Pulitzer on the Road Podcast Episode 1 Transcript: “Small Town Shakedown”

Recorded in Brookside, AL

Katie Baggett: It was about 11 at night and it was very dark. They just stayed right on my bumper. All the way down to right here, and they flipped their lights on, and then I pulled over. And they are blacked out. There's no insignia, but just the little lights on there. 

I could tell, oh, this must be the police. So then they get out of the car and they look like the SWAT team. 

They are in all black. The only thing you can see is their eyes through a ski mask. And the only thing that identifies them is this little thing that says agent and then a number after it.

So, I'm like, “Who are these people?” 

I thought, Am I getting robbed? Like, what’s going on.

John Archibald: You say you're afraid you were being robbed. Do you feel like you were?

Katie Baggett: I feel like I did get robbed. Yes.

Nicole Carroll: That’s Katie Baggett and the officers who pulled her over that night were from the tiny town of Brookside, Alabama. Her offense? They said they couldn’t see the light over her license plate from 50 feet away. The tag light worked, but it was stormy, and visibility was poor. Didn't matter. They ran her license and found out it was suspended. They towed her car. She never got it back. In 2020, police towed 789 from a town of just over 1,200 people.

We were standing in front of a junkyard off Interstate 22 just outside Birmingham, Alabama, in the exact spot where she was pulled over. She was sharing her story with reporters from AL.com, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting, and Pulitzer Board Co-Chair Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. The AL.com team of John Archibald, Ashley Remkus, Ramsey Archibald and Challen Stephens won the Pulitzer for exposing how Brookside police preyed on residents to inflate revenue, which soared 640 percent over the two-year period from 2018 to 2020 to make up almost half the city’s total income. Their coverage prompted the resignation of the police chief, the resignation or dismissal of most of the force, four new laws and a state audit.

Welcome to Pulitzer on the Road. Bringing you closer to Pulitzer winning work through discussions between Pulitzer judges and winners. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll, a Pulitzer Board member and professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each spring, the Board meets in Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University in New York to choose the winners. The discussion is rich and insightful. This podcast is designed to bring a similarly thought-provoking experience to you. In this podcast, we travel back to Brookside with John and Ashley, the journalists with AL.com.

Neil Brown: When did you first think about Brookside and what became your main story?  

John Archibald: Well, I'm going to back up just a little bit to how we got into this in the first place. Because there was a reporter here who got a job at the L.A. Times. And he had, prior to his leaving, he had gotten a grant from Columbia to do a report on criminalization of poverty. Somebody had to do this story. We both felt strongly about criminalization of poverty, so we said, ‘Well, hell, we'll do it.’

And so for three months, we sat around thinking. What the *** have we gotten ourselves into? Because, you know, I love this topic, it's really important to me, but it’s really hard to make people care about. And how are we going to show this cycle of fines and fees in a way that people don’t just write them off as somebody who was doing something that they shouldn't have been doing. They got what they deserved. Because they really don’t understand this cycle. 

And so we set out to find what we like to think of as the Rosetta Stone that would help people understand criminalization of poverty. I remember talking to this one person, Carla Crowder, who runs a place called Alabama Appleseed, which does a lot of prison work and such.

She said you know I don’t know what's going on in Brookside, but something is. And I went back and started looking up lawsuits from Brookside and deep in one lawsuit and attachments was the audit report from Brookside.

Any reporter out there knows that feeling when you’re going through documents and you see that thing that crystallizes everything and the hair on the back of your neck stands up and you say, damn, I got something here.

It was that moment. 

Neil Brown: What did you see? 

John Archibald: I saw the numbers that will forever be in my head that, over the course of this two-year period, the amount of fines and fees came up 640 percent, that 49 percent of the budget of this town was funded by pulling people over and fining them. And a lot of states had passed laws to prevent that. And 49 percent was insane. And Ashley, who is a social media sleuth, began to find all these things.

Ashley Remkus: You could see it, and it's not special to Brookside. But it’s you know shaming people. It's bragging about arrests and things that change people’s lives. And you could see the officers, right? They don’t identify themselves. They’re wearing all black. You can only see their eyes. The vehicles are blacked out and you could see it on their social media page. Like they weren’t hiding these things. I mean, there were pictures of officers wearing all black, or you know, wearing like a bandana over their face.

And it made you think, is this, like, highway pirates?

Nicole Carroll: The town reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the eight years between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. 

