ray.

The measure would have required the government to adopt safeguards to ensure bags were not used to smuggle drugs, explosives, weapons or any other materials used to advance terrorism.

“We are concerned that terrorists could, and we have every reason to believe, have shipped under the protection of diplomatic immunity pouches carrying such items as small armed weapons and explosives to be used against law enforcement officers,” Dennis Martin, then-president of the American Federation of Police, testified at a congressional hearing.

The State Department opposed the measure, arguing that the United States was the largest sender of diplomatic pouches. “The beneficiary of diplomatic immunity fundamentally is the United States government because our personnel abroad could not function without it,” the department’s head of protocol said.

The measure died in Congress.

Last year, the department requested that states stop issuing special license plates to honorary consuls, saying they “may imply privileges and immunities to which honorary consular officers are not entitled.”

Some states, however, are still issuing the plates, including Oregon, Arizona and Georgia, ProPublica and ICIJ found. Texas has issued or renewed more than 3,900 plates to honorary consuls since 1994, records show.

One financial crime expert pointed to another vulnerability.

Some foreign governments have chosen to classify honorary consuls as “politically exposed persons” who present a higher risk of financial crime and are more closely scrutinized by financial institutions.

The United States has not done so, leaving that determination to financial institutions.

“An honorary consul can be used much like a gatekeeper,” said Sarah Beth Felix, a former banking compliance executive. “It’s a great way to run dirty money because honorary consuls are typically not tagged as higher risk in a monitoring system and they get the benefit of not being subjected to law enforcement searches.”

The Treasury Department said that U.S. regulations do not define politically exposed persons. “Whether honorary consuls are PEPs depends on the facts and circumstances surrounding the consul’s appointment and role,” said Jayna Desai, spokesperson for the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Watch the documentary “The Global Threat of Rogue Diplomacy” Worldwide Warning Signs

For years, government investigations around the world have chronicled lawlessness and abuse among consuls that appear to eclipse incidents in the United States.

Twenty-five years ago, Bolivia announced a review of the honorary consul system there after high-profile scandals, including one in which the country’s consul in Haiti was dismissed after police reportedly found an arsenal of weapons inside the consul’s home, including rifles, pistols and a grenade launcher. Authorities suspected that the consul was linked to paramilitary groups fighting against the Haitian government, local media reported.

“It is well worth reviewing completely this outdated custom of honorary consuls,” local newspaper La Razón wrote after the arrest in an editorial titled “The Chronic Problem of Honorary Consuls.”

“It is a thousand times preferable not to have anyone to represent us in a nation than to go through undignified situations,” the newspaper wrote.

In 2003, Hungary overhauled its system after a stockbroker wanted for fraud and embezzlement fled the country in an honorary consul’s Mercedes. The stockbroker also held an ID card from another honorary consulate, according to media reports.

After the incident, the Hungarian government announced a review of the honorary consul system and stopped issuing identity cards to employees of honorary consulates. The stockbroker was convicted and jailed for five years; the consuls were not charged.

In 2007, Liberia dismissed nearly all of its consuls overseas after reports from Europe, Asia and the Middle East of drug smugglers and money launderers holding honorary consul passports, according to a U.S. State Department cable at the time.

In 2019, Canada became one of the largest governments to review the system, initiating the probe after reports about Ramli, nominated by Syria, surfaced in Montreal.

“I cried at the time. How come this person was appointed?” said Muzna Dureid, a Syrian refugee. “Even in Canada, we don’t feel safe.”

The government investigation found that “time constraints and lack of information management expertise” limited an initial review of Ramli, who went on to say in an interview with Maclean’s magazine that a prominent Syrian volunteer rescue group was a “terrorist organization.”

Canada introduced a new process to examine and appoint honorary consuls, adding a code of conduct.

A Family of Consuls

Despite the findings by governments, most countries have not called for widespread reforms. That includes Spain, where authorities are currently investigating three honorary consuls accused of helping to launder money for Simón Montero Jodorovich, an accused drug dealer.

In a 2,000-page report, police wrote in 2019 that the consuls representing Mali, Croatia and Albania allegedly called Jodorovich “big boss.”

Honorary consuls, the police reported, work without pay for the countries they represent. “What is obtained,” police wrote, “is compensation in terms of prestige, privileges and social relations, not to mention the coveted diplomatic bag … that crosses borders without any control.”

The consuls, who have not been criminally charged, have denied wrongdoing. An attorney for Jodorovich said his client is innocent and “has never manipulated any consul,” adding that Jodorovich’s relationship with them was transactional.

In Central America, the government of Honduras has previously reviewed its honorary consuls overseas, but consuls within the country have received less attention.

The powerful Kafie family has counted eight honorary consuls among its members, representing an eclectic group of countries that include Finland, Latvia and Panama.

In 2015, Schucry Kafie, a prominent businessman who has served for years as honorary consul for Jordan, was arrested in a Honduran corruption scandal, accused with others of overcharging the government for medical supplies.

Others implicated in the scandal were detained, but Kafie was released by a judge, who noted that his status as consul required him to sometimes leave the country, court records show.

The charges against Kafie were ultimately dismissed.

In a written statement, Kafie said that the government’s case was politically motivated and that the company did not overcharge for equipment. He added that the court allowed him to leave the country for health reasons and not because of his job as honorary consul.

Watch video ➜

In Panama, the Kafie family has a power plant that has for years drawn complaints from nearby residents, who say they fear it emits toxic gas.

Martin Ibáñez, 66, said his skin itches and his eyes burn from the smoke. He has written to the Panamanian government and others, hoping someone will determine whether the plant is operating safely.

“It’s like they dropped an atomic bomb,” he said this year. “I will die one of these days, but I want to go down fighting.”

Kafie said the plant did not cause health problems.

Martin Ibáñez, who lives on a farm near the plant, said he believes that gasses from the plant have made members of his community sick. (Linus Hoeller/Medill Investigative Lab) “Harm and Abuse”

In 2020, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research offered a course for honorary consuls that explored diplomatic law and ethics.

“Without a strong governance and reporting process, honorary consuls can become isolated and remote and their activities can be contrary to the interests of the sending state,” the institute noted at the time.

The course was offered only once. An institute official told ProPublica and ICIJ that there were not enough participants.

Diplomatic law experts said governments should require training and also make public the names and locations of honorary consuls. Of more than 180 countries that appoint and receive honorary consuls, only 42 publish up-to-date information, including names of consuls. Dozens of countries report no information at all, ProPublica and ICIJ found. Governments could also introduce an honorary consul code of conduct, evaluate the records of those currently holding the posts and start investigating new nominees, experts said.

“The harm and abuse,” said Jarvis, the law professor from Florida, “far outweighs whatever benefit the system is providing.”

In Michigan, Shumake’s honorary consul post for Botswana ended in 2015. He had also been appointed honorary consul by the government of Tanzania; that post ended in 2015 as well.

While consul, he won a contract to build a rail line in Tanzania in a deal that opponents criticized as improper and opaque. Shumake defended the project; the rail line was never built.

The Botswana Ministry of Foreign Affairs told ProPublica and ICIJ that Shumake’s tenure was terminated after the U.S. State Department disclosed that he had been accused of misconduct. The ministry did not elaborate. The government of Tanzania did not respond to requests for comment.

One year after the consul posts ended, U.S. authorities seized more than $250,000 in cash at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina from one of Shumake’s associates. The money was stashed in a carry-on bag, which later tested positive for traces of cocaine, according to documents from a subsequent civil forfeiture case.

The courier referred authorities to Shumake, who said he had raised the money to support communities in Africa and the Caribbean and that as “an ambassador” of an international commission, he had diplomatic immunity in transporting it, according to court documents. Authorities seized the cash.

Shumake declined to respond to detailed questions from ProPublica and ICIJ, but he said the U.S. returned the money. Court records show the government agreed to return half the money to the international commission.

In an unrelated case in 2017, Shumake pleaded guilty to misdemeanor violations in a Michigan court after his mortgage auditing company was accused of improperly taking fees from distressed homeowners.

“You preyed on people at their lowest possible moment,” a county judge told Shumake at his sentencing hearing.

Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Shumake and others had set up a fraudulent crowdfunding scheme that promised investors profits from the cannabis industry. The SEC filed a lawsuit, which is ongoing. Shumake has denied wrongdoing.

A screenshot from a video posted this year about former honorary consul Shumake

In May, seven years after his honorary consul positions ended, he posted a video online titled “Robert Shumake Holds the Titles of Honorary Consul.” The video includes an image of two men shaking hands — while exchanging wads of cash.

Reporting was contributed by Jennifer Avila, Jesus Albalat, Robert Cribb, Atanas Tchobanov, Zsuzsanna Wirth, Delphine Reuter, Nicole Sadek and Michael Korsh, Hannah Feuer, Michelle Liu, Grace Wu, Linus Hoeller, Dhivya Sridar, Quinn Clark, Henry Roach, Evan Robinson-Johnson, Susanti Sarkar, Margaret Fleming, Julian Andreone, Sela Breen and Belinda Clarke, of the Medill Investigative Lab.

Video by Matthew Orr for ProPublica and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, reporting 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 idea seemed simple centuries ago when governments began to deploy a different kind of diplomat to advance their cultural and economic interests in outposts around the world.

Honorary consuls are not nearly as high-profile as ambassadors and other career diplomats. As private citizens, the volunteer consuls work from their home countries to represent the foreign governments that nominate them. The arrangement was meant to build country-to-country alliances without the need for embassies and staff, an inexpensive and benign diplomatic arrangement that over the years was embraced by a majority of the world’s governments.

But a first-of-its-kind global investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that corrupt, violent and dangerous honorary consul appointees — including those accused of aiding terrorist regimes — have turned a system meant to leverage the work of honorary citizens into a perilous form of rogue diplomacy that has threatened the rule of law around the world.

Watch the documentary and read the series by ProPublica, ICIJ and more than 50 international media organizations.

Reporting was contributed by Eva Herscowitz, Emily Anderson Stern, Hannah Feuer, Michael Korsh, Jordan Anderson, Diana Moukalled, Hala Nasreddine, Nicole Sadek and Dejan Milovac, of the Medill Investigative Lab.

by Craig Silverman and Ruth Talbot

In late 2021, the right-wing site Conservative Beaver published a story falsely claiming the FBI had arrested Pfizer’s CEO for fraud.

It wasn’t Conservative Beaver’s first brush with fabricated news. The site had falsely claimed Barack Obama was arrested for espionage, Pope Francis was arrested for possession of child pornography and “human trafficking,” and the Pfizer CEO’s wife died after being compelled to take a COVID-19 vaccine. As Conservative Beaver pumped out these and other lies, Google placed ads on the site and split the revenue with its then-anonymous owner.

Its owner was eventually identified as a Canadian man, Mark Slapinski, after Pfizer threatened to sue him for defamation, and Google removed ads from the site in November of last year due to public pressure. Soon, Conservative Beaver went offline.

But today, roughly a year later, Slapinski is still making money from Google ads.

He runs the conservative political site Toronto 99 and uses the same Google publisher account he had for Conservative Beaver to collect ad revenue. Google simply allowed Slapinski to start a new site and keep earning money. It’s the equivalent of taking away an unsafe driver’s car instead of their license.

In the nearly half-trillion-dollar digital ad industry, Google sets the rules of the road. More than any other company, Google determines the online ads we see, what they cost and who gets paid for them. It runs the biggest search ad business and provides the industry’s leading tools for buying, selling and displaying ads.

And if you have a website and want to earn money from digital ads, you can join the Display Network, where Google places ads on what it has publicly said are more than 2 million websites and an untold number of mobile apps. It’s the modern equivalent of a national network of billboards on nearly every highway being controlled by a single company — and reportedly generated $31 billion in revenue for Google last year.

But if you’re Slapinski, Google’s Display Network has another benefit besides its market share: its secrecy. Google is the only major ad platform that hides the vast majority of its ad-selling partners. This means Google does not disclose all the websites and apps where it places ads or the people and companies behind them. The company conceals this information even after helping establish and publicly supporting an industry transparency standard for disclosing such sellers, which its competitors have largely adopted.

Nandini Jammi of industry watchdog group Check My Ads called out Google’s relationship with Conservative Beaver in a Nov. 7, 2021 tweet. (ProPublica screenshot)

In response to questions, Slapinski denied running Conservative Beaver. “That’s fake news!” he wrote in a Facebook message, despite the large body of evidence he was behind the site. He acknowledged operating Toronto 99, but declined to explain why that site uses the same Google publisher account as Conservative Beaver. He did not respond to questions about Google ads and said he does not publish disinformation.

“I don't publish fake news,” he said. “I follow strict editorial standards.”

Google’s embrace of publisher confidentiality means roughly 1 million publishers can remain anonymous to companies and individuals who buy ads on its network to reach customers. This opens the door to a range of abuses and schemes that steal potentially billions of dollars a year and put lives and livelihoods at risk due to dangerous disinformation, fraud and scams.

Google’s ad business helps fund dangerous disinformation that puts public health and democracy at risk around the world, earns money from millions of gun ads while publicly claiming to block them, and allowed a sanctioned Russian ad tech company to harvest data on potentially millions of people, including possibly those in Ukraine, putting their security and privacy at risk.

It all makes the Display Network one of the world’s most lucrative black boxes. Ads are placed where they shouldn’t be. Money flows to someone other than the intended website or app owner. Publishers of banned sites can easily keep collecting ads and revenue from unsuspecting brands. But because of Google’s allegedly monopolistic dominance of the digital ad industry, companies ranging from mom and pop shops to the biggest brands in the world keep shoveling money into it, hoping for the best.

A Glossary for Understanding Digital Ad Buying and Selling

• A seller refers to an entity with ad space available for purchase. This is typically a publisher that runs websites and/or apps and makes money selling ads. ProPublica is a seller; Candy Crush is a seller. Or it can be an intermediary like an ad consultancy that works with many publishers to help them earn ad revenue from Google ads.
• The advertiser is the buyer.
• An ad network like Google’s Display Network aggregates the ad space available from sellers and makes it available for buyers to purchase via an automated auction system.
• Once accepted into the Display Network, each seller is given a unique ID that looks like this: pub-6728307037029826. A seller can use their ID on multiple websites or apps. A seller can also have multiple IDs. Money earned from ads placed on these properties is deposited by Google into the seller’s account(s).
• Ad networks like the Display Network release a public list of sellers they work with. This is called a sellers.json file. It is supposed to confirm if an ID is active in Google’s system, whether it belongs to a publisher or intermediary and the person/company and domain(s) associated with it.
• But unlike every other major ad network, Google’s sellers file is almost completely confidential. It is mostly a list of IDs like pub-6728307037029826, with no company, individuals or domains listed.

