The Jump Line: Deadly Police Chases, Forever Chemicals, and more
Happy Friday! The last few weeks have been…a lot! There have been a few big Supreme Court arguments, lots of criminal legal news, a number of really good investigations, and a few excellent new resources for journalists and researchers. (Also Josie’s podcast, Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, was nominated for a Peabody Award!)
As always, please send us ideas, tips, thoughts, and comments! Everything is welcome always, and this week we’re especially interested in hearing any stories you may have about cops on college campuses and campus surveillance. You can email us directly (our emails are hannah@justjournalism.org and josie.duffy@gmail.com) or you can comment publicly on the post.
Thanks to everyone who sent in tips already, and thanks to the journalists who have reached out with ideas and questions! We hope to hear from even more of you in the coming weeks. And don’t forget to tell your friends about us!
Quickly, here are a few things worth reading this week before we get into the bigger stuff:
On Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry’s catastrophic move to defund public defense in the state // Lauren Gill for Bolts Mag
Former federal and state prosecutor Terra Morehead has been forced to surrender her law license after it came to light that she helped Kansas police frame an innocent Black man named Lamonte McIntyre, who was exonerated after spending 23 years in prison // Peggy Lowe for Kansas Public Radio
In California, recently discovered handwritten notes from the 90’s document serious prosecutorial misconduct in jury selection — Black and Jewish jurors were systematically excluded from serving on Alameda County juries // Sam Levin for The Guardian and Salvador Hernandez for the Los Angeles Times
Why are police chases getting deadlier?
According to a new investigation by Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson at the San Francisco Chronicle, police chases kill an average of nearly two people every day in the US. Often initiated for minor offenses (or… no offense at all), the policies that determine what kind of pursuit is permissible, and when, vary widely from department to department. Some departments allow police to chase for anything - including benign, often wealth-related things like expired licenses or tags. What’s consistent across the country seems to be the danger these chases pose to drivers and bystanders.
Why we’re thinking about it:
On Friday, April 5th, an Atlanta Police chase ended in the death of a man. He was Georgia’s fourth person to die as a result of police chases in just one week. Those are pretty grim numbers, especially given how preventable they are.
This has increasingly been on our radar here in Georgia, but it turns out the increase in deaths holds true across the country. According to the US Department of Transportation’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis, deadly police chases have increased by over 40% since 2001.
Angles to consider:
What is your police department’s policy on chases?
In many jurisdictions, police are allowed to conduct a high-speed chase for even the most minor of infractions. Last month’s Chronicle investigation found that most lethal chases began with nonviolent offenses or traffic infractions like running a red light, playing music too loudly, or, ironically, because a driver wasn’t wearing their seatbelt. Some high-speed chases couldn’t even be traced back to any crime at all, no matter how minor. This piece lays out varying policies in several jurisdictions across the country.
Last year, Jonah Chester at Wisconsin Watch and Ben Jordan at WTMJ reported on Milwaukee’s changing police chase policies. The city adopted one of the strictest policies in the country in 2010, and chases declined significantly. When, 5 years later, that policy was loosened to allow chases for more crimes, the number of chases – and deaths – climbed back up. In 2012, Milwaukee saw 50 police chases; in 2022, there were 1,028.
The investigative team at CBS Texas has been trying to get a glimpse of Fort Worth’s police chase policy, but the city is refusing to disclose it. They’ve gone so far as to sue the Texas Attorney General’s office after it ruled that the policy should be shared with the public under open records laws.
How many people die each year as a result of police chases in your community?
The Chronicle analysis shows that between 2017 and 2022, police chases claimed the lives of 3,336 people (551 of them bystanders) and injured more than 50,000. The database compiled by Susie Neilson, Jennifer Gollan, and Janie Haseman can tell you how many of those deaths occurred where you live.
What are the consequences for police officers in your community who kill or injure people during chases?
The Chronicle investigation also details the challenges with bringing criminal charges against police officers responsible for fatal crashes. When victims bring civil suits against police departments, taxpayers often foot the bill.
More reading:
A 17 year old was killed as a result of a police chase on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, and the responsible police department immediately disbanded // Samantha Michaels for Mother Jones
In Cleveland, a police chase in 2019 resulted in the death of a 13-year-old girl walking on a city sidewalk with her friends. Last week, her family settled with the city of Cleveland for $4.8 million. Despite the high profile death, people are still dying as a result of police chases in the city – as recently as last month.
A police officer in Addis, Louisiana was recently convicted of manslaughter for killing two teenage girls in a 2022 high-speed chase.
