It's Friday, September 5, 2025 and in this morning's issue we're covering: Illinois expects ICE to come to Chicago, Charlotte primary forecast: Expect low turnout, high impact, Doctors appointments on demand, no insurance required, Shadow Arrests: When a Call for Help Turns Into Involuntary Commitment, COMMENTARY: California must learn from history. Forced mental health care harms more than heals, Fitchburg cuts the ribbon on affordable housing project for artists, Midwest oat growers want a renaissance, but it will be hard without Big Ag, International Paper’s departure creates water challenges, opportunities, New Orleans teachers, fired after Katrina, reflect on lives upended.

Media outlets and others featured: Capitol News Illinois, Carolina Public Press, North Carolina Health News , MindSite News, CalMatters, CommonWealth Beacon, Investigate Midwest, The Current, Verite News.

As Trump declares ‘we’re going in,’ Pritzker says ‘terror and cruelty is the point’

by Ben Szalinski, Capitol News Illinois
September 2, 2025

Article Summary

• Gov. JB Pritzker said he expects ICE’s work in Chicago to look similar to recent federal action in Los Angeles. ICE operations are expected to begin later this week.
• In an Oval Office news conference just before Pritzker spoke, President Donald Trump said ‘we’re going in’ when asked about sending the National Guard to Chicago. Pritzker argued Trump is waiting for a skirmish between law enforcement and protesters to justify the deployment.
• Also on Tuesday, a federal judge in California ruled Trump had no legal basis to deploy troops to L.A.
• Pritzker said information gathered from sources indicates Mexican Independence Day celebrations could be ICE’s target.
• Trump cited Chicago’s violent Labor Day weekend as evidence the city needs National Guard intervention.

This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

Gov. JB Pritzker said Tuesday he expects Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to employ the same aggressive strategies they used in Los Angeles earlier this summer after President Donald Trump said he will deploy the National Guard to Chicago.

The information, Pritzker said, was not directly communicated to him, but rather gleaned from anonymous sources in the federal government, military and “well-sourced” news reports.  He said he’s been told members of the Texas National Guard are being readied for deployment to Chicago and many of the same federal ICE and Homeland Security groups that worked in L.A. are being relocated to Chicago.

Pritzker said Illinois State Police received a call from Customs and Border Protection Chief Gregory Bovino over the weekend confirming that ICE will ramp up immigration enforcement in Chicago at some point this week. But the call, Pritzker said, was more rhetorical than informational.

Bovino, who was recently described in a New York Times article as “the face” of Trump’s immigration policies, led immigration operations in L.A. which included aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics leading to claims of racial profiling, according to the Times.

“Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves on one important question: Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?” Pritzker said.

To what extent the effort will be aided by the National Guard is unclear. But just minutes before Pritzker took questions, Trump removed any doubt that he’d like to deploy the National Guard – even as a federal judge in California ruled Tuesday that his Guard deployment in that city was illegal.

“We’re going in. I didn’t say when we’re going in,” Trump said from the Oval Office, repeating that he wants Pritzker to call him and ask for help.

Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago will be the staging grounds for ICE, the Sun-Times reported. Pritzker said staging began at the base Monday.

The governor also said he believes the Trump administration planned to come to Chicago in September to target Mexican Independence Day celebrations.

“Let’s be clear: the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anyone living here,” he said.

Chicago has one of the largest Latino populations in the nation, and 74% of that group are of Mexican heritage, according to a study last year by the University of Illinois Chicago. The city’s Mexican Independence Day parade is schedule for Sept. 14.

Pritzker encouraged residents to learn their rights and film ICE’s work.

“Authoritarians thrive on your silence,” he said. “Be loud for America.”

Pritzker also warned protesters to remain peaceful and said Trump plans to use skirmishes with ICE to justify sending the National Guard.

“If someone flings a sandwich at an ICE agent, Trump will try and go on TV and declare an emergency in Chicago,” he said. “I'm imploring everyone, if and when that happens, do not take the bait.”

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said he plans to take legal action if federal officials take unconstitutional actions, including in law enforcement duties.

“President Trump has been utilizing the notion that he and he alone can deal with crime in American cities, and his preferred tool in doing so is the American military,” Raoul said. “The problem with this approach is that it's both bad strategy and illegal.”

L.A. deployment illegal, judge rules

A federal judge in California ruled Tuesday morning that Trump’s troop deployment to Los Angeles in June to fight crime violated an 1878 law prohibiting the military from carrying out domestic law enforcement. The judge wrote there is ample evidence to suggest Trump plans to continue violating the law, citing the president’s statements about Chicago.

Trump activated thousands of members of the National Guard without California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s permission to manage protests against aggressive immigration raids in the city. The judge ruled there was no evidence of rebellion or that local law enforcement was unable to manage the protests themselves.

The ruling provides Illinois with a legal precedent to lean on should Trump again try to deploy the National Guard in Chicago under the guise of managing protests and protecting ICE officials.

“I would love to do it now,” Trump said of Chicago. “We’re going to do it anyway. We have the right to do it because I have an obligation to protect this country.”

Raoul said no situations that would allow the president to deploy the National Guard in Chicago exists.

“The militia clauses of the United States Constitution give Congress sole authority to decide the circumstances that allow the president to federalize the National Guard,” Raoul said. “The 10th Amendment preserves states’ sovereignty to enforce state laws as they see fit.”

Labor Day weekend violence

Labor Day weekend was violent in Chicago. Fifty-eight people were shot and eight were killed in incidents across the city, which included three mass shootings.

The violence marked an uptick from last year’s Labor Day weekend when 22 people were shot and eight were killed.

Trump inflated where Chicago ranks on crime compared to other cities in his remarks Tuesday, comparing it to Afghanistan and again calling it a “hell hole.”

“The president's absurd characterizations do not match what is happening on the ground here,” Pritzker said. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. There is no emergency that warrants deployment of troops.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson blamed Trump for the city’s gun violence problems because Trump’s administration has withheld federal funding for violence prevention from the city. He added he welcomes more partnerships with federal law enforcement agencies.

Violent crime is down in Chicago this year, however. Chicago Police Department data through Aug. 24 shows crime is down 13% overall compared to 2024, including murders down 32%. Crime remains up 40% from 2021, however.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Charlotte primary forecast: Expect low turnout, high impact

by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press
September 3, 2025

Mecklenburg County is one of 10 North Carolina counties with primary elections this fall. Charlotte is one of even fewer municipalities with contests set for next week. In the largely Democratic stronghold, the primaries generally decide the overall winner. 

Turnout is usually low. In the 2023 mayoral primary, about 5% of registered voters made their way to the polls, according to State Board of Elections data. This year appears to be no different. As of Aug. 29, just under 1,000 Charlotteans had voted by mail or at the city’s sole early voting site, according to the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections. The election is Tuesday, Sept. 9. 

Don’t let the low interest fool you. The results of Charlotte’s primary elections will significantly impact both the city and North Carolina as a whole. 

