 Welcome to Shielded, a special forum looking at law enforcement and police accountability. My name is Connor Goodwin and I'm ProPublica's Interim Director of Communications. Tonight, we'll be drawing on two recent ProPublica investigations, one focused on New York City's Police Department and the other on the Sheriff's Office in Jefferson Parish, a suburb outside New Orleans. We'll be hearing from the reporters involved in these investigations and our hope is to foster a robust conversation about policing and accountability. For those new to us, ProPublica is a non-profit newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism. And tonight's event is brought to you in partnership with WWNO and WRKF, the Louisiana Public Radio Stations, which took part in our local reporting network this past year. Following the killing of George Floyd, the national discussion of police reform and accountability took on a new urgency, but more than a year later, little has changed. As ProPublica's reporting on New York City's Police Department and WWNO and WRKF's recent investigation into the Sheriff's Office and Louisiana's Jefferson Parish have revealed, many law enforcement agencies operate with little effective oversight, making it hard to hold police accountable. By cross-examining these investigations, editors and reporters from both news organizations will distill larger lessons on how accountability really works for law enforcement. Tonight's conversation will be split into four parts. In the first three sections, our panelists will discuss accountability, transparency, and then reform. The final section will be dedicated to answering questions from the audience. To ask a question at any point, just click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and type it there. Now allow me to introduce the reporters. Richard A. Webster is an investigative reporter based in New Orleans who reported the Jefferson Parish series for WWNO and WRKF. Webster previously covered the criminal justice system for a variety of publications, including ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Tofer Sanders covers race, inequality, and the justice system for ProPublica. In 2019, he was part of a team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for public service and won the Peabody and George Boak Awards for their coverage of President Trump's family separation policy. Eric Humansky is a deputy managing editor of ProPublica, where he has overseen two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects, including a series he edited on NYPD abuse of nuisance abatement laws. Our moderator today is Nicole Carr. Nicole is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice and racial inequity for ProPublica's South unit. Thanks again for joining us and thanks to McKinsey and Company for their support. I'll let Nicole take it from here. You'd think we'd know how to do this by now, right? Thanks, Connor, and thank you to everyone joining us here tonight and our awesome panelists. We're going to start in this section of accountability. But before we get to the questions and we'll start out with Rich. Rich, will you give us a brief overview of your latest project in Jefferson Parish? Sure. We've looked at, spent the last year looking at the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office. Jefferson Parish is a suburb of New Orleans, whereas New Orleans is majority black community. Jefferson Parish is majority white, very conservative. And we had heard from the residents there in the black community that there were a lot of abuses happening. And they looked right across the border in New Orleans where there was a consent decree in the Department of Justice came in and they said, why are people not looking as closely at the Sheriff's Office when equally, if not worse, things are happening? So when we're talking about operations and accountability, we're really talking about two different structures in terms of the way the leadership is put in place, right? So when we're talking about big cities and police departments, the chief is usually appointed or chosen by the mayor. And so you have that oversight with the city leadership when it comes to the police department, with the sheriff's offices. We're talking about elected officials. We're talking about partisanship and we're talking about the voters having a say in who becomes the sheriff. How does this impact the way that the sheriff's office operates? Sure. I mean, it impacts pretty much every facet of it. So the sheriff's in Louisiana, it's a constitutionally created and protected position. As you said, the parish president council has no sway, no power over the sheriff's office. They were only held accountable by the electorate. So once every four years, they go before the voters. And in Jefferson Parish specifically, an incumbent sheriff has not lost an election since 1979. So there is not a whole lot of change. They're very powerful. Once you're in office, you're basically there for as long as you want. And that plays out in a lot of different ways. So the most powerful sheriff in Jefferson Paris in history is Sheriff Harry Leak. He was there for 28 years, despite the fact that he, in what people described, espoused openly racist policies. He said that if a black driver was caught in a white neighborhood that they would be stopped. And yet he was elected over and over and over again. In Jefferson Parish, they only, this past October, announced that they were going to implement body cameras. And they were the last large law enforcement department in not only the state but the country to hold out on implementing body cameras. And that's just because there's just not a whole lot of public pressure. And you contrast that real quickly with New Orleans, where it was one of the worst police departments in the entire country. And a coalition of residents, both black and white, civil rights organizations, and attorneys, and public and elected officials came together and they just said, this will not stand. And they demanded change and that's what happened. So there was never a time where you saw a lot of demographic changing in Jefferson