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Bond Architects has announced that team member Breanna Kolk has received her architecture license. A graduate of the University of Kansas, Breanna Kolk has been working in the AEC industry for 6 years. Her diverse design experience includes the education, municipal, and government sectors. She has played an integral role in many of Bond Architects’ […]
The post Bond Architects’ Breanna Kolk Earned Her Architecture License appeared first on Construction Forum.
Dear Friend of Press Freedom,
For 164 days, Rümeysa Öztürk has faced deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and for 83 days, Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.
It was bad enough when government officials claimed that journalists are inciting violence by reporting. But now, they’re accusing reporters of actually committing violence.
The supposed violence by reporters? Recording videos. At least three times recently, a government official or lawyer has argued that simply recording law enforcement or Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers is a form of violence. Read more here.
Congressional Republicans introduced our farewell article to the former president, titled Biden’s press freedom legacy: Empty words and hypocrisy, into the record at a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week.
That’s great — it’s always nice to have our work recognized. But if these lawmakers agree with us that former President Joe Biden was bad on press freedom, someone should really tell them about this Donald Trump character who’s in office now. All the abuses we identified in the article Republicans cited have (as the article predicted) worsened under the new president, and he’s come up with plenty of new ones too.
We wrote a letter to let the committee know that if it’s serious about addressing the issues our article discussed, regardless of who is in office, we’re here to help. We’ll let you know if they reply (but don’t hold your breath). Read the letter here.
The Trump administration has not provided any legal justification for blowing up a boat carrying 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers on the Caribbean Sea. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out if lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel were consulted before the slaughter and, if so, what they said.
If there is an OLC opinion about the targeting of the Venezuelan boat, the public and Congress should be able to debate it right now. Unfortunately, the government has long taken the position that OLC opinions should be secret, even though there should be no such thing as secret law in the United States. Read more here, and, if you want to learn more about government secrecy and what we’re doing to combat it, subscribe to The Classifieds.
An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would allow lawmakers to scrub information about themselves from the internet. The bill fails to achieve its stated purpose of keeping lawmakers safe — except from investigative journalism.
This week we helped lead a letter to senators from press freedom and civil liberties organizations objecting to the misguided legislation. Even if the NDAA amendment does not succeed, it’s likely that this bill will be back, and we’ll be ready to fight it. Read the letter here.
In 2023, Biden issued an executive order limiting government use of commercial spyware. Subsequently, the Biden administration issued a stop-work order on a $2 million contract between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Paragon, a spyware vendor that makes products that have reportedly been used to spy on journalists.
It now appears ICE is reinstating this contract. Read more here and subscribe to our Digital Security Tips newsletter.
What we’re reading Inside Trump’s decade-long war on the press: 75,000 posts, 3,500 direct attacks Editor and PublisherTrump’s anti-press rhetoric is “not bluster; it is not a personality trait. It is deliberate,” our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker’s Stephanie Sugars said. “It is very much at the cost of the strength of our social fabric and our shared reality.”
RSF and Avaaz launch international media operation RSFGreat work by our friends at Reporters Without Borders organizing this response to Israel’s slaughter of journalists in Gaza. It’s unfortunate that more U.S. outlets did not participate. If the outlets you support were not among the few, ask them why.
Illinois restores protections for press targeted with frivolous lawsuits The DissenterWe spoke to The Dissenter about the Illinois Supreme Court’s ridiculous ruling that the state’s law against strategic lawsuits against public participation doesn’t protect reporting, and the recently passed bill to repair the damage.
He plagiarized and promoted falsehoods. The White House embraces him The New York TimesWe talked to the Times about influencers replacing journalists at the White House. Yes, it’s awful that Trump won’t grant reporters the honor of getting lied to at press briefings. But the decimation of FOIA — a source of facts, not spin — is even more concerning.
Noem accuses CBS of ‘deceptively’ editing interview about Abrego Garcia The HillKristi Noem’s complaints underscore why news outlets can’t settle frivolous lawsuits. Now, the door is wide open for government officials to question every editing decision news outlets make, whether to shorten an interview for time or to not air lies and nonsense.