[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ alerts and weekend roundup newsletters]

The mayor and City Council create policy, approve a budget and appoint key city staff members. And as the most populous city in North Carolina, and the 14th-most populous city in the United States, what happens in Charlotte may be a model for what happens elsewhere. 

Nearly a dozen primary and general candidates shared what might be at stake in the election with Carolina Public Press. 

Among the top issues were the city’s transit future, public safety, an affordable housing shortage and an alleged lack of transparency and accountability among Charlotte’s current elected officials. 

Who’s running in Charlotte? 

Every two years, Charlotte voters pick their mayor and 11 council members — one from each of the city’s seven districts, and four at-large members. 

In the mayoral race, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles is running for her fifth term. Since winning her first primary against former Democratic Mayor Jennifer Roberts in 2017 by 10 percentage points, Lyles hasn’t faced much resistance. 

Several candidates hope they can flip the margins in their favor this time around. Jaraun (Gemini) Boyd, Delter Guin III, Brendan Maginnis and Tigress McDaniel all threw their hats in the ring this cycle. 

Ten Democrats are vying for four spots in the at-large City Council general election contest, where they will face Republicans Misun Kim and Edwin Peacock for four overall council seats. 

Incumbents Victoria Watlington, LaWana Slack-Mayfield, James Mitchell Jr. and Dimple Ajmera are joined by challengers Matt Britt, Roderick Davis, Will Holley, J.G. Lockhart, Emerson Stoldt and Namrata Yadav. 

Incumbent Democrat Malcolm Graham is running unopposed in District 2, which stretches from western uptown to the northwestern part of the city. Republican Ed Driggs is also unopposed in District 7, in the city’s southeastern corner. 

In District 1, which includes most of uptown and surrounding areas, incumbent Democrat Dante Anderson faces Charlene Henderson El in the primary, but the winner will have no general opponent. 

There aren’t general election opponents in the District 4 race between incumbent Democrat Renee Perkins Johnson and Wil Russell or the District 5 race between incumbent Democrat Marjorie Molina and Juan Diego Mazuera. District 4 is the city’s northern neighborhoods including the university area, while District 5 is eastern Charlotte between uptown and Mint Hill.  

Three Democratic candidates — Warren Turner, Joi Mayo and Montravias King — are running against incumbent Democrat Tiawana Brown in the District 3 primary election, and Republican James Bowers will face the victor. District 3 is located in western and southwestern Charlotte.

Finally, District 6, just southeast of the city’s center, will be a contest between Sary Chakra and Krista Bokhari in the Republican primary. The winner will face Democrat Kimberly Owens. There is no incumbent in the race but the current District 6 council member is a Republican.

Local Democratic parties do not endorse in primary races, but the Black Political Caucus does. Its opinion holds weight for many voters. 

BPC endorsed Lyles for mayor, and the incumbent City Council members in every district but district 3, where they endorsed Joi Mayo over incumbent Tiawana Brown, and district 6, where they endorsed Democrat Kimberly Owens in absence of an incumbent. 

Current Charlotte Council controversies

There’s no shortage of drama in Charlotte local politics. 

In May, council member Tiawana Brown was indicted by a federal grand jury for wire fraud. Brown and her two daughters allegedly filed false applications to get more than $124,000 in COVID pandemic relief funds, which were later used for unrelated expenses, including a $15,000 birthday party celebration. 

Brown isn’t the only incumbent facing controversy. 

Charlotte Police Chief Johnny Jennings allegedly threatened to sue the city for text messages he received from former City Council member Tariq Bokhari threatening to get him fired during an argument over officer protective vests. In a closed session, the city agreed to settle with Jennings for $305,000, which was uncovered by WFAE. 

Bokhari resigned to take the number two spot in President Donald Trump’s transit administration. His wife, Krista Bokhari, is running to replace his District 6 seat in what many consider the only truly competitive race of the cycle. Bokhari has a Republican primary challenger, Sary Chakra, and a Democratic general opponent, Kimberly Owens. 

Owens doesn’t like the proximity to Trump’s “chaos” that having Bokhari on the council might cause, she said. 

“I don't like the optics of someone sitting on our City Council who could conceivably, now that we've had some violence on our city lines, put up a flag and say, ‘Hey, Trump, we need you to send in the National Guard,’” she said. 

At-large City Council member Victoria Watlington is also under fire for calling the city’s settlement with the police chief “unethical, immoral, and, frankly, illegal” in an email to constituents. 

Jennings will retire at the end of the year, giving the new City Council power over the direction of the police department. 

Mayor Lyles hasn’t escaped her fair share of criticism, either. The Charlotte Observer found that since December 2023, there were only three meetings where all council members and the mayor showed up and were on time. Lyles’ attendance record was 82%, the fourth-worst in the group.  

Need for change

J.G. Lockhart feels a disconnect between Charlotte’s leadership and its tradition, culture and values. Many of the current City Council members aren’t Charlotte natives, and he wants to change that.

“A lot of people (who) are currently on (the) council have an idea of what they think is in Charlotte’s best interest, but those ideas are coming from other cities that they're from, and Charlotte is a different kind of city,” he said. 

It’s time for a changing of the guard, he said. 

Namrata Yadav, who is running as an at-large candidate, wants to hold elected officials to a higher standard. 

“We are growing at a pace that is surpassing expectations,” she said. “So, we need people who are competent and can see what the future of possibilities look like, and are working for the city and not just for their own benefit.”

Brendan Maginnis stepped up to run for mayor to give Lyles some competition. Maginnis, a former Marine who ran for a U.S. House seat last year, said he has the grassroots organization and campaign experience to get the job done, if people are paying attention. 

That’s a big if. But Maginnis sees leadership in need of reform. Lyles has done good work Maginnis hopes to expand, but it’s time for new ideas, and a new example, he said.

“People are going to look at leaders, which the mayor is the leader of City Council, and they're going to take their cue from them,” Maginnis said. “And so if she's absent, then they're absent, and then what do you end up having is a dysfunctional City Council that leaves 10 minutes early and is not really getting the job done.” 

He would like to add transparency to city government through a participatory budgeting process, a citizens commission that would review major decisions and an elected official scorecard tracking their votes and attendance, he said. 

Mecklenburg Transit

The separation between Democratic candidates in Charlotte is about the size of a penny — that is, the 1-cent sales tax increase referendum on November’s ballot for all Mecklenburg County residents.

In July, the North Carolina legislature passed the PAVE Act, which gave Mecklenburg County the go-ahead to raise sales taxes to pay for major road, rail and bus transportation projects, if the voters approve the ballot referendum in November.

If approved, the county would create a 27-member transit authority to decide how the money is spent. 

Wil Russell supports the referendum. If the transit plan were enacted, the Red Line commuter rail would run through Charlotte's District 4, where he’s running for office. Russell said it’s important to give people transportation options other than cars.

“I think just in general, Charlotte does need help with infrastructure and transit,” he said. “And so this is an opportunity to provide those funds in order to expand our bus system, expand roads and expand transit options across the city.” 