Parish to put on that type of public pressure. I mean, there's definitely changes, like small changes. The black population is growing, the Hispanic population is growing, but not enough to sort of exert any sort of big change so far. And Eric, we're gonna get to you now in this section and just an overview of your latest reporting. And one of your latest pieces was just out about a week ago, following up on NYPD, but kind of give us an overview of where you were with that recording. Sure, so I should say I don't have a history of doing police reporting. I actually ended up doing this through a, frankly, a very personal way, which is that my wife and our then six-year-old daughter two Halloween's ago were walking home from a friend's house and saw an NYPD police car go up the wrong way on the street and hit a teenager. And it was very disturbing. And my wife came home and told me about it and I went to check it out and I followed up with the police. And what they actually ended up telling me was, oh no, your wife didn't see what she thought she saw. A police car did not hit that teenager. Actually, the teenager ran across the hood of a parked, stopped a police car. So it was like basically the police car didn't hit the kid, the kid hit the police car. And I ended up saying like, I ended up following up on that and actually canvassed our neighborhood and spoke to other witnesses who said they saw exactly what my wife had saw. And the NYPD, when I followed up with them, stuck to it. And I said, so let me just be clear, you guys are gonna tell me that four people didn't see what they say they saw. That's what you're gonna stick to. And the answer was, yes, that's exactly what they were gonna stick to. And that moment really stuck with me and frankly stuck in my craw as a way of saying, wait a second, you guys can just brazenly, frankly, say something that multiple witnesses say is not true and who's gonna hold you accountable? Who's gonna check this, right? Who's gonna follow up on this? And that led me to say, well, how does accountability work for the nation's largest police department? And it led me to dig into that. And the answer that I came back with, which is no surprise, but the specifics are revelatory, is it doesn't really work. The system is set up bluntly and frankly, not to work. There is very little independent effective oversight. And that's something that not just myself, but pro-publica really ended up diving into, including, by the way, our fellow panelists here, Tofer, also did great work about how police officers were being promoted to some of the highest levels of the NYPD despite long problematic records. Just to take one example and he did multiple stories. And Tofer, I do want you to jump in on this. We're gonna get more into the description of your reporting, but as you were seeing these promotions and you obviously run across the red flags or potential red flags that the public would not have known about, you know? Yeah, it was really thanks to some of the work that Eric was able to do to free up some key data that at the time was available to more people than they thought, but Eric had the wits about them to go and make the request for the data. And so we were able to get a glimpse of kind of behind the machinery on what happens when officers are found to have violated basically their rulebook, if you will, their policy manual. And it was what you might expect. A whole lot of nothing can happen when officers violate their rules. And so we were able to do a deep dive into several kind of high ranking officers to get a sense of, you know, these officers have been able to withstand all the things that come with being NYPD officer, they've risen through the ranks. And oh, by the way, they have this record of repeated complaints against them from the public. And number of those complaints being substantiated, meaning that the body that looked at the complaint found there to be validity to the complaint. And that went from everything from, you know, physical abuse to, you know, having guns drawn on folks to people being hit with nightsticks, the whole shebang. And so there were several high ranking individuals among that list. We dove that deep into a few of them. And we found that repeatedly, no matter what the complaints were and what the substantiation was, the system found a way to promote them. And repeatedly over a long time span, right? Because we're looking at careers here and this wasn't, you know, recent complaints or issues or investigations that were coming up, it was a pattern over time. Yeah, these complaints span their career. In fact, sometimes you would see the complaints become more serious and egregious once these officers got a little bit of rank in them and they had a little bit of power and I guess maybe felt a little bit of immunity. You'd see some of the egregiousness of the complaints become even more so as they rose through the ranks. We're going to get into the impact of the reporting in a few minutes a little further along into the program but while we're talking about complaints I want to kick this back to you Rich and kind of talk about the process for citizen complaints. You know, we just heard Eric talking about witnesses and them being told they did not see what they really saw. How did the process work in Jefferson Parish for filing complaints and the follow up to citizen complaints? And was that even happening? Yeah, this was one of the more shocking things that we found out. So one of the stories we looked at was Sojourner Gibbs and this was a woman who was in a Sam's lot, Sam's little parking lot on Juneteenth getting groceries for her family's celebration and she had a diabetic seizure, went into shock. They called 911, deputy showed up. Instead of providing aid, they accused her of being a drug addict, dragged her out of her car, threw her down on the ground, zip tied her hands. It was this whole traumatic event. She's still traumatized to this day. You know, and then so she filed a complaint through the system that you're supposed to. She had a witness, the witness had video. A month later, she gets a letter in the mail. Two months