summer-2003-Part 2-live - Nieman Foundation - Harvard University

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Watchdog Reportingyet know how many traffic offenses,misdemeanors or felony arrests thereare, nor how many are linked to anyone individual.Keep records of database workupdated: Our FOIA requests and challengesunfolded over almost 10 years,so we sometimes found ourselves repeatingresearch and review of documentsbecause of staff turnover andthe passage of time. Be sure to keeprecords easily accessible and leavememos to your successors about whatyou’ve found and done.Take the fight to your readers:Assign a reporter not involved in thecase to cover this story. Give thought tohow to play the story in the newspaper.Involve editors who are not involvedwith the case and empower them toedit these stories with fairness, contextand balance. Give interviews whenappropriate to help explain thenewspaper’s position. Be sure yourown reporters press those on the otherside to fully represent their concerns.At The News Journal, one of ourcourt reporters has covered developmentsin the case. Our attorney and Iand previous executive editors havepresented the newspaper’s views ininterviews for these stories. Stories areplayed on the front page or the localsection, depending on their news value.Editors not directly involved in thecase help make this decision and editthe story.This debate is a crucial one for thepublic to understand. As we have arguedin court, “It would seem thatwhat little privacy issue could be arguedto exist, it is so remote as to be faroutweighed by the public’s interest inanalyzing the performance of the criminaljustice system.”Readers expect newspapers to helpwatch over the elected leaders whogovern them and the officials who rungovernment acting on their behalf. Andthose newspapers doing so responsiblyand regularly have established acredibility that enhances the value oftheir publication. ■Deborah Henley is executive editorof The (Delaware) News Journal.Henley also has worked at New YorkNewsday, The New York Times, andThe Courier-Journal in Louisville.News Journal colleagues MerrittWallick, Jean Buchanan and RobertLong, and the newspaper’s attorney,Richard Elliott, Jr. of Richards,Layton & Finger, contributed to thisreport.dhenley@delawareonline.comThe Arguments: The News Journal v. DELJISTo try to prevent newspaper access tocomputer databases, the DelawareCriminal Justice Information System(DELJIS) has argued that:1. By using fields to link cases relatedto a defendant, a criminal historyrecord will be created. That record,along with age, race, gender andgeographic details, make it possibleto cross-reference data fields withinformation appearing in newspaperssuch as The News Journal andother public databases to identify,by name, individuals in the DELJISdatabase.2. Releasing a police officer’s name and/or identifying number would be aninvasion of personal privacy andsafety.3. The newspaper is not considered aresearch entity and for that reason isnot permitted by state code to accessthis data through a user’s agreement.To try to get access to the information,The News Journal has argued that:1. The News Journal is studying thecriminal justice system and has nointerest in attempting to put namesto criminal history records. Further,less than two percent of all feloniesare reported in The News Journal,and there are no other databasesavailable that could be used to crossreference the DELJIS database inorder to re-identify individuals, giventhe limited information of age, race,gender and county of residence.Further, The News Journal has astatutory right to obtain specific convictioninformation on an individualand does so regularly when reportingdaily news stories. Thus, TheNews Journal has no reason to usethe database to identify individuals,assuming that were possible.2. The names of police officers regularlyappear in a number of publicrecords.3. DELJIS has provided access to thisinformation to groups outside ofthe media, some with a user’s agreementand some without. These requestshave not been litigated. Therefore,the newspaper is not receivingequal treatment under the law.4. The state is trying, through repeatedlitigation, to interfere with citizens’right to “easy access to publicrecords” accorded in the DelawareFreedom of Information Act. ■104 Nieman Reports / Summer 2003
