by Mollie Simon

Last summer, ProPublica compiled 68 videos that appeared to show police officers using disproportionate force against protesters during the nationwide events following George Floyd’s death in police custody.

We had culled the videos from hundreds circulating on social media in the wake of the protests and highlighted the cases that seemed to clearly show officers using disproportionate force. We then reached out to dozens of law enforcement agencies whose officers are in the videos and asked some straightforward questions: Have the officers’ police departments investigated the incidents? And what consequences, if any, have the officers in the videos faced?

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As time passed, we’ve been checking in with the departments to get their answers.

After a year, we wanted to give a final update on what we know: Departments have disclosed discipline for 10 officers.

A Seattle Police Department officer received a written reprimand for striking a protester with “six to eight punches over six seconds.” In Grand Rapids, Michigan, an officer shot a man in the shoulder at close range with a long-range tear gas round. He received two days without pay. In Salt Lake City, an officer received “ coaching and counseling ” for using a shield to push an elderly man.

Six officers were initially fired, though two got their jobs back after a review. Criminal charges are also pending against 11 officers, including some who have already faced internal discipline.

In 17 cases that we followed, the departments have decided not to discipline the officers or could not identify them.

Investigations are still ongoing in 25 of the cases. This includes a high-profile case in Buffalo, New York, where two officers pushed a man backward , causing him to hit his head on the pavement. A grand jury dismissed felony assault charges against the officers, but a decision on departmental discipline is still pending.

Finally, in 18 instances, ProPublica could not determine the disciplinary outcome — either because the department did not respond or the department said it could not share the information.

The weaving journey of accountability has played out starkly around one of the cases in Atlanta.

In May 2020, the mayor announced the firing of two officers just a day after they were involved in the violent arrest of two college students who were pulled from a car.

But the officers quickly sued to get their jobs back, citing a lack of due process. In February, Atlanta’s Civil Service Board agreed. The two officers are once again employed by the department but remain on administrative leave. The incident remains under investigation. Criminal charges have also been filed against the officers , including assault, though the district attorney who brought them has since been voted out of office.

One reason departments have declined to comment on the status of cases is that the incidents have been subject to litigation. But the back and forth on such suits can be illuminating.

Responding to a lawsuit by a protester who was hit by a Los Angeles Police Department vehicle, the city wrote that the “force used against plaintiff, if any, was caused and necessitated by the actions of plaintiff, and was reasonable and necessary for self-defense.”

In about half of the cases we reviewed, including one resulting in discipline, the officer or officers involved have not been publicly identified. Sometimes, it’s not even clear which law enforcement agency they worked for.

In Minneapolis, where Floyd’s death occurred, sparking outrage across the world, a video captured the moment in May when officers patrolling a neighborhood fired paint rounds at a woman’s home while enforcing a curfew.

A Minnesota National Guard spokesperson told ProPublica the agency was “not involved” in the incident. The Minneapolis Police Department said the incident was “not our agency.” The Minnesota State Patrol said that it reviewed the video of the incident, and that “the officer who fired the marking round was not a State Patrol trooper.” When asked which agency the officers who fired the paint round were from, the spokesperson said it was “unclear.”

by ProPublica

The Society for News Design España announced on Thursday that ProPublica projects won two medals, one gold and one bronze, at this year’s Malofiej, a prestigious annual competition honoring the best infographics in media from around the world.

“ Hawaii’s Beaches Are Disappearing ,” a ProPublica Local Reporting Network project with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, won a gold medal in the innovation format category. The story exposed the various ways in which coastal homeowners have used loopholes to circumvent Hawaii’s environmental laws at the expense of the state’s beaches. To show people the high stakes of the policy debate, the Star-Advertiser’s Sophie Cocke worked with ProPublica news applications developer Ash Ngu to create an interactive graphic that allows people to tour a stretch of Oahu coastline. With the use of drones and advanced techniques that tie the footage to shoreline maps, it seamlessly shows how the area’s beach has been devastated by seawalls, property by property. Using databases built from thousands of pages of paper records, the piece also includes a feature to allow readers to search whether properties had received permits to keep older seawalls or to construct new ones.

“ States Are Reopening: See How Coronavirus Cases Rise or Fall ” won a bronze medal in the features category. The visualization by Lena Groeger and Ngu sought to answer a simple question: Is the COVID-19 situation in my state getting better or worse? To show whether infections were going up or down, Groeger and Ngu created a novel data visualization that let people see, at a glance, how states compared. The main graphic featured arrows placed in a rough geographic arrangement, a mapping technique known as a cartogram. To show when a state would be able to reopen, they built a section for each state, sequentially stacked in alphabetical order. In a series of easy-to-read charts, they showed where states fell on five COVID-19 measures, each based on White House guidelines for what states needed to do to reopen safely. They also included green checkmarks or red X’s to indicate whether a state “passed” each one of these measures.

See all of this year’s Malofiej Awards winners here .

by Agnel Philip , ProPublica, and Zoë Sobel , KUCB

A KUCB and ProPublica analysis has found that in recent years, Alaska has accounted for a growing share of the country’s fatalities from crashes involving small commercial aircraft.

Since 2016, 42% of the country’s deaths in these crashes occurred in Alaska, up from 26% in the early 2000s. And in recent years, the state has seen a series of midair collisions involving commercial flights, a type of crash that has largely been eliminated in the rest of the country thanks to greater oversight by the federal government and advances in technology.

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Experts point to the state’s unique hazards, such as mountainous terrain, unpredictable weather patterns and limited safety infrastructure, when explaining why fatal crashes are more common in Alaska than elsewhere.

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In the past two decades, the number of deaths in crashes involving small commercial aircraft has plummeted nationwide, while in Alaska, deaths have held relatively steady. But detailed analyses of Alaska’s aviation crash patterns have been limited, in large part because of the lack of public Federal Aviation Administration data concerning these small operators, which include air taxis, air tours and medical evacuations. The news organizations’ analysis attempted to bridge some of these gaps.

Large Air Carriers vs. Small Commercial Operators

Companies such as United, Delta and Alaska Airlines are known as large air carriers or Part 121 operators because they operate under that section of the FAA’s federal regulations when ferrying passengers and cargo. Flights under Part 121 face the strictest standards, owing to the risks associated with carrying large numbers of passengers and to the greater resources at their disposal. These types of flights rarely crash, accounting for only four of the nearly 2,300 fatal crashes in the U.S. in the past decade.

Small commercial operators typically fall under the FAA’s Part 135 regulations, which are less strict than Part 121. For example, pilots can have as little as 500 hours of experience compared with the 1,500 hours required of pilots flying under Part 121. Nationwide, Part 135 flights had a fatal crash rate 75 times higher than Part 121 flights in the past decade, according to National Transportation Safety Board reports .

There are two types of Part 135 operations: scheduled, also known as commuter, and the much more common nonscheduled, which includes air taxis, charters, air tours and many medical evacuation flights. (In our investigation, we refer to the unscheduled group collectively as air taxis or charters.) There are small differences in the regulations that apply to each: Nonscheduled plane flights (as opposed to helicopter flights) can carry up to 30 passengers (compared to nine for scheduled flights) and typically face slightly looser standards, such as a higher maximum number of hours pilots can fly in a year. Among scheduled and nonscheduled Part 135 flights in the past decade, nonscheduled Part 135 flights made up the vast majority of fatal crashes both nationwide and in Alaska.

Most other aviation falls under the FAA’s general aviation regulations, known as Part 91, which is typically meant for private individuals flying their own aircraft. These regulations are the loosest, and this type of aviation makes up the vast majority of all fatal crashes in the country. There are some commercial flights that can be conducted under these rules, but these weren’t consistently marked in the data used to track aviation crashes.