later saying they're all exonerated. She was never interviewed. The witness was never interviewed. They never looked at the video. So, you know, it raised a lot of questions. So we asked for, you know, a public records request, give us all of the citizen complaints and they refused. They said that's confidential information. So we did wind up finding out that over a three-year period, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's office sustained a single citizen complaint over three years. And that was a deputy who went into the back of an ambulance, someone had tried to kill themselves and he smacked the person in the face and choked them. He got a three-day suspension, I think. And during that same time period where the sheriff's office sustained a single citizen complaint, the New Orleans Police Department sustained 247. And that's a department that has more than 400, 400 more officers than the sheriff's office. So it's, it betrayed the fact that there's little accountability or discipline happening in that department. And it would take a sustained complaint for this to become a public record, correct? For you to be able to pull that. I mean, that's what they said. You know, it's, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued because that was against the state's public records law that was thrown out. But yeah, that's what they said, that we could only get that. So we're gonna segue into transparency. And Topher, I just want you to speak to police unions and the role that they play in getting to accountability. How can they get involved at sometimes obstruct that process? What were you finding in the reporting? Obstruction is the only way they get involved based on my experience in my reporting. You know, police unions are there to protect the members. And they take that definition of protection to mean to at all costs, no matter how egregious the actions are to shield and withhold and to frustrate the efforts of the public to understand, know and learn more about what's happened with a specific officer or with trends within an agency. They're not fans of allowing data like the type that Eric was able to procure and allow us to dig into. They're not fans of that data being released to the public. In fact, they sued to keep that data shielded and away from the public. The unions all of the country behave this way. This is not just NYPD, give you a short story about what happened in just in Jacksonville, Florida, a place I reported right before I got to ProPublica. There used to be a process where when there was a police involved shooting, the final kind of deliberative process was a public session, a public meeting where that officer would come in, there was a board that looked at whether that shooting was appropriate and followed all the regs and anybody in the public could come and sit in that meeting and watch the proceedings of that meeting. A sheriff somewhere along the way said, you know what, we're gonna close this off. We're not gonna do this anymore. They shut down the public access to those meetings. Then a new sheriff said, I'm gonna reopen them, part of this reform energy. You know, I'm gonna open them up so everybody can see them again. And the union threatened, the union got lawyers involved, the union, this was three years ago, an open process. Nobody was really saying boo about it, except the union every one time there was a really bad shooting, they were saying boo about it. But the minute it shut down, the union used all of its might to keep it closed and away from the public. That's what unions do. That's the experience I have of what police unions do across this country, whether we're talking Southwest Coast, Midwest or East Coast. Obviously play a huge part in funding campaigns and impacting those decision makers and who ends up. And look at the strings they pull, right? The sheriff who's an elected body, just like in Jacksonville sheriff is an elected officer. We know the conversation that are happening on the back table. Oh, I'll act like I wanna open them up, you threaten to sue and I won't do anything and everybody will be all the happier. That's how this game is played. Despite all of that and not wanting that data set and what had really supported pro-publica's reporting, Eric, can you speak to the impact that the actual reporting had on transparency in the NYPD? What changed because of the access to this and this report? Well, so we have been able to bring some transparency. As Topher has mentioned, there was the union sued to keep police records, disciplinary records secret, as they had been in decade for decades in New York. And we found ourselves in a very lucky and funny position where we got these files in the basically week or two, it took the police union's lawyers to get themselves to get their acts together to sue. So we got the information very quickly and we decided before they could move ahead with their case in which a judge was actually putting a restraining order to say like, none of this information can be made public, we decided in a very responsible, deliberate way to say eff it. This information is in the public interest fundamentally. And so we put it out there. And then the judge, frankly, that created a kind of momentum to make the information public. And we've done that with generally speaking with a number of cases. You mentioned I published a story the other week, it's because or last week, it's because a state judge ruled that the NYPD had illegally withheld footage of a shooting, but the police shot some, a man named Kowalski Treywick. And a case that I have written about and our coverage was raised during the case as an example of how important the evidence can be, how important the issues are in bringing stuff to light. So it's not just data, it's that paying attention and really digging into these cases even when the police unions are fighting, even when a lot of the institutions, frankly, that are supposed to be pushing for accountability are not working as they should. We're paying attention and that can make a difference. While we're talking about data, I wanna go back to Rich and some of your latest reporting