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the company uses a combination of human oversight, automation and self-serve tools to protect ad buyers and said publisher confidentiality is not associated with abuse or low quality.

“We want to see more publishers embrace greater transparency, and we conduct regular outreach to our partners to explain the benefits of opting out of confidentiality,” he said. “We do see a lag in consent among small-scale publishers, which may be because they are unaware of this option, or because their account includes personal information and they have legitimate privacy concerns.”

Aciman said the vast majority of ad revenue from Google’s systems goes to publishers who do not keep their information confidential.

ProPublica spent months trying to crack open Google’s black box ad business. We wrote thousands of lines of code to scan more than 7 million website domains looking for Google ad activity, sourced and analyzed data on millions more domains from half a dozen data partners, and spoke to some of the most knowledgeable experts about Google’s display ad business.

In the end, we matched 70% of the accounts in Google’s ad sellers list to one or more domains or apps, more than any dataset ProPublica is aware of. But we couldn’t find all of Google’s publisher partners. What we did find was a system so large, secretive and bafflingly complex that it proved impossible to uncover everyone Google works with and where it’s sending advertisers’ money.

Alongside reputable publishers and popular games and online tools, we uncovered scores of previously unreported peddlers of pirated content, porn and fake audiences that take advantage of Google’s lax oversight to rake in revenue.

In one example, a Bulgarian company helped scores of piracy sites with close to 1 billion monthly visitors earn money from Google ads. Most alarming, Google knew from its own data that these sites were engaging in mass copyright theft, yet it allowed the sites to receive ads and money from major brands such as Nike and HSBC Bank right up until we contacted Google.

As for what else lurks in the black box, only Google knows.

Most Google Sellers Are Confidential

Each time someone visits Toronto 99, the site sends digital requests to Google asking it to place ads on the page. Each of those requests contains this series of numbers and letters: pub-5958167306013620.

It’s a unique ID that identifies Slapinksi’s Google publisher account, much like how your Social Security number identifies you to the government. Google issued Slapinski the account ID when it accepted him as a publisher in the Google Display Network, greenlighting sites he launched to receive ads. The same ID was used by Conservative Beaver.

Google has issued millions of account IDs in the more than 200 countries where its Display Network is active. Anyone operating a website or app in those countries can apply to join.

Once a publisher has an ID, they can add it to new sites and apps that they operate, as Slapinski apparently did. Google also allows publishers to register for more than one ID. The result is an ad network with millions of constantly shifting publishers, sites, apps and IDs.

To help ad buyers navigate this murky ecosystem, ad networks are supposed to disclose a list of the publisher accounts they work with. For Google, this list — which is called a sellers.json file or sellers list — should contain all the websites and apps Google has authorized to earn money in its Display Network, from big publishers like The New York Times to small bloggers. When done correctly, the list should allow advertisers to match Slapinski and the ID pub-5958167306013620 to Toronto 99 and block the site if they wish.

Google itself helped create this concept three years ago and publicly champions it and related standards, saying they “provide advertisers with a greater visibility into the overall supply chain, which can help them inform future buying decisions.”

But among the roughly 1.3 million IDs in Google’s sellers list, over 75% are marked “confidential” and contain only the ID, including Slapinki’s. It’s the default setting in Google’s system. ProPublica’s Google ID was also marked confidential but is being changed to disclose the organization name and affiliated domains.

As of this fall, only 23% of Google’s records listed a person or company name, and just 11% also included the domain of their organization. Google’s competitors almost always publicly list all account IDs alongside such information as the name of a person or company connected to it and the associated domain or domains.

Google Is Less Transparent Than Its Competitors

Google’s list of the websites and apps it provides ads to has far more confidential and partially confidential entries than its competitors, meaning it hides either the name or the domain associated with the account, or both.

(Jounce Media)

On their own, a list of these IDs provides no useful information — it’s like wiping the names from your phone’s contact list, leaving just the numbers.

The upshot is that the largest ad network in the world won’t reveal the identities of the vast majority of its publisher partners. The risks go beyond a lone disinformation peddler like Slapinski. Legislators, including Sen. Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have warned that the opaque and fraud-ridden digital ad ecosystem led by Google poses a national security risk. Each layer of confidentiality further obscures where money and consumer data flows in the digital ad industry, undermining trust and exacerbating risks.

“The lack of transparency and regulation in the digital advertising space is an issue that I have been concerned about for many years,” Warner said in a statement to ProPublica. “Unfortunately, the industry hasn’t improved its practices since I first raised concerns back in 2017, as advertisers consistently appear to lack meaningful control over the types of content that is seen alongside their ads and are oftentimes completely unaware of where their advertisements are being displayed.”

Last year, Warner and a bipartisan group of senators expressed alarm that Google and other companies share data about Americans with undisclosed foreign partners as part of the ad buying and selling process, and that billions of dollars flow through Google to unknown parties around the world.

After the U.S. sanctioned several Russian websites following the invasion of Ukraine, ad tech researcher Krzysztof Franaszek showed that two months later, Google continued to allow many of them to earn money from ads. He also revealed the company placed ads on other sanctioned Russian, Iranian and Syrian sites for years. Critically, nearly 90% of the sanctioned sites earning money from Google ads contained no identifying information in Google’s master ad sellers list, according to Franaszek. Like Slapinski, their accounts were confidential, listing nothing more than a Google account ID.

Aciman said Google works to comply with all relevant sanctions and emphasized that publisher confidentiality should not be seen as nefarious.

“By no means does confidentiality indicate that a publisher is engaging in fraud or other nefarious activity,” he said. “The vast majority of our publishers, including those who are listed as confidential in their sellers.json, are well intentioned, policy compliant, and contribute to the overall vibrancy of our network.”

But industry experts and critics say there’s no way to prove that without Google meeting the same standard as its competitors.

“Google has manufactured a uniquely explosive situation: sending billions of ad dollars everyday to unknown individuals around the world. It is effectively one of the largest dark money transfers in the world — and it’s funded by all our ad campaigns,” wrote Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin of the Check My Ads Institute, an ad industry watchdog, in a recent article.

They called upon Google to release a full deanonymized sellers file.

Google’s actions thus far suggest major changes are unlikely to happen quickly. The company waited a year after other ad networks began publishing their sellers files to release its own, overwhelmingly anonymous version in 2020. Following pushback, the company offered excuses, including having to update help center documentation, conduct training and contact all the account owners. The company also said there could be privacy and security risks to requiring all of its publisher partners to disclose the individual or company associated with an ID. It said things would improve.

Two years later, Google has increased the total number of fully public entries in its sellers file from 5% to 11% — still by far the worst in the industry. Google’s file also carries a notice not seen in its competitors’: “This file is a beta and is unverified.”

Google declined to comment on the notice. Aciman said publisher transparency is a “critical” part of the ad ecosystem, and pointed to a Google Help Center article that encourages publishers to make their information transparent.

“Google has a unique publisher base and we want to ensure we’re balancing both industry transparency and publisher confidentiality and choice,” he said.

But as of today, new publishers signing up with Google’s ad network are still confidential by default.

Over 380,000 of Google’s Partners Remain a Mystery

After months of data collection and analysis, 70% of the account IDs in Google’s sellers file were matched to one or more websites or apps (11% of these were accounts that Google provided public information on). But 30% of these accounts weren’t declared by Google or in our or our partners’ data, leaving us and Google’s advertising partners in the dark about where their money might be getting spent.

So we attempted to do what Google would not: connect the company’s list of more than 1 million account IDs to the actual sites and apps where ads appear. We were able to match almost 900,000, or 70%, of the accounts in Google’s file to one or more domains or apps and found over 5 million sites that are or were associated with Google publisher accounts. But over 380,000 account IDs remain ghosts, perhaps never used by the entity that registered them or used in a way our data couldn’t capture, perhaps active on a mobile app or site outside of the roughly 300 million available to us in our data and that of our partners.

Some accounts were associated with hundreds of sites, some moved from site to site like a game of whack-a-mole, some were seen on sites before or after being publicly listed in Google’s sellers file. And thousands of accounts are added and removed to the file every week, rendering a given week’s list of publishing partners almost immediately obsolete. This effectively prevents ad buyers from having a basic understanding of the sites and apps where their ads could appear, and who they fund as a result.

Google’s reasons for not disclosing its publisher partners are “rubbish,” according to Ruben Schreurs, the chief product officer of Ebiquity, a media research company that has worked with such brands as L’Oréal, Sony, Nestlé, and Audi. He said it’s in Google’s business interest to keep ad buyers in the dark, because the Display Network is filled with sites and apps most advertisers would not want to do business with.

“They have so many obviously nefarious or even sanctioned partners that use Google’s technology,” Schreurs said.

Porn and “Crap”

Google placed ads on Female Prison Pals, where inmates share photos and answer adult-oriented questions such as their favorite sexual position. (ProPublica screenshot)

Our effort to deanonymize Google’s vast network of publishers revealed a bewildering array of sites and apps. There are news and sports sites in many languages, food blogs, utility sites such as spell-checkers and percentage calculators, and gaming sites. There are sources of disinformation, such as OANN and many others around the world, and the fetish site WikiFeet, which features photos of women’s feet, often without their permission.

In spite of a policy banning sexually explicit content, we found Google placing ads on adult sites like Sexlexikon.net, iSexyChat and Female Prison Pals. On the last of these, Google showed ads to us when we visited pages with photos of female inmates in the United States accompanied by their responses to a questionnaire with prompts such as their favorite sexual position and the age at which they lost their virginity.

Since Google doesn’t release a list of the sites and apps where it places ads, ad buyers ranging from major brands like Nike to small local businesses can’t exclude all of the unsuitable publishers in Google’s network. They can preemptively block problematic sites and apps they know about, but then they must await reports from Google about where their ads were placed.

Even then, Google keeps customers partially in the dark. In most campaigns, the company conceals a percentage of ad placements. This means Google does not reveal all the sites and apps that received the ads and associated revenue. Call it the black hole in Google’s black box.

In an example revealed by watchdog group Check My Ads in May, 10% of all the ads in a million-dollar campaign run via Google were listed as “anonymous” in the report generated for the advertiser. Roughly $100,000 worth of ads were placed on sites and apps, but Google wouldn’t say which ones. (The campaign data was shared with Check My Ads on the condition it not name the brand that ran the ads.)

Schreurs analyzed $1 billion worth of ads placed for his company’s clients and found that 3.6%, or $36 million worth, went to unknown websites and apps. Google isn’t the only company that conceals a percentage of advertiser placements and spending. But the company combines the practice with other methods of obfuscation, like its largely anonymized sellers file, that thwart transparency and accountability.

Google also doesn’t allow ad buyers to block by account ID. Even if buyers know that pub-5958167306013620 is the publisher account for the owner of Conservative Beaver, they can’t direct Google to block their ads from appearing on sites or apps using that ID.

Aciman said the company is currently beta-testing a tool that allows ad buyers to block by seller ID.

“This would enable buyers to block confidential sellers by adding those sellers to their blocklist,” he said. “The tool is expected to launch for general availability in 2023. This would go beyond our existing tools that provide advertisers with robust controls that lets them decide where their ads appear.”

Ruben Schreurs, chief product officer of Ebiquity, a media research firm (Ebiquity)

Schreurs said Google has a financial interest in concealing which sites and apps it works with. The company earns money by taking a cut of each ad placement — the higher the volume, the more Google makes. To maintain that volume, the company needs to work with low-quality and risky publishers, he said.

“We all know that most of Google’s inventory is crap,” he said.

Aciman disputed the quality concerns and said that most of the money flowing through Google’s ad system does not go to confidential publishers. In late 2020, a Google executive said more than 90% of revenue goes to the small percentage of partners that are publicly identified in its sellers file. Aciman said the percentage is even higher now.

If that’s true, it begs the question of why Google risks working with so many sites and apps. But the concerns about Google’s ad network go beyond the hidden identities of its publishers and sites.

Attack of the Manga Pirates

PapayAds, a Bulgarian company, works with piracy sites and listed false information in its public Google account information. (ProPublica screenshot)

Last year, a marketer working for a Fortune 500 company launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.

The goal was to reach business owners in the U.S. by placing digital ads on websites and apps in Google’s Display Network. Using Google’s DV360 ad buying tool, the marketer entered details about their desired audience, uploaded a list of risky or otherwise inappropriate sites and apps to block from receiving ads and launched the campaign. The marketer said they were not authorized to share campaign data publicly, and did so on the condition that their name and that of the Fortune 500 company not be disclosed.

Over the next few months, Google placed more than 1.3 trillion of the company’s ads on over 150,000 different websites and apps. The biggest recipient of ads — more than 49 million — was a website called PapayAds. The company was registered in Bulgaria less than two years ago and lists one employee, CEO Andrea De Donatis, on LinkedIn. Its site is a single page that says it helps publishers increase their ad revenue. PapayAds has just one ad slot on its page, which is presented as a demo for prospective clients to see what banner ads look like. One of its customer testimonials comes from someone using a pseudonym.

That’s not the only time De Donatis used fake or misleading names. PapayAds is among the small percentage of Google partners that list both the name or names of people associated with the company and its domain in Google's sellers file. At least two of PapayAds’ sellers accounts list the name of De Donatis. But the rest are registered to his girlfriend, his brother and a set of dubious names that Google and De Donatis confirmed are also not associated with the company. One account is in the name of Luca Brasi, the famed character in the first Godfather film.

Google placed ads in a single slot on the PapayAds’ corporate website, such as this one from Royal Caribbean. (ProPublica screenshot)

It seems impossible that 49 million ads were legitimately placed and viewed on PapayAds’ site over the span of several months. In an interview with ProPublica, even De Donatis expressed skepticism. “I don’t have an explanation for this,” he said, adding that he does not recall receiving payment for such a large volume of ads.

Google declined to comment on the campaign, rendering the 50 million ads it charged a Fortune 500 company for one of many mysteries of its black box.

But the story of Google’s relationship with PapayAds goes deeper. It also includes a possibly related scheme involving online piracy, fraudulent advertising and fake online traffic. And even after discovering at least part of the operation, Google didn’t take steps to remove PapayAds or the many piracy sites it works with from the Display Network.

Here’s how the scheme worked. First, PapayAds signed up website publishers to help them earn money from ads. At least 679 websites list PapayAds as their Google Ads partner, based on our findings and data from Well-Known, a site that tracks advertising systems. This means these sites publicly declare that they use PapayAds account IDs to help receive ads and money from Google.