KUCB and ProPublica focused this analysis on commercial passenger and cargo flights conducted under Part 135. Passengers pay to take these flights just as they do a flight with a major carrier. But while there is a high expectation of safety from major carriers, Part 135 flights are much more dangerous.

Comparing Alaska to the Rest of the Country

Counting fatal crashes by flight type and region of the country is possible with publicly available data, and that led to our finding that Alaska accounted for a growing share of fatalities nationally. However, overall flight activity by flight type and region for air taxis and charters is not publicly available, which made it impossible to tell if Alaska has a disproportionate share of Part 135 fatalities when accounting for its higher share of these flights. The FAA collects this information but doesn’t publicly report data on flight activity.

The FAA uses a survey to generate yearly estimates of total flight activity for those categories, but the results published on the FAA’s website don’t separate these types of operations at the state or regional level.

The FAA declined to provide the survey results by region and type of operation, saying it was against the agency’s policy to calculate new figures for outside entities. A Freedom of Information Act request for the source data was denied, with the agency saying all the data from the survey is collected and maintained by a third-party contractor. KUCB and ProPublica have appealed the denial.

How We Did It

The news organizations used NTSB crash data to tally fatal crashes. The NTSB collects and reports data on all aviation accidents in the country. From this data, we were able to calculate Alaska’s share of fatalities from small commercial aircraft crashes.

Our finding that Alaska has seen a series of midair collisions involving commercial flights relied on the NTSB’s midair collision flag to identify those crashes. We then filtered this subset to crashes that involved aircraft covered by Part 135 rules.

The news organizations also analyzed the causes of commercial crashes in the state using the NTSB’s crash data and found no significant disparities between Alaska and the rest of the country. Pilots involved in fatal crashes had similar levels of experience on average, although the data didn’t specify how much they had flown in Alaska specifically. Environmental factors such as weather weren’t cited more frequently in Alaska’s fatal crashes either. Experts said this might be due to challenges with determining causes of the state’s crashes.

Finally, the news organizations analyzed the status of NTSB recommendations using data downloaded from the board’s website . We looked at all recommendations closed by the board between 1991 and 2020 and calculated the percentage of recommendations closed with “unacceptable action,” meaning the target agency disagreed with the recommended action and decided not to implement it or has not taken action to implement the recommendation. We compared this percentage across the three decades and found the FAA’s percentage of recommendations designated as unacceptable action increased from 15% in the 1990s to 20% in the 2000s to 37% in the 2010s. We also compared this to other agencies within the Department of Transportation and found similar increases. The FAA received the most recommendations and had among the highest overall percentages of unacceptable action decisions.

by Zoë Sobel , KUCB , and Agnel Philip , ProPublica

On a clear day in May 2019, the tourist season was just starting up in Ketchikan, Alaska, a southeastern city of 8,000 that had become a cruise ship hot spot. For Randy Sullivan, that meant another day — his fifth in a row — of flying sightseeing tours and charters.

Sullivan and his wife, Julie, owned Mountain Air Service, a single-plane family business that had allowed Randy to realize his dream of becoming his own boss. Randy was born and raised in Alaska. He grew up in Ketchikan and had been flying in the area for more than 17 years. He, more than most, knew the dangers of commercial aviation in the state.

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“When Randy first started flying up here in Alaska, he learned from some of the best pilots up here and he valued everything they taught him,” Julie said. “Safety was number one for Randy.”

For the 10 a.m. flight, his first of the day, he met his four passengers from the Royal Princess cruise ship at the dock. They boarded his single-engine, propeller-driven, red-and-white floatplane for a tour of Misty Fjords National Monument, 35 miles northeast of Ketchikan. This picturesque landscape, filled with glacial valleys and steep cliffs, is such a popular and crowded flightseeing destination that local operators banded together a decade earlier to create their own voluntary safety measures for flying in the area, including designating radio channels for communication and routes for the planes to follow.

After noon, Sullivan’s de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver was on its way back to town. Another commercial carrier, Taquan Air, was flying one of its own airplanes, also on a flightseeing tour, back to Ketchikan. The two planes collided at about 3,350 feet. The accident destroyed the Beaver and killed all five aboard, including Sullivan, as well as one passenger from the Taquan Air plane. All 10 survivors were injured.

Julie Sullivan’s husband, Randy, was killed in a plane crash in 2019. She has the tail number of the plane Randy flew tattooed on her wrist. (Ash Adams, special to ProPublica)

Shannon Wilk lost three family members in the midair collision, including her brother Ryan, who was on Sullivan’s plane.

“I didn’t think the next time I’d be in the same room with him, he would be in a casket,” Shannon said. The crash also claimed the lives of Ryan’s wife, Elsa, and Elsa’s brother, Louis Botha. “I thought he’d get home, we’d keep getting pictures, we’d talk about it and we’d just keep going.”

The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent governmental agency that investigates transportation accidents, eventually determined that the pilots of the aircraft saw each other too late to take evasive action, calling it an example of the limitations of avoiding midair collisions by relying only on what pilots can see through the window.

Fatal midair collisions involving commercial aircraft are practically unheard of in the rest of the country, but in Alaska, there have been five in the past five years alone. In each of them, at least one plane either lacked a key piece of optional safety equipment or wasn’t using it properly.

More broadly, in recent years Alaska has made up a growing share of the country’s crashes involving small commercial aircraft, according to an investigation by KUCB and ProPublica. In the past two decades, the number of deaths in crashes involving these operators has plummeted nationwide, while in Alaska, deaths have held relatively steady. As a result, Alaska’s share of fatalities in such crashes has increased from 26% in the early 2000s to 42% since 2016. Our analysis included crashes involving at least one plane or helicopter flying under the Federal Aviation Administration’s typical rules for commuter, air taxi or charter service. (The flight safety record of large air carriers is strong in both Alaska and nationally.)

Alaska’s increased share of aviation deaths can be attributed, at least in part, to its continued reliance on smaller operators, which have worse safety records than large airlines but appear to have waned in popularity outside the state, according to experts.

In interviews with KUCB and ProPublica, federal officials, lawyers and aviation safety experts said the FAA, which oversees air travel in the country, carries much of the responsibility for improving aviation safety in the state. Some say the agency has been slow to adopt rules and provide additional support for the unique conditions in Alaska, leaving pilots and customers to fend for themselves. Some critics also say the FAA has struggled to hold operators accountable for questionable safety track records.

While it has long been known that flying in Alaska is more dangerous than in the lower 48, there are fewer safeguards in the state than almost anywhere else in the country. Because much of Alaska is considered uncontrolled airspace, pilots flying in large areas of the state have limited access to weather and traffic information.

That leaves pilots, many of whom come to the state to get their first commercial flying experience, on their own to navigate rapidly changing weather, mountainous terrain and challenging landings at small rural airports with unpaved, poorly lit runways. Flights can turn deadly even in the hands of experienced pilots.

Alaska’s Growing Share of Small Commercial Aircraft Fatalities

The state’s share of deaths from crashes involving commuter, air taxi and charter planes made up an increasing portion of the country’s total in the past decade.

Note: Each bar in the chart depicts the percentage from the preceding five years; the listed year is the last in the range (i.e. the bar labeled 2020 represents the share from 2016-2020). Crashes involved at least one aircraft that fell under Part 135 of the FAA’s regulations. (Agnel Philip/ProPublica; Source: National Transportation Safety Board)

The NTSB has been among the most vocal entities pushing the FAA to change its approach in the state. The NTSB is responsible for making recommendations to prevent future accidents, but it lacks the authority to enact them. Following a roundtable meeting in 2019 focused on improving small-plane aviation, the NTSB issued a safety recommendation asking the FAA to review and prioritize Alaska’s aviation safety needs and ensure it’s making progress on implementing safety enhancements.