on traffic stops, talk about how you decided to go in this direction and what this reporting yielded. Yeah, so we had heard from a lot of people in Jefferson Parish that in the black community that they were being racially profiled during traffic stops, you can't go to the law enforcement agency and get this data. In 2001, there was this law passed by the state in a supposed effort to combat racial profiling where they required every police department, every sheriff's office to collect data during traffic stops so far as the person's age, gender, race, ethnicity, et cetera and then report it back to the state so they could look at the data and figure out whether this is happening. But the law included an out saying that if the law enforcement agency had a policy against racial profiling, then they're exempt. They don't have to do anything. They basically solved racial profiling. So as you can imagine, every single law enforcement agency across the state scrambled to put together these policies and since 2001, I think two law enforcement agencies had ever submitted data. So anyway, so we decided to get six years worth of data from the court itself. That was 73,000 citations issued in Jefferson Parish. And the first thing we found out was that black people were being cited one and a half times their population rate. But the thing that really stood out was out of 73,000 citations, only six people deputies claimed were Hispanic. And the Parish has 440,000 people, 18% are Hispanic. So that raised a whole lot of issues. And then the top 10 most common names of white drivers cited five of the names were Hernandez, Rodriguez, Martinez, Gomez, Lopez. So it was pretty obvious that a lot of the people, basically every person who was Hispanic was being misidentified as white. And we talked to a lot of experts and they said, one, it could be a systems issue, but it's also if everybody's white, there can't be any racial bias. So, I mean, we reached out to the sheriff's office and they did not respond as they've not responded to any of our stories, but it raised a lot of concerning issues. And that gets into this question of how data is collected, how it is analyzed, how it's analyzed, because the way it's analyzed shapes priorities for the city, priority shape policies. And if we don't have a problem here, we don't need to address it. So you can talk about the importance of the way that we interpret data that we have. The numbers were there, but they're being looked at this way. Yeah, I mean, the point of the law, if every expert that we talk to, you need to look at this data. The data shows everything. The data hopefully is going to be unbiased and you can figure out what is happening and any department that is interested in finding out whether misconduct is happening, they look at the data. And there's a lot of states across the country. I think there's like 23 that have these data collecting laws in place, some are better than others. You know, North Carolina is good at California, Illinois a bunch. But yeah, I mean, in a department that is very interested in figuring out and maintaining public trust, they look at the data. And it's pretty obvious that the Jefferson Bear Sheriff's office is not looking at the data because if they were, you would hope that they would question why there were only six Hispanic people over six years pulled over inside it. So if we get into this conversation on reform and what you all have seen as a result of your reporting so far, let's just do a round robin as it relates to reform. So for Eric, what have you all seen with NYPD and Bridge can jump in? I'll let Eric take that. Apart from the fruit baskets that they're sending us, thanking us for our insightful coverage. Well, I mean, on a broad level, I think that the sort of final story has still to be written on that as most folks know, there's a new mayor who's coming into office. I just saw Topher's eyes light up. I can't say that the path to deep changes will necessarily come from him. We'll see. He's a former for those who don't know, former police officer himself who actually has long called for reforms. But the city council in New York, there have been actually a number of bills, a whole package of bills proposed to reform how oversight has done. One of the city councilors credited our coverage as sort of directly spurring some of those proposals. I think that the final legislation has still to be voted on. But the larger picture here is as I think Topher was saying, this is decades and decades, if frankly, not more of a kind of institutional resistance to independent oversight. I mean, just to give a sense of it, New York has a civilian oversight board. This is a real like mind twist, let's say. New York has a civilian oversight board of the NYPD for the first decades of its existence. It existed a quote unquote civilian oversight board. It existed within the NYPD and only actually headed by NYPD officers and commanders. There was nothing civilian about it. It was about civilian complaints. And so you're talking about a sort of decades long path here where people have sort of chipped away and our job is to show the reality and policy makers and citizens can make decisions based on that. But I think this is a, it is a very, very long arc we're talking about. Topher, anything else? Not really, yeah. No, just said, again, just like to tell stories. So here is an organization as NYPD, where I don't know, maybe five, six years ago, they set up another organization you dig into it called the Inspector General's Office, giving it all the powers of investigative authority and it was set up to be, here's the entity that will have the subpoena power and the ability to dig through the files and look at all the inside machinery that the Civilian Review Board can't do and that other people can't do. Oh, no, yeah, NYPD just told them to go fly kite too. For many, many years, telling them to fly kite. Like, nah, you can't look at this. Nah, you can't get those documents. Nah, we don't think you should get that data. And that's how they dealt with a body that was supposed to be there equal and was supposed to be able to have