But in 2018, it began to build a force, with 13 full-time officers and two reserves at the time of the story, to patrol six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22. At the time, city officials said they were concerned about slow response times from the county and drug activity in the area. They hired an aggressive new chief, Mike Jones. He acquired three military surplus vehicles, one residents called “the tank.” Black SUVs lined the parking lot. They had two drug-sniffing dogs – one was named Cash. 

By 2020, John reported, Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it had residents. He came out to Brookside on Dec. 2, 2021, to watch the court proceedings. The city holds court just once a month, and with the increase in citations, and COVID distancing requirements, the line stretched far into the parking lot. Police had to direct traffic. At the courthouse, John was talking to people in line when chief Mike Jones walked up. 

John Archibald: They proceeded to tell me how happy they were that I was there. It was such a good news story. There’s a good news story on how they were cleaning this place up and turning it into a real police department, and everything the chief said, the mayor just nodded the whole time.

I’ll never forget. There are these moments when you're reporting the story, when you know something significant. I said, you know, it’s been a 640 percent increase in fines and fees over the last two years. It’s 50 percent of the budget. And he said, “Yeah, it should be more.”

Neil Brown: Chief said that?

John Archibald: Essentially, if we were working harder, it would be more. And at that moment, it was like, okay. Then I asked for a lot more documentation and they sent it as sort of justification for what they were doing. And that’s when all of these numbers began to fall into place. They essentially just verified everything we’ve been hearing. 

Nicole Carroll: John had what he needed for the first story. It was published Jan. 19, 2022. The community erupted. In the days that followed, Chief Jones resigned and state leaders from both parties called for investigations. Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, a Republican, vowed: “We’re going to get something done on it. I promise you that.” A state legislator and the Jefferson County Sheriff had a Brookside public meeting on February 2. Thirty one people came forward to tell their stories. Here are just a few.

… From that day forward, I got followed by the police every day I got off work, off the freeway home, literally every day. When officers pulled me outta my car, my car still in drive, and that was just cause I had a new tag and I had just bought my car the day before.

…He pulled me over, wrote me a ticket for move-over law. And I tried to explain to him, you can’t move over when there's a 18-wheeler next to you. 

...I got pulled over five times with my tag. I had just purchased the vehicle from my mother and I had 18 days to get legal. I got pulled over five times within four days, two times by the same police officer. The ticket's $25. The court fees are $225 on a $25-dollar ticket. I didn't have the money. I'm living in the mobile home park. I don’t live there anymore. I don’t have the money. I’m struggling. My husband said, can I get on a payment plan? Officer Jones grabbed his arm, dragged him to the clerk and said, you need to pay it or you're gonna get 30 days in jail. 

…I just want to see justice for me, my husband and everybody, because they’re unfair. They abuse their authority. They don't care about nobody’s life in this room, but their own and their families. We all need help. 

These departments are policing for profit, and it has to stop now. It’s not a Black thing. It’s not a white thing. It’s not a Latino thing. It’s a people thing. Amen. And we, the people, will put our elected officials on note. If you don’t do something, we gon’ do it.

Nicole Carroll: Brookside’s town square is the municipal center. The police station, the mayor’s office and the courthouse share a building. The community center, post office and water and fire departments fan out around it. 

We asked the new police chief, Henry Irby, if he would talk to us for this podcast. He turned us down, saying he can't comment because of ongoing litigation. Fifteen lawsuits have been filed against the city or its police officers, and while a few have been settled, most remain active. 

We reached out to lawyers for former chief Mike Jones and the owner of Jett’s Towing, which hauled the cars. Neither responded. Brookside city prosecutor Mark Parnell and former Municipal Judge Jim Wooten also did not respond.

We asked if we could record our podcast inside one of the city buildings. Again, we were told no. So we were speaking with John and Ashley in the parking lot outside the police station, a giant flag flapping with each gust of wind. Just up the road is the Dollar General. We headed that way next.

Neil Brown: So tell us a little bit about Brookside. We’re walking up to the Dollar General, and I think I read in your story, this may be the only commercial enterprise in town.

John Archibald: There’s three septic tank cleaner companies. But, Dollar General’s the place where people go to shop here.

It’s within 50 feet of the police department. 100 feet of the post office and the fire department. That’s about all there is here. Brookside, at least when the story is written, is a town of 1,253 people, largely white, but much more diverse than it was in the previous census and pretty poor.