Nearly all of the of PapayAds client sites we examined specialize in publishing pirated versions of Japanese comics, known as manga, or Korean comics, known as manhwa. Others feature pirated Japanese animated films and shows, or pornographic manga known as hentai. Google and other ad networks ban ads from appearing on copyright infringing content. Google also bans ads from appearing on pages containing hentai.

This past summer, PapayAds used code that misled Google and ad buyers into thinking Google ads were being placed on PapayAds’ site when they in fact appeared on manga piracy sites, according to Pixalate, a digital ad fraud protection and privacy compliance company that examined PapayAds at our request.

De Donatis described this as a “test” he attempted with some manga sites, and said his company did not realize it broke Google’s rules. PapayAds is merely providing a service to clients approved by Google, he said.

“I’m just providing some IT technology,” De Donatis said. “I don’t think I did anything bad.” (His first language is Italian, but he spoke English during two phone interviews.)

Pixalate also found the operation included an element of deception to maximize profit: bots. It found that some of the web traffic on PapayAds and its manga piracy partners was automated. Bots artificially inflate the number of ads viewed on a website, thereby increasing revenue.

“I can tell you that we never used bot traffic or fake traffic,” De Donatis said.

Pixalate’s findings did not attribute the automated traffic to a particular entity. It’s possible the bot activity was connected to PapayAds’ clients or another entity.

Google detected the improper activity over the summer and withheld the associated ad revenue earned by PapayAds clients from their August and September payments, according to De Donatis. According to Google policy, that money should have been refunded to advertisers.

De Donatis didn’t say how much was withheld, but described it as a large amount relative to his and his partners’ typical earnings. (He claimed on his LinkedIn profile that PapayAds generates $400,000 in revenue per month, but removed that information after speaking with ProPublica.)

Google declined to comment on the withheld revenue and overall scheme. Speaking generally, Aciman said the company is “engaged in a comprehensive effort to detect and stop invalid traffic, which is powered by a combination of technology, operations teams, and policy.”

But what did Google do after detecting what by industry definition is an ad fraud scheme involving a set of manga piracy sites filled with stolen content? It kept placing ads on them, and kept working with PapayAds up until being contacted by ProPublica.

This occurred in spite of the fact that Google has at least two years of data showing that many manga sites working with PapayAds are serial copyright infringers.

We selected a sample of 50 manga sites from the list of more than 650 sites that publicly said they work with PapayAds to receive Google ads. Data from Google’s transparency report shows that since 2020 Google has removed 1.9 million of these manga sites’ URLs from search results due to copyright infringing content. Yet 34 of the 50 sites appeared in the Fortune 500 company ad buy under their own domains, and the full list of 50 continued to receive Google ads until very recently.

Google could see in its own data that these sites were engaging in mass piracy, and that they were working with PapayAds to receive ads and revenue. But it did not take action to kick them, or PapayAds, out of its ad system.

The 50 sites in our sample collectively received close to 750 million visits in September, according to analytics company Similarweb, and were able to make money from that traffic thanks in part to Google. We were shown ads placed by Google for major brands including Nike, Sephora and HSBC Bank when visiting manga piracy sites. The brands did not respond to requests for comment.

Google placed a Nike ad on TV y Manga, a site it has delisted more than 10,000 URLs from in its search engine due to copyright infringement. (ProPublica screenshot)

Jalal Nasir, the CEO of Pixalate, expressed concern that Google is directly placing ads on such obvious piracy sites.

“I’m a little surprised that Google with their big team is not able to detect this stuff happening,” he said.

Nasir also said it’s a huge red flag that PapayAds does not have a privacy policy, a requirement for any Google partner and a necessity for compliance with data protection laws. “Do they have proper due diligence in place?” he said of Google.

After speaking with ProPublica, De Donatis added a privacy policy to his site. He said he’s not responsible for the content of the sites that use his platform, and noted that nearly all of the manga sites were approved by Google to receive ads before signing on with him.

An ad for Google appeared on Reaper Scans, a manga piracy site. (Source: Rocky Moss)

“Like 90% of them already have Google ads when they come to us,” he said.

Google also failed to take action against PapayAds and the raft of manga sites it works with after being warned about them almost two months ago. Rocky Moss, the co-founder of fraud detection company DeepSee.io, identified PapayAds as a major player helping piracy sites earn money. On Oct. 25, he emailed his contact at Google to draw their attention to the company.

“Just wanted to flag a particularly egregious pirate traffic seller,” he wrote. Moss attached an image of a concerning ad he’d seen placed on Reaper Scans, a manga piracy site working with PapayAds for which Google has received and acted on thousands of copyright infringement reports.

The advertiser in question? Google.

Moss said the tech giant’s inaction is disappointing but not surprising.

“There are good people working at Google who want to do the right thing. They just can’t get the approval to solve the problem,” he said.

After we contacted Google with our findings, the company removed all of PapayAds’ seller accounts.

“We are in the process of reviewing the specific sites shared with us by ProPublica and have already removed ads from several and have terminated the accounts associated with PapayAds,” Aciman said. “We will continue to take action as we detect any additional policy violating content.”

Nasir and Moss expressed dismay that Google failed to stop PapayAds and the piracy sites sooner. They said there are likely an untold number of companies like PapayAds operating in the Display Network.

“It’s probably a drop in the ocean of what’s happening out there,” Nasir said.

Jeff Kao contributed reporting.

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

This video 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.

When the salmon are running up the Columbia River, Native people are there with them. They live, eat and sleep at the river. Their children grow up at the river. They catch salmon for subsistence, for ceremonies and for their living.

This is the life of the Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum, the Salmon People. It is a life Columbia River tribal people have lived for generations and have fought for decades to protect. Over the last century and a half, they have watched as forces eroded their access to salmon. Treaties removed them from their traditional fishing areas; dams massively reduced the numbers of salmon that swam in the waters; environmental contamination further poisoned the well.

And now, as climate change threatens the salmon throughout its life, the stakes of that fight are existential.

Watch the documentary, and read all of ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting’s team reporting on the threats facing salmon and the broken treaties that the government swore would protect tribes’ right to fish.

by Bryant Furlow, New Mexico In Depth, with additional reporting by Asia Fields, Maya Miller and Joel Jacobs, ProPublica

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

Are you part of the Gallup-McKinley County Schools community? We’d like to hear from you.

One chilly March afternoon, dozens of Navajo children spilled out of their middle school to play in the snow before heading home. Students in jackets and parkas can be seen on grainy security camera footage chasing and pushing one another to the ground.

The next day, the principal called one of the children into her office. “She said I was expelled,” the child said in an interview, looking at his feet as he sat with his grandmother on their living room couch. “We were just playing around.”

His offense, according to school records, was “assault and battery” for pushing another student down.

The seventh grader, whose middle name is Matthew, said that was the culmination of months of being written up for “everything” — from being off-task in class to playing on the school elevator. (Out of concern that the boy will be stigmatized at school, his grandmother agreed to speak on the condition that she not be identified and that he be identified only by his middle name.)

In New Mexico, Native American students are expelled far more often than any other group and at least four times as often as white students.

Matthew’s school district, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, is responsible for most of that disparity, according to an analysis of state records by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020.

Gallup-McKinley is one of the largest school districts in the state by enrollment and geography, but even so, it has just 4% of the state’s students. Twice the size of Delaware, the district sits along the western edge of New Mexico and includes wide swaths of the Navajo Nation. The Chuska Mountains stretch northward, overlooking sandstone cliffs, mesas and canyons, in a landscape dotted with piñon pine, juniper and the fossilized remnants of long-gone oceans.

About three-quarters of Gallup-McKinley’s roughly 12,000 students are Native American, most of them Navajo. It has the largest Native enrollment of any public school district in the United States, according to federal figures.

Gallup and other towns that ring the Navajo Nation have a history of bias and exploitation. In a recent book, University of New Mexico professor David Correia wrote that Gallup’s businesses, including payday lenders, unscrupulous art dealers and liquor stores, have a history of exploiting Native people.

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Wendy Greyeyes, who is Navajo and an assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, said that history plays out today in a more subtle way: through school practices that lead to Native students being disciplined more harshly than others. School policies “are used to justify racist behavior,” she said.

In addition to analyzing statewide discipline data, New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica interviewed 80 people, including 47 parents, grandparents and current and former students, to understand discipline practices in Gallup-McKinley schools. District officials, including Superintendent Mike Hyatt and school board President Christopher Mortenson, did not respond to repeated interview requests.

The state education department requires school districts to report all disciplinary incidents. Those reports track the type of discipline, such as suspensions and expulsions, and note whether police were involved. Gallup-McKinley school officials sometimes called the police or juvenile probation officers over physical altercations, tobacco or drug possession and disorderly conduct, those records show.

Over the past decade or so, the number of expulsions and incidents involving law enforcement has dropped substantially in New Mexico. While Gallup-McKinley’s discipline rate has fluctuated over the past decade, it has remained far higher than the rest of the state.

Native Students Face Harsher Punishment Across New Mexico

Native students in New Mexico experience higher annual rates of expulsions and incidents involving police than white students. In Gallup-McKinley, students across the board are punished more harshly than those in the rest of the state, but the large Native student body is still disciplined at higher rates than white students.

(ProPublica analysis of New Mexico Public Education Department STARS data. Chart by Joel Jacobs.)

That has happened under the nose of the state.

Since 2018, New Mexico has been under a state district court order to remedy its failure to provide a sufficient education to Native Americans, students learning English as a second language and other underserved youth. The child of one of the lead plaintiffs in the case that led to the order attended school at Gallup-McKinley. Though most of the court order dealt with state funding and oversight, the judge did address school discipline, noting that high discipline rates are a signal students need more help in school.

The New Mexico Public Education Department uses school districts’ annual reports to track racial disparities among special education students, as required by federal law. Unlike some other states, it doesn’t otherwise track racial disparities in discipline.

The department declined to address the news outlets’ findings. Kelly Pearce, a department spokesperson, said the state could discuss only the “big picture” because school districts are in charge of discipline. If families have complaints about school discipline, she said, they should go to the federal Office for Civil Rights. No one has complained to that office regarding school discipline in Gallup-McKinley from the 2015-16 through the 2020-21 school years.

A spokesperson for New Mexico Attorney General-elect Raúl Torrez called the news outlets’ findings “alarming” but said the office doesn’t have authority to investigate civil rights abuses by school districts or other public bodies. Torrez will advocate for legislation to change that, spokesperson Taylor Bui said.

Daniel Losen, who studies racial disparities in school discipline as director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said someone needs to investigate discipline rates in Gallup-McKinley.

School districts with higher concentrations of students of color often “have higher use of police and just more draconian discipline practices,” Losen said. “Why is what’s happening to kids in Gallup so much worse than what’s happening to kids in the rest of the state?”

Gallup-McKinley’s Discipline Rates Tower Above the Rest of New Mexico

Students in Gallup-McKinley County Schools were disciplined far more frequently and severely than those in the rest of the state in the 2016-17 to 2019-20 school years. The district especially stands out when it comes to expulsions and incidents in which students were referred to police or juvenile probation.

Gallup-McKinley reported at least 211 expulsions over the four school years, an annual rate of 4.6 per 1,000 students. That’s at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state. Students in Gallup-McKinley schools also faced 735 disciplinary incidents involving law enforcement, which amounts to a rate nearly four times as high as the rest of the state. The disparities persisted from elementary through high school.

Gallup-McKinley Students Face More Frequent Severe Punishment

From elementary through high school, kids in Gallup-McKinley schools were expelled and faced discipline involving law enforcement at annual rates far higher than their peers in the rest of the state.

(Source: ProPublica analysis of New Mexico Public Education Department STARS data. Chart by Joel Jacobs.)

Native students within the district are subjected to these punishments at roughly twice the rate of their white peers. The district’s Hispanic students face similarly high rates, but because Gallup-McKinley’s Hispanic student population is relatively small, these numbers don’t significantly drive up the state’s discipline rates for Hispanics overall.

Gallup-McKinley’s student behavior handbook states that the rules will be “enforced fairly in an age-appropriate manner” and that the district is committed to providing all students safe school environments “free of discrimination, violence, and bullying.”

Ben Chavez, who directed discipline in the district until earlier this year, told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica he was not given permission to speak about the issue.

Rachel A. Rodriguez, a former Gallup-McKinley County Schools discipline administrator, attributed Native students’ higher disciplinary rates to problems among rural families, like poverty, trauma and substance abuse.

The belief that alcohol abuse is more frequent among Native Americans is widespread, but it’s not borne out by the facts. And neighboring districts with large numbers of Native students and similarly high rates of unemployment and poverty don’t dispense as much harsh discipline as Gallup-McKinley.

For example, Gallup-McKinley reported significantly higher rates of expulsions and incidents involving law enforcement than the Central Consolidated district in neighboring San Juan County. Central Consolidated has an even higher proportion of Native students than Gallup-McKinley and a similar “at-risk index,” which is used by the state to identify school districts that need additional money to educate high-needs kids.

One of the main drivers of Gallup-McKinley’s discipline rates is disorderly conduct — an infraction that until the current school year wasn’t even defined in its or state education department policies, rulebooks, parent handbooks or regulations. The 2022-23 Gallup-McKinley student handbook defines it simply as “action(s) which substantially disrupt(s) the orderly conduct of a school environment.”

(Gabriella Trujillo, special to ProPublica)

“Disorderly conduct,” said former Gallup-McKinley Assistant Principal Ron Triplehorn, “is going to be kind of your catchall, just kind of a generic term for general misbehavior.”

Statewide, Native students were expelled for disorderly conduct at least 76 times and law enforcement was involved in 193 such incidents from 2016-17 to 2019-20. About 90% of these incidents occurred in Gallup-McKinley schools.

Across the United States, students of color tend to be disciplined at higher rates for vaguely defined, catchall minor infractions like disorderly conduct, Losen said. “That’s where the largest racial disparities are usually found,” he said.

Gina Laura Gullo, assistant director of education services at the Pennsylvania State Education Association, did her Ph.D. dissertation on unconscious bias in school discipline. She found that school administrators who scored higher on measures of implicit racial bias assigned harsher discipline to students of color than white pupils.

“Infractions that are more subjective in nature,” she said, “such as disorderly conduct, insubordination, classroom disturbance and the like, are those that are specifically subject to more implicit bias.”

How Matthew Got Kicked Out of School

For 13-year-old Matthew, inattentiveness, playing on an elevator, not following instructions and pouring glue on a desk were all classified as disorderly conduct.

He said his discipline problems started after the principal caught him making fun of her in the hallway. Over the next two months, she suspended him four times and wrote him up four other times.