Lockhart is staunchly against the tax. In 1998, when Charlotte passed a half-cent tax referendum to fund transportation, it went poorly, he said. 

A collective of mayors with little to no transportation experience were in charge of managing the system, and all Charlotte got out of it was the Blue Line and several billion missing dollars, Lockhart said. 

What Charlotte really needs is a better bussing system so fewer people are on the road, he added. 

Current councilmember LaWana Slack-Mayfield can’t support the tax either. She takes issue with the financial burden falling on the city instead of the state or federal government, since Charlotte is one of the largest financial contributors to the state. 

Yadav sees the need for transit, but understands the city hasn’t always been transparent about how it's spending money. She supports putting actual transit riders on the transit authority, not just corporate representatives. 

Mayoral candidate Tigress McDaniel also acknowledged that Charlotte needs to invest in infrastructure, but thinks the current plan is underdeveloped. 

Public Safety

Four days after a Ukrainian woman was stabbed on the Charlotte Area Transit System’s Blue Line by a homeless man, Mayor Lyles issued a statement. 

“CATS, by and large, is a safe transit system,” Lyles wrote. “However, tragic incidents like these should force us to look at what we are doing across our community to address root causes. We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health.”

To some, the delayed response was a sign of passive leadership. 

“That's unacceptable,” said District 3 City Council candidate Montravias King. “Where are you at? Are you checked out? Has the mayor checked out four days to respond? Crime itself is a problem, and we need leaders that are going to show up and lead, get out front.” 

While violent crime has significantly declined in Charlotte in the past year, property theft and car break-ins have remained concerns for residents.

Libertarian mayoral candidate Rob Yates feels that community policing efforts at CMPD have been effective, despite the prominence of crime headlines. He thinks the city should expand its current efforts, but that crime concerns are slightly overblown. 

Owens has a unique solution to crime concerns: get people back in the office. While she understands the resistance to return-to-office policies, she feels that bringing more people into city spaces will make people feel safer. 

She also suggested focusing on better ticketing enforcement and more camera monitoring on transit, which would require investing in the recruitment and retention of police officers. 

Republican at-large city council candidate Edwin Peacock agreed that CATS needs to address its open gate system. 

“Fare evasion to many just seems like kind of a minor issue, but it really is kind of an underpinning of who do you have on the train, and how safe is it when you're riding,” he said.

Housing and development

Affordable housing is on nearly everyone’s mind in Charlotte. 

In the region encompassing Charlotte, Concord and Gastonia, half of renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend over 30% of their income on housing, according to a 2025 National Low Income Housing Coalition report. Low-cost rentals in Mecklenburg County dropped from about half to 12% of total rental stock between 2011 and 2022, according to Census data. 

District 4 in the northern portion of Charlotte is one of the last green spaces in the city,  Russell said. Residents are concerned about over development, said Russell, who is an affordable housing construction manager. 

In general, District 5 candidate Juan Diego Mazuera feels like Charlotte has prioritized corporate and private interests over voters’ interests. While he is the youngest candidate in the election at 27, he doesn’t think seats are owned by anyone. 

“We are at a crossroads where we decide who we prioritize and value most: The workers and the people who contribute to the revenue that is generated by these corporations, or the corporation?” Mazuera said. 

McDaniel isn’t buying the mayor’s assertion that the city is creating more affordable housing, she said. 

“The incumbent has made claims for the last three elections that she has been working with developers to combat the issue of affordable housing, and yet they build another high rise that is even more expensive rent wise than one before,” she said.

However, Peacock thinks Charlotte is doing about as much as it can do on affordable housing already. At the same time, local leaders need to focus on economic mobility — creating larger household incomes so Charlotteans can support themselves in a growing, more expensive area, he said. 

How the city addresses its growth is important statewide, he added. Buncombe, New Hanover and Wake County are also growing areas, and will take notes based on how Charlotte leads the way, Peacock said. 

Decisive Charlotte primaries

The stars would have to align “pretty spectacularly” for Yates to win the mayoral election, he said. 

But still, he’s running to win. Yates cares more about his ideas — like putting solar panels on the top of Charlotte bus stops to generate extra electricity — seeing the light of day than holding elected office, he said. 

It’s an attitude most non-Democratic candidates are forced to hold in Charlotte, where registered Republicans make up less than a quarter of voters, while Democrats and unaffiliated voters each make up about 40% of the electorate. 

It’s hard to change the status quo when nobody is paying attention, though, and many Charlotteans are opting out, King said. If you asked them who their councilperson was, they wouldn’t have a clue.

“This is what keeps people in power, that really shouldn't be in power anymore,” King said. “People have checked out on municipal elections.” 

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Doctors on demand, no insurance required

by Michelle Crouch and Charlotte Ledger, North Carolina Health News
September 2, 2025

By Michelle Crouch

The Charlotte Ledger

When city of Charlotte workers get sick, they don’t have to wait weeks for a primary care appointment or shell out a co-pay for an urgent care visit. Instead, they can often be seen on the same day, at no charge, at one of six local clinics run by Marathon Health.

Like a growing number of other employers, the city has embraced a health care model known as direct primary care that sidesteps traditional health insurance for its 9,000 workers and 3,500 retirees. Under the arrangement, the city pays Marathon a flat monthly fee for each employee; in turn, employees are guaranteed same-day or next-day doctor’s appointments. 

Think of it “like a gym membership for health care,” said Dr. Meaghann Bernardy, regional medical director for Marathon Health’s East region.

At the appointments, employees can get care for minor injuries or illnesses, nutrition coaching, lab work, mental health therapy and even physical therapy. Some of the clinics are open outside of typical business hours. Depending on their insurance plan, employees pay nothing or a $30 fee. 

The employees still have traditional insurance for bigger-ticket needs, such as specialist visits, complex procedures and hospital stays.

Christina Fath, the city’s benefits manager, told a group of local human resources professionals last week that the city has saved millions since contracting with Marathon in 2016 by reducing emergency room visits and making it easier for city workers to get care before health problems turn into crises.

“Our health care costs have not gone up as much as national averages,” she said. “While this may be attributed to various factors, the data shows that if our plan members had sought the same care in another health care setting, the plan would have paid more for that same health care. We’ve seen a reduction in non-emergent emergency room visits, urgent care visits, lab spend and (an) increase in preventive care visits and screenings.”

Employees also save money, she said, by avoiding copays and coinsurance payments. “That’s money in their pockets,” she said.

Popping up all over

The direct primary care model is catching on nationwide. Between 2017 and 2021, direct primary care memberships nationwide grew 241%, according to a 2023 industry report. Another analysis predicted the global market for direct primary care would grow from $61.34 billion in 2025 to $96.4 billion in 2033.

Some direct primary care practices operate like so-called concierge medicine practices, which sell memberships directly to patients. But benefits experts said a lot of the growth has been employer-based, like the city’s plan with Marathon, as companies look for ways to provide better care for their workers while keeping soaring health care costs in check.