“I think the FAA has acknowledged that they can do something. They have indicated a willingness to make some improvements,” NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said. “We want them to quit studying this issue. We want them to move forward and implement this.”

The FAA, however, hasn’t implemented many of the NTSB’s recent safety recommendations, including requiring small operators to collect and analyze their flight data in ways that many large commercial air carriers do voluntarily. The NTSB also has asked the FAA to install equipment throughout Alaska that would allow pilots to fly using navigation systems, which is safer than operating by sight, especially when pilots encounter poor weather and visibility.

The FAA declined an interview request but said in a written statement that it had created a new program, the Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative , to look at how the agency is providing resources to the state, their effectiveness, and what more can be done. This group is seeking feedback from the aviation community on the most pressing issues.

“Improving aviation safety in Alaska has long been and remains one of the FAA’s top priorities,” the agency said in its statement. “The FAA’s approach is based on the understanding that safety is a journey, not a destination, and our work will never be done.”

Some experts say additional regulations may not effectively address existing safety concerns and instead put the onus on individual operators to raise their standards.

“Additional rules are not necessarily the immediate answer,” said Jens Hennig, vice president of operations at the General Aviation Manufacturers Association and a member of several FAA rule-making committees. “In many cases, realizing that level of safety gets into many intangible things. What’s the safety culture in the operator? I can’t regulate that.”

Hennig and others say companies can adopt many tools and technologies to improve safety, although they acknowledge that the FAA could do a better job of outreach in Alaska.

One week after the May 2019 crash that killed Randy Sullivan and five others, another Taquan Air floatplane, a type of aircraft that allows for water landings and is popular in Alaska, flipped upon landing in Metlakatla’s harbor and killed 31-year-old epidemiologist Sarah Luna and pilot Ron Rash. It was Rash’s first commuter flight with Taquan.

Sarah Luna (Courtesy of Laura Luna)

The NTSB determined the probable cause of the accident was the pilot’s failure to compensate for an off-center tailwind while landing. New pilots, like Rash, were not expected to perform tailwind landings, so they were not taught how to do them during Taquan’s flight training, the NTSB said in its final investigation report. Also contributing to the crash, according to the NTSB, was Taquan’s decision to assign an inexperienced pilot to a destination prone to challenging downdrafts and changing wind conditions.

Taquan declined requests for an interview.

In a letter to the NTSB in 2020, Taquan’s chief pilot said the company had identified significant safety issues, including pilot competency and hazards in water takeoffs and landings. In response, it added pilot competency checks, created checklists to grade new hires on certain tasks, and requires each new pilot to get a minimum of 10 hours of initial operating experience.

Luna’s parents said she knew the risks inherent in commercial aviation in Alaska. But her dedication to her work at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and her commitment to improving the health of Alaska Native people were greater than her fear. Luna began working in Alaska in June 2018 as part of the consortium’s liver disease and hepatitis program. The flight to Metlakatla, where she’d be meeting patients in person, was her first floatplane ride and her first trip off the road system.

“What happened is not acceptable,” Sarah’s mother, Laura Luna, said in March. “Even though it’s almost two years, it’s like it happened yesterday.”

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“Aviation Is Kind of a Lifeline”

Flying in the country’s largest state is unlike flying anywhere else. Because of the state’s small, spread-out population, commercial aviation is dominated by small planes. While larger planes fly to hub communities like Bethel, Nome or Unalaska, they cannot fly to smaller villages because there’s neither the passenger demand nor the infrastructure to support them.

About 80% of Alaska communities are not on the road system, and for the people who live in those places, flying is simply unavoidable. Planes serve as buses for kids traveling to sporting events and other school activities. They transport pregnant women to hospitals where they can safely deliver, and they carry residents to medical appointments not available in their hometowns. They take sexual assault victims to big cities for forensic examinations.

“In Alaska, aviation is kind of a lifeline,” said John Hallinan, a retired FAA flight standards officer who worked at the regional office in Anchorage. “If you shut down service for any particular reason, there’s an impact that’s felt within the community.”

But Alaska lacks infrastructure that is standard in the lower 48. For example, it has 235 state-owned rural airports, of which only 47 are paved. Plus, rural airports are not staffed at all hours of the day.

“What it means is you’re on your own more,” said Tom George, the Alaska regional manager for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a national nonprofit aviation group. “The weather you see out the window is the weather you have to consider and use as your basis for making decisions, as opposed to being able to call up on the radio and find out 50 to 60 miles ahead of you what conditions are like at the moment.”

Despite the state’s inherent dangers, there are limited safeguards in place.

When most people fly commercially in America, they travel on large jet planes from companies like Delta, United and American Airlines. These airlines face the strictest regulations because fatal crashes involving these planes have killed large numbers of people. For example, their pilots typically need to have at least 1,500 hours of flying experience.

While some large air carriers do operate in Alaska, particularly the eponymous Alaska Airlines, there are far more small, often piston or turboprop planes that are well-suited to the state’s unique terrain and limited infrastructure. Pilots for small operators , like Taquan Air, can have as little as 500 hours of experience. They can also fly more hours annually than pilots working for large carriers and are subject to different rest-time requirements.

Nationally, commuter, air-taxi and charter flights were involved in fatal crashes at a far higher rate than large air carrier flights in the past decade.

Glossary

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Large air carrier: Flights conducted under the FAA’s Part 121 regulations, which typically apply to jet planes with at least 10 passenger seats.

Commuter: Flights conducted under the FAA’s Part 135 regulations that are done on a set schedule and carry up to nine passengers. (Helicopter flights don’t have seating restrictions.)

Air taxi or charter: Flights conducted on demand under the FAA’s Part 135 regulations. These typically include air tours and medical evacuation flights that can carry up to 30 passengers. (Helicopter flights don’t have seating restrictions.)

But it isn’t possible to calculate what the crash rate of small commercial flights was in Alaska compared to the rest of the country because such calculations require knowing the varying amounts of activity between different areas. But the FAA doesn’t release data on the number of flight hours for most of these operations by state or region, and it denied a Freedom of Information Act request from the news organizations because the data is collected and kept by a third-party contractor on behalf of the FAA. KUCB and ProPublica have appealed the denial.

Alaska’s dangerous flying conditions have claimed the lives of numerous high-profile figures, including several politicians.

In 1972, a plane crashed on its way to Juneau carrying then-U.S. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska. The plane has never been found.

On Aug. 9, 2010, a float-equipped 11-seat airplane carrying guests from a company lodge owned by telecom company GCI to a camp for an afternoon of fishing crashed into mountainous tree-covered terrain about 10 miles outside of Aleknagik, a small city in the Bristol Bay region. The crash killed the pilot and four passengers, including former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who had survived a 1978 plane crash that killed his first wife. The four surviving passengers were seriously injured.

The Stevens crash was strongly felt in the state’s aviation community, as he had been a champion for additional funding and Alaska-specific modifications to federal aviation regulations.

“Anybody that lives here knows somebody, it seems, that has died in an accident. People that are this close to a lack of safety are very invested in making it better,” Hallinan said. “Sen. Stevens was very invested in trying to get Alaska up to some kind of level of safety that was on par with the contiguous 48 states.”

Last July, the private plane of Alaska State Rep. Gary Knopp and a chartered plane carrying six people collided south of Anchorage , killing all seven.

And in March, five people — including the Czech Republic’s richest man, billionaire Petr Kellner — were killed on a heli-skiing trip when their helicopter crashed near Knik Glacier.