access to all of that information. I just did, let me just chime in here for a sec. I just did a quick story a couple of weeks ago on a report that this Inspector General put out and we're gonna get into the issue but about body-worn cameras and video evidence. I know I'm getting ahead of you but I'm only gonna drop this one little thing which was a footnote in the report. The footnote in the report said basically BTW, by the way, we tried to meet with the NYPD to ask them about this issue. The NYPD refused to meet with us, right? Just like, this is supposed to be an overseer of the NYPD and the agency that they are overseeing told them to the politest term would be go fly a kite, as Topra just said. And Rich, we're gonna get into some questions concerning the DOJ and what it takes for them to get involved but first, I wanna pull from the questions and I'm getting them in the chat. This relates to sheriff's offices. We had a question about accountability as it relates to that office. If you have taxpayers involved, taxpayers funding this, isn't there some sort of automatic oversight that comes along with being funded by the public? That would be interesting. The sheriff just collects a percentage of the tax. Again, except for the electorate, they are just untouchable. There is no civilian oversight, there's literally nothing. Like, they don't have to do anything that they don't want to unless the voters vote them out or they feel that they're threatened. And yeah, I mean, that's why reforms are just so hard to come by. So you would think that the tax issue would be something that you could wield, but no, I mean, there's a certain percentage that is allotted to them and then that's it, you know? Yeah, and if I could just piggyback all that, they respond only to political pressure. That is the thing that moves a sheriff in any way. And just keeping it 100 everybody can kind of, because I think this may run, works in New Orleans, I mean, in Louisiana, but in Florida, they're county offices, right? They are responsible for a county. And because of that, they have their constituency blocks, you know, they should have a core city that will be diverse and have diverse interests and have diverse needs and desires that relates to their police agency. But then they have a lot of rural interests, then those political blocks have vastly different desires and, you know, and requests of the sheriff, and they know where their bread is butter. And so they end up creating policies or reacting to, you know, political pressure that kind of fits their voting block, if you will. Yeah, we have a similar setup in Georgia as well. I mean, we had an instance where a sheriff was implicated in an indecent exposure incident. He was charged. He was found the video of him doing what he said he was not doing in the park. And he'd used a taxpayer funded vehicle to go in the middle of the night to do what he would. Officer involved exposure, if you will. Yeah. And was chased by a rookie cop with an APD who was not assigned body worn camera. So it was your word against my word and I'm gonna call up so and so and let's handle this. But what we found was the Florida commissioners, you know, they would weigh in on the budget that the sheriff's office got. But once it got, once the money was there, nobody was overseeing budget, how you used your resources, any of that. And then when it came to, you know, the decision in this, he was charged. Judge found him guilty, did all of this stuff. When it came to stripping powers, the oversight board had so many levels of appeal that this man ended up fulfilling his, the rest of his term before anything could be done. And it was that constitutional law office power that allows you to appeal the state judge, to appeal the governor's office, to do all these things. This stuff can take years, you know, for anyone to be held accountable, even when certification is served from your top law enforcement officers. So yeah, there's a lot of power in that. But Rich, when you're talking about DOJ involvement, like in New Orleans and talking about the consent decree and how they came in, what's the process for the feds to even choose what they're going to investigate and move forward? I just wanted to add one thing with the sheriff's, in Louisiana, the sheriff's don't respond to political pressure, like they apply political pressure. Like it's like, the sheriff's association is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the state. And the sheriff's also have a civilian at will workforce that they can deploy as an army during elections. Like there's, they feel very little political pressure, I think. But as far as like the Department of Justice, in doing this story, we talked to five or six former members of the DOJ, including Jonathan Smith, who was the head of the Civil Rights Division. So when they're choosing what department to look at, they said there's no sort of like set criteria. You don't have to have like this many uses of force. You don't have to have this many like deaths. Sometimes they choose it based on whether there is like an issue that they feel is not getting enough attention, but is like rife throughout departments across the country. You know, like treatment of people, mistreatment of people with like mental health problems, like, you know, autistic people or mistreatment of the homeless. And so they'll choose a department that is, you know, having that issue just to sort of raise it to a national level, you know, other than that, they said that, you know, one thing they said when Jonathan Smith was there, they had 15 attorneys working in the Civil Rights Division. And he was pointed out that there are 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country and they're just flooded, especially now that Trump's out in Biden's and they're just now being flooded with all of these requests. So, you know, he made the point that there's only so much they can do, you know, but he raised the thing that in order to get this, sometimes it's high profile incidents like, you know, Michael Brown or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, but he did emphasize, they