WATCHDOGReporting Holds Michigan’s Child WelfareSystem AccountableAt the Detroit Free Press, a watchdog reporter sees the impact of his stories.By Jack KresnakWatchdog ReportingLike other children’s beat reporters,I closely followed the case ofFlorida’s missing five-year-oldfoster child, Rilya Wilson, whose disappearancelast year added to the alreadyabysmal reputation of Florida’s Departmentof Children and Families. I wonderedhow many foster kids were missingin my state of Michigan.After 15 years on the juvenile justicebeat, I already knew that runaway fosterchildren were a chronic problem inthe child welfare system, but it was aproblem that no one seemed too concernedabout. The typical responsefrom juvenile court judges and childwelfare officials has been to file a missingperson report with the police andhope for the best.Whatever the number of missingMichigan foster kids was, however, Iknew I’d need a compelling humanelement for my reporting to capturethe attention of readers and to haveany impact on how state agencieshandle these cases. In August 2002, theright story appeared. A juvenile courtreferee in Detroit was livid that thestate agency responsible for placingfoster children into protective care haddecided to send a 12-year-old boynamed Prentiss to live with hismother—even though the referee hadterminated the mother’s parental rightsto Prentiss because of drug abuse andhomelessness. The mother had movedto Atlanta, gotten a decent job withMCI and, reportedly, kicked her drughabit. She was caring for two youngerkids who were doing just fine, at leastthat’s what child protective servicesofficials in Georgia told their counterpartsat the Michigan Family IndependenceAgency (FIA).Two months after the FIA sentPrentiss to be with his mother in Atlantashe, Prentiss and one other childdisappeared. Three weeks later,Prentiss and his sister were found inDallas panhandling to feed his mother’scrack cocaine addiction.Tracking Missing FosterChildrenMy article in the Detroit Free Pressabout Prentiss (August 30, 2002) saidthat the state had lost track of 302foster children. FIA spokespersonKaren Smith had provided the numberthat, she said, is sent quarterly to theU.S. Department of Health and HumanServices. I quoted Smith as saying thevast majority of the kids were teenagedrunaways; many of them were girlsneglected or abused at home wholatched onto a boyfriend.When the story appeared, the FIA’sinitial response was anger at me for“blowing out of proportion” a routineproblem with teenaged children understate supervision running awayfrom foster homes and shelters. Allstate child welfare systems experiencea certain number of children who arekidnapped out of foster care by theirparents or relatives, the officials inMichigan said. FIA Director DougHoward strenuously denied that thestate had lost kids; they were merely“absent without legal permission”(AWOLP) from their foster care placement,he told me. “This is Michiganand in Michigan we don’t lose kids,”Howard said. “They walk away or aretaken by others without the court’spermission, but we don’t just losethem…. I take great offense that thearticle made it look like in Michigan wedon’t care.”By happenstance, the Wayne CountySheriff’s Department’s child rescue taskforce—which works with the FIA andjuvenile court to locate at-risk children—founda missing six-year-old fosterboy the day the first story broke. Hehad been kidnapped by his mother, aformer FIA employee who had swornto a judge that the child was with hisfather in California. My admittedlysnarky lead in the next morning’s FreePress was, “There are now only 301missing foster children in Michigan.”Based on the e-mail and voice mail Igot during that Labor Day weekend,those two stories prompted strong reactionsof outrage at the overseeingagencies from Free Press readers. Theday after Labor Day, Governor JohnEngler called the FIA director in for ameeting. Suddenly, the agency’s attitudeof denial about missing fosterkids changed, and the state began totake some practical and innovative stepstoward finding solutions. Three weekslater, Michigan became the first state topublish the names and photographs ofmissing foster children on its Web site,www.michigan.gov/fia. (I’d broken thestory about the Web site a week beforeit was announced.)Realizing that the FIA did not havephotographs of dozens of missing fosterkids, the agency ordered its socialservice workers and private foster careagencies under state contract to conductface-to-face visits of all 18,000foster children immediately and to takepictures of them. Foster care workersalso scrambled to make sure that thecourt orders to take into custody missingchildren were current. Within aNieman Reports / Summer 2003 105
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