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Combating “Bush Syndrome”

It’s been 41 years since the NTSB first issued a special report on air-taxi safety in Alaska. Data collected between 1974 and 1978 showed that the nonfatal air-taxi crash rate was almost five times higher than the rate in the rest of the nation, and the fatal crash rate was more than double.

The study found three main culprits for Alaska’s high crash rate: “bush syndrome,” defined as a pilot voluntarily taking on unnecessary risks to complete a flight; substandard airport facilities and poor communication of airfield and runway conditions; and inadequate weather information and navigational aids.

Fifteen years later, the NTSB published another safety study specifically about Alaska, which reiterated many of the same concerns, saying pilots and operators faced pressure to provide reliable air service in “an operating environment and aviation infrastructure that are often inconsistent with these demands.”

“I cannot tell you how many phone calls I’ve gotten over the years from people in Unalaska and other parts of the state, calling me personally on my cell phone, saying, ‘Why did you cancel the flight? The winds are not blowing now,’” said Danny Seybert, the former owner and chief executive of PenAir, once Alaska’s second-largest commuter airline, which offered scheduled passenger service as well as charters. PenAir closed in 2020 following a series of bankruptcies and a fatal 2019 plane crash in Unalaska while under the ownership of Ravn Air Group. “There’s a lot of pressure generated from people that live and work in these communities to travel on time and exactly when the flight is scheduled to go, no matter what.”

The FAA has embarked on numerous programs to improve safety in the state. For example, in 1999, the agency began a program to deploy weather cameras that would help provide a near-real-time view of conditions in sites across Alaska. Some 230 cameras have been installed.

One of its most significant efforts occurred between 1996 and 2006, when a joint industry and FAA research project called Capstone equipped aircraft in southeast Alaska and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the western part of the state with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast systems. The ADS-B tech and its associated ground infrastructure was hailed as a marked improvement over traditional radar systems because it could provide information on weather and the location of nearby aircraft to pilots in areas radar didn’t reach before.

In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the aviation accident rate decreased by 47% between 2000 and 2004, after the Capstone project began.

The FAA deemed the project so successful that it moved to implement ADS-B nationwide. However, the rule only applies to most controlled airspace, which the agency defines in a way that excludes most of Hawaii and Alaska. According to Hennig, the GAMA vice president, Alaska lags far behind the rest of the country in terms of ADS-B-equipped planes.

The cost of ADS-B has gone down over the years. Today, Garmin sells full ADS-B devices for $5,295 . The costs are relatively minor for even small operators, especially compared to the cost of their planes.

Some pilots, like Mountain Air’s Randy Sullivan, chose to install the technology because of its safety enhancements.

“[Randy] wanted to have the ADS-B in his plane because he knew how many floatplanes flew in the area and he wanted everybody to see him and to be able to see them,” Julie Sullivan said. “It was very important to have that device in his aircraft.”

Randy Sullivan’s son, Spencer, wears a hoodie with the tail number of his late father’s plane printed on the back. (Ash Adams, special to ProPublica)

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Not Enough Deaths to Bring About Change

On Oct. 2, 2016, two pilots departed the Quinhagak Airport in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta with one passenger, headed for a 70-mile trip to Togiak. This was the pilots’ third of five scheduled flights that day, on a route that would ultimately bring them back to Bethel.

The captain, Timothy Cline, had worked for Hageland Aviation Services Inc. since 2015, while the second in command, Drew Welty, was in his first flying job, having finished flight training that spring at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Just before noon, the turboprop Cessna 208B Grand Caravan collided with steep mountainous terrain, killing everyone on board.

Cline’s widow, Angela, told investigators that her husband was a fantastic pilot and that she didn’t believe this accident could have happened without some mechanical error, according to notes of the interviews included in the NTSB report. Cline had lost two friends in plane accidents in recent years — one had died two months before — and while he was a little worried, he didn’t have any specific concerns. “The accidents made him more safe and he did not take any chances. [Cline and his wife] had a fantastic life together and he did not ever want to lose that,” according to a summary of the interview. She could not be reached for this article.

The NTSB found the probable cause of the accident to be the pilots’ decision to continue flying into deteriorating weather and visibility. But the agency also cited Hageland’s policies, inadequate training and poor FAA oversight as contributing factors.

In May 2014 — two and a half years before the Togiak accident — the NTSB issued an urgent recommendation for the FAA to audit all aviation operations and training for operators owned by Hageland’s then-parent company HoTH Inc. This followed a 16-month period where the NTSB investigated five accidents involving Hageland aircraft and another incident in which one of its planes went off the runway. The audit resulted in at least 20 changes to company operations or policies, including flight training, aircraft maintenance and evaluating the riskiness of flights.

A number of associated entities — Ravn Air Group Inc., Ravn Air Group Holdings LLC, JJM Inc., HoTH, PenAir, Corvus Airlines Inc., Frontier Flying Service Inc., and Hageland Aviation Services — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2020. Many of the assets have since been sold and are now operated by new owners. Representatives for Hageland are winding down the estate of the former operating entity and declined to comment on this story.

The Togiak crash is one of Alaska’s most recent accidents that resulted in NTSB recommendations for improvement, including providing small commercial operators with access to better weather information. Nearly five years after the crash, none have been fully adopted by the FAA.

“The thing is the FAA has always been good at reacting to an accident and establishing a requirement after a major crash,” said Tom Anthony, director of the University of Southern California’s Aviation Safety and Security Program and a former FAA regional division manager for civil aviation security in the Western Pacific.

Experts noted that the nature of crashes in Alaska — typically involving small aircraft with few casualties — partly explains why those accidents get limited attention. When there are enough fatal accidents, said Hallinan, the retired Anchorage FAA flight standards officer, the issue gets more attention, which can help speed up changes in regulations and improve safety.

“Safety comes at a cost. It comes down to the flow of money. It’s awful to think about it like that,” he said. “What it comes down to [is] the expense that you can ask of a 737 operator versus what you can ask of somebody that is operating a couple of [small planes] — there’s just a different level of burden that’s associated with that.”

Sumwalt agreed. “I think perhaps from a policy point of view, once you have a large number of accidents, a large number of fatalities, that’s when it really gets the attention of the right people to make things happen,” he said. “I’m certainly not suggesting we need more fatalities, but I think oftentimes it is blood that gets things done in Washington.”

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Unadopted Recommendations

The FAA doesn’t always move forward with the NTSB’s recommendations, and the agencies have disagreed more often in recent years.

A KUCB and ProPublica analysis of NTSB data found the safety board deemed that the FAA didn’t take adequate action on 37% of the recommendations it closed in the past decade, up from 20% in the 2000s and 15% in the 1990s. Other agencies within the Department of Transportation also saw increases over that time, but the FAA, which received far more recommendations than others, had among the highest overall percentages.

“I think it’s important to note that the NTSB doesn’t just pull safety recommendations out of thin air and say, ‘You need to do this,’” Sumwalt said. “These recommendations are written in blood. They’re a result of tragic, tragic accidents and crashes. And so therefore, we think it’s imperative that the regulator move forward with implementing these recommendations and implementing them in a timely fashion.”

Some of the unadopted recommendations relate to cost. The FAA is required by law to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before issuing new regulations; NTSB recommendations are not subject to that requirement. Sometimes the FAA opts to implement voluntary measures or guidance to improve safety rather than making the changes mandatory.

The FAA and NTSB often agree on the nature of a problem, but political forces get in the way of change, said Anthony, the former FAA regional division manager.

“In almost all cases, the FAA is in concordance with the NTSB on these recommendations, but there is frequently political pushback to say, ‘No, we don’t want that regulation. We shouldn’t have it. It’s too expensive. Can’t do it,’” he said. “I was actually shocked when different aviation organizations would say, ‘No, we don’t want to do that’ [to] ideas we felt in our division were obviously needed.”