“The whole issue has always been that it’s difficult to get your employees to go to a primary care physician, so they end up going to ER instead,” said Jon Rankin, CEO of the North Carolina Business Coalition on Health, an employer group that advocates for improved health care delivery.

“Oftentimes, folks are waiting six months to a year to see somebody,” he said. “Employers are saying: ‘What are our options? How can we improve that?’”

Jordan Harris, an employee benefits consultant for Main Street Insurance Group, said direct care providers are “popping up all over the place.” He mo said some operate strictly through telehealth while others, like Marathon, run on-site or near-site clinics.

The monthly fee typically ranges from $25 to $100 per person and can depend on the total number of employees, their ages and how many extra services, such as physical therapy or health coaching, are included. 

New law could boost direct care trend

So why isn’t every company jumping on the direct primary care bandwagon? Rankin and Harris said employers with staff scattered across multiple locations can run into challenges guaranteeing that every worker has a clinic nearby. Even if geography isn’t an issue, some companies hesitate to make the up-front investment or aren’t convinced of the promised long-term savings, they said.

However, Harris said he expects the trend to accelerate as a result of recent federal legislation that allows Health Savings Account dollars to be used for direct primary care. Previously, he said, many employers hesitated to offer it to workers on high-deductible plans who have HSAs to pay for their out-of-pocket costs. 

About 20 percent of the city’s workers are currently on such an HSA plan and have to pay a nominal fee for using Marathon’s services, Fath said. 

Marathon Health is one of the largest employer-based providers of direct primary care in the U.S., with more than 720 locations nationwide, including 60 in North Carolina. In addition to the city of Charlotte, it has contracts with 27 other N.C. organizations, including Mecklenburg County, Lenovo and Reynolds American.

Marathon estimates that employers who sign up save $1,100 per year on each enrolled worker, and up to $4,400 annually on those with a chronic condition. 

Tryon Medical’s homegrown approach

In Charlotte, Tryon Medical Partners has built a direct primary care program that has steadily expanded since 2019 and now serves about 25 Charlotte-area employers, according to Chief Operating Officer Jordan Archer.

Archer, who described the model as “all-you-can-eat primary care,” said enrolled workers receive unlimited, preferred access to Tryon Medical doctors and longer appointments than other patients.

Local companies see the program as a way to cut costs and as a retention benefit, Archer said. What sets Tryon apart, he added, are its local providers.

“Do you want a physician who just got plopped down in this market coordinating your care?” he said. “Or do you want a doctor who has been here 20 years building their career, who knows the best orthopedic surgeon to do your hip?”

More time with patients 

Doctors said they like the direct care model because they can avoid the hassle of dealing with health insurers and spend more time with patients.

Family medicine physician Ajiri Barnes joined Marathon Health in 2023 after 18 years at a large Charlotte-based hospital system. At the hospital, she said, she was pressured to refer patients to in-house specialists, not always the ones she felt were best for her patients. And appointments were limited to 20 minutes.

“I didn’t feel like I had the time to spend with patients to do what they needed,” she said. “Invariably, you ran behind. Then you’re charting for hours after work.”

Although Barnes took a small pay cut when she left the hospital system, she said the change was worth it. She now sees about half as many patients per day, and she spends 30 to 40 minutes with each. She also leaves on time almost every day.

“I finally feel like I can finally practice medicine the way it should be practiced,” she said. “In my old job, patients sometimes waited a year to see me. Here, they can see me tomorrow.”

Support beyond primary care

Menshana Briana McNeil, 25, receives care at a Marathon Health clinic through her father, a Charlotte sanitation worker. Nearly three years ago, she said, she asked her Marathon Health physician for help losing weight and was paired with nutrition coach Amy Hanson. They met twice a week at no cost.

McNeil said the coach’s support helped her to lose 63 pounds, run her first 5K and reverse her prediabetes. At Hanson’s urging, she also completed her CNA certification, which helped her to get a better-paying job.

‘She is like my guardian angel,” she said. “I don’t know where I would be without her.”

McNeil will soon turn 26 and age off of her father’s insurance plan — a change she is already dreading.

“It’s hard to believe that all of this is included because he works for the city,” she said. “When I turn 26, I’m going to cry.”

This article is part of a partnership between The Charlotte Ledger and North Carolina Health News to produce original health care reporting. 

You can support this effort with a tax-deductible donation.

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Shadow Arrests: When a Call for Help Turns Into Involuntary Commitment

by Josh McGhee, MindSite News
August 29, 2025

'You can go voluntarily or you can go involuntarily.'

This story is part of Policing the Vulnerable, a package of stories reported and produced in collaboration with Medill Investigative Lab-Chicago, the Invisible Institute and South Side Weekly.

On a gloomy Sunday afternoon in Chicago, Sgt. Andrew Dakuras hopped out of his patrol car in front of a downtown highrise and strolled into the elevator, finishing a text as the doors closed. He rode up to the 31st floor, exited and stopped at the third door on the left. He knocked: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. 

“One second, I'm getting dressed,” yelled a voice from behind the door, captured on Dakuras’ body-worn camera. A minute passed. “Coming…” 

When Janette Bass, a petite, fifty-nine-year-old white woman, finally unlocked the entrance to her condo on this day in 2019, she also opened another door: one that led her to being taken against her will to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation based solely on the decision of a police officer. That has now become an increasingly common event, one experienced by six Chicagoans every day, according to 2024 data gathered by Invisible Institute and MindSite News.

That summer day six years ago, Dakuras walked into disarray—dishes and pans scattered around the kitchen, papers paving the way to the dining area. Bass tried to tell Dakuras what happened.

The main water line broke in the building. A group of men entered her apartment when she wasn't dressed and refused to leave. She tried to complain and was banned from the building office. She called the police several times. She changed the locks on her door at a cost of $200. She finally filed a police report and now wants to fill in missing details, she said. Dakuras declined to sit and the conversation took a turn.

“Ma’am, if you talk to the detective, the detective can amend it,” Dakuras said. Growing agitated, he called the officer who she said took the original report. She’s already talked to him multiple times, she tells Dakuras. His voice grows louder. “Ma’am, I’m talking on the phone. Do not interrupt me.”

She tries to plead her case, then pauses. “Don’t scream at me, sir. I’m the victim,” Bass says. Moments later, Dakuras ends the call, and walks to the door to leave. She asks for his name and takes a picture of him. He doubles back, but refuses to file an additional report.

“Ma’am, are you in crisis?” he asks.

“Because of you,” she retorts.

“Are you under the treatment of any doctors?” Dakuras continues.

She tells him to leave. He refuses and radios for an ambulance. “What hospital can I take you to?” Dakuras asks. “You can go one of two ways: you can go voluntarily or you can go involuntarily.”

Bass calls a friend and tells them she’s being arrested. She asks the officer to leave more than sixty times over the next four minutes as he follows her around the apartment. Then she flees. 