Police body cameras are supposed to shed light. Rhode Island rules let officers keep footage in the dark Rhode Island CurrentWhen rules restrict police body cameras from being used to provide transparency, the only use left for them is surveillance.
Judge Charles Wilson defends New York Times v. Sullivan ReasonA good recap of why “originalist” attacks on the actual malice standard — which limits defamation claims by public figures — are so disingenuous.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.
After the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary, school leaders in Uvalde, Texas, initially planned to publicly defend district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, but officials instead chose to remain silent as investigations into police actions unfolded, newly released records show. Arredondo is now facing criminal charges over law enforcement’s delayed confrontation with the gunman.
The previously unreported details were revealed in over 25,000 pages of records the district has disclosed over the course of a week since Aug. 26 after a yearslong legal fight with news outlets, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which filed over 70 public information requests for the records in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
The documents should have been published in early August when school leaders and Uvalde County originally released requested records following a settlement with the news organizations. Rob Decker, an attorney representing the school district, admitted at a board meeting Aug. 25 that his office made “an error on our side” by only releasing a fraction of the files. Board members, including Jesse Rizo, who lost his 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares in the shooting, grilled Decker about the firm’s oversight.
“When we use the word ‘error,’ that’s putting it really lightly,” Rizo said. “The word ‘negligent’ comes to mind.”
However, the district’s law firm may have again failed to disclose all of the requested information, according to Laura Prather, one of the attorneys representing the newsrooms in the records litigation. Prather sent a letter Friday demanding the district publish the remaining files, which could include details about the school maintenance issues with doors that failed to lock, Arredondo’s severance and additional communications among officials. Decker, the district’s lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.
The school district’s repeated disclosure problems mirror the mistakes made by the city of Uvalde last year, when officials there did not include at least 50 body- and dashcam videos in their first records release. They scrambled to disclose all of them months later.
As the district’s law firm began trickling out records last week, another shooting made national headlines when two children were killed and another 21 kids and adults injured at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. The timing only further underscores the importance of releasing the Uvalde records as quickly as possible, said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
“A lot of times, governments will think that by stalling or trying to avoid the release of records, they can shirk responsibility and avoid the tough questions,” said Shannon. Doing so only makes it harder to stop similar tragedies from happening and hinders families’ ability to heal.
“Getting information sooner rather than later is the way to go,” she said, “and that’s not what we’ve seen surrounding the Uvalde shooting.”
Though news organizations had previously obtained from sources many of the records government agencies withheld, the newly released documents include undisclosed internal communications that offer deeper insight into the inner workings of the school district. Its leaders have rarely commented on the shooting publicly in the three years since it left 19 elementary students and two teachers dead.
Among the new revelations, the documents show the unraveling of the district’s support for Arredondo as details of the delayed law enforcement response were made public in the weeks after the shooting.
School leaders have long attributed their silence and refusal to release these records to the multiple local, state and federal investigations into the law enforcement response to the massacre. That included a criminal probe by the Uvalde district attorney that eventually led to child endangerment charges being filed against Arredondo and another school officer last year. Both have maintained their innocence ahead of the trial, scheduled for later this year.
Arredondo initially received the bulk of the blame for the response, though an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune later found that officers across state and local agencies wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and failed to take control of the response.
Three days after the tragedy, Steve McCraw, then head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, announced at a press conference that Arredondo was responsible for law enforcement’s failure to confront the gunman until 77 minutes after he’d entered the school.
Hours later, district spokesperson Anne Marie Espinoza emailed then-Superintendent Hal Harrell a press release that defended Arredondo, stating, in part, that his action isolating the shooter helped students and staff escape the building. The statement cautioned that the district could only provide limited information due to the ongoing investigations but said it was “appropriate timing to share these clarifying details.”
The school district, however, never published that version of the press release, allowing McCraw’s narrative to continue circulating undisputed. The internal communications released so far don’t explain why. None of the district’s leaders involved responded to the newsrooms’ questions in recent days.
The district instead published a press release the following Wednesday that made no mention of Arredondo but said the school would not comment on the shooting until all state and federal agencies completed their review.
Emails also show that during the week after McCraw’s press conference, the district’s law firm drafted paperwork to place Arredondo on administrative leave.
Harrell waited several more weeks before taking that action.