The FAA said in its statement that it “has a close working relationship with the NTSB” and pointed to its progress on some of the NTSB’s recently released top priorities for 2021 and 2022. For example, the FAA has started drafting rules to mandate safety-management systems, which standardize how companies evaluate and manage risk, for charter and air-taxi operators.

These systems have been required for large air carriers since 2015 but have been voluntary for everyone else. The NTSB first proposed mandating them for small commercial operators in 2016. Currently only 20 of 1,940 small commercial operators nationwide have an FAA-approved system.

Mike Slack, a Texas-based aviation attorney who represents multiple clients involved in Alaska plane crashes, said the FAA has failed to adequately oversee individual companies. He sent a letter to the agency in April 2019 expressing concern that the Taquan Air pilot in a 2018 crash — when a plane carrying 10 passengers from a remote fishing lodge to Ketchikan flew into the side of a mountain — should have been sanctioned by the FAA. Seven months later, FAA officials responded saying the agency had “used appropriate mechanisms to address safety concerns with the pilot.”

In May 2019, the month after Slack’s letter was sent, Taquan Air had two fatal crashes.

“The FAA could have made a difference in preventing those two crashes,” said Slack, who represents Julie Sullivan and her family in their claims against Taquan Air, which he says have been settled. But he said in hindsight it is clear Taquan didn’t do anything meaningful to address safety concerns. “The FAA just looked the other way.”

The FAA said multiple offices examined the performance of the pilot in the 2018 crash and determined the evidence did not support revoking his credentials.

As a result of the collision between Sullivan’s plane and the Taquan plane, a group of 14 Ketchikan commercial operators — including Taquan — modified their voluntary safety measures and agreed to equip all of their aircraft with full ADS-B systems. Taquan also requires its pilots to sign a document agreeing to abide by the new guidelines.

Taquan declined to comment, stating that it is “referring all questions to the NTSB.” Six separate cases filed in federal court by crash victims against Mountain Air, Princess Cruises and Venture Travel, which does business as Taquan Air, were confidentially settled in April. This month, another wrongful death suit filed against Taquan in state court was settled. In that case, brought by the families of two Mountain Air passengers, Taquan denied claims that the company has a “significant, documented history of unsafe operations” and that it was liable for the deaths.

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What the Future Holds

Randy and Julie Sullivan and their children. (Courtesy of Sullivan Family)

Nearly two years after the midair collision in Ketchikan that killed Randy Sullivan and five others, the NTSB board gathered virtually to vote on the findings, probable cause and safety recommendations stemming from their investigation.

Until COVID-19 hit, the NTSB, headquartered in Washington, D.C., had never held a virtual board meeting. But because of the pandemic, this was the agency’s 12th virtual board meeting in 51 weeks, and most staff had replaced their background with the official NTSB backdrop in varying shades of blue.

While both planes were outfitted with full ADS-B systems, the NTSB concluded, the Taquan plane wasn’t broadcasting its altitude because a piece of equipment was turned off. The NTSB was not able to determine who turned off the equipment, but the last time this plane broadcast its altitude was two weeks before the accident. Without this information, the iPad application Sullivan used to look at ADS-B data could not provide visual or spoken alerts of the impending collision. Sullivan’s tablet was destroyed during the accident, so the NTSB was unable to determine whether he was using it or how the application was configured. Taquan’s ADS-B was incapable of providing visual or spoken alerts even if it had been turned on.

Following this accident, the NTSB issued safety recommendations encouraging the FAA to identify high-traffic air tour areas — not only in Alaska, but also in Hawaii and the lower 48 — and require the use of ADS-B technology when flying in those areas. Furthermore, the NTSB asked for all commuter and charter operations, regardless of where they fly, to be fully equipped with ADS-B so that aircraft will be able to see each other’s locations.

“From the earliest days of powered flight, pilots have been taught to avoid other airplanes by watching out for them,” Sumwalt said in a post-board-meeting press release . “This accident clearly demonstrates why that’s just not enough. Our investigation revealed that it was unlikely that these two experienced pilots could have seen the other airplane in time to avoid this tragic outcome.”

Interested Alaskans had to wake up early to attend the meeting, which began at 5:30 a.m. local time. Julie Sullivan was one of those tuned in. She got up around 4 a.m for a pre-board-meeting call for survivors and family members of the victims. She had a friend come over to her house for support, and they watched the meeting together.

It was a relief to see the meeting held, but it was hard for her to watch animations of the crash. Though the NTSB doesn’t fault either pilot for the accident in their final report, Sullivan believes the report holds her husband responsible for a collision he couldn’t have seen coming due to the other plane’s location and technological problems, and that it does not factor in Taquan’s recent history of crashes.

Shannon Wilk — who lost three family members in the same midair collision that killed Randy Sullivan — often feels hopeless and helpless. She doesn’t live in Alaska, and while she doesn’t want anyone else to lose a loved one in an accident, she doesn’t feel like she has the power to change the state’s system, with its history of commercial crashes.

“When you see that these crashes continue to happen and you see that more well-known people have died in these kinds of crashes and still nothing is being done about it, little you is not going to be able to do anything about it,” Wilk said.

The Sullivan family has settled their claims against Ketchikan-based Taquan Air. (Ash Adams, special to ProPublica)

by Zoë Sobel , KUCB , and Agnel Philip and Alex Mierjeski , ProPublica

Even though much of Alaska has uncongested airspace, in recent years it has seen a series of midair collisions involving commercial operators.

In the past five years alone, there have been five such fatal collisions. There haven’t been any in the rest of the U.S. since 2009. (There was one fatal midair collision involving a for-hire sightseeing plane in Idaho last year, but it flew under the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulations typically meant for private aircraft.)

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The collisions have prompted some to call for increased use of Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) systems, which can alert pilots to the presence of other planes flying nearby. The technology has been associated with a decrease in all accidents and is required in nearly all of the lower 48 states. The National Transportation Safety Board found that the technology was either not installed or not functioning properly in at least one of the planes involved in each of the five crashes in Alaska.

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Below are details of the state’s five midair collisions. Two are still under investigation by the NTSB, meaning the probable cause of the accident has not yet been identified.

Locations of the five fatal midair collisions involving small commercial aircraft in Alaska since 2016. (Ken Schwencke/ProPublica)

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Aug. 27, 2020

Location: Fairbanks

Fatalities/injuries: Two people were killed, two injured.

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What happened: Two planes collided at Chena Marina Airport 3 miles west of Fairbanks International. One plane, operated by Flying Moose Alaska LLC, carrying two hunters from a remote camp, was landing and the other was taking off.

Resulting changes in policy/safety recommendations: This accident is still under investigation and no safety recommendations have yet been issued.

Responses: KUCB and ProPublica tried to connect with a representative of Flying Moose Alaska, but the owner was the pilot and died in this accident. The private pilot of the other plane did not respond to a phone call or email seeking comment.

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July 31, 2020

Location: Soldotna

Fatalities/injuries: All seven people on both planes were killed.

What happened: Alaska State Rep. Gary Knopp was piloting his private plane south of Anchorage when it collided with a chartered plane that was carrying six people to a remote lake for a fishing trip, killing all seven. The NTSB’s preliminary report revealed that Knopp was flying illegally; he had been denied a medical certificate in 2012 due to vision problems from glaucoma.

Resulting changes in policy/safety recommendations: This accident is still under investigation and no safety recommendations have yet been issued.