“I felt I had nowhere to go,” Bass later told Invisible Institute and MindSite News. “I’m like a trapped rat.” 

Dakuras chases her down the stairs and into the hallway on the 27th floor, throws her onto the ground by her shirt and handcuffs her. “Janette, this is not how rational people act,” Dakuras says. “This is not normal.”

Bass was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, then transferred to another hospital and held against her will for what she recalled as a "couple days" before being released. 

Rising rates of police-initiated involuntary commitment

The Chicago Police Department handles over 100 mental health-related incidents every day. Some end in arrests, some may lead to voluntary transport to medical facilities and some end with no action taken at all. But in recent years, data obtained by Invisible Institute and MindSite News shows officers are increasingly turning to a more controversial option: forced hospitalization, detaining people against their wishes at a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation. 

For more than two years, the two newsrooms obtained and analyzed data from the Chicago Police Department on its handling of mental health-related incidents. Between 2023 and 2024, the first years for which comprehensive data is available, the number of police-initiated hospitalizations increased from 1,764 to 2,319—an increase of more than 30%. During these years, more than 20% of mental health calls responded to by Chicago police resulted in an officer deciding to forcibly hospitalize someone.

In total, police have involuntarily hospitalized people for psychiatric reasons at least 6,700 times since 2021, according to the analysis. Chicago police officials did not respond to a list of questions about use of forced hospitalization.

On paper, the city has created an alternative response program intended to divert individuals from both arrest or forced care. In 2021, the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) program began operating in a handful of police districts on the South and West Sides as a co-response model between police and mental health providers. In 2023, police were removed from the teams. 

But reporting from MindSite News and Medill Investigative Lab-Chicago has shown how limited funding, inter-department turf battles, and shifting priorities have hampered the program’s growth and ability to respond to all relevant mental health calls. With federal funding for the program expiring soon, its future is in question.

“Police involvement makes these encounters inherently carceral and violent,” said Jordyn Jensen, executive director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern’s law school. “Police are trained to enforce compliance, not provide care.”

While involuntary commitment is supposed to be a last resort, patients’ advocates, policy researchers and many clinicians say its increasing use by police officers with minimal mental health training and little oversight frequently leads to bad outcomes — especially when employed after a rough encounter with law enforcement. 

Jamelia Morgan, founding faculty director of the center, focuses her research on the intersection of race, gender and disability. In 2023, she wrote an article questioning whether involuntary commitments are in conflict with protections in the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure by government authorities.

Morgan argues that “non-coercive, non-punitive” approaches to bringing people into treatment are more likely to keep people engaged—whether it's taking medications or participating in psychotherapy. Forcing a person to get services may get them treatment once, she told Invisible Institute and MindSite News, “but in the future, the level of engagement goes down along with the treatment outcomes.” 

Forced hospitalization: The new 'default' response

Police officers can initiate a forced hospitalization for a person they believe is likely to harm themselves or others under the terms of Illinois’ Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code and bring the person to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. A medical professional can then place the person on a psychiatric hold and keep them against their will for up to three days until a court hearing is held at the hospital. If a judge accepts the testimony of medical professionals that the person requires ongoing treatment, they can then be held for up to ninety days at a handful of troubled state facilities run by the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) or over two dozen private institutions. 

Involuntary commitment has become the “default” response to mental health crises in Illinois, according to a 2025 article in the Illinois Bar Journal. For patients, it mirrors incarceration; for police, it’s similar to an arrest—without the necessity of a crime. 

It also pushes people into a largely untracked system that can leave the person in crisis traumatized and unwilling to seek further treatment, or further cycling in and out of forced treatment and jails. No state body tracks information about initial forced hospitalizations, hearing processes or outcomes, according to a spokesperson for IDHS. 

“Involuntary commitment is generally a traumatic, not therapeutic experience, often ending in handcuffs," said Jensen. "Being handcuffed to a bed in an emergency room with a cop outside your door—that’s not a therapeutic experience for anyone. Research also shows that forced hospitalization can lead to long-term disengagement from mental health services and deep mistrust of providers.”

Cassie, twenty-three, was a student at a Chicago college in 2020 and 2021 when they were twice taken to psychiatric hospitals against their will, they told Invisible Institute and MindSite News. The first hospital stint was initiated by family and the second by a school counselor. Cassie, who asked to be identified by their first name only, described forced hospitalization as a “carceral institution” in an interview with Invisible Institute and MindSite News. 

They recall being strip-searched by staff multiple times a day checking for evidence of self-harm. They couldn't shower alone or use a bottle of soap without a staff member present. They were also sedated, their only choice a pill or an injection.

“You don’t have any autonomy over your body, over your time, over your possessions. You are not allowed to leave,” Cassie said. “It’s very dehumanizing.”

The experience left Cassie wary of calling suicide hotlines for help or talking about their mental health experiences—for fear that people will dismiss their perspective or justify their previous involuntary commitments. 

Involuntary hospitalizations are common in the United States, and they are poorly tracked. A recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offered a figure of 1.2 million involuntary hospitalizations per year as a rough estimate—and likely an undercount. The number roughly matches the entire state and federal prison population of the country.

The figure was based on an extrapolation of data contained in a 2021 research paper that used estimates from twenty-five states to come to a national involuntary commitment rate of 357 people per 100,000 in population. That 2021 paper also found that data on involuntary commitment was “sparse” and that only twenty-two states had collected continuous data from 2012 to 2016.

While many people experiencing a deep psychiatric crisis can be stabilized in a hospital setting, research suggests patients frequently suffer long-term negative effects. The New York Fed study analyzed data in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, using a research strategy that is almost uniquely possible in that county because of the comprehensive data it collects. 

Researchers looked at what happened to a group of people who were reported to local authorities as being in crisis and were seen as being judgment calls—some physicians evaluating them would choose to involuntarily hospitalize them and others would not. For that group of people, the researchers found that hospitalizing them nearly doubled their risk of dying by suicide or overdose and nearly doubled their chances of being charged with a violent crime in the three months after their evaluation compared to those who were not hospitalized after their evaluations. The study also found one out of five people died within five years of their evaluation—a rate higher than those leaving jail, enrolling in homeless shelters or living with severe mental illness in general. Twenty-four percent are charged with a crime within a year of the evaluation, the study found.

Locked Up

For Janette Bass, the trauma of her hospital stay didn't end with her release. About two weeks later, Officer Dakuras heard a familiar address over the radio and volunteered to take the call. “This is my girl, Janette,” he said over the radio. 

Minutes later, Dakuras and two officers are on her floor, and he yells her name as she opens her door. She immediately retreats, slamming her door after realizing it’s him. “You don’t want to see us,” Dakuras says as the other officers laugh.

Bass says being “locked up” in the hospital left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and night terrors that continue today. For months after, she stayed in bed, causing her to gain weight and develop diabetes, she said in a lawsuit she filed against Dakuras and the department in November 2019.