all really did emphasize the fact that, you know, if people feel like their local law enforcement agency needs to be investigated, like write the DOJ, get, you know, a massive people together and make that request. It may not work, but they say that, you know, do that. But again, like it's sort of, I don't know, it's picking straws out of a pile. It's really hard to choose like how they do this. So in the instances where we've seen true reform video evidence has clearly been critical in getting to that stuff. So what happens when you don't have that? And we know there are all kinds of policies around use of body cam and not using it and who's required to do it and when. What do you rely on in terms of a tool for reform when you don't have that type of evidence? Who's that for? I'm gonna kick it to you, Eric. I mean, here's the gods on a truth. If you don't have a video, if you don't have the receipts it's really, really hard, right? It's really, really hard. I mean, if you think of the most infamous cases of police violence, police killings just to take one category, you know, you just ran through a bunch of names, you know, here in New York, Eric Garner, you know, obviously the list goes on. The vast majority of those we know about because somebody recorded it, right? And if you look at the initial coverage, I mean, you know, someone pulled up, I remember the police's initial disclosure of George Floyd, right? Of what happened with George Floyd. It has no resemblance to reality, none, right? And so if you're relying on the official reports you may or and often may not get close to the truth. And so, and as you were just saying, even with, and this is something that we focused on and frankly I want to focus on more is video evidence, you know, these cameras, body-worn cameras worn by police has the potential, has the potential to really make a difference. But what doesn't change with technology is the power dynamic. What doesn't change is the accountability and just to take the very specific thing of like, well, who's in control of that footage? Who gets to decide when it's released? Who gets to decide who sees it? You know, in this case, I wrote about Kowalski Treywick. Here's just the thing that blew my mind is, so we got footage as a result of some lawyers having to sue 20 months after the fact, right? 20 months after the fact, we got footage. And the day after we published a story with the footage, the police oversight board, the civilian oversight board in New York City, right? Called me and said, well, I called actually the lawyer who was involved and I heard afterward and said, oh, ProPublica just published this video. Do you think you could give us a copy of the video? This is the agency that's in charge supposedly, right? And has to ask an outside entity for access to the video. That's how it really works in practice, right? So, you know, technology can make a huge difference, but what it can't surmount is power, right? And that's what I think everybody has to keep in mind. Yeah, and we even saw here in Atlanta, you know, we were pulling officers from federal task force because the Justice Department was not requiring those officers who are on loan to the feds for these operations to activate the body cam and it was costing the city when we would get into civil litigation to not have that evidence. And they saw, you know, look, it's gonna be beneficial all the way around for us to turn these things on and preserve the evidence. I'll kick to Rich and Topher just as a whole on this last question and reform before we get to more Q&A from the audience. But what are the factors that have spurred reform as far as what you've seen in your reporting outside of video, if any? I'll step in there first, Richard. Yeah, I'll just say enormous scandal. That's all I got. And that can be spurred by really amazing reporting that can generate that scandal as far as revealing something so just amazing that people can't help but respond to it. Enormous scandal and embarrassment. But as we are living in a society where shame and embarrassment means far less than it used to, you know, I don't know what will spur that type of change but that's what I have seen in my reporting. Yeah, so, I mean, just jumping on what Topher said, I mean, right, the lack of shame and the lack of sort of public outcry, like absent that, like where are you? So there was this case, what was it in 2020 where a 14-year-old Tramal McGee, he and some buddies like Stollkar and Woodjoy Riding and he ran and as he was like trying to crawl underneath the shed unarmed, face down on the ground, a Jefferson Parashare deputy shot him in the back and they were going to charge him, they arrested him for like resisting arrest and et cetera. And, you know, you think that that would be something that there would be sort of sort of like humbleness or some sort of like contrition on the part of the sheriff's office and they were just sort of combated with him. They said, that kid knows what happened. If he wants to complain, come in, you know, there are a lot of instances where there is even video. You know, there was an instance at a Mardi Gras parade where if there's a viral video and Jacobi Cage, he was attacked basically and assaulted by these deputies, they wrote this completely false report, charged him with resisting arrest, with battery. And despite the video coming out and it was a viral video viewed like almost 300,000 times, they wanted to proceed with the charges. And the guy who wrote the false report wasn't disciplined. And, you know, again, like if they don't have to fear losing their job, if they don't have to fear being voted out of office, like I don't really know where that pressure is going to come unless it comes from outside and some sort of power that's greater than them. So, I mean, this really plays into one of our first audience questions and these questions are broken up into different categories. This first one is what can I do? And so we've touched on this a bit and dozens of people wrote in asking, what can you do as a concerned citizen to spur this change? Rich, you'd mentioned this conversation with the DOJ and