The first time, Matthew was suspended for a day because a teacher reported that he didn’t follow instructions and poured glue on his desk. Matthew told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica that he was putting glue on his hand when some got on the desk, and that he peeled it off.

Matthew’s grandmother allowed the news outlets to review his school disciplinary records. The principal did not respond to interview requests.

In November, Matthew’s teacher wrote that he objected to Matthew’s “behavior towards learning.” He “is always off-task, disrespectful, and defiant,” his teacher wrote in a note to the principal.

When Matthew wore a blue shirt to school, a dress code violation, the principal wrote him up for “gang-related activity.”

She wrote him up for “bullying” after she used security camera footage to conclude he and another student banged on her office window and ran off. Matthew told the news outlets he didn’t do it; the only evidence in his file is two blurry images taken from the video.

The principal suspended Matthew for a day after confiscating a miniature toy butterfly knife. “Weapons possession,” she wrote. He said he had bought the plastic and tin toy from a vending machine.

Two weeks later, she suspended him for a week for allegedly cutting a classroom chair with the elastic band of his face mask. That, the principal wrote, was “vandalism.” Matthew told the news outlets he slipped the band into an existing cut in the back of the plastic chair, and the teacher saw him pulling it back and forth.

In December, the principal ordered a disciplinary hearing, citing his “multiple misbehaviors.” Matthew and his grandmother signed a behavior contract, agreeing he would stay out of trouble.

“It would have been nice if she had asked why he was acting like this,” Matthew’s grandmother said. She said she would’ve told the principal that Matthew has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Though Matthew once took medication at school, he doesn’t have an individualized education plan, or IEP, which would afford him protections for discipline related to his diagnosis.

Matthew had reason to be distracted at school: His grandmother, who is raising him, was undergoing radiation treatment for breast cancer. A judge awarded her custody of Matthew when he was little, after his father died. He sees his mother only occasionally.

Then came the incident in March, when Matthew was kicked out of school for pushing the student to the ground. In a letter to his grandmother, the principal wrote that a security video showed Matthew “chasing and shoving” a “female student into the snow multiple times” and that when the girl was questioned the next morning, she reported back pain.

(Gabriella Trujillo, special to ProPublica)

Matthew’s grandmother said the principal refused to show her the video or allow her to hear the girl’s version of events. Instead, the principal provided a single picture. It “just showed a girl in the snow with two boys standing there,” the grandmother said. “I didn’t recognize him.”

New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica reviewed the video, which had no audio. It shows groups of children talking and roughhousing. The student identified in the report as Matthew pushed another student down, possibly twice. Earlier, another student had pushed the same student down but apparently was not disciplined, according to the district’s response to a public records request for other disciplinary reports from that afternoon. All three students appeared to interact afterward.

Matthew’s grandmother told the principal she wanted to appeal the decision to kick Matthew out of school. “She told me, ‘Good luck.’”

Normally the school district must hold a hearing before expelling or suspending a student for more than 10 days. But the behavior contract Matthew and his grandmother had signed said if he broke the rules again, he would be disciplined without a hearing.

Although Matthew said the principal told him he was expelled, her letter to the grandmother called it a long-term suspension. Under the district’s rules at the time, that meant Matthew could have returned to school after 90 days. But when Matthew’s grandmother later tried to enroll him in summer school, which fell outside that time, the principal refused, the grandmother said.

After Matthew was kicked out, his grandmother asked that he be allowed to take online classes or complete homework so he didn’t fall hopelessly behind. Schools allowed both when they were closed during the pandemic. The principal refused, the grandmother said.

Over the following weeks, Matthew became increasingly withdrawn, his grandmother said. “He stopped talking to me very much,” she said. “I worry.”

Delores Greyeyes, director of the Navajo Department of Corrections and mother of Wendy Greyeyes, said some parts of Matthew’s story sounded familiar. When she was a girl, she said, she and her friends poured glue on their hands.

“We let it dry and pulled it off to see our palm and fingerprints,” she said. “So when you tell me this student was disciplined for disorderly conduct because glue got on his desk, I have to wonder: Was that curiosity?”

Greyeyes, a former social worker, interviewed inmates at the state prison in Winslow for her dissertation research. They told her their first encounters with police happened in school. Trouble often started small — missed homework or sleeping in class. Teachers saw them as defiant rather than asking them what was wrong, she said, leading to escalating discipline.

“One of these young men said his school administrator told him he was a ‘no-good Indian’ and put it in his head his destiny would be to be in jail or dead,” she said.

The Unintended Consequences of Harsh Discipline

Karl Lohmann, a retired Gallup-McKinley elementary school teacher, remembers when the school district established a “zero tolerance” policy in the early 1990s. Many teachers welcomed it, he said, because they thought it would give them more support and more say in student suspensions.

Several years later, he sent a fifth grade Native American boy to the principal’s office for stealing a handheld electronic spelling game. “I expected the principal to call in the parents and get it back,” Lohmann said.

Instead, the boy was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car. “That was part of my education about how policies can have unintended consequences,” Lohmann said.

Research has shown that “zero tolerance” or “no excuses” policies, adopted in many school districts around that time, can do more harm than good and even serve as a vehicle for bias. After calls for reform, many school districts have shifted away from zero tolerance in favor of prevention of misbehavior and a focus on students’ emotional needs.

Gallup-McKinley’s current discipline policy doesn’t mention zero tolerance. But neither does it embrace an approach gaining favor in the state: restorative justice practices such as talking circle mediation. The state has announced that it will conduct a pilot study of restorative justice practices to reduce expulsion and suspension rates. Twelve schools across the state will participate; none are in Gallup-McKinley.

Severe discipline practices criminalize student misbehavior, said Regis Pecos, a former governor of Cochiti Pueblo and a leader in efforts to reform education in New Mexico.

Harsh forms of discipline, coupled with a lack of emotional support or restorative justice practices, create a “hostile education environment,” Pecos said. Students become demoralized and come to see themselves as the problem. That fuels high dropout rates, underachievement, poverty, health disparities and high suicide rates, he said, “compounding the challenges for students, parents and communities.”

Gallup-McKinley’s three-year strategic plan, completed in February, says one desired outcome is a reduction in the number of disciplinary referrals that result in charges against students, but district officials did not answer questions about how that would be achieved. The plan was removed from the district’s website after New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica asked about it.

About a dozen students and parents told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica they supported the district’s strict discipline measures. About twice as many said some students are singled out while others are handled lightly, and punishments can be arbitrary and counterproductive.

This spring, dozens of students, mostly Native, were suspended for a senior prank in which they threw streamers, toilet paper and glitter and sprayed shaving cream throughout the school.

(Gabriella Trujillo, special to ProPublica)

Some of the students’ parents said the district pressured them to waive their right to a hearing in exchange for allowing the students to graduate. Several parents instead sued after their children had been suspended for more than 10 days without a hearing — a violation of the school district’s policies.

A judge ordered Gallup-McKinley to allow the students to return to class. The school district held hearings and suspended the students a week before graduation, although they did graduate.

Students, parents and alumni protested what they saw as a strict response to an annual prank, which the district called “criminal activity.” District officials called police over the incident, although they told police they would handle student discipline and no one was charged.

Rodriguez, the former Gallup-McKinley discipline administrator, said school officials sometimes can’t avoid calling the police. She described one such incident involving a fifth grade boy.

“He was so angry,” she said. “We called the police and three officers had to put him down and put him in handcuffs. When I came home that night, I cried. I said, ‘I never want to see a fifth grade student put in handcuffs again.’ It was traumatizing to me. But we had to.”

Other times, she said, police were called to help retrieve children, including elementary students, who left campus. “They run — take off running from the school and we chase them, but they’re faster than us,” she said. “So we have to call the police to find them.”

McKinley County Sheriff-elect James Maiorano III said his office has been contacted a few times over the years for missing students. The Gallup Police Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Maiorano, who has been with the sheriff's office for 18 years, said the agency is increasing its presence in Gallup-McKinley schools to deal with fights and drug possession.

Discipline involving police can have profound consequences. Rhonda Goodenough, who once ran the state probation and parole office in Gallup, said even a sealed juvenile record of a minor offense sometimes stops a young person from joining the military. Recruiters would call, asking her to unseal or explain a minor’s criminal record, but she wasn’t allowed to say anything.

“There was nothing I could do,” Goodenough said. “They couldn’t get it off their record.”

By the end of the school year, Matthew had missed close to 100 days of class. In August, he learned he would be forced to repeat seventh grade.

“He’s really quiet. He used to talk with me, but now it’s just ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘I dunno,’” his grandmother said in September. “Before, he used to talk to me about class and what they did, but since he started getting in trouble there, he’s just not interested in school anymore.”

Matthew said his favorite subjects are math and science. In elementary school, he participated in an after-school STEM club. Before his string of suspensions, his grandmother said, he had talked about going to college to become an engineer.

“If we can just get him through high school and into college,” she sighed, “I can die content.”

Josh Peck contributed reporting. Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Joel Jacobs, ProPublica, and Bryant Furlow, New Mexico In Depth

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

New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica used data from the New Mexico Public Education Department to analyze student discipline rates across the state. The news outlets found that one district, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, played an outsized role in the disproportionate discipline of Native American students in the state. That district enrolls more Native students than any other public school district in the United States and a quarter of Native students in the state.

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Through public records requests, the news organizations obtained a spreadsheet of all disciplinary incidents reported by school districts to the state Public Education Department. The data was extracted from the state’s public schools database, called the Student Teacher Accountability Reporting System, and covered the 2010-11 to 2021-22 school years.

We chose to analyze multiple recent years to account for fluctuations in discipline from year to year. Discipline data for the 2020-21 school year was not included in our analysis because of school closures during the pandemic. Data for 2021-22 was excluded as well because it was incomplete. Ultimately, our analysis focused on the 2016-17 to 2019-20 school years.

To calculate the annual discipline rate per 1,000 students, we used state enrollment figures covering the same years, also from STARS. To compare the district’s Native student population to other districts nationwide, we used data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which showed Gallup-McKinley enrolled more Native students than any other public school district in the 2021-22 school year, the most recent year for which national data is available.

Because of how race and ethnicity are reported in state enrollment and disciplinary data, any student who identifies as ethnically Hispanic, which includes some Native Americans, is counted only as Hispanic. Hispanic students make up about 18% of the Gallup-McKinley student body, while Native Americans make up about 73% as of the 2021-22 school year. Both groups were disciplined at similarly high rates compared with white students. However, because Gallup-McKinley accounts for a much smaller portion of the state’s Hispanic students, the district’s high discipline rates did not significantly impact statewide Hispanic discipline rates.

Our analysis included disciplinary incidents involving students from kindergarten through 12th grade. The enrollment data used for our rate calculations included pre-kindergarten students; the Public Education Department did not provide data that allowed us to remove those students from all of our rate calculations. Pre-kindergarten students make up a small percentage of overall enrollment; including them in our denominator slightly reduced calculated discipline rates.

We included charter schools that are part of traditional school districts as well as alternative learning environments such as home schools that are included in districts’ reports. Statewide, they account for roughly 5% of student enrollment and 1% of infractions. Our analysis excluded charter schools that are treated as their own school districts, which enroll about 5% of the state’s students.

Each record included a “Discipline Response” field, which noted the most severe punishment imposed for a given infraction. School district staff choose from a list of options to populate this field. The options include “Expulsion” and “Modified Expulsion,” in which expelled students receive some educational services. We included both when tallying expulsions.

Arrests and referrals to law enforcement are grouped in a single option in the “Discipline Response” field, called “Arrest/referral to justice system.” That meant we were unable to determine the precise number of arrests. Referrals mean calls to law enforcement agencies or to the state-run juvenile probation office.

The data included a separate “Criminal Charge Code” field, which is meant to indicate whether a police report had been filed, according to the STARS manual. A few districts contacted by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica said they use this field to record when they call law enforcement, instead of selecting the “Arrest/referral to justice” system option in the “Discipline Response” field. (Gallup-McKinley officials did not respond to multiple requests over a period of months to discuss their discipline practices and data entry.) When referring to incidents involving law enforcement, we included any record marked with “Arrest/referral to justice system” or “Criminal Charge Code.”

During the time period we analyzed, if a student faced multiple types of discipline (such as an arrest and suspension), schools were instructed to record only the most severe punishment, according to the STARS manual. The most severe punishment in the system is “Arrest/referral to justice system,” and the second-most severe response is expulsion. As a result, if a student was arrested and expelled in response to an incident, it may appear only as an “Arrest/referral to justice system” in the data. State officials told us they don’t know how often that happened.

Not accounting for incidents marked as “Arrest/referral to justice system,” Native students had an expulsion rate roughly 13 times that of white students statewide from the 2016-17 to the 2019-20 school years. If all arrest/referral incidents of white students involved expulsions, and none of Native students did, this disparity was reduced to four times. We used the most conservative figure in our story, although the true disparity is likely larger. We used a similarly conservative method when comparing Gallup’s expulsion rate to the rest of the state.

Here are the details on how we reached our conservative estimates:

• To compare Native and white expulsion rates, we divided the Native expulsion rate (1.53) by the sum of the white rates for expulsion and arrest/referral to the justice system (0.12 + 0.23).
• To compare Gallup-McKinley and the rest of the state, we divided the district’s expulsion rate (4.58) by the sum of the rest of the state’s rates for expulsion and arrest/referral to the justice system (0.16 + 0.26)

When analyzing the data, we found about 20 cases in which a school district, including Gallup-McKinley, reported few or no disciplinary incidents for the first several months of a school year, despite reporting significant numbers in the rest of the year. We ran a separate analysis to account for those gaps, which produced similar findings.

Because of the limitations of the “Discipline Response” field and differences in how districts report law enforcement interactions, we compared rates across a variety of measures. For all measures of severe punishment, stark disparities persisted between Gallup-McKinley and the rest of the state and between Native American and white students statewide.

Gallup-McKinley Has Higher Rates of Severe Discipline Than the Rest of the State

We looked at annual rates of discipline per 1,000 students, averaged across the 2016-17 to 2019-20 school years, for several different measures of punishment.

Native Students Are Severely Disciplined More Than Their White Peers in New Mexico

We looked at annual rates of discipline per 1,000 students, averaged across the 2016-17 to 2019-20 school years, for several different measures of punishment.

by Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News, and Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

The story was also produced in partnership with NBC News.

The U.S. Education Department’s civil rights enforcement arm has launched an investigation into a North Texas school district whose superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove LGBTQ-themed library books.