It’s an old coal mining town that has fallen on some pretty hard times and it’s lost a lot of population over the years. 

Ashley Remkus: I had never heard of Brookside.

I mean, 22 is a pretty recent addition, and you can see now they’re just building gas stations up there on the exit. And municipalities in Alabama are prohibited from giving speeding tickets on the interstate because a state legislator got ticketed twice on an interstate and created that rule.

Neil Brown: That’s all politics is local, baby. I love it. 

John Archibald: Yeah, it was known for this Russian food festival, if anything, and most people didn’t know anything about it. I’ve come to learn that it was considered a speed trap for a long time. But prior to this, prior to 2018, it was a one-man police department.

It was literally one guy in a traditional Ford LTD kind of cop car, riding around mostly taking care of stray dogs and giving some tickets, but nothing like this.

Nicole Carroll: Tasha Bishop works at the Dollar General, she had come outside to see what we were doing in the parking lot. We told her we were revisiting AL.com’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work on Brookside. Did she have a story to tell? She said was pulled over many times. Once, her car was towed when she had her kids, and they had to walk. 

Nicole Carroll: But I was just talking to Tasha, she works here, and she’s willing to talk to us just a little bit. And so thank you so much, because she has a unique perspective.  

Neil Brown: How long have you lived in Brookside?

Tasha Bishop: 10 years. I’ve seen a lot, I have seen a lot.

Neil Brown: How long have you worked at the Dollar General?

Tasha Bishop: The Dollar General? It’s about 4 months now, here. 

Neil Brown: Is this a little bit of the center of town?

Tasha Bishop: Yeah, it’s the center of attention in town. It's the big Walmart so to speak.

Neil Brown: Have you ever been pulled over by Brookside?

Tasha Bishop: A lot, a whole lot.

I wasn’t the only one that was targeted. The housing community was extremely targeted, extremely like you're not five feet over the tracks. And if you could go there, you could see a little area that is tucked off that is behind a wooded area. It’s like a little road and you can sit there at night time, and with the cars being black and matte, you don’t see it.

I’m coming across those tracks. At the time I was working at Walmart, I have to be at work at 4 in the morning. So yeah, I'm leaving out at about 2:30, 3 o’clock in the morning to get to work. You’re coming across the tracks at me, flying. All I see is lights in the back. Where did you come from?

How am I speeding from here to the exit of this parking lot? How much speeding are you going to do? You got to make a stop at the end of this parking lot because there's a stop sign. You pull my car, my kids in the car. You made me and my children walk. Yeah, because of my insurance was lapsed two days. Not saying you're supposed to give me a slap on the wrist or something like that, but seriously two days and you're gonna make me and my kids walk? 

You ruined a lot of people’s lives.

And after, like I said, I’ve been out here 10 years. So since we got the new chief, sergeants and new officers, everything has been smooth. They do their job if you're speeding coming through here. I’m not gonna lie. I've been through here getting it.

And like I said, fair is fair. We all have to follow the law. It’s part of the adult rules as well as the children’s rules. But targeting and doing things to people that is not necessary. I found it evil and just mean. We didn't have that type of money to hire lawyers. But we did call Internal Affairs. We did start that ball to rolling. 

Neil Brown: How much did it cost you dollars wise would you say? Take off the ones where you had it coming.

Tasha Bishop: God, when you get your vehicle towed for whatever reasons they feel like they want to tow it, there has never been a set amount.

Neil Brown: Never the same. 

Tasha Bishop: It will range from 150, 200, to 225. I’ve even paid 325. That was the last time I got towed. That was literally the last time and I made it clear, you won't tow my truck again. 

Neil Brown: Did you feel helpless?

Tasha Bishop: Who, me?

Neil Brown: Yeah.

Tasha Bishop: Because I mean, at this point, I’m a single mother with six kids and my back is against the wall.

So what am I to do?

I mean, look around and you see where we live at. You need a car. I don’t care if you got a scooter or a bike. You need something. But, as a mother, you need your vehicle. 

Neil Brown: I talked to a guy yesterday we were speaking to a long timer here, a lot of stuff was happening. He didn't really realize it was happening to other people. Did you know that it was happening to other people as well?

Tasha Bishop: It’s crazy because you don’t realize it. I have no idea that they were targeting as many people until you go to court. 

And it was unreal that we all had the identical story. 