**Responses: High Adventure Air Charter, operator of the chartered flight, declined to comment. The day of the accident, the company acknowledged on Facebook that one of its planes was involved in the fatal midair collision. The company stated that it supported the NTSB investigation and said, “Our thoughts and prayers are with all of the families involved in this tragic accident.” Families of the crash victims filed federal suits against the estate of Knopp and his widow, Helen, as well as the companies that owned the charter plane and the estate of the charter pilot. The defendants in the suits have denied negligence claims and filed cross-claims against one another. A trial will take place next year. Knopp’s widow and the estate settled with the estate of another passenger in May in a separate state case. The charter plane operators and the estate of its pilot settled with the same passenger’s estate out of court last year.

About two weeks before the crash, an FAA inspector had recommended that High Adventure Air Charter equip its plane with ADS-B, but a co-owner expressed concern about the cost, according to NTSB interviews conducted in the course of their investigation.

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May 13, 2019

Location: Ketchikan

Fatalities/injuries: Six people were killed, 10 injured.

What happened: When returning to Ketchikan after a flightseeing tour of the Misty Fjords National Monument, two floatplanes collided at about 3,350 feet. Both planes were carrying passengers from the Royal Princess cruise ship. The crash claimed the lives of six people, including the Mountain Air Service pilot who was flying one of the planes, his four passengers, and one passenger from the other plane, flown by Taquan Air. Following the accident, Taquan Air suspended all flights for several days. Mountain Air Service — a one-plane and one-pilot outfit — ceased operations.

Resulting changes in policy/safety recommendations: The NTSB issued safety recommendations , one of which encourages the FAA to identify high-traffic areas, like Ketchikan, and require the use of ADS-B technology for air-tour operators in those areas so that planes will be able to see each other’s locations. The NTSB also reiterated a past safety recommendation that calls for mandating safety management systems — which can help companies evaluate and manage risk — for air-taxi, charter and commuter operations.

Responses: Taquan declined to comment. Julie Sullivan, the widow of the Mountain Air pilot, has settled all claims against Taquan Air, according to her lawyer. Six separate suits brought by crash victims in federal court against Mountain Air, Princess Cruises and Venture Travel, doing business as Taquan Air, were settled in April. This month another wrongful death suit brought in state court against Taquan was settled. In that suit, filed by the families of two Mountain Air passengers, Taquan denied claims that the company has a “significant, documented history of unsafe operations” and that it was liable for the passengers’ deaths.

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June 13, 2018

Location: Anchorage

Fatalities/injuries: One person was killed, none injured.

What happened: Two planes collided west of Anchorage at about 1,000 feet. One of the planes, a commercial flight by Spernak Airways Inc., crashed into the Big Susitna River, killing the pilot. Although damaged, the private plane involved in the collision was able to land safely at an airport. The NTSB determined the probable cause of this accident was that the pilots did not see and avoid each other.

Resulting changes in policy/safety recommendations: No safety recommendations came from this crash. However, about four years before this accident, following a series of midair collisions in the same area, the FAA made “significant changes” to the radio frequencies used for communication between pilots there.

Responses: Spernak Airways declined to comment. On Facebook on June 13, 2018, the company wrote, “We lost a dear friend and pilot today. Thank you for your support and understanding during this difficult time.”

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Aug. 31, 2016

Location: Russian Mission

Fatalities/injuries: All five people aboard both planes were killed.

What happened: A scheduled Ravn Connect flight and a Super Cub operated by Renfro’s Alaskan Adventures Inc. collided near Russian Mission. An NTSB performance and visibility study showed that the airplanes would have been visible to each other for about two minutes before the crash. Neither plane had operational navigational aids that would have alerted its pilot to the presence of the other plane.

Resulting changes in policy/safety recommendations: The NTSB’s final report on this accident included information on preventing similar accidents, including a safety alert that explains the importance of pilots looking for other aircraft while flying even in low-traffic areas and communicating their plane’s position using available technology. Following two other midair collisions in 2015, the NTSB also held a presentation on midair collisions and issued two safety recommendations to educate air-traffic controllers about the circumstances of these crashes.

Responses: Hageland Aviation Services Inc., which was doing business as Ravn Connect, contested part of the NTSB’s investigation and submitted its own report stating the Renfro’s Alaskan Adventures pilot had an “inadequate visual lookout” and didn’t yield the right-of-way to the Hageland pilot. Representatives for Hageland declined to comment.

In an email to KUCB and ProPublica, Wade Renfro, an owner of Renfro’s Alaskan Adventures, said his company is limited in what it can say about this accident due to pending litigation. However, an expert retained by the company concluded that this midair collision was the fault of the Hageland pilot because the Renfro plane had the right-of-way, and the Hageland pilot failed to see and avoid the Renfro plane.

Several wrongful death suits involving the two companies have been settled or dismissed in state court.

by Robert Faturechi and Jeff Ernsthausen

The leading candidate to take over the investigation relating to former President Donald Trump’s taxes paid virtually no federal income taxes in four of six recent years.

Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who is married to hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein, is running for Manhattan district attorney in the Democratic primary, in which early voting has already begun. She and her husband reported income as high as $107 million in 2011, and she recently donated $8.2 million to her campaign — more than her seven Democratic rivals have raised in total.

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But in 2017, according to a trove of tax data obtained by ProPublica, she and her husband paid no federal income tax. In 2015 and 2013, they also paid no federal income tax. In 2014, she and her husband paid $6,584.

Farhadian Weinstein provided a statement in response to questions from ProPublica: “In 6 of the last 11 years (the years in which we had income), we paid more than 50% of our income in Federal, State and New York City taxes. In the other years, we earned no net income and, as a result, did not pay income tax. We both benefited from many opportunities in this city and country and are glad to pay taxes at among the very highest tax rates in the entire country.” (The IRS records obtained by ProPublica show that from 2010 to 2018, the couple paid 25.9% overall in federal income tax on the money they made during the seven years when they had positive adjusted gross income, which the IRS defines as earnings minus certain items like alimony. On average, the couple paid 12.6% annually from 2010 to 2018. During that time, the top federal marginal tax rate fluctuated between 35% and 39.6%. These figures don’t count state and local taxes, which typically are significantly less than federal taxes.)

In two of the years in which the Weinsteins paid no federal income taxes, they reported negative income, losses that appear to be driven by the volatile performance of Boaz Weinstein’s hedge fund. They also claimed and received a refundable tax credit — a total of $5,000 over those two years — designed to help middle- and lower-income families with the costs of raising children.

In the other two years in which they paid little or no federal income taxes, they reported adjusted gross income of about a million dollars each year. They were able to reduce their income tax bill in those years by using a variety of deductions.

There’s no indication the Weinsteins did anything illegal.

The Weinsteins are among thousands of wealthy people whose tax return data ProPublica has obtained. Last week, ProPublica published its first article using the IRS data, which revealed that the 25 richest Americans paid little or no federal income taxes compared to their immense gains in wealth in recent years. This story was not on our initial list of coverage of the IRS data but a ProPublica reporter came across Farhadian Weinstein’s information as part of his ongoing research. With the primary election a week away and the outsized spending by Farhadian Weinstein continuing to draw attention , ProPublica concluded the public interest would be served by letting voters and other taxpayers see her tax history.

She is vying to lead one of the most prestigious prosecutorial offices in the country. If Farhadian Weinstein wins the Democratic primary, she is virtually guaranteed to win the general election later in the year since Democrats dominate the borough. She would take over the office at a pivotal time: Violent crime in New York City is rising , and the office is widely reported to be in the advanced stages of an investigation into the taxes and finances surrounding Trump and his company.