The city settled her case for $332,500 in October 2024. She also filed a complaint with the city, but the Civilian Office of Police Accountability found no “obvious misconduct” and closed the case without a finding. 

“I have a lot of anxiety. I can’t get near police. I’m scared to death of them,” Bass said in her deposition. “It’s really scary when it’s somebody of authority that can arrest you falsely.”

In a recent interview with Invisible Institute and MindSite News, Bass said she moved across the country to avoid Dakuras but still feels frightened when she sees police. 

Forced hospitalization on the national agenda

Involuntary mental health treatment has long been controversial. Until the 1960s, there were few safeguards preventing people deemed mentally ill from being hospitalized against their will, and abusive treatment in mental asylums was common. In the 1960s and 70s, following the closure of many large mental institutions, legislation aimed at protecting patients rights against indefinite involuntary commitment passed in most states, while leaving in place emergency holds by law enforcement and others. In broad terms, these laws aimed to limit the use of involuntary hospitalization to cases where people were deemed to be a threat to themselves or others, using a controversial standard later enshrined nationally by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975. 

In recent years, some politicians and policy groups have pushed hard for broader use of forced mental health treatment as a way to address visible drug use, the presence of unhoused, mentally ill people on the streets and incidents of violence committed by people with mental illness.

It’s a policy with significant public and bipartisan support, pursued in somewhat different forms by the Trump administration and Democratic elected officials from California to New York. And it signals a likely increased role for police in forced treatment across the country. 

While no Illinois elected official has made a significant push for such policies, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation earlier this year looked at acts of violence committed by a small number of people with histories of severe mental illness. The article reported on efforts to expand use of a legal process known as outpatient civil commitment that empowers judges to order a person with a history of psychiatric hospitalizations or violence to receive outpatient treatment, even if they don't want it. 

In New York, where outpatient civil commitment has been in use since 1999, advocates have questioned its ethics and effectiveness. The practice “strips individuals of their autonomy, stigmatizes mental illness, and potentially worsens mental health conditions,” according to a report published this year by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. Advocates argue that it is not a replacement for community-based mental healthcare.

“There is no evidence that involuntary commitment offers long-term benefits, and significant reasons to believe that expanding the practice will cause harm,” wrote Carl Coleman, a legal bioethics professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, in the introduction to a paper opposing the expanded use of involuntary commitment. 

“Involuntary commitment seems to be increasingly presented as a response to homelessness, especially mentally ill people who are homeless, and it's just not an appropriate response,” Coleman said in an interview. “The idea that simply because someone is mentally ill, they have no right to have a say about what happens to them, is unjust. That's not how healthcare normally works.”

Even when police suggest—but don't say they are requiring—hospital treatment, people may not feel they have a choice.

"There’s a power imbalance there, especially when police are first responders," said Jensen. “People might, technically, agree to go to the hospital because they’re met with no other option, but that agreement is happening in the presence of an armed officer, so under the threat of force without fully understanding their rights or true alternatives.”

Any police officer in Illinois has the authority to hospitalize a person they deem to be a danger to themselves or others; it doesn’t matter how new the officer is or how familiar they are with mental health crises. 

‘Boom! It’s over with quick.’

A CPD officer interviewed by Invisible Institute who joined the force in 2022 was already filing petitions to involuntarily commit people during her probationary period, the first eighteen months on the force. Hospital staff members provided her with guidance and paperwork: “Here’s the cheat sheet. You know what to do," she recalled them telling her.

“Boom! It’s over with quick,” she said in an interview. “You go back to the station, you write your report. The next day you come to work you’ll see the same individual on the corner.”

While involuntary commitment has been pitched as a way to break the cycle of incarceration for some people with mental illness, the encounters can be dangerous and violent. People in crisis are often tackled and forcefully handcuffed before being taken to the hospital, according to a review of police department records.

In some cases, officers respond with force, using guns, tasers, batons or mace when they respond to a call and find a person holding a knife, screwdriver or other object they perceive as a weapon. Even force deemed less-than-lethal can lead to fatal encounters, reporting has shown. 

Chicago police recruits take part in a few hours of basic training in techniques for managing and deescalating mental health crises. Training materials for new recruits on responses to mental health show that the overriding message is that people experiencing a mental health crisis should be hospitalized—whether they want to be or not.

The officer says when she encounters mentally ill people committing retail theft or other small crimes, she is faced with a decision: Arrest them for retail theft and they’ll “get right back out and go to the same spot and do whatever they've been doing,” she said. “What’s the point of taking them to jail? It's better if I take them to the hospital to try to give them some help.” 

For people experiencing mental health crises in Chicago, at least some alternatives to arrest and hospitalization exist. In 2020, the state human services department started the Living Room Program to fund crisis respite programs aimed at diverting crises and avoiding hospitalization, including two sites in Chicago: Thresholds in Uptown and Healthcare Alternative Systems in Belmont-Cragin. 

The program is mentioned in police department guidelines on mental health admissions released in 2023, but the department does not appear to be a major source of referrals. Since July 2024, 8,700 of 12,400 unique visitors to Living Room programs throughout the state were walk-ins, and 3,700 were referred by law enforcement, EMTs, fire departments, hospitals, churches, or other agencies, according to IDHS spokesperson Daisy Contreras.

“Living Room providers continuously work to raise awareness about their services among law enforcement, focusing on officers’ ability to refer individuals in behavioral health crisis to a Living Room as an alternative to an emergency room, jail, or other carceral settings,” Contreras wrote in an email. 

‘Gasoline on the fire’

When Dakuras came to Janette Bass’s apartment in 2019, he had not taken part in any training on how to respond to mental health incidents, according to his later deposition. But he believed she was suicidal, even though he never asked. 

He claimed that Bass's actions showed that she might harm herself: She said yes when asked if she was in crisis though she sardonically blamed him for causing it, ran into the hallway without her shoes on, and refused to be evaluated by paramedics.

Camera footage shows Dakuras radioed for a mental health transport immediately after Bass told him he was causing her distress and then followed her around her apartment. The other reasons he cites in his deposition for initiating the hospitalization didn’t occur until after he had already called for an ambulance.

“It’s clear as day she asked him to leave and he’s just pouring gasoline on the fire,” Gregory Kulis, an attorney who represented Bass in her lawsuit against the city, told Invisible Institute. “It’s textbook egging somebody on.” 

While Illinois law allows police to connect people in psychological distress with healthcare, Kulis said it can be abused by officers acting in bad faith. “It’s a tool that occasionally some police officers might use to protect their own unlawful acts,” he said.

This was not the first time Chicagoans complained about Dakuras, or the only incident where the city was forced to pay for his actions. According to Invisible Institute’s Civic Police Data Project, eighty-two allegations of misconduct have been made against Dakuras, including illegal searches, property damage and false arrests. At least twenty-three use of force reports have also been filed, including for an incident where Dakuras allegedly beat and kicked a Chicago Cubs fan during the 2016 World Series celebration outside Wrigley Field. In 2021, a federal jury awarded the fan $54,000 in damages.