Nicole Carroll: Katie Baggett, who you heard from earlier, is one of those with a similar story. It was late at night. Dark. The unmarked police cars were matte black. The reason she was pulled over was questionable, they said her license plate light wasn’t visible 50 feet away on a stormy night. They found her license was suspended so they took her minivan.

Neil Brown: Did you know what was gonna happen? What was your next move once you got home? 

Katie Baggett: Well, it was like midnight by that time, so my next move was to pass out. But the next day I tried to call the courthouse and find out where my car was, and they said that they couldn’t tell me over the phone.

I had to come up there and pay like two hundred and something dollars. They implied that the money was just to find out where my car was. I mean, my car was probably worth less than $800 and I just figured I can’t afford to spend that because I gotta take Ubers back and forth to work until I die, basically.

I noticed that the people that were interviewed and the people that I saw on the news and things like that, they were all like families or like poor people, the worst people that you can target. But they knew, and I think it was kind of sinister, they knew that we would not fight, because we wouldn't get our cars back because we wouldn’t have the money.

Nicole Carroll: We asked Katie if we could see where she lived in Brookside at the time of the ticket, it was less than a mile from where she was pulled over. While we were interviewing her in her old cul-de-sac, her former neighbor came out, and said drivers who were stopped must have been doing something wrong.

Neil Brown: So how do you feel now? I mean, time is healing it a little, no?

Katie Baggett: I’m still not financially recovered, but time does heal. The storm provides, that’s what I say. Y’all are doing the good work, I’m thankful for all of it, honestly, it’s one thing that we can say we don’t suck at is like, it’s like speaking up for ourselves, in you know, as Alabama I mean.

Neil Brown: For sure. Takes guts. Takes guts. 

John Archibald: There’s still a lot of lawsuits pending. A lot of people still trying to get something back.

Katie Baggett: Good. I really hope that I see other municipalities going through the same thing and that it’s a change across the board. I would love for that to happen. I would love for them to understand that the people do have power. You can’t just walk all over us.

(Neighbor walks down the driveway, we are in the road in front of her).

Katie Baggett: Hey, how are you? We’re doing a little podcast interview. 

Neighbor: A what?

Katie Baggett: A podcast interview. 

John Archibald: I just asked her to show us where she used to live. So we came into your cul de sac to interrupt your neighborhood.

Neighbor: What’s the podcast for?

Katie Baggett: It’s about all the stuff that happened with Brookside and the lawsuits and all of that stuff.

Neil: We’re with the Pulitzer Prizes. These folks were honored for that work.

Neighbor: You know there’s mixed feelings about that, right? 

The people that are complaining about it are people that did bad stuff. 

I don’t appreciate this being brought into my neighborhood.

John Archibald: We appreciate that perspective very much.

Neighbor: You might want to look more into the story. The only people who ever get in trouble are people that actually do drugs and stuff. I’ve lived here 14 years. I’ve never had an issue. I’ve never been pulled over. I don’t go over the speed limit. I stop at four way, at the stop sign. I don’t do drugs. I’m a respected member of the community and I don’t have any problems with them, so...

John Archibald: Well, that’s an interesting…

Neil Brown: Well, isn’t that a reminder that this town is still very on edge about things. And they have different views. 

John Archibald: There’s a lot of disagreement over what’s needed here. That may have been what allowed a lot of this to sort of take off in the first place.

Nicole Carroll: We had one more stop on our tour of this story, Jett’s Towing, a tow yard about 10 minutes outside of Brookside, in Adamsville. It’s a little hard to find, you’ve got to go down a gravel back street, and there is very little signage. 

Neil Brown: So we’re out in front of Jett’s Towing, where there’s a green, metal green fence. Behind it are a bunch of cars. That’s where they hold the cars. There’s a sign here. John, why don’t you read the sign? 

John Archibald: Wrecker fees are additional to release fees. Cash only. No credit cards. No checks. 

Neil Brown: So, how does Jett’s figure in? 

John Archibald: This place is great in the sense that it looks like just what it is, which is a sort of shadowy figure in this story, but one that’s impacted a ton of people.

A lot of people get stopped for anything from no insurance to charges of all description and had their car towed. And many of the stories that people tell are in the difficulty and the expense of trying to get those cars back. 

And so they go to Brookside. Brookside charges them an escalating amount of money from less than $200 all the way up to close to $300 for releasing the car and they’d send them down to the Jett’s wreck yard, which would tell them that those release fees don't get your car back, they just get you here.