The documents reveal Arredondo was increasingly anxious to discuss his side of the story. In an email exchange with a reporter from The New York Times shortly after McCraw’s press conference, Arredondo wrote that he wished he could speak publicly: “It’s extremely difficult not to be able to respond right now.”
The police chief said he could not comment due to the ongoing investigation at that point.
About two weeks later, as the investigations continued, Arredondo gave the Tribune an exclusive interview sharing his experience of the shooting response and maintaining that he was not the incident commander.
He told Harrell, the superintendent, the article was coming about two hours before publication.
The superintendent’s emails indicate he met with the district’s law firm the next day to discuss drafting an agreement for Arredondo that barred him from making any more public statements unless he received written permission from Harrell. The instructions emphasize that the district will remain silent about the shooting to “ensure the integrity of the pending investigations,” indicating public comments could be considered interference.
“Any failure to comply with these directives may result in adverse job action, up to and including termination of your employment,” stated the agreement.
On June 15, the police chief informed the superintendent that he needed time off to attend a hearing at the Texas Capitol the following Tuesday and to prep with his counsel the day before.
Arredondo testified behind closed doors for five hours in front of the state House committee tasked with investigating the shooting on June 21. The same day, McCraw provided a searing condemnation of the law enforcement response in a separate state Senate hearing that was open to the public. He claimed police could have stopped the shooter within three minutes had it not been for Arredondo’s indecisiveness.
The next day, Harrell placed Arredondo on administrative leave.
In a draft of the press release announcing Arredondo’s leave, then-Assistant Superintendent Beth Reavis suggested saying that district leaders had not received any information about the response ahead of the hearing.
“Yesterday, like you, I saw the released information for the first time,” she suggested to Harrell and the district’s attorney, then said they should add, “Something like ‘Pete’s on leave, blah blah blah’” in an email.
The district ultimately published a press release stating Harrell initially did not intend to make personnel decisions until after the investigations into the shooting were concluded, but due to the uncertainty of when they would be done, he decided to place Arredondo on leave.
Arredondo’s attorney, Paul Looney, said he wasn’t surprised when the district walked back its support for their police chief or when he found out from the news organizations that the district had drafted a letter requesting Arredondo’s leave weeks before giving it to him.
“It’s obvious that their initial reaction was the truth and then they decided to shelve the truth and join DPS on cover-your-ass politics and Pete was expendable,” Looney said. “The truth is that Pete did a good job that day.”
The majority of the documents disclosed in the latest batch were pulled from Harrell’s email inbox. In the hours and days after the tragedy, leaders and survivors of other school shootings offered support. But many parents, educators and law enforcement across the country called for him and the police force to resign.
Harrell often emailed himself to-do lists that included reminders like “funerals,” “security we can get done” and people he needed to call. The former superintendent received backlash during a June 9 press conference where he declined to answer questions about law enforcement investigations. The next day, he included “retirement plan” and “transition plan” on his emailed to-do list. Harrell, who did not respond to the newsrooms’ interview requests, retired later that year.
The latest batch of emails also raised additional questions. The release, for example, included a chart that showed 13 threats made to schools in the district that year, including one to Robb Elementary, but did not provide details on how leaders handled them or exactly when they occurred.
Once the school district completes its release of records, DPS will be the last agency sued by the newsrooms that continues to shield materials related to the shooting from disclosure. Prather, the newsrooms’ counsel, said the state law enforcement organization’s documents are especially important because the agency led the investigation into the shooting and maintains a 2-terabyte file with the most extensive accounting of the event.
The newsrooms won an initial ruling in 2023 and the judge ordered DPS to publish its records, but the agency appealed the decision. The appellate court has yet to make a ruling after oral arguments last October.
The state agency did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but it has long argued that publishing documentation of the shooting could interfere with ongoing investigations and eventual prosecutions.
“You’re talking about a situation where people have experienced the most horrible tragedy and loss they could possibly imagine and they already distrust those who are supposed to protect their children,” Prather said. “Then to further fight for three years to get answers about what happened that day and to have that information trickle out, only after you’ve been told by a court over and over to produce it … it’s like a death by a thousand cuts.”
Jessica Priest and Alex Nguyen of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.
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