In July 2024, while off-duty, Dakuras was caught on video calling another bar patron the n-word during an altercation. That same night Dakuras allegedly got into a heated argument with two other off-duty officers after he made unwanted sexual advances toward a woman at a party. According to complaint records, Dakuras allegedly became enraged when the officers asked him to leave the woman alone and called them the n-word during their confrontation. 

Dakuras has also been accused of sexually assaulting another woman in 2023.

Now a lieutenant, Dakuras continues to collect a salary of at least $165,000 while these incidents are investigated, even though, as of February, he still appears on the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s list of officers stripped of police powers. He did not respond to requests for comment sent by reporters to listed contact information.

Kulis says officers sometimes use involuntary hospitalizations to retaliate against individuals who question their actions and that he has represented people who filed complaints after being involuntarily committed. 

“It can be a traumatizing experience,” Kulis said. “You’re upset already. A police officer is not listening to you. Then the police officer is saying, ‘Well, you’re not right. We’re going to have to take you to the hospital.’”

The data problem

It’s hard to know how common encounters like these are. Despite longstanding concerns about the ways that Chicago police respond to people experiencing mental health crises, the department didn't collect data on officer-initiated involuntary hospitalizations until recently. 

In 2017, responding to outrage over allegations of persistent racism and use of excessive, sometimes fatal, force by Chicago police—most notably the 2014 murder of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald—the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing report. The investigation found that the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training program, which is supposed to teach officers techniques to de-escalate conflicts, failed to prevent the use of force during mental health calls. 

“CPD’s documentation of these incidents is often insufficient to determine whether the force was necessary, appropriate, or lawful,” the DOJ investigators wrote. “Consequently, all we know are the broad contours of terribly sad events—that officers used force against people in crisis who needed help.”

The department began using a standardized mental health form in a single police district in 2016, but officers were not required to complete it if arrest or use-of-force reports were also filled out, limiting CPD’s ability to evaluate its response to mental health incidents. That same year, a report from a city task force found that city agencies drastically undercounted the true number of mental health calls in Chicago. 

The consent decree entered into by the city and state attorney general’s office in 2019 required the police department to document all mental health calls and note whether a person was hospitalized involuntarily—and whether a CPD officer initiated it. 

While the data show a rise in involuntary commitments each year since 2017, some of that increase is due to improved record-keeping. In addition to the consent decree, a 2021 state law required Illinois police departments to report every time they were involved in a mental health crisis. The number of reported police-initiated involuntary hospitalizations jumped from 400 in 2020 to more than 1,000 in 2021. But this is still likely an undercount since the standardized mental health form was not implemented across all CPD districts until 2023.

The data also show a clear pattern of racial disparities in the involuntary hospitalizations initiated by Chicago police. Black people make up 30 percent of the city’s population, but account for 70 percent of involuntary hospitalizations. Black women make up 16 percent of the population and nearly a third of forced hospitalizations. In contrast, white people comprise 32 percent of the city’s population, but make up just 16 percent of forced hospitalizations, according to data provided by CPD.

“Longstanding stereotypes that position Black women as aggressive or difficult makes them disproportionately likely to be perceived as disruptive, dangerous in both clinical and policing contexts,” said Jensen. “Even when Black women are simply in distress or asking for help they’re more likely to be labeled as in need of forced intervention.”

The holes in the data and lack of meaningful oversight means some of the worst outcomes are hidden. Perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than in the case of Latoria Hill, a thirty-six-year-old Black woman who died after officers attempting to bring her to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation shot her repeatedly with a Taser. Her story has not been reported previously.

What happened to Latoria?

On May 2, 2020, Chicago police responded to multiple 911 calls about a partially clothed woman with a broom attacking people and cars near Narragansett Street and North Avenue on the West Side. One caller reported that the woman was armed with a kitchen knife. One of the dispatchers labeled the call as a “mental health disturbance.” 

When officers arrived at the scene, they found Hill rummaging through clothes and shoes discarded on the ground outside her apartment building looking for her phone. Sergeant Ronni Kane yelled at Hill to put down the knife. Kane was the only CIT-trained officer on the scene, according to CIT training data and the incident report. 

In body-worn camera footage, Hill can be heard telling Kane she couldn’t find her phone. Kane promised to help Hill look for her phone and get her a cigarette if she puts the knife away. 

As she negotiated with Hill, taser in hand, Kane repeatedly ordered her colleagues at the scene to wait, step back and “calm it down.” Still, at least eight officers surrounded Hill, inching closer by the second with tasers and batons at the ready.

The tense interactions between the officers appeared to agitate Hill. 

“Listen babe, we can’t go away until you get rid of that knife. This ain’t gonna get any better, and I don’t want to tase you,” Kane said to Hill, according to body-worn camera footage.

“She’s calmed down a ton in the last few minutes,” she told her colleagues, stepping back from Hill.

Moments later, Hill retreated inside her apartment building and the front door locked behind her. Officer Gary Sanabria is seen on body-worn camera footage forcibly kicking the door open and chasing after Hill with his taser pointed at her as she slowly walked backwards up the stairwell. 

“Drop the goddamn knife or I’m gonna light you up!” Officer Gary Sanabria shouted. 

“Let her go up the stairs, Gary. If she falls, we’re done,” Kane warned. Others warned he was getting too close. 

Sanabria fired his taser, which missed Hill as she attempted to close the door to her apartment. Then, the officers forced themselves into the unit as Sanabria fired his taser from behind the partially opened door. Hill screamed and fell onto the floor of a mostly bare bedroom. Kane rounded the corner and fired her taser at Hill as she writhed on the floor. Four officers handcuffed her as others watched, according to body-worn camera footage. 

The officers can be heard on the video discussing whether she should be charged with aggravated assault of a police officer, a charge frequently filed by CPD officers to obscure police misconduct or justify excessive force, according to a 2018 investigation by the Chicago Reporter. But instead of arresting Hill, Kane decided she should be taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. 

After Hill was handcuffed, Sanabria crudely explained the incident to another officer. “I killed two cartridges on her," he said. "She didn’t like the lightning.” Neither Kane nor Sanabria responded to requests for comment.

Hill was taken to West Suburban Hospital, where she was placed in restraints because she was being aggressive, combative and uncooperative with emergency department personnel, according to reports obtained by Invisible Institute and MindSite News. Around 3:30 a.m. the next day, Hill’s restraints were removed, but she was restrained again three hours later. Around 8 a.m., Hill went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 8:31 a.m. PCP was also found in her system. 

Hill’s mother brought a wrongful death lawsuit, alleging that Hill “was never a threat to any of the police officers or anyone else” and that police used aggressive and disproportionate tactics. She and other members of Hill’s family declined to comment.