it's like, hey, if people get together in mass and they write the justice department that may get someone's attention, that's one way. Topher, we talked about public shame and outcry and scandal and that obviously involves citizens sometimes. But when you think of the average person and what they can do to draw attention to an issue, what is it? Is it contacting the reporters? Is it letting them take it from there? Is it writing the DOJ? What is it? This is for everyone. Yeah, keep your cell phone charged. Like, I mean, that's one thing you can do. But the other thing is you have to elect people in your state houses that care about reform. And I don't even know where in result of that is, but I know if you do elect people that care about reform then they can start to try to move the needle from inside the political sphere. So I think about, you know, Ithaca, New York and they had a young mayor who cared about reform. And so he pursued a lot of the initiatives that his constituents appeared to care about related to their police force. And that's what it took. It had it been a different mayor, those reforms may have not even gotten out the gate. And so you have to, I think, elect sheriffs. If you have a sheriff, you have to see if there's a sheriff that cares about these reform initiatives, the ones that you care about and try to get them in office. But outside of that, keep your cell phone charged. I think if I could chime in, you know, there are, I'm a big fan of keeping your cell phone charged and, you know, don't underestimate, you know, the power of one person to witness something and say something. But in addition to that, you know, I think a lot of communities, I know, a lot of communities have groups that have organized around some of these issues and without speaking to any specific group or any specific platform, I do think that, you know, groups can be a vehicle for magnifying your voice, right? And for being heard on these issues. And it's surprising actually, you know, one, I feel like we haven't given a lot of great uplifting news during this. And so one thing that I have found, and that is to me heartening, is it doesn't take that many voices to really be heard and to get politicians and leaders' attention. Because frankly, and honestly, not that many people are speaking up most of the time. And so when the occasional person does or the occasional group does, it can get people's attention. But I would just encourage, you know, the collective voice is often more powerful than the individual one. And, you know, that there are people who really dedicate themselves to tracking these issues and following these things. And we're seeing, you know, who in your community does that? And I gotta go back to the saying you don't know what you don't know. It's one thing to witness something and be front and center and be able to contribute to fleshing out a narrative or giving a bigger picture of something. But if I'm not a part of one of these groups and I'm curious about how accountability has panned out in my jurisdiction, what type of data and records are available to the average citizen, basically what's available to us, right? I mean, what's a public record is a public record. But where would you even start with trying to figure out what accountability looks like, you know, in my downtown police department and in my county sheriff's office? Google? You know, if, you know, the United States for better or worse doesn't have a, you know, who is a tofer who we're saying or maybe it was actually sorry, Rich, you know, 18,000 different law enforcement agencies. You know, we don't have national police, probably for the better, I don't know, but so, you know, that's 18,000 different policies, 18,000 different levels of disclosure. And, you know, so I actually think, you know, it's not that hard actually to figure out what is out there and what is not out there. And sometimes it's surprising the level of detail that is out there, you know, I don't know if we have any viewers from Chicago, Chicago, just to take an example, that's a lot of detail. I know New Orleans, a federal consent decree has published a fair bit of information. I hope I'm not wrong on that, Rich, you tell me. And, but, and the other thing is, by the way, you know, going to, whether it's community board meetings and so forth, you know, being an active citizen is, I think, a meaningful thing. I just want to jump on that. Like the thing, and I also think that people should raise awareness for what's not there. So like the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office does, we've requested all non-shooting use of force incidents and they didn't have it. They said, we do not track this. That's obscene to me, you know? And so I think, and I think that if people raise that, they went as, you know, as Eric was saying, go to these like board meetings and say, where is this information? Why is that not there? And like raise that issue because that should be like, just completely unacceptable that you say, I don't know how many of my deputies hit someone. I mean, so I think if people, you know, focus on what's there, but also really focus on what's not there. And again, I just say this is where you can use some of your political power. If you, as a citizen, you're right to vote. When it's time for reelection, make that a thing that you ask the candidates every time you see them at a forum or that you get the entities that put on these political forums. I've seen this happen in places I've lived and work where you know, you got the entities, they'll get together and like, this is the question we're gonna repeatedly ask them every time they go around and do all the little chicken dinner circuits and talk about why they wanna be the sheriff again. Well, can you get us a use of force, some stat data? We want that, will you commit to that? Like that's part of that process that you can use. So Topher, a question came in for you about citizens holding police unions accountable or figuring out what's going on within the union, which we're not talking about something taxpayer funded and public records and all that type of stuff. How