Don’t Drink the Water
Why we’re thinking about it:
Remember this graphic, about the mismatch between the scope of a problem and the corresponding amount of media coverage? Millions of people are sickened by their drinking water each year, but those illnesses receive scant media coverage compared to crimes like robbery. Investigative journalist Andy Pierrotti is helping shift that balance with a multi-year investigation into Rome, Georgia’s drinking water, first at 11Alive and now for InvestigateTV/Atlanta News First. Like many other municipalities across the country, Rome’s potable water source up until 2017, the Oostanaula River, was contaminated with PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals.” PFAS are known to cause several types of cancer and other serious illnesses, a fact that executives at large manufacturers like 3M (which had a plant near Rome) knew and covered up for years.
Angles to consider:
Does your state Department of Health offer public education or population testing?
Where state public health officials have been unable to act, journalists have stepped in. After the Georgia Department of Health said it wasn’t planning on further investigating PFAS levels in the Rome area, the Atlanta News First (the local CBS affiliate) team stepped in and tested the blood of 11 people. The results – nearly all of them had PFAS levels beyond the national average – were worrying enough that researchers at Emory University obtained a grant to do further testing of the population.
Research universities also fill the gap left by state public health departments. In North Carolina, North Carolina State University has been doing blood testing of people impacted by the poisoning of the Cape Fear River Basin.
Follow the lawsuits and the settlement money!
The poisoning of Rome’s drinking water got on Andy Pierrotti’s radar initially because of the litigation against nearby carpet manufacturers. It turns out there’s a whole host of lawsuits winding their way through courts at the same time. The city of Rome will receive more than $200 million from 3M, DuPont, and other carpet manufacturers to address the water contamination. (Getting all the numbers right is difficult, because several PFAS manufacturers sued Rome, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Rome News-Tribune in an attempt to get them to stop reporting on the financial aspect of the settlements, citing “trade secrets.”)
Last year, 3M settled with hundreds of contaminated municipal water systems for over $10 billion. A portion of the settlement funds is meant to go towards testing in affected areas, so there are some future stories to be written there.
If you need a timely hook to investigate this in your community, the EPA just set, for the first time, a limit on acceptable levels of PFAS in water. Austin Fast and Cecilia Garzella at USA Today have a really useful map for identifying communities whose water has PFAS levels above the new EPA limit.
More:
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg and Ethan Corey at one of our favorite outlets, The Appeal, have assembled a first-of-its-kind prison commissary database for journalists and researchers. Locked In, Priced Out has commissary lists and pricing from 46 states. There are plenty of identifiable trends. The aging population inside will soon be facing steep markups on products they are likely to need, like a 600% markup on denture cups in Georgia. Price gouging on products needed to survive in extreme heat is also a theme: in Kansas, an incarcerated person would have to spend more than a month of prison wages in order to afford a 6-inch fan and more than 100 days of wages for an 8-inch fan. There are endless jumping off points for potential stories in the report.
…and speaking of shifting the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people, Kylie McGivern at ABC Action News in Tampa Bay investigated a wild story out of the Florida Department of Corrections. The state charges people a daily fee to be incarcerated, but McGivern found that even when someone is released early they still owe the State of Florida $50 a day until their original sentence ends. There is no consideration of ability to pay.
Every state except Hawaii has some form of ‘pay to stay’ fees they impose on incarcerated people (or, more realistically, their families). The Prison Policy Initiative compiled research on these kinds of fees (and more) across the country, if you want to look into what your state does. Here’s an analysis from the Brennan Center about pay to stay fees. Brittany Friedman is an expert on the subject.
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. Basically, the question before the court is whether municipalities can criminalize people for sleeping outside. Grants Pass, a city of about 40,000 in Oregon, aggressively enforces anti-camping ordinances with fines and the threat of incarceration. We’re looking back at good coverage of homelessness and the criminalization of poverty in the US:
Medicaid – and a state’s decision whether or not to expand it– plays a significant role in homelessness. Most directly, some Medicaid funds can now be used to get people housing, affirming policy experts who have long argued that housing is a form of healthcare. Rachel Cohen reports for Vox.
For ProPublica, Heather Vogell does a deep dive into private equity’s takeover of the American housing market.
Houston has had some successes with moving people off the street and into housing of their own. Matthew Kimmelman reports on that for the New York Times here.
At Balls and Strikes, Jay Willis wrote a piece on the Grants Pass case called “How the Supreme Court Could Bless Police Cruelty to Homeless People”
And one from the vault: Radley Balko’s report for the Washington Post on the fines and fees racket in Ferguson and other towns in St. Louis County, Missouri.
That’s all for today! Things we’ll be looking at in upcoming issues - the nexus of AI and police reports, parole boards in the South, maternity ward closures, and more!