Farhadian Weinstein has made fairness a central principle of her campaign. As she has put it on her campaign website , “Tali believes in a DA’s office that is ethical, fair, and advances equity for all New Yorkers.” She has presented herself as a centrist in a progressive Democratic field. A former federal prosecutor and general counsel for the Brooklyn DA’s office, she has picked up a string of high-profile endorsements, including from former Attorney General Eric Holder, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the New York Daily News and the New York Post.

Farhadian Weinstein has received hundreds of thousands in donations from wealthy financiers, including contributions from Citadel’s Ken Griffin, PointState Capital’s Zach Schreiber and Pershing Square founder William Ackman. That has prompted criticism that she will be soft on white-collar crime as the DA in the nation’s financial capital. She has said those donations will not influence her.

Farhadian Weinstein has raised $12.8 million in all (including the $8.2 million she contributed herself), towering over the next closest competitors, Alvin Bragg at $2.3 million and Lucy Lang at $1.6 million.

Boaz Weinstein founded Saba Capital Management. The firm reportedly once managed more than $5 billion, but it has performed unevenly in the past decade.

In two of the years that the Weinsteins paid zero federal income tax, 2017 and 2015, their returns show millions in business losses. In those years, the couple reported a net negative income.

But they avoided virtually all federal income taxes even in two of the years in which they made money. In 2014, their adjusted gross income was almost a million dollars. That year, the couple’s deduction for investment interest expense skyrocketed to just under a million dollars, essentially wiping out their taxable income for the year. The tax code allows investors to take a deduction for interest paid on money they borrow to invest. That effectively allows their risk-taking to be subsidized by other taxpayers.

In 2013, the couple reported $1.5 million in adjusted gross income and still paid no federal income tax. That year, the couple reported a deduction of more than $1 million for “miscellaneous expenses” — a catchall deduction, since eliminated, that can include expenses for tax and investment advice and some legal expenses. (The tax records obtained by ProPublica did not enumerate the specifics of those expenses, and Farhadian Weinstein declined to answer questions about them.)

If Farhadian Weinstein ultimately is elected, the status of her most high-profile potential case — the Trump investigation — is unclear. There have been no charges filed, and there may never be. According to The New York Times , investigators have focused on potential financial crimes such as tax and bank fraud, including whether one or more employees of the Trump Organization received certain benefits from the company without paying taxes on them and whether the company possibly lowered the value of properties to pay less in taxes and inflated their value to secure loans. Trump and his company have denied wrongdoing.

by Sarah Alvarez , Outlier Media , and Erin Smith and Beena Raghavendran , ProPublica

Many Detroiters can’t afford to pay their electric bills.

In 2020, DTE Energy shut off 80,606 electric accounts for nonpayment. This happened even in the hottest and coldest months during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are looking into DTE because without electricity, people suffer. In contrast to DTE, the city of Detroit agreed to halt water shutoffs until the end of 2022 to help people make it through the pandemic.

If you use DTE or Consumers Energy for electricity, reporters at Outlier Media and ProPublica need to hear from you: Have debt collectors called you because of an electric bill? If your electricity was shut off, how long were you left in the dark? Do you have shut-off notices you can share?

If you need help filling out this form or want to share over the phone, please call: 313-314-6578 ‬.

by Catherine Rentz

In my last dispatch , I told you about beginning to look into the criminal records of the men arrested as a result of officials testing cold-case evidence in Baltimore County. Today, I want to finish that story, walk you through how I enlisted the help of academics, and reveal some of the surprises and challenges I faced once I began reporting beyond the data.

First, I want to begin with a line that has stuck with me from the 2017 HBO documentary “I Am Evidence” about backlogged rape kits.

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“These rape kits are the best bargain in the history of law enforcement,” said Timothy McGinty, the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor, after he saw the results of processing nearly 5,000 untested rape kits. At least one out of every four alleged perpetrators identified through the mass testing turned out to be a suspected serial offender. Cuyahoga’s investigations had led to more than 800 indictments as of September 2020.

Money had long been used as an excuse not to test these kits, but as I looked up the criminal histories of the dozens of men who’d been arrested as a result of testing a small sample of DNA, I had to ask whether that money could be saved by preventing other crimes.

The original database I built was not organized to answer this question. It tracked the arrested men, but it was not set up in a way that could quantify and parse their other crimes for deeper analysis.

I reached out to ProPublica and to Rachell Lovell, a Ph.D. researcher from Case Western Reserve University, to help me expand it and code the types of crimes. Lovell had sat on a task force McGinty created to process and analyze rape kits and had published related research .

Academics have more time to ponder the bigger picture than journalists or law enforcement, and they can be invaluable resources. Lovell and Rebecca Campbell from Michigan State University are two of the country’s top researchers who are changing attitudes about sexual assault through timely research into unprocessed rape kits.

They reminded me of Wendy Carr, the psychologist character on “Mindhunter,” the Netflix series based on the FBI’s elite serial crime unit, who systematically organized the interviews with convicted criminals to find patterns that could help solve other crimes. These women are doing the same thing with rape kit data as the nation processes warehouses full of untested evidence.

I enlisted the help of one of Lovell’s fellow researchers and co-authors, Laura Overman, to take what I had begun and rebuild it. Overman transformed it into a more searchable database, filled in gaps, coded the crimes and conducted an analysis similar to the one the team did in Cleveland, with a few modifications.

We ultimately ended up with a database of approximately 1,500 criminal records representing charges filed against close to 50 men for felonies or other serious crimes. ProPublica graphics journalist Lucas Waldron transformed many of those records into a simple and impactful graphic revealing 18 suspected serial rapists, many of whom also committed other violent crimes such as murder and assault.

(Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

But the data presented only one side of the story. Developing a document trail and sources proved more challenging.

I obtained the case files of serial rapist Alphonso Hill, who became a central figure in my investigation. As I thumbed through the files, I was blown away. I found a list of 30 sexual assaults that detectives had linked to Hill by either modus operandi or DNA. He had only been convicted of 10 rapes. (Initially, he had denied committing most of them; he eventually confessed to those for which he was charged and there was a DNA connection.)

Police granted me access to the reports for many of the cases through public records requests, but blocked the release of about half of them, telling me the cases were still open.

This was the beginning of a struggle for documents with the police, which I had not anticipated given that most of the cases were more than three decades old.

It was a contrast to what I’d seen in other cities.

In Cleveland, McGinty had invited Lovell and a journalist, Rachel Dissell, to sit on the task force charged with processing the unsubmitted rape kits. The two planned to learn as much as they could from the testing results and disseminate their lessons. Lovell had access to forensic reports and raw law enforcement data, from which she developed one of the most detailed databases on sexual assault in the country. In turn, their research found trends that helped local law enforcement better target violent offenders.

Baltimore County’s State’s Attorney Office had been incredibly helpful in sharing public records and interviews, but no centralized task force had been organized to process the DNA and analyze and disseminate the results. Police were and still are doing most of the work on the cold cases. I have had to appeal to officials to get questions about the cold-case DNA cases answered, or to obtain access to related police reports and other public documents.

McGinty and Kym L. Worthy, the Wayne County, Michigan, prosecutor, saw both the horrifying lapses caused by past undertesting and the promising results of the “test everything” approach; both were now vocal advocates for mass testing. They established a clear line between past transgressions and present positive actions. They allowed cameras in, let data out, and posted information online.

The U.S. Department of Justice began touting their findings and urging police departments that are receiving federal grant money for testing to be more transparent and engage with media .

The old ways of ignoring most of the rape evidence and shielding data and records had protected career criminals, not the survivors, and had cost the justice system and residents millions of dollars.

To answer the question I started with: Was it more cost effective to test the rape evidence earlier? In many cases, DNA testing was not available at the time the evidence was collected. But in other cases, it was. New research by Lovell indicates that the government saves substantial money by testing, investigating and then, if possible, prosecuting all of the cases.