do you keep up with the union and hold their feet to the fire on issues that are impacting that they've got some pull on? Yeah, I don't know that the public has any lever of influence on the police unions, other than, you know, their membership writ large, like the actual members who are employed by the police and agency, if there are, you know, trends, problems and issues related to how they're conducting their job and whatever that dovetails into the union's work and how the union has interacted with the agency, you might have some leverage that way, but the union is a private entity and it answers to its members. And if you aren't a member, then there you go. So Eric, how does that play into oversight boards and what they may or may not be able to do about something impacted by the union power? That was a question for you. Like, is there anything? Yeah, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, to me, the thing that we looked at is a fundamental question, but really across the United States and that I think each of us has spoken to different aspects of. And that is the fundamental question of the, is our law enforcement, our law enforcement departments truly under civilian control? That's really the question, right? You know, the military, there's a long and proud history in the United States of civilian control, right? The police departments, ironically, though they're not a military force, have often, you know, that civilian control is either circumscribed as a result of the laws themselves, you know, the entities that are the civilian entities literally don't have the power or are by policy or culture. And that's, you know, ultimately the question that I think we as citizens have to face, and to understand the issue clearly, that to me is what it is. Yeah, I know here in Georgia, there's often a question about why the GBI is not investigating a certain case and this involves an officer and folks not even realizing that the way the statutes are set up, the agency itself has to request the GBI to come in and be that independent arm. And so you kind of look at these situations and think, oh, there's automatically some type of oversight and it's actually baked into the state law that no, there's not. So they would have to be actively involved in wanting some sort of state-sponsored oversight for that to even happen. I am getting some new questions and hold on, my Slack channel is not, let me expand my board here. Let's see. For Eric and Topher, what methods have you deployed to get comprehensive disciplinary records when producing them is required by law, but where there's substantial resistance to doing so? I mean, you know, Topher, you want to take that one? I mean, I'll, you know, this isn't my story, it's my homie's story. But, you know, I'll let folks behind a little bit of the machinery here is, you know, you source up, you know, Eric was smart, he asked for some data at a time that a lot of folks weren't asking for it. And so we got some cool data, that was awesome. But, you know, I'm a real, I think it's important when you cover police that you actually talk to the police. Like, I think that's part of the gig. And so I have a lot of police sources. And, you know, me and my brother Joaquin, we sourced up and we got a lot of the sources talking to us about, you know, how it works when they're in uniform, like what it looks like for them. And that kind of points us in a lot of directions. You're able to make contact with a number of people. And a man Joaquin went into the projects one night and got a box of documents. It was a great story. I can't get all the details. A man went into the project that a box of documents, documents we weren't supposed to have and we got them. And it was great, it was beautiful. And so we were able to tell a very rich story about all the details and things like that because, you know, we sourced up and we were able to kind of connect with people who had access, but it takes all that. Like you gotta go to the projects and get some box of documents. Like it takes all of that to get into some of these details. I want that in the lead. I want people to understand that in the lead. So yeah, it's not easy. And it shouldn't be that hard. These are people who salary are paid by all the citizens and they're doing an important job and their job can sometimes have life and death consequences. And it should not be that difficult to learn about their employment history and learn about their employment track record. And so, you know, whatever citizens can do if it's, you know, joining these politically active bodies and making, amplifying their voices so that they're heard or it's, you know, trying to see how they can find the right candidates, support the right candidates to achieve the kind of reform they want inside and outside game, right? That's what you have to do if you want to see the needle move on this. This next question comes from a fellow journalist, Justin Price in the Arizona Republic. Mr. Rich said on the excellent story about misidentification of Hispanic drivers, can you outline broadly the scope of work in a general timeline of that recording? When did that idea come into focus and what aspects of the reporting took the longest to flesh out? I mean, it wasn't very linear. So we, you know, we were working on the major first story for, you know, ProPublica which is like the overarching, like, you know and we had that like in our pocket and that was always just sitting there and we didn't know whether we were gonna have time to do it honestly. So we got that data, you know, I started in September of 2020 and maybe got that data in January. And then we were like, wow, this is amazing but we had all these other stories to do. So there wasn't sort of like, we started in, you know, March and it took us like a month and a half. So but it wasn't, it wasn't that hard. Like once you have the data then you just have to, you know try and figure out what it means and why this is happening. So I wish I had like sort of like this thing I could franchise and be like, yeah, this is how you do it but no, it was, I don't know. It was kind of scattershot.