Education and legal experts say the federal probe of the Granbury Independent School District — which stemmed from a complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and reporting by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune — appears to be the first such investigation explicitly tied to the nationwide movement to ban school library books dealing with sexuality and gender.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified Granbury school officials on Dec. 6 that it had opened the investigation following a July complaint by the ACLU, which accused the district of violating a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender. The ACLU complaint was based largely on an investigation published in March by NBC News, ProPublica and the Tribune that revealed that Granbury’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, instructed librarians to remove books dealing with sexual orientation and people who are transgender.

“I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women and there are women that think they’re men,” Glenn told librarians in January, according to a leaked recording of the meeting obtained, verified and published exclusively by the news outlets. “I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

Later in the meeting, Glenn clarified that he was specifically focused on removing books geared toward queer students: “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books,” he said, according to the recording.

The comments, combined with the district’s subsequent decision to remove dozens of library books pending a review, fostered a “pervasively hostile” environment for LGBTQ students, the ACLU wrote in its complaint. Chloe Kempf, an ACLU attorney, said the Education Department’s decision to open the investigation into Granbury ISD signals that the agency is concerned about what she described as “a wave” of anti-LGBTQ policies and book removals nationally.

“In this case it was made very clear, because the superintendent kind of said the quiet part out loud,” Kempf said in an interview. “It’s pretty clear that that kind of motivation is animating a lot of these policies nationwide.”

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed the investigation and said it was related to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sex, gender and sexual orientation. The Office for Civil Rights doesn’t comment on pending investigations, the spokesperson said.

If the investigation confirms violations of students’ rights in Granbury schools, the agency can require the district to make policy changes and submit to federal monitoring.

Neither Glenn nor the district responded to messages Monday. In an earlier statement following the news outlets’ reporting in March, the district said it was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds. And the district said that its primary focus is educating students but that “the values of our community will always be reflected in our schools.”

Granbury, a town 40 miles west of Fort Worth, has been embroiled in a heated debate over what types of books children should be allowed to read at school.

Last year, voters in Granbury elected a pair of school board members who campaigned against LGBTQ-affirming school curricula and library books. Afterward, Glenn began asking district administrators about several books that an unnamed school board member had found in the district’s online catalog, according to text messages reviewed by NBC News, ProPublica and The Tribune. The messages from the board member to Glenn included screenshots of eight titles, all of which dealt with LGBTQ topics, with the words “gay,” “trans” and “gender” highlighted in some of the book descriptions.

In January, when Glenn met with librarians, he told them that the new school board was “very, very conservative” and that any employee who holds different political views had “better hide it,” according to the recording of his comments. In the days that followed, the district embarked on one of the largest mass book removals in the state, pulling 130 titles, most of which featured LGBTQ characters or themes.

After a volunteer review committee voted to return all but a few of the titles, two disgruntled members of the committee filed a police report in May accusing district employees of providing “pornography” to children, triggering a monthslong criminal investigation by Hood County Constable Chad Jordan, which remained open as of August. Jordan didn’t respond to messages requesting an update on the investigation.

All of that — including the fact that Glenn has never apologized or walked back his comments — has created an unwelcoming environment for LGBTQ students in the Granbury district, the ACLU argued in its complaint.

“These comments, combined with the book removals, really send a message to LGBTQ students in the districts that: ‘You don’t belong here. Your existence is shameful. It should be censored,’” Kempf said.

In recent months, Granbury parents and voters have continued to pressure the district to remove books with LGBTQ themes or descriptions of sex. Last month, Karen Lowery, one of the women who sought criminal charges against Granbury librarians, won a seat on the school board; she has vowed to purge books that she has deemed inappropriate for children. Of the nearly 80 titles conservative activists want banned, 3 out of 5 feature LGBTQ characters or themes, according to an analysis of books posted on GranburyTexasBooks.org, a website where they have compiled parent reviews.

Lowery didn’t respond to messages requesting comment.

At her first meeting as a school board trustee on Dec. 12 — one week after the Office for Civil Rights notified the district it had opened an investigation — Lowery called for all “obscene” books to be pulled from shelves. In response, Glenn asked her to provide a list of titles so the board could discuss it at a future meeting.

"I think as a district, we do want to resolve this," Glenn said of the library book controversy. "Speaking on behalf of every administrator in the room, and probably community members because I know there are a few of you that are ready to have this behind you, too."

Education and legal experts said the Education Department’s decision to open an investigation in Granbury is significant because it sets up a test of a somewhat novel legal argument by the ACLU: the idea that book removals themselves can create a hostile environment for certain classes of students.

“It’s certainly the first investigation I’ve seen by the agency testing that argument in this way,” said W. Scott Lewis, a managing partner at TNG, a consulting firm that advises school districts on complying with federal civil rights laws.

The ACLU of Texas made similar legal arguments in another civil rights complaint filed last month against the Keller Independent School District in North Texas in response to a policy banning any books that mention “gender fluidity.” The Education Department has yet to decide whether to open an investigation in Keller, Kempf said.

Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at the nonprofit PEN America, which has tracked thousands of school book bans since last year, said the same legal argument could be made in districts across the country where parents, school board members and administrators have expressed anti-LGBTQ motivations.

“It’s not uncommon to see people explicitly saying that they want to remove LGBTQ books because they believe they are indoctrinating students,” said Friedman, who cited a case in Florida in which a teacher called for the removal of a children’s picture book about two male penguins because, she said, it promoted the “LGBTQ agenda.”

Granbury isn’t the only North Texas school district facing federal scrutiny.

The Office for Civil Rights over the past year has opened five investigations into allegations of discrimination at the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, a wealthy Fort Worth suburb that has been at the center of the national political fight over the ways schools address racism, gender and sexuality. If the Education Department finds Carroll students’ rights have been violated, experts said, the federal agency could require the district to implement the same types of diversity and inclusion training programs that conservative activists have fought to block in Southlake.

Carroll Superintendent Lane Ledbetter has said the district has taken steps, including retraining staff members in how to handle bullying complaints, to ensure students from all backgrounds feel safe at school.

“If OCR determines that there are steps that we can take beyond what we have implemented, then we will absolutely comply,” Ledbetter said in a video address to the community after news of the federal civil rights investigation broke last year. “My priorities are kids, and we’re going to keep them safe.”

As in Southlake, some students and parents in Granbury say they’re counting on federal investigators to force changes.

Lou Whiting, 17, a nonbinary senior at Granbury High School, said Glenn’s recorded comments made them feel unsafe and unwelcome at school. Whiting, who helped organize student protests of the book removals, cried when they learned that the federal government had opened an investigation.

“It’s just really good to hear that there are people who are listening to us and actually doing something about it,” Whiting said. “It means a lot to hear that our efforts meant something.”

by Agnel Philip and Eli Hager, ProPublica, and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — In the months after a West Virginia court permanently took away their right to parent their daughters this past April, Jackie Snodgrass and her husband were left in a quiet house. The kids’ rooms remained untouched. The same dolls and stuffed animals were arranged on their younger daughter’s bed. The same clothes in the closets, becoming outgrown. The same photos on the walls, outdated.

The court had denied a final visit — despite the children continually saying they missed their mother — so the parents never got to say goodbye to them in person. Snodgrass worried about them constantly, especially her older daughter, who has diabetes. An app pinged her intermittently with updates on her child’s blood sugar. Occasionally, it would dip too low or spike too high.

“What if something happens to her?” Snodgrass said. “And if it does, I’m not going to be allowed to be there.”

Once considered a last resort reserved for parents who abandon their children, the involuntary and permanent termination of parental rights now hangs over every mother and father accused of any form of abuse or neglect — including allegations of nonviolent behavior like drug use or truancy, the two central parenting issues in the Snodgrasses’ case. Known in the legal world as the “death penalty” of child welfare, it can happen in a matter of months.

No state terminates parental rights more frequently or faster than West Virginia, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis. One in 50 children here experienced the severing of their relationships with both of their parents from 2015 to 2019, the last full year of federal child welfare data available before the pandemic. For most of them, it occurred within 11 months of being removed from their home for the first time.

In the Snodgrasses’ case, it took only five months.

Nationally, the parents of about 327,000 children lost their rights from 2015 to 2019, the analysis found. In one-fifth of those cases, it happened in less than a year.

Over the past 25 years, courts and child protective services agencies have increasingly turned to this ultimate consequence, partly in response to Clinton-era federal policies that support faster adoptions. According to a recent study, the risk that a child will experience the loss of their legal relationship with their parents roughly doubled from 2000 to 2016. One in 100 U.S. children — disproportionately Black and Native American — experience termination through the child welfare system before they turn 18, the study found.

Most of those families became entangled in the system because of allegations of neglect, a broad category closely linked to poverty and substance use. Just 15% of children whose parents’ rights were severed around the country from 2015 to 2019 had been removed from their homes because of concerns about physical or sexual abuse, according to the ProPublica and NBC News analysis. (The reasons ultimately cited for the terminations themselves weren’t provided in the data.)

“None of us believes banishing a child from a family of origin is a perfectly fine result,” said Marty Guggenheim, a retired New York University law professor and child welfare expert who has argued termination cases before the Supreme Court. “But that’s where we are today. We are off of our moral compass.”

West Virginia Terminates Parental Rights Faster Than Any Other State

States differ widely in how quickly they terminate parental rights after a child is first removed from a home.

Note: Dots represent the median time between a child’s first removal from the home and when both of their parents’ rights are terminated. Washington D.C. is included as a state. (Source: ProPublica analysis of National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect records. Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)

The hurry to end families can be traced to the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton.

In a tough-on-crime era, the new law was supposed to keep fragile, abused children from languishing for too long in foster care. It created a rigid timeline — a ticking clock — for every child who entered state custody after having been removed from home because of an allegation of child maltreatment. After 15 months, barring specific exemptions, state and local agencies were required to file for termination of the birth parents’ rights or face losing federal funding. And states that increased adoptions were rewarded with bonuses for every additional child they placed.

Despite the law’s goal of getting more kids adopted, tens of thousands of such children have remained in foster care for months or years after being cut off from their parents. They are known as “legal orphans,” with no birth families anymore but no adoptive ones, either.

And research shows that many children who experience termination of their parents’ rights will suffer what is known as ambiguous loss, similar to grieving after a death but without the closure of knowing a loved one is gone forever.

To understand the impact of the child welfare system’s most extreme outcome, ProPublica and NBC News surveyed hundreds of families who experienced termination of parental rights and interviewed dozens of parents, children, caretakers, caseworkers and attorneys. Those we spoke to described a confusing legal system that at times seemed stacked against birth families trying to reunite and inured to the pain of long-term family separation.

“There was all this lost time when me and my dad had wanted to talk to each other but were being prevented by the state government,” said Reed Ridens, a graduate student in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who spent years in foster care as a legal orphan. “There was a lot of damage and a lot of repair that needed to be done between us, and a lot that had been taken away.”

Snodgrass’ kids’ rooms remain untouched. She and her husband, Wes, haven’t seen them in person for over a year.

Some of the 1997 law’s original supporters — and even some top child welfare officials — now warn that the timeline Congress prescribed is too rigid and that some states may have taken the reforms too far.

Maureen Flatley, a child welfare consultant who helped craft the law, said she now believes it urgently needs to be revamped, including the prescribed timeline for terminating parental rights. “We can’t pretend anymore that adoption is just some magic panacea,” she said in an interview.

The federal government also has voiced concerns about focusing too narrowly on termination time frames. In the final days of the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families issued a memo warning states against rushing to end rights.

Jerry Milner, a top official at the agency under President Donald Trump, said the Clinton-era law should be overhauled or repealed. Its timeline was the product of political negotiation, he said, not scientific research on how long parents should be given for recovery or redemption before they lose their rights to their children. “But it’s hanging over parents’ heads like a death sentence,” he said.

Yet the Biden administration has continued to defend the law. The statute allows states to make exceptions to the timeline if they believe termination would not be “in the best interest of the child” or if the state has failed to provide adequate reunification services, an ACF spokesperson said in response to written questions. Decisions are to be made on a case-by-case basis, the agency added.

And recent attempts by Congress to revise the timeline have failed to gain much traction.

Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., believes it’s imperative for lawmakers to try once more: She plans to introduce a child welfare bill in the next Congress to allow states to extend the timeline for termination to 24 months, among other changes.

“The harsh timeline doesn’t allow people to be rehabilitated or give them a chance to be reunited with their children,” she said.

Five Months to End a Family

Jackie Snodgrass and her husband, Wes, attracted the attention of West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources in February 2021 because their girls had missed too many days of school. It was a problem that the family and the child protective services agency had tussled over for years, according to court documents Snodgrass provided to ProPublica and NBC News, but it came to a head when their absences piled up amid virtual schooling during the pandemic. Both parents were placed under court-ordered supervision.

The family moved from their tiny town of 1,400 to Wes Snodgrass’ mother’s home in the capital city, Charleston, to be closer to school for the girls, whose attendance was improving. They started a tree-trimming business and were making ends meet.

By October 2021, Jackie Snodgrass was busy planning her older daughter’s dream 16th birthday party — with pink decorations and a DJ, like on MTV.

“I like their birthdays better than Christmas, because it’s just their day,” she said of her children.

But the stress of the move and the truancy case had taken a toll. Snodgrass’ husband said he had used methamphetamine during that time, and in November, on an impulse, she tried it too. When the court overseeing their case started mandating drug screens, both parents failed.

The child welfare agency’s response was immediate: Like many states, West Virginia considers failed drug tests to be proof that a child is in danger, which can lead to the child’s removal. Snodgrass said a caseworker told her and her husband over the phone that they had to immediately pack up and leave the children with her husband’s mother.

After just five months and a few hearings, as the Snodgrasses struggled to comply with court orders, the judge ruled that they were unfit to raise their girls ever again.

They haven’t seen them in person for over a year.

The property in the tiny town of Liberty, West Virginia, where the Snodgrasses lived before they moved their family to Charleston

Jackie Snodgrass’ parents now have custody of the children and plan to adopt them. Her mother said the girls have taken the separation hard, acting out and asking why they can’t see their mom and dad. Visiting is prohibited even though they live 5 miles apart.

In West Virginia, which has been ravaged by drug epidemics in recent decades, children are more likely to enter foster care than anywhere else in the country. Substance use was the most common reason cited for removing children from their homes in the state’s parental rights termination cases, according to the ProPublica and NBC News analysis.

Nearly every state acts more quickly when drugs are involved than when children are removed based on concerns about physical or sexual abuse. But West Virginia is particularly aggressive, giving parents the least amount of time to recover: More than a fifth of the state’s terminations involving parental drug use occurred less than six months after the children were first removed, the news organizations found.