Her findings indicate the Cuyahoga sexual assault kit initiative saved the community $26 million, or $5,127 per kit, including the tangible and intangible costs of future sexual assaults averted through convictions.

After I began conversations with cold-case survivors, including Laura Neuman, and wrongly convicted men like Bernard Webster, it became clear how these crimes permeated every part of their personal and financial lives and led to a myriad of other costs to the criminal justice system and other victims.

Piecing together investigations of Hill in both city and county jurisdictions, I found that the serial rapist had left significant clues behind about his identity as early as 1979, before most of the rapes had occurred. Could most of these rapes have been prevented?

It wouldn’t be until my interview with retired Sgt. Rose Brady that I began to understand how vested the police had been in finding the perpetrator and the many efforts detectives made to get him in the 1970s, 1980s and 2000s.

by Jenny Deam

Last year as COVID-19 laid siege to the nation, many U.S. hospitals dramatically reduced their aggressive tactics to collect medical debt. Some ceased entirely.

But not all.

There was a nearly 90% drop overall in legal actions between 2019 and the first seven months of 2020 by the nation’s largest hospitals and health systems, according to a new report by Johns Hopkins University. Still, researchers told ProPublica that they identified at least 16 institutions that pursued lawsuits, wage garnishments and liens against their patients in the first seven months of 2020.

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The Johns Hopkins findings, released Monday in partnership with Axios, which first reported the results , are part of an ongoing series of state and national reports that look at debt collections by U.S. hospitals and health systems from 2018 to 2020.

During those years more than a quarter of the nation’s largest hospitals and health systems pursued nearly 39,000 legal actions seeking more than $72 million, according to data Johns Hopkins researchers obtained through state and county court records.

More than 65% of the institutions identified were nonprofit corporations, which means that in return for tax-exempt status they are supposed to serve the public rather than private interest.

The amount of medical debt individuals owe is often a small sliver of a hospital’s overall revenue — as little as 0.03% of annual receipts — but can “cause devastating financial burdens to working families,” the report said. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has estimated medical debt makes up 58% of all debt collection actions.

The poor or uninsured often bear the brunt of such actions, said Christi Walsh, clinical director of health care and research policy at Johns Hopkins University. “In times of crisis you start to see the huge disparities,” she said.

Researchers said they could not determine all of the amounts sought by the 16 institutions taking legal action in the first half of 2020, but of those they could, Froedtert Health, a Wisconsin health system, sought the most money from patients — more than $3 million.

Even after Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers declared a public health emergency on March 12, 2020, hospitals within the Froedtert Health system filed more than 100 cases from mid-March through July, researchers reported, and 96 of the actions were liens.

One lien was against Tyler Boll-Flaig, a 21-year-old uninsured pizza delivery driver from Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, who was severely injured June 3, 2020, when a speeding drag racer smashed into his car. Boll-Flaig’s jaw was shattered, and he had four vertebrae crushed and several ribs broken. His 14-year-old brother, Dominic Flaig, tagging along that night, was killed.

Days after the crash, their mother, Brandy Flaig, said she got a call from a hospital billing office asking for her surviving son’s contact information to set up a payment plan for his medical bills.

Then on July 30 — less than two months later — Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee filed a $67,225 lien against Boll-Flaig. It was one of seven liens the hospital filed the same day, totaling nearly a quarter of a million dollars, according to the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access website used by researchers and reviewed by ProPublica.

“It’s during the pandemic, we’re still grieving, and they go after Tyler?” Flaig said. “It’s predatory.” Tyler Boll-Flaig declined to be interviewed.

Froedtert Hospital is the largest in the Froedtert Health system, which includes five full-service hospitals, two community hospitals and more than 40 clinics. The health care system reported more than $53 million in operating income during the quarter ending Sept. 30, 2020 — double the amount from the previous year, according to its financial filings. It has also received $90 million in federal CARES Act money to help with its COVID-19 response and operating costs, a spokesperson said.

Only Reedsburg Area Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, pursued more legal actions in the spring and summer of 2020, with 139 lawsuits and 22 wage garnishments, the study showed. Medical center officials did not respond to a request for comment.

In contrast, Advocate Aurora Health, the top-suing health network in the state before the pandemic, dropped to zero court filings after February 2020, the report found.

Stephen Schoof, a Froedtert Health spokesperson, said in an email he could not comment on the Boll-Flaig case because of patient privacy laws. He also said the health system was unable to comment on the Johns Hopkins study because it had not yet reviewed all the findings. But Schoof disputed the numbers he was sent by ProPublica, calling them “inaccurate and misleading.”

Schoof objected to how researchers defined and counted legal actions. He said that Froedtert Hospital ceased filing small claims lawsuits in March 2020 but continued to pursue liens on patients involved in accidents that might result in settlements.

“The lien process does not impact a patient’s personal property and is intended to recoup expenses from settlement proceeds from the negligent party’s insurance company,” he said.

That is what happened in the Boll-Flaig case. Jason Abraham, Boll-Flaig’s lawyer, told ProPublica the lien is in the process of being settled with the hospital. He said the sum will be covered by the at-fault driver’s car insurance and workers' compensation insurance since Boll-Flaig was on the job when the accident occurred.

Liens allow hospitals to get paid quickly and by state law must be filed within 60 days of hospital discharge. Because he was hospitalized during the pandemic, Boll-Flaig was released after about 24 hours, his mother said.

Abraham said the hospital was “trying to get to the front of the line because they think there is a pool of money available.”

Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit news site, reported late last year that Froedtert Hospital filed 362 liens through Dec. 11, including 251 after May. That was more than the 300 liens it filed in all of 2019, the news investigation showed.

In New York, the Johns Hopkins researchers found 51 hospitals filed legal action against more than 1,800 patients between January 2018 and mid-December 2020. More than half came from just one health system: Northwell Health, a nonprofit that is the largest in the state, operating 19 hospitals with affiliations at four more across the state.

The most litigious in the Northwell system during that time was Long Island Jewish Medical Center, which filed a total of 2,011 court actions, with more than a quarter of those pursued last year, the research showed.

“During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, most hospitals substantially reduced or even ceased all medical debt lawsuits. However, as the pandemic’s first wave subsided, many New York hospitals resumed business as usual,” the study says.

Although he had not seen the Johns Hopkins report, Rich Miller, executive vice president of Northwell Health, said he was skeptical of its findings, in part because the health system stopped all legal action against patients from April through September of last year.

Northwell resumed filing cases for about two months in the fall of 2020, but has since stopped. Any case filed during the brief resumption has now been rescinded, he said.

Miller said his health system does not take legal action against Medicaid patients, those over 65, the unemployed, people with disabilities or military members. Patients are pursued legally only if they have ignored attempts to work out payment plans or if they have “a strong ability to pay,” he said.

All hospitals have specific guidelines and steps they must follow before taking any “last resort” collection actions, said Marie Johnson, vice president of media relations for the American Hospital Association.

Health care systems must balance the need to be adequately financed with “treating all people equitably, with dignity, respect and compassion,” Johnson said.

Still, the problem highlights the murkiness of the U.S. healthcare system, said Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor specializing in health law. “Sometimes we treat it like a commodity, sometimes we treat it like a right,” he said. “In the eyes of the law, these are just personal debts.”

But he questioned the wisdom of equating unpaid medical bills, often incurred during emergencies or crisis, with an overdue credit card: “Is this really how we want to process payment disputes?”

Have You Been Sued by a Hospital, Doctor or Other Medical Institution? Tell Us About It.

ProPublica and MLK50 have been investigating Memphis institutions that profit from the poor. Now, we want to hear from people across the country who have been sued or arrested after unpaid medical bills.