To get your car back, we’ll have to charge you another few hundred. And that is a rate that changes depending on the person, depending on the time. But people would have to search different locations for their cars, pay exorbitant fees and they really felt like that they were being cheated. 

The city and the police department made a decision that towing was big business. Because on more than one occasion, they decided to raise their rates of release fees. We can make a lot of money just by raising the amount of money we charge people to go tell them that they have to get it from Jett’s, which ended up over $200, and at the same time, we're told that the rates of wrecking went up during the same period of time.

That combined with the fact that, you know, in this two-year period, we had a 1,400 percent increase in tows. And as you said, that’s more than two a day in this tiny town. So very clearly as the fines and fees began to provide more and more of the town revenue, towing became an integral part of it. 

Neil Brown: There were some folks who said the wrecker was on the scene almost as fast as the Brookside Police Department. Did you hear a fair bit of that?

John Archibald: Yeah, there were lawsuits to that effect as well. It said that they were pulled over and by the time they stopped, that the wrecker from Jett’s Towing pulled in at the exact same time as the police, meaning that they knew they were going to tow that car from the minute they turned their lights on.

Neil Brown: Did you ever talk to Jett’s?

John Archibald: Jett’s has steadfastly declined comment on the story.

Neil Brown: I mean, we were doing the math, right? They went from towing a car a week to two a day, essentially on average, right? 

John Archibald: In a town of 1,253 people. 

Neil Brown: Well, what I’m thinking is how you lost your car, you can’t find your car, and you have no way of hunting down or figuring out how to get to where your car might be. And then you gotta pay. 

John Archibald: You know, we talked to people who say they wouldn’t be told where their car was until they could name the officer who arrested them and if they didn't have their paperwork or the officer, who in almost all cases signed their reports as agent, some name or some initial or number. If you don't know the name of your officer, you had to do a search for your car, which sometimes meant going to one or two of these locations that Jett’s has or they thought Jett’s has because sometimes it's not that easy to know where it is and sometimes those cars wound up on a lawn outside City Hall. It became a hunt. And the longer they remain at the wrecker’s facility the more fines pile up. The longer they’re here, the more they cost to get out.

And so a lot of those people just gave up on ever getting their car.

Neil Brown: We talked to Katie Baggett earlier. Your story says that by the time she was really able to get her car out, the fees, including the towing fee, had reached almost $2,000. For a car she said was worth $800. 

John Archibald: Right. So it becomes easier to just leave it alone and go away.

Nicole Carroll: We had spent the day in Brookside, from the junkyard where Katie Baggett was pulled over to the windy police station parking lot. From the entrance of Dollar General to Jett’s Towing, where a passerby stopped to ask what we were doing then angrily honked as he drove away. We had visited a family on a farm who said they were still jittery about the police, and we talked with Tasha Bishop, outside her store, who said things are much better now.

Neil Brown: Well, thanks for a great day.

John Archibald: Thank you. 

Neil Brown: It’s been fun to see the people you talked to and the places you went. And as powerful as the stories were, they hold up well.

Let’s just go back to the beginning for a second. How’d you get into journalism?

Ashley Remkus: When I was in, like, high school, teachers told me they thought I was a good writer. Very flattering, I guess. But once I went to college, I found myself in the communications department not really knowing what the heck I was going to do. And then one day I drifted into the campus newspaper office and never left. 

Neil Brown: What school?

Ashley Remkus: At UNA, North Alabama. And once I got in there and started doing work at the school paper, I saw that we really could, even on small things, have impact. And that was just incredibly special to me, and I think that’s what kept me coming back, even though it was a lot.

John Archibald: You know, a series of mistakes got me here. I pretty much flunked out of one school and went down to Tuscaloosa to go to school at the University of Alabama. I had six different majors which didn't pan out, which by the way is a great education for journalism.

And I followed this girl into The Crimson White, the student newspaper at the University of Alabama, and fell pretty much in love with both of them and I’m stuck with both of them still. 

It was the first moment in my life where I started feeling like people were listening to what I had to say. And in that moment, I just knew this is what I wanted to do, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Neil Brown: This story is about a power structure in town. So talk a little bit about how you first came across Mike Jones and what do you know of how much he’s been held accountable?

John Archibald: Mike Jones was police chief at Brookside of course. Didn't know much about him when this started, other than the fact he had moved to Brookside. And my first brush with him was when I went to talk to people who were going to court out there. Long lines of people going to court out there. And he came out and finally agreed to talk to me after some time of putting me off. And he just had this self-assurance. 