In response to ProPublica and NBC News’ findings, state Del. Danielle Walker, a Democrat, expressed outrage at West Virginia’s haste in terminating parental rights and said the Legislature needed to conduct an intensive study to look at termination and related issues.

“There is no advocacy for the biological parents in this state. There’s none,” said Walker, who said her office would research the subject and compare West Virginia’s child welfare practices to those in other states. “Since when is six months enough to have proper recovery — any kind of recovery?”

Family attorneys and advocates say this posture toward addiction and recreational drug use punishes many parents whose children may not be in danger. Parents who are committed to seeking help to get their children back can be penalized if they relapse, even though drug treatment experts have long said such setbacks are a normal part of recovery.

“It’s a race against the clock for these families to oftentimes deal with a generational trauma,” said Jim McKay, director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, an advocacy group. “We should be partnering with families and working alongside them rather than having it be a prisoner of an arbitrary date on the calendar.”

Ray Kendall, a former caseworker for the state’s Department of Health and Human Resources, said the agency’s “astronomical” workload caused many of his colleagues to become jaded toward substance use cases. West Virginia had 1 caseworker for every 167 children it investigated in 2019. That was among the nation’s highest caseloads, leaving less time for workers to help parents access services that can prevent termination.

“I don’t think six months is enough time to truly become completely sober and able to be in control of your life and take care of your kids, so it is a bit unrealistic,” said Kendall, who left the agency in 2019 in part because of frustrations that he couldn’t do more for families.

West Virginia has also been rewarded by the federal government for acting quickly to end families, having received $24 million in incentive payments under the 1997 law for increasing the number of adoptions it finalizes. (The program expanded in 2014 to include payments for guardianships, in which responsibility for children is transferred to other adults without completely severing parental rights.) Adjusted for child population, West Virginia has brought in 65% more in these incentives than the next highest state, Alaska.

The state’s Department of Health and Human Resources declined to make officials available for interviews. In response to written questions, the department didn’t dispute ProPublica and NBC News’ findings about the frequency and speed of termination in the state; it denied that the state’s statutes and policies fail to provide parents enough time for reunification.

Courts have the discretion “to make individualized decisions based upon the actions of the parents and the best interest of the child,” said Jessica Holstein, a spokesperson for the agency, who added that parents can also appeal the decisions.

Holstein said the agency has tried to reduce caseloads by adding staff members, increasing salaries and using temporary “crisis teams” to backfill vacancies.

“The culture at DHHR supports family connections,” she said, noting that the department prioritizes foster care placements with relatives when possible, as happened in the Snodgrasses’ case.

A trampoline that Snodgrass’ daughters used to play on at their Charleston home

Cindy Largent-Hill, director of the juvenile division of the West Virginia Administrative Office of the Courts, said the state’s termination schedule is meant to prevent cases from dragging on too long.

“They may look a bit unfair because three months doesn’t sound like a long time, or six months, or 12 months,” said Largent-Hill, who works with the state’s circuit court judges. But, she said, “you don’t want cases to languish in court for three, four or five years.”

Snodgrass said she still is shocked by how quickly her case devolved. After the judge’s decision, whenever she felt a glimmer of hope, she would reread the order: “Any and all parental, guardianship, and custodial rights of the respondent parents … are hereby permanently and forever TERMINATED.”

“There’s, like, anger or something behind it,” Snodgrass said. “It seemed way too fast, but it also feels like years since I’ve seen my kids.”

The Push for Permanency

For most of U.S. history, it was rare for courts to permanently cut parents’ legal ties to their children without consent, according to a forthcoming paper by Chris Gottlieb, director of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic. Typically, child welfare cases would end in termination only when states could prove that parents had abandoned their kids or as part of voluntary adoptions.

After states began requiring teachers, doctors and other professionals to report suspected child abuse or neglect in the 1970s, the number of kids entering foster care rose dramatically. In many cases, children stayed for years in out-of-home placements.

By the 1990s, a substantial body of research showed that such long foster care stays could harm child development. At the same time, increased access to birth control and abortion had led to a sharp decline in the number of children available for prospective adoptive parents, according to Gottlieb’s research.

The 1997 federal law was meant to address both trends. Its prominent supporters pointed to high-profile cases in which children were brutally beaten or killed after having been returned to their parents from foster care. Many argued that it was far more important to move children quickly into permanent homes than to spend an indeterminate amount of time trying to “fix” birth families. That ultimately would make more kids available for adoption.

Adoptions out of foster care increased from 31,000 in 1997 to 66,200 by 2019, according to federal data, while the foster care population has declined.

All states now have statutes that meet the federal law’s timeline requiring them to pursue termination if a child has spent 15 of the previous 22 months in the foster system, according to a ProPublica and NBC News survey of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The law allows states to move slower if a child is placed with relatives but also faster under certain circumstances, such as if a parent has committed a serious criminal offense.

More than 30 states have even tighter timelines, the news organizations found — in some cases when young children are involved, under the rationale that they are in greatest need of immediately stable homes where they can start bonding with permanent families.

In Texas — the only state other than West Virginia with a median time to termination of less than a year — most counties put the penalty on the table the moment children are temporarily removed from a home, in order to place “parents on notice from the beginning of the case,” according to the state child welfare agency’s policy handbook.

A sign points to the Department of Health and Human Resources, the agency that handles child welfare cases, in Romney, West Virginia.

Not every state moves so quickly: ProPublica and NBC News’ analysis found 16 states where the median time to termination is more than two years. Those longer cases, in some instances, can signal systems aren’t working as they should, reflecting bureaucratic dysfunction or what some child welfare officials describe as a pattern of giving parents “too many chances” that ultimately doesn’t help reduce termination rates, according to a 2021 report on state child welfare practices by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Still, longer timelines can also reflect a stronger focus on family reunification and a willingness to devote greater resources to meet that goal, child welfare experts say. New York and Illinois, for example, offer more robust social services, and they are also places with influential parent advocacy groups, said Christopher Wildeman, a child welfare expert and sociology professor at Duke University. (Wildeman is the director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided the data used in the ProPublica and NBC News analysis.)

In the wake of the opioid crisis, which has led to more kids being in foster care, Congress has tried to increase support for parents involved in the child welfare system. In 2018, it passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, approved with bipartisan support and signed by Trump. The law allows states to put federal funding previously restricted for foster care expenses toward mental health services, substance use treatment and parenting classes to help keep families together.

The Administration for Children and Families “is committed to focusing on prevention and early intervention so that families who come into contact with child welfare systems do not find themselves in the position of facing a termination of parental rights,” a spokesperson said.

But the legislation has strict requirements for which programs it will fund, and states have been slow to implement it. Eleven states are still waiting for their plans to be approved by the federal government, according to recent agency data, and six haven’t submitted plans at all. And some child welfare advocates have criticized the law’s focus on narrow initiatives like parenting classes, which they say fail to address poverty and the other root causes of neglect that prompt most child welfare cases.

“If I don’t have a house and I’m struggling, how are some parent education classes going to help?” said Christine James-Brown, the president and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

West Virginia has drawn on the new federal funding but has spent only $125,000 since the summer of 2021, according to agency officials. The state is also trying to expand “family treatment courts,” designed to promote reunification rather than termination.

West Virginia’s senators, Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, told ProPublica and NBC News that they are committed to keeping families together when possible. Capito added that the news organizations’ findings are “concerning” and that her staff would look into those issues.

But when they were asked whether the state has adequate resources for family reunification — or whether the federal timeline for termination should be altered — neither senator responded directly.

Test Clean or Else

Some family advocates doubt that any new funding would have a significant impact on termination rates without a fundamental change in attitudes among local agencies and courts toward parents accused of child maltreatment, especially those struggling with substance use.

Judges have ultimate authority in such cases, but there is limited scrutiny of what happens in their courtrooms. In many states, including West Virginia, the public isn’t allowed to observe child welfare proceedings, and documents are typically kept under seal. Some judges order parents not to speak about their cases to anyone who isn’t involved, and if they disobey, it can be held against them.

What’s more, West Virginia judges often require parents to admit in court that they have a drug problem before they grant them an “improvement period,” said Joshua Edwards, a public defender in the state. If they refuse and the state proves to a judge that they used drugs, it becomes highly unlikely they will get their kids back, he said.

Jackie Snodgrass admitted in court to using drugs and neglecting her children’s education; she acknowledged in an interview that she regretted that her instances of meth use had put her family in jeopardy. But she never thought the mistake could lead to the end of her relationship with her daughters. After all, Snodgrass said, she had never hurt the girls, and according to court documents, they wanted to go home.

But the outcome hinged on whether the Snodgrasses complied with the services they were offered, including parenting classes and drug tests. And the government had little patience for mistakes or disagreements.

Snodgrass said she was required to call daily before 10 a.m. to find out whether she needed to be drug-screened. Once, around Thanksgiving, she said, she called a few minutes late, and the test was considered a failure.

Snodgrass goes through drawings left behind by her daughters.

From the start, Snodgrass and her husband were prohibited from seeing their daughters, even for supervised visits, because they couldn’t test clean consistently. She was testing positive for marijuana at the time, but she said she soon became so hopeless about the prospect of losing the girls forever that she used methamphetamine again to cope.

Snodgrass said she saw the phrase “termination of parental rights” in court papers for the first time early this year. Soon after, she said, a caseworker told her she would have to enter a long-term inpatient drug treatment program, probably for at least 45 days.

The family’s tree-trimming business didn’t have many clients yet, and Snodgrass, who was working as an assistant at a nursing home, was the primary earner. She said she feared they wouldn’t be able to pay their rent if she took an extended leave from work, and she told the caseworker that she was open to outpatient treatment, instead.

Her reluctance to enter an inpatient program proved critical, according to case documents. West Virginia is among 22 states with statutes saying that parents’ failure to comply with court-ordered rehabilitation or drug treatment plans, regardless of any evidence of harm to children, can itself be grounds for permanent termination of parental rights, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis of state laws.

Near the end of the case, Snodgrass said, her lawyer suggested that she divorce her husband because she was testing clean more often than he was. But the two were childhood sweethearts, and despite his drug use, he was a good father and her best friend, she said.

Still, she told the judge, “If I need to leave my husband, I’m willing to do that to bring my kids home.”

Her husband said in an interview that he was shocked to hear this in court but that he understood the position she was being put in. “I felt real low,” Wes Snodgrass said. “I felt like I didn’t have a family no more.”

It didn’t matter. In their case file, DHHR listed five general criteria for determining whether to recommend termination of parental rights to the court, including how long a child has been in foster care, whether a case involves serious abuse or abandonment by the parents or whether their rights have been severed before.

The couple met just one of the criteria: The agency concluded that there was “no reasonable likelihood” that the neglect allegations against them could be “substantially corrected in the near future,” citing their failure to comply with the court’s requirements within the previous five months.

Still denied any visits with the girls, they had no chance to hug them goodbye.

Rethinking the “Death Penalty” of Child Welfare

Fueled in part by the 2020 demonstrations for racial justice nationwide, family rights activists have made a renewed push to change the child welfare system — including the repeal of the Clinton law.

At the start of the new Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick, the representative from Florida, plans to introduce a bill to allow states to extend the timeline for termination and exempt parents who are actively participating in classes, treatment or other services; it would also encourage states to place more foster children with relatives instead of strangers. The bill was originally introduced last year by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., but it failed to move forward, and Bass recently was sworn in as the new mayor of Los Angeles.

Cherfilus-McCormick and other Democratic lawmakers say they plan to make the issue a priority next year.

But that could be challenging given the changing balance of power in the House. Republicans, who will take the majority in January, have yet to co-sponsor any of the recent proposals to alter the federal timeline for termination.

Meanwhile, there has been growing support for alternative custody arrangements that don’t require termination of birth parents’ rights. In 2008, Congress passed a law allowing states to access federal funds to support guardianship by family members, and 40 states and the District of Columbia now have such programs.

And about half of states have laws that would allow parental rights to be reinstated or restored, although that is still rare and is often limited to cases in which the children lack permanent homes.

Support for such reforms varies widely among states, and the changes have yet to have a major impact on national adoption or reunification rates.

Washington, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, said the outsize impact of termination on low-income and Black families makes it especially urgent for Congress to fix the mistakes it made in the 1997 law. “It’s indefensible to have such short timelines,” said Norton, a longtime member of the Congressional Foster Care Caucus.

“The most important relationship in a family is the relationship between parents and children,” she said. “We should do everything we can to preserve that.”

Lost Time

“There’s, like, anger or something behind it,” Snodgrass said of the order that terminated her parental rights. “It seemed way too fast, but it also feels like years since I’ve seen my kids.”

Jackie Snodgrass said the gravity of what was happening in court didn’t hit her until the judge finally said the words: He was terminating her parental rights.

“My heart just fell to my knees,” she said. “It felt like I had just died. Like everything had been taken out of me.”

Snodgrass and her husband say they’ve been clean for several months, and they recently have had a new reason to hope. Her parents said state adoption officials told them that they will most likely be allowed to let the Snodgrasses see their children again, once the adoption is finalized.

But for now, they still aren’t supposed to have contact with their girls or even ask how they are doing. Since being separated, the older daughter has reached out to Snodgrass and they’ve talked by phone and instant messaging. Snodgrass is worried her daughters won’t think she cares about them if she keeps missing major life events like birthdays.

Still, she is more fortunate than many parents whose rights are terminated. When foster children are adopted by strangers, they can be cut off completely from their biological parents. Another mother in West Virginia who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News said she scours social media for photos of her daughters and stares at their adoptive home in a nearby town on Google Street View.

Snodgrass said that even if she is allowed back in her children’s lives, it still scares her that she has no control over their relationship, including any legal rights to make decisions about their medical treatment.

In between phone calls they’re not supposed to have, Snodgrass continues to get updates from her daughter’s blood sugar app. She said it provides a small comfort.

Hannah Rappleye, of NBC News, and Asia Fields, of ProPublica, contributed reporting. Alex Mierjeski and Mollie Simon, of ProPublica, contributed research.

by Jake Pearson

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 a collaboration between New York magazine and ProPublica.

By the time Karl Ashanti neared his office in the New York City Law Department’s headquarters in March 2018, the police were shutting down Park Place. Ice had fallen from the buildings above, so an officer had cordoned off the area. Ashanti flashed his work ID and the cop let him through. Then, about two-thirds of the way down the block, he ran into a second officer. “Turn around now,” John Shapiro barked. “I said now.”

Ashanti stiffened. The two men were about the same size, each around 6 feet tall and 240 pounds. Shapiro was in his blue New York Police Department uniform. Ashanti, a city lawyer, wasn’t due in court that day and had dressed casually in dark slacks, a button-down, an overcoat and a winter hat. The two had never met before, but there was something about Shapiro’s brusque demeanor that Ashanti recognized.

For 11 years, Ashanti had defended NYPD officers against lawsuits alleging civil-rights violations in federal court. He was a senior litigator in a little-known Law Department unit that exclusively handles such cases, the Special Federal Litigation Division, known simply as Special Fed. As a Black man who’d grown up in Jamaica, Queens, Ashanti thought he brought valuable perspective to the work. He’d seen how Black people, and Black men in particular, could, through no fault of their own, be targeted by prejudiced men in uniform. Still, Ashanti took pride in his legal skills and had come to embrace the combative approach that Special Fed typically took in fighting claims of police abuse, even in the face of compelling evidence that police behavior violated the constitutional rights of the people they had sworn to protect.

On Park Place, Ashanti told Shapiro, who is white, that he was trying to get to his office. Shapiro insisted he go back the way he came. Ashanti moved between two parked cars to cross the street and Shapiro hustled to cut off his path, repeating his order. The two men faced each other in the middle of the road. Shapiro tapped Ashanti on his shoulder. Ashanti backpedaled and asked to speak to a supervisor. Shapiro took out his handcuffs. Within 90 seconds of their first encounter, the officer arrested the attorney.

Shapiro claimed in criminal filings that Ashanti resisted arrest and shoved him twice, so forcefully that Shapiro had to step back to catch his balance. The New York Post splashed the allegations in its pages, calling Ashanti a “livid lawyer.” It wasn’t true. Security-camera footage showed no shoving during the incident. As it unfolded, nine other people freely walked up and down Park Place. Court records revealed it wasn’t the first time Shapiro had been accused of abusing his power. By the time he detained Ashanti, the officer had already been named in three false-arrest lawsuits. (Two were settled, and one was dismissed.) Ashanti’s own unit had handled those cases.

Within days of the incident, the Law Department gave Ashanti an ultimatum: resign or be fired. After more than a decade defending the police, Ashanti was finding out what it was like on the other side of the law.

Footage of the incident between Ashanti and officer John Shapiro (New York Supreme Court)

On Oct. 29, 1984, when Ashanti was 11 years old, police officers in Morris Heights entered Eleanor Bumpurs’ apartment and killed her with a shotgun. Bumpurs was 66 and mentally ill. Her family had instructed her not to let strangers into her home, and when the police showed up to assist in her eviction that day, she lunged at them with a kitchen knife. Her death inflamed the city. In Ashanti’s neighborhood — a predominantly Black community of working-class Caribbean immigrants and city employees — the shooting entered a canon of police killings that, over decades, have shaped attitudes on race and the police. Ashanti remembers that this was about the time when his mother first gave him the Talk. “It’s not like she didn’t have respect for authority,” Ashanti says. “It was not that I should dislike the police. It was more like, ‘There are some police officers who will abuse their power, and unless you capitulate, things might escalate.’ She was like, ‘I want my son alive.’ She said that more than once to me.”

Not long after, three Black men whose car had broken down in Howard Beach were chased by a pack of white teenagers with tire irons and baseball bats. One of the men fleeing the mob was struck by a car and killed. Another was savagely beaten. For Ashanti, the takeaway was clear: Don’t ever ride your bike into Howard Beach. “It’s the ironic thing about growing up in New York City, which is such a quote, unquote liberal city,” he says. “You have these incidents of not just police but private racial violence.” Police racism was real, he thought, but cops didn’t have a monopoly on prejudice; it was simply everywhere.

In sixth grade, Ashanti did well on an exam given by Prep for Prep, a nonprofit group that sends promising students of color to elite, mostly white private schools. He attended Buckley, the tony all-boys academy on the Upper East Side, where he was a few years ahead of Donald Trump Jr., then high school at St. Paul’s, the exclusive New Hampshire boarding school.

One Friday during sophomore year, it was his turn to choose a film for movie night. Students normally picked comedies, but Ashanti went with “Colors,” the 1988 drama about Los Angeles cops patrolling gangland beats. One of the older boys “rolled his eyes about the selection and shit,” Ashanti says. “And then maybe like one or two other people joined in. A What the fuck is this? kind of thing. Just, like, a complete rejection of anything that had to do with the ghetto, with Black and Latino culture.” With him. “I just remember looking at them like: You fucking privileged assholes. Everything has to be your way all the fucking time.”

On several occasions, upperclassmen barged into his room in the middle of the night and pelted him with water balloons. He thought they were sending a message: “Here’s this motherfucker who won’t fall in line.” At 23, he legally changed his last name to Ashanti, shedding the birth name, Francis, that his enslaved African ancestors had been “branded” with. “I’m sure one of their goals was for one of their descendants to one day be free of that name,” he says. “I know that’s what it would be for me.”

Ashanti is impeccably credentialed — he went on to Stanford, where he was president of his all-Black fraternity, and then Georgetown Law — but when he returned to New York and entered the workforce, his trajectory slackened. At a succession of run-of-the-mill firms, Ashanti took cases involving businesses suing businesses, personal injury and insurance. The work could be challenging, but it didn’t satisfy his civic or lawyerly ambitions. A landlord and tenant arguing the terms of a 20-year lease? Boring. Cattle-call appearances in state courts before overworked judges? Uninspiring.

One morning on his way to the office, Ashanti says, an officer pulled him over for “erratic driving” and falsely cited him for having lapsed insurance. He was held for 12 hours. Another time, while applying to a new firm, his interviews seemed to be going well until he met with an elderly white partner. Ashanti later testified that the man said “something more malicious than ‘You’re articulate for a Negro.’” (The firm settled an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint. Ashanti said he received an apology that implied the partner was “like the grandpa you don’t want to bring out to the party.”)

Nine years passed in the lower tiers of corporate law. Ashanti wanted autonomy, and he wanted to conduct trials — maybe even change lanes to civil-rights law. From an early age, he’d been inspired by Thurgood Marshall. But he didn’t have a civil-rights background, and the longer he spent doing corporate law, the less possible switching tracks felt. He started talking with a recruiter, and when an opportunity arose at Special Fed, Ashanti listened with great interest.

The cases would be in the federal courts, where the smartest jurists operate, and he’d be handling them soup to nuts, appearing before judges and juries. And the subject matter was appealingly complex. The main statute governing Special Fed’s work, Section 1983, traces its roots to a Reconstruction-era bill known as the Ku Klux Klan Act that lets individuals sue local government officials for violations of their civil rights. It’s an extremely technical platform to litigate, with a century and a half of accumulated case law. “That’s the heart of our legal system: the relationship between government and individuals,” Ashanti says.

He would have preferred to do civil-rights work on behalf of plaintiffs, but the firms that handled such cases weren’t offering him a job. Plus, for a native New Yorker, joining the Law Department had a special attraction. “Representing the City of New York did fill me with a sense of pride,” he says.

The idea that he’d be arguing the side of the police just wasn’t much of a factor in his decision to join the division, he says. “I didn’t feel any kind of way about representing police officers and correctional officers because I always knew — I always knew — it was all about the work and the cases,” he says. “It’s always a case-by-case situation.”

Special Fed was created in 1998 by the administration of Rudy Giuliani to deal with a surge in lawsuits against police officers, jail guards and prosecutors. Its dozens of attorneys investigate citizens’ allegations of beatings, false arrests and other civil-rights abuses and decide whether to mount a defense or settle. Generally, they fight.

Many Special Fed veterans say the unit prizes winning at all costs, even when there is merit to a plaintiff’s case. Victory can still be had in making the process as difficult as possible for citizens — getting suits thrown out, abandoned or negotiated down to the smallest possible payout. The lawyers tend to see themselves as guardians of the public fisc, pitted against those who would drain the coffers: criminals looking for a payday, greedy lawyers, bleeding-heart juries. They litigate aggressively, sometimes drawing rebukes from judges for violating court rules, blowing deadlines and pressing the boundaries of professional conduct. Earlier this year, a judge dressed down a senior Special Fed lawyer for failing to obey court orders. “If I order something and you can’t do it, you can’t just blow it off,” the judge said. One plaintiff’s attorney told the New York Daily News, “They get away with things that no other litigant would ever get away with.” (A spokesman for the Law Department says, “We take our ethical responsibilities very seriously and have zero tolerance for misconduct that undermines our mission.”)

Sometimes even a victory at trial isn’t enough for Special Fed. In 2020, after defeating a Bronx man in an excessive-force case, the division sought sanctions against him and his legal team for bringing the suit in the first place. A federal judge wrote scathingly that the effort to penalize the plaintiff was “wildly inappropriate” because the man had had a reasonable case. More troubling, the judge wrote, was the chilling message that the episode sent to the law firms that do pro bono work for low-income people “with facially valid claims against powerful defendants.”

Ashanti believed he could be a more nuanced operator at Special Fed. Shortly before he started, in November 2006, plainclothes officers shot 50 bullets at a car driven by a Black 23-year-old named Sean Bell in the early hours of his wedding day. It was the city’s most incendiary police killing in years, and Ashanti felt it personally — Bell was from his neighborhood. “Sean Bell was me,” he says. He decided that at his new job, the Bell case would serve as his moral barometer. The family would inevitably file a civil suit against the police; would Special Fed settle it judiciously, or would the unit reflexively fight to minimize the payout? “That was the biggest question to me: Are we going to defend the indefensible?” Ashanti says.

Joseph Guzman, who was wounded in the police shooting that killed Sean Bell, speaks outside the Queens Criminal Court in March 2007. (Michael Nagle/Getty Images)

He showed up to his first day of work in March 2007. The third floor of the New York City Law Department was like a relic of the drab municipal offices of the 1970s, with paralegals and claims specialists sitting in cubicles in the middle of the floor and attorneys occupying small windowless offices. Conference rooms had removable walls so they could double in size when teams of litigators fielded especially big cases. Armed NYPD officers — liaisons between Special Fed and its police clients — walked the halls.

Ashanti handled about 40 lawsuits a year, and he found that few fit his Sean Bell binary. Most presented as murky, with imperfect evidence and plaintiffs who might have been breaking the law, introducing questions of credibility and sympathy with juries. One of his first assignments involved a class-action suit alleging that Rikers Island jailers were unconstitutionally strip-searching female inmates and conducting nonconsensual gynecological exams. Ashanti was one of eight or so lawyers on the Special Fed team. Questions about constitutional violations and public accountability receded as the day-to-day work ground on with arguments over records, process and liability. (The suit was settled years later for $33 million.)

Like most in his profession, Ashanti believed in some core tenets about representation: Attorneys are not their clients, and our adversarial system demands that each side have zealous counsel. But at Special Fed, almost from the start, he struggled to moderate that zeal. In a performance review, a superior noted that “Karl’s passion for an issue many times comes across as temper and this detracts from his professional demeanor.” Another report in 2011 chided Ashanti for getting into two “public confrontations,” one with a colleague and another with opposing counsel. At the same time, his bosses — all but a few of whom were white — were thrilled with the results he was getting. They praised him for settling cases for even less money than they had authorized.

The lawyers who stood across the courtroom from Ashanti knew all about zealous advocacy, and they saw his behavior as needlessly hostile. Several felt he embodied what was wrong with Special Fed — a relentless sparring that obscured what was really at stake in the cases: civil rights and public accountability. Rose Weber, a longtime civil-rights lawyer who had worked at Special Fed in its early days, was especially disturbed by Ashanti’s tactics in a 2010 excessive-force case. Her client claimed to have been slammed to the ground by a plainclothes officer, rupturing discs in his back. In a motion, Ashanti wrote dismissively that the alleged abuse was “of minor importance.” The judge called the argument “as groundless as it is troubling.” Weber, who would go on to lose the case, spoke to other plaintiffs’ attorneys about Ashanti and collected a handful of confrontational anecdotes in a folder on her computer. Compared to that of other Special Fed lawyers, she says, Ashanti’s approach “wasn’t even beyond the realm. It was a realm of its own.”

Another frequent opponent, Robert Quackenbush, had a more civil relationship with Ashanti. In a case with video evidence showing that police had lied in sworn testimony, he got into a dispute with Ashanti about compensation for his client, who had been punched and pepper-sprayed. Quackenbush cited two precedents that he believed supported his reasoning. Ashanti wrote, “I’ve read those cases and disagree but if we agreed about everything we wouldn’t be adversaries. Be well.”

“The most charitable assessment is that he was extremely combative,” Quackenbush says. “People wanted to attribute his litigation style to his soul or something. I don’t personally do that. He was a Black man working for the City of New York on police cases at a time judges were finding the police were discriminating against Black people. That had to have been an impossible job and an impossible situation.”

Ashanti was one of just a handful of Black lawyers within Special Fed. He said in a 2020 deposition that he detected a racial dimension to the way he was perceived by some opposing counsel. “If I push back on any issue, they’re like: ‘You don’t have to get so worked up. You don’t have to get so upset.’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’” he said. “There’s no use of the N-word, but it was the underlying idea of an overly-aggressive-Black-man kind of thing.”

On a separate occasion, Ashanti took the testimony of a witness at an opposing attorney’s home office. It grew so contentious the other lawyer, Carmen Giordano, called 911. Giordano told a judge in the case that Ashanti “refused to stop yelling in a startling and menacing manner” and wouldn’t leave when asked. Ashanti denied that; he told the judge he had had a “momentary lapse in professionalism” that didn’t merit a “call for a police presence to put me back ‘in my place.’” He added that the idea that he was “threatening” was “predicated on an expectation of violence due to racist notions about Black men having an inherent propensity to commit violence, rather than the actual behavior of the individual.” His supervisor took his side.

Within Special Fed, Ashanti talked with Black colleagues about the difficulties of advancement. “It was kind of harder to build a career as a Black attorney than as a white attorney,” he said in the 2020 deposition. But he also put that observation in context: “It’s not specific to the Law Department,” he said. “It’s just society. The Law Department is a microcosm of society.”

When it came to his own cases, Ashanti says, he never felt angst. He could reconcile using his legal skills in defense of the police while at the same time recognizing that Black people were at greater risk of police maltreatment. Besides, the job provided him with a stable, middle-class life. He got married, and he and his wife, Jovanna, moved to Staten Island, where they would go on to raise two sons and be active in their church as born-again Christians.

Ashanti compartmentalized. “Professionals do professional shit,” he says. “Excuse my language. But, like, if you’re a basketball player, you fucking play basketball. You do what you do, and I am a lawyer, so I lawyered up. I did my work.”