Well, the truth is he was the kind of person, and every reporter knows them, who will look at you and lie in your face as if he believes you're an idiot. And, you know, sometimes the best thing to do in that situation is just to let him continue to think that’s true. 

We wrote the story, with his direct involvement, and two days later he was asked to leave or resign.

He disappeared, fell off the radar. It was impossible to find him. It’s been very difficult to track him down since, until he was driving through South Alabama and had not turned in his Brookside badge and flashed that badge to get out of a speeding ticket and was arrested for impersonating an officer for which he’s still awaiting trial at this time, which is a felony.

So the question of whether he got what he deserved, or he paid a price for it in some ways remains up in the air. He is named in many of the 15 lawsuits. There still are some federal agencies asking questions. We don't know where they are in that process. He did lose his job and his livelihood there, in many ways he paid.

Neil Brown: So, what about the town attorney? So, where’s Mark Parnell today? Do you think he had a role in it?

John Archibald: You know, in my view, there’s the police chief, there’s the mayor, there’s the prosecutor, and there’s the judge. None of this could have happened without the cooperation of all four of those people. 

Ashley Remkus: Absolutely.

John Archibald: The judge had some legal problems and was banned from ever being a judge again in the state of Alabama. 

The police chief was run out of town, essentially. The mayor gets a little bit of a break because he only became mayor right before this broke and has some plausible deniability. And when it all hit the fan, he did react quickly to say, we need help, and changed things at that point, in my view.

The prosecutor, I mean, he was involved in every one of these cases, and some might be good and some might be bad, but it would not have happened, it could not have happened without him. 

Neil Brown: Overall, the people we talked to today felt they were heard.

John Archibald: I’ve been doing this a long, long time. And I’ve done a lot of stuff that put people in jail or got people fired and all that stuff. But when you hear people stand up and talk about what their lives were and how important it was for them to feel like they were being heard, that somebody was listening, whoever that was, and they come and tell you they got their life back. 

That is the best thing I've ever done in this long career. 

And I just want to ask, who could not write that story in a way that is compelling? It's the simple thing that happens when you go out and talk to people. And you do those things and they write themselves sometimes.

Neil Brown: Did you expect results as quickly as you have gotten them? I mean, that’s unbelievable.

Ashley Remkus: I don’t think we expected results at all. I mean not to the level that they rose to. Come on, if we had talked a week before this thing ran that there’d be laws changed in four months. We would never have had that conversation, right? 

John Archibald: I was in a bad place in some ways when we set out to do this, I mean, just the state of journalism, all this, what are we going to do? Do we have any resonance anymore? And then to have that kind of response, it was like adrenaline.

And what we learned here was that everybody has a Brookside. Across the country, we would get notes from people who say this happened to me here, and we're seeing that now in stories in Texas and Louisiana and other places that have very similar stories. 

Neil Brown: One of the things I think is so powerful about the story that it’s another example about why we need local journalists. Because this is a classic situation that if no one is looking, look what happens. 

John Archibald: I’ll lay awake a lot of nights thinking about the stuff I don't get to. And that’s the thing that haunts me. It’s exactly that. We've gotta do a better job everywhere of covering the people closest to us. 

Nicole Carroll: So what makes a work worthy of a Pulitzer Prize?

In describing the selection of AL.com’s work, the jury called the series “jaw-dropping,” for its uncovering of “shocking, infuriating and brazen behavior” by local police officials, and for their “clearly and concisely written” stories supported by “indisputable findings.” This was a series, according to the judges, that “provided a significant public service by protecting vulnerable residents and stopping an egregious abuse of power.”

Thank you for joining Pulitzer on the Road. We’re honored to bring more attention to Pulitzer-winning work and the creators behind it. This series is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It is supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation. All episodes are edited for length and clarity. In future episodes, we’ll hear from authors Barbara Kingsolver and Hernan Diaz. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends to listen in. To see this work and the work of all the 2023 winners, please go to pulitzer.org. Pulitzer on the Road is produced by Central Sound at Arizona PBS. Our producers are Anna Williams and Alex Kosiorek with Arizona PBS and me. Our audio engineer is Robert Disner. Editing, promotion, and other support by Sean Murphy, Edward Kliment, and Pamela Casey. Fact checking by Jessica Quesada. Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller is our executive producer. I've been your guide, Nicole Carroll.

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