Whom exactly does the city lawyer represent? The straightforward answer is the city, of course. But the issue gets more complicated if you consider whether New York is its citizens or its employees. When residents file lawsuits against the police, the text of the municipal charter turns into something of a paradox. It requires the Law Department to represent “the city and every agency thereof” but also says it should “maintain, defend and establish” the interests of “the people thereof.” Is it acting in anyone’s best interest to get a civil case against a police officer thrown out if it enables the officer to cross the line again?

For years, Special Fed took the narrow view — that its lawyers represented the police and that its chief obligation was to minimize payouts over officers’ misconduct. That was especially true at the end of the Bloomberg administration, which clamped down by designating more cases “No Pay” and forcing the Special Fed lawyers who fielded them to go to trial.

In 2014, however, Bill de Blasio was sworn in as mayor after campaigning on police reform, and it looked as though his administration would answer the question of representation in a dramatically more expansive way. De Blasio’s pick to lead the Law Department was Zachary Carter, an esteemed Black lawyer who had served as a U.S. attorney and federal judge. Carter began telling city lawyers that they represented, in some fashion, the names on both sides of the v. in a lawsuit’s title. And he unveiled a new doctrine, “Justice in Our Work,” that he hoped would change the culture inside the agency.

Curiously, Carter wanted the defense lawyers to act more like prosecutors — but only in the sense that they should exercise a degree of forbearance. Defense lawyers must argue every point in service of their clients, but the Supreme Court has held that prosecutors have an ethical obligation to deliver not just convictions but justice. They are meant to drop cases and withdraw charges when it seems like “the right thing” to do. In New York, that is the title of the District Attorneys Association’s ethics handbook, which opens by telling members there is a higher civic duty that goes beyond defeating the opposition. “Unlike other lawyers,” it reads, “the client we represent is the public, whose interests are not necessarily served by winning every case.”

Zachary Carter (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“Justice in Our Work” was a radical approach to city lawyering. It challenged Special Fed’s standard playbook: seeking dismissal, fighting disclosure, putting the screws to plaintiffs during depositions. In a memo to senior staff, Carter said he was not asking city attorneys to “turn a blind eye to clearly established law or fail to aggressively litigate when faced with sympathetic opposing parties.” Instead, he argued, they should use those analyses as starting points before settling on an outcome that would advance the “nebulous question” of what it means to act in the city’s best interest. “Failing to identify the just option among alternative legal positions is a failure to counsel the City in a way that allows it to fulfill one of its most fundamental obligations: to govern in a just manner,” he wrote.

For a while, the new doctrine had a big impact. In January 2014, the administration ended the city’s efforts to defend its stop-and-frisk program. Later that year, Carter directed Special Fed to settle its highest-profile civil-rights case — brought by five Black and Hispanic men wrongly convicted of raping and beating a woman in Central Park in 1989 — for $41 million. But “Justice in Our Work” was not to last.

That December, two police officers were assassinated while sitting in their patrol car, destroying what little remained of de Blasio’s relationship with the NYPD and its unions. Then Special Fed settled a case involving a Brooklyn man who was shot by police after he brandished a machete. The man had a weak claim, but city lawyers agreed to pay $5,000 to erase the chance that it could be heard by a sympathetic jury. The Post put it on the front page under the headline “Ax & You Shall Receive.” Then-Commissioner Bill Bratton condemned the settlement, saying it was “outrageous” that the agency “is continuing to not support the men and women in this department.” The blowback was so hot that even de  Blasio chimed in to say the payment was “wrong.”

In a memo to union leaders, one of the mayor’s top aides clarified the administration’s police litigation policy, writing that the Law Department would “enhance the representation of police officers” sued while on the job. The NYPD created a new legal team to augment the Law Department. And Carter appointed a new head of Special Fed, Patricia Miller, who championed the “No Pay” approach. She is still in charge. This past March, during an interview on John Catsimatidis’ talk-radio show, a host asked Miller how hard it was to combat the media’s demonization of “the men and women in blue.” She responded: “I think you hit on a good point. We provide a voice for police officers.”

Joel Berger, a civil-rights lawyer who served as a Law Department executive during the administration of David Dinkins, says there is a “buddy-buddy relationship between the NYPD and the Law Department that would’ve been unheard of in my day.” From the perspective of the civil-rights bar, Special Fed has for years put the interests of the police above those of its primary client: the city and the people who live there.

A few years after Ashanti joined Special Fed, the city resolved a lawsuit brought by Sean Bell’s fiancée and others for $7 million. Ashanti thought it showed that his employer had a limit — that it would pay up in egregious cases — and that the settlement represented something like justice. “The cop isn’t going to sit down in a room and apologize to you,” he says. “In our civil system, it is money.”

How much Special Fed agrees to pay plaintiffs is decided by a process known as “seeking authority.” In memos, lawyers present their bosses with the facts of their cases, including confidential details like internal NYPD disciplinary records, and request an amount they think will put the matter to rest. Ashanti says he came up with figures by weighing several factors: a fiscal responsibility to protect the Treasury, how likely he was to win and precedents, adding more money when “the actions of the police were egregious or there was more of an injustice.”

In general, Ashanti considered himself a force for good within a flawed system — an arbiter of civil-side justice, denying awards to those who would wrongly accuse good cops of bad deeds while working behind closed doors to get deserving clients justly compensated. But if that was true, it was well disguised from the New Yorkers who alleged their civil rights had been violated.

In 2015, Ashanti was assigned a lawsuit against four officers accused of false arrest, excessive force and other offenses. A 21-year-old man named Allen Brown had been a passenger in a car driven by a friend of a friend when police in an unmarked vehicle attempted to pull them over. To Brown’s shock, the driver sped off, then left the car and fled by foot. Brown, who is Black, panicked. He ran, too, hiding in the basement stairwell of a nearby house. A resident called 911. Brown later testified that even though he emerged with his hands raised, the cops beat him up, kicking him in the face multiple times while he was handcuffed.

The officers denied this, but it wasn’t the first time they had been accused of misconduct. Ashanti’s unit had represented each of the officers in at least one prior case. One had already been named in three. Collectively, the cases cost taxpayers $158,000.

Ashanti fought Brown vigorously. In the courtroom one day, he seemed to suggest that because Brown ran, he brought whatever happened upon himself. “Any force that was used was the product of the fact that not only did he flee from the vehicle but then trespassed on someone else’s property,” Ashanti said.

Taken aback, Judge Ramon Reyes Jr. told Ashanti he thought he’d just “made a misstatement.”

“Which is?” Ashanti asked.

“That the force used was related to the fact that he was trespassing,” Reyes said. Ashanti started to talk, but the judge cut him off: “You can’t use force. Period.”

Ashanti said he hadn’t meant to imply that. They went back and forth, and Reyes got exasperated. “Lower your voice,” he told Ashanti. “You think because you raise your voice, your arguments are more persuasive. They’re not.”

Ashanti offered Brown $20,000 to settle. But Brown’s lawyers soon discovered that Ashanti hadn’t provided them with a key Internal Affairs report. A judge sanctioned the city for the failure. Ashanti protested that an “inadvertent clerical error” was to blame, but another judge upheld the penalty. The case, which Brown once offered to resolve for $200,000, eventually settled for $325,000.

Brown is now 29. He says the purpose of his lawsuit was mostly to get some accountability for what had happened to him. He still feels particular resentment toward Ashanti, whose full-throated lawyering had made Brown seem like a liar. “It was the undermining — and the sort of sweeping under the rug — of what had happened to me,” Brown says. “I just feel it was very unfair.” He adds, “I don’t know if this is even the job to be empathetic, but he definitely lacked any sort of empathy or any level of understanding.”

When told how Brown feels, Ashanti is unmoved. “How can I put this?” he says. “Civil rights can be violated and that person can still be a knucklehead, you know what I’m saying?” He claims that back at Special Fed, he had tried to advocate for Brown. “He wasn’t there, wasn’t privy to the conversations where I was trying to get authority for the case because I thought his civil rights were violated.” Ashanti says. “Mature people know these things, right? I’m not going to say, ‘Yeah, you’re right — these cops really fucked him up badly. How much do you want, Allen?’ Like, come on. Come the fuck on — excuse my language. Like, that’s not how things are done.”

Ashanti sees the Brown case as an instance of his furthering the cause of justice, not the opposite. “It’s why you need people like me in those positions,” he says. “That’s what a fucking idiot like him is too stupid to see. You need someone like me in those positions versus a white guy who doesn’t give a fuck about you. Any intelligent person can see that, who’s actually mature enough to understand that two things can be true that are seemingly — seemingly — contradictory.”

Not everyone at Special Fed could handle the dissonance. At the same time that he was working the Brown case, Ashanti was asked to mentor a new hire named David Ferrari, who was 25 and fresh out of law school. Like Ashanti eight years earlier, he was immediately assigned complex litigation. Unlike Ashanti, he revolted.

Ferrari was besieged with cases, many of which were frivolous on their face. But he also found that in many of his assignments, officers accused of brutality or other civil-rights violations refused to tell him clearly what had happened. Interviewing cops in his third-floor office, he’d try and fail to get them to go beyond blanket statements like “I was forced to administer a blow.” Ferrari would tell his bosses that it was impossible for him to determine if the plaintiffs’ cases had merit. Ferrari recalls, “The response was: ‘What are you talking about? He told you everything you need to know to make the case.’”

Ferrari turned to Ashanti. Ferrari remembers him saying: “I hear you. I empathize. We’re all very stressed. We just have to keep our head down and keep pushing.” The job ate at Ferrari so much that his health suffered. “Doing the job well was different than doing the right thing,” he says. “Certainly, nobody encouraged me to do something unethical. The culture, the atmosphere, the need to not settle these cases lends itself to a toxic environment.” Ferrari quit after about two years, making sure the office knew he had nothing else lined up. “When I left, I had at least six different attorneys come to my office,” he says. “‘How did you escape this place? How do I get out of here?’ That’s when I felt really vindicated.”

Ferrari says that when he heard about Ashanti’s arrest on Park Place in March 2018, he felt nothing but sympathy. “The job was not easy on him either,” he says. “My intuition was that as overworked as I was, I know he was more overworked. I knew that whatever cases that had the gray area we were struggling with, those were chosen for me because a first-year could handle it. His were a lot more complex.”

Allen Brown’s reaction to Ashanti’s arrest is less generous. Ashanti, he says, is “getting a taste of his own medicine.”

After his altercation with Officer Shapiro on the icy street, Ashanti spent 14 hours in custody. The experience was surreal. “The main component of my job was defending police officers in similar situations who are sometimes guilty of falsely arresting people. And this was one of them,” he says. “That irony hit me immediately.”

His bosses suspended him while they investigated. Ashanti soon learned the breadth of Shapiro’s allegations — that not only had he supposedly shoved the officer but he’d also gone on a tirade, claiming that he’d be “contacting the media” and could no longer “work for this police department or this city anymore.” Ashanti denied saying those things. But then the Post published its “livid lawyer” article.

Ashanti’s superiors did not see his arrest as an isolated incident. A year earlier, he had been brought before top management for violating city rules. Ashanti had represented his wife in small-claims court in a dispute with her former employer, a nonprofit wholly owned by a city agency — a clear conflict of interest. (He was later fined $8,500.) To the Law Department, Ashanti’s use of his city ID to enter a roped-off block was further proof that he felt the rules didn’t apply to him.

With his job in the balance, Ashanti got on the phone with Muriel Goode-Trufant, the agency’s managing attorney. “I knew it was a done deal,” he later testified, “but I expressed my disappointment in her as a Black woman to basically take the racist actions of this police officer that led to my false arrest and then to compound the problem, in order to appease the NYPD, by making me, in essence, a sacrificial lamb. I don’t think I used that term, sacrificial lamb, but that was it in sum and substance. So she was putting the interest of appearances, or the relationship between the Law Department and the NYPD, over what’s right and what’s just.” It was the same argument that Ashanti’s opponents had been leveling against Special Fed for years.

The conversation didn’t help. Within a week of his arrest, Ashanti was told he could resign or be fired. “Despite our frustrations with Karl, it did not mean that we disliked him, so we gave him the opportunity to make the choice,” Goode-Trufant said in a deposition.

Over the next few months, prosecutors withdrew all the charges against Ashanti except for one count of harassment, which is punishable by up to 15 days in jail. That August, wearing a light-blue dress shirt and blue tie with white dots, Ashanti walked into a Manhattan courtroom for a bench trial. He sat at a table as his lawyer walked Shapiro through a crucial 12 seconds of surveillance footage, which doesn’t show any obvious shoves or step-backs.

The judge issued her decision: not guilty. “You know how we always complain we’re under surveillance everywhere?” says Ashanti’s wife, Jovanna. “Thank God for that. That’s what saved Karl.”

After his acquittal, Ashanti turned to reputation repair, hiring a company to scrub his Google results and enlisting members of his church to lobby the Post until the paper removed the story about his arrest from its website. He got a job at a firm representing plaintiffs in civil-rights litigation, advocating for them against the city. He was finally realizing his original ambitions of using the law to help others. “It just took a long, long time — a long, circuitous route to get here,” he says.

Ashanti also sued the city and Shapiro for damages. (The officer has since drawn yet another lawsuit, his fifth in less than a decade. A Canal Street vendor claims that Shapiro yanked her arm so forcefully while arresting her that he broke her shoulder bone, an injury that required a plate and screws to repair. The city denies that claim and is defending him in state court.) Shapiro declined to comment. In a statement, a police spokesperson also declined to comment and denied, generally, that the police have “undue influence on the Special Fed and its work,” saying any claim that it does “is outrageous and inaccurate.”

Ashanti v. The City of New York is ongoing. The city says it’s treating the case as it would any other. “While we work to vigorously protect the interests of the city in every case, we are always mindful that opposing parties are also citizens who should be treated with respect and whose claims should be evaluated fairly,” a spokesman says. “We have upheld all of these values in defending against the meritless case brought by Mr. Ashanti.”

As the case drags on, Ashanti sometimes sounds a bit like Brown. He complains that the city lawyer assigned to his lawsuit is treating it like a “No Pay” case and “fighting tooth and nail against me.” There is a deep sense of outrage, even hurt, in his voice. And yet when I asked him recently about the parallel to Brown, and whether his experience has made him rethink his own hardball tactics at Special Fed, he was unequivocal. “I did my job the right way,” he says.

Over a decade at Special Fed, Ashanti defended the police and jail guards in more than 300 cases accusing them of violating New Yorkers’ constitutional rights. “I didn’t become a Law Department counsel because I was afraid of how people would view me or I was afraid my liberal card would get snatched away, or my Black card,” he says. “I know who I  am. I know what I’ve been through. I know what I believe.”

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