The city initially asserted that officers were merely “providing assistance” to Hill and should be granted immunity. After that was rejected by the judge, city attorneys settled with Hill’s mother for $85,000. Despite this, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability administratively closed its case without coming to an official finding, as it did in Bass’s case. “Our review of evidence uncovered neither misconduct nor a violation of Department policy,” investigators wrote.

COPA did not provide a formal comment when contacted by reporters.

Hill’s death was not the only wrongful death suit Kane was involved in. In 2010, she was one of five officers named in the wrongful death of a thirty-nine-year-old Black man named John Coleman, Jr. He died in police custody after he was tased by police and Kane and her partner failed to provide immediate medical attention. The city settled with Coleman’s family for $1.3 million in September 2011. 

Former Superintendent Garry McCarthy recommended firing both officers but they were reprimanded instead. 

After Hill was transported to the hospital, Sanabria toured the apartment and picked up the taser prongs. On camera footage, he can be seen walking into a bedroom near the front door, where Hill was initially tased. 

He lifted up a blue comforter and picked up a phone.

Andrew Fan of Invisible Institute contributed data analysis to this story. Jaehee Kim contributed reporting to this story as a Humphrey Fellow with Invisible Institute through ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism.
Invisible Institute is part of the Mental Health Parity Collaborative, a group of newsrooms that are covering stories on mental health care access and inequities in the U.S. The partners on this project include The Carter Center and newsrooms in select states across the country.

This article first appeared on MindSite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

COMMENTARY: California must learn from history. Forced mental health care harms more than heals

By Keris Myrick, Special for CalMatters

This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Guest Commentary written by Keris Myrick

Progressive values and humane public policies are California virtues. But not for people living with serious mental illness. For people with schizophrenia, our treatment clings to an old, dangerous myth: “To save them we must take their autonomy.”

Some say people with schizophrenia have what is called anosognosia, meaning they lack insight that they have an illness and so require forced treatment.

Whether one believes in anosognosia or not, we must believe in people and their humanity. Rather than describing their objections as noncompliance, we must meet people where they are and hear their “no” as expressed autonomy, a desire to be heard on their own terms.

A French physician, Dr. Philippe Pinel, in the late 1700s famously unchained men and women in his asylums. Today’s chains look different. Reports from Disability Rights California detail widespread warehousing of people in psychiatric facilities after doctors have ordered them discharged and in jails despite them facing no criminal charges.

Lack of prevention and early intervention in outpatient care are major problems. 

Unhoused individuals experiencing mental health challenges require considerable outreach and engagement to build sufficient trust to bring them into the mental health system. Medicaid won’t pay for such concerted efforts, leaving them to fall deeper into the cracks of homelessness, incarceration or worse. 

Many people don’t fall — they’re pushed — into crisis. Pushed by poverty, racism and systems that criminalize illness and treat trauma with handcuffs. That’s not humane care; that’s control dressed up as care.

A person with “voluntary” court-ordered treatment without housing will be told they can live with their family. But families aren’t effective replacements for funded systems of care. They’re already stretched, grieving and navigating a maze of waiting lists and delays. 

Another missing piece in our system is the value of lived experience. 

When those with lived experience in mental illness try to collaborate with policymakers to develop voluntary, community-based services — especially for those who are unhoused or in a mental health crisis —  they are frequently rejected. In recent years, their testimony opposing several California bills that expand involuntary treatment often is ignored or dismissed, rather than being recognized as informed, valuable insight. 

Worse yet, this lived-experience perspective is framed as “letting people die with their rights on.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have experienced this. I have navigated coercive treatment approaches, systems that locked me up, traumatized me and caused me immense harm. 

Telling my story causes me further harm, even though my intention is to help others. I can’t escape the stigma. People make assumptions about “limited” abilities and “irrational” beliefs. Parts of my story can jeopardize future employment, housing opportunities and social connection. 

We can have education, professional careers and expertise from lived experience, but it’s all delegitimized through the discriminatory lens of a schizophrenia diagnosis. 

I survived. Many others do not. 

When I did not believe in myself, my providers, family and peers saw me as more than a set of symptoms; they saw a person with strengths and a deep need for connection, purpose and hope. 

I use my experience to heal and advocate for systems promoting dignity. We don’t want people to die. We want them to live with their rights on, free of shame, trauma and the system’s failures.

People with lived experience know the system’s chasms intimately, so we can help repair it. We know that true health care is not time-limited or transactional; it requires approaches that are noncoercive, rooted in dignity — such as peer-led programs, culturally competent supports and housing-first models. 

Media coverage, providers and elected officials assert that safety requires coercion. But coercion begets resistance. Humans reach for freedom. A diagnosis of schizophrenia doesn’t eliminate a person’s yearning for liberty. 

We’ve been here before: institutionalizing women for being “too emotional,” sterilizing those with disabilities “for their own good,” tearing Native children from their homes to “civilize” them, diagnosing enslaved Africans who fled bondage with drapetomania (runaway slave syndrome). 

Now concern for public safety seems to justify involuntary holds and forced treatment. We must learn from history; not repeat it. 

Providers, administrators, family members, elected officials and people with lived experience must work together. If any voice is missing, we miss the opportunity to create real healing.

People living with schizophrenia deserve support, freedom, dignity, and a system based on their potential, not just their pathology.

It’s time we stop mistaking force for humane care and start investing in what works: trust, time, families, housing, collaboration and the belief that recovery is possible on each person’s terms.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Over 10 years in the making: Fitchburg cuts the ribbon on affordable housing project for artists 

by Hallie Claflin, CommonWealth Beacon
August 29, 2025

WHEN A LOCAL DEVELOPER came to Fitchburg Art Museum director Nick Capasso more than a decade ago with an idea to create artist-preference housing downtown, he needed little convincing. But the rest of the city, including the Fitchburg City Council, wasn’t as receptive to the concept of a “creative economy.”  

“Initially it was a foreign concept, because no one's done artist housing here,” Capasso said. “We had spent years systematically educating the Fitchburg City Council to get them to understand that we're not inventing the wheel here. This has been done successfully in other communities.”  

More than 10 years later, the post-industrial era city that suffered from the long-term decline of manufacturing has embraced arts and culture as a way to restore its standing as a vibrant hub of North-Central Massachusetts.  

Local, state, and federal leaders gathered Thursday to cut the ribbon on the Fitchburg Arts Community, a 68-unit affordable housing project with amenities for artists, designed and developed by Marc Dohan, executive director of the nonprofit Fitchburg community development organization NewVue. 

Not only has the $45 million project brought much-needed housing to the city’s recovering downtown that is affordable to a community that can help drive urban revival, it has also tackled blight by restoring three former municipal buildings once vacant and boarded up. Residents began moving into the FAC in the spring, and nearly all the units are now occupied.  

“These homes help create space for musicians, painters, performers, designers and makers of all kinds to live, work, and connect right here in the heart of our city,” Mayor Sam Squailia said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.  

The community housing has attracted artists from North-Central Massachusetts, as well as other parts of New England, according to Capasso, who called it a “dream come true.”  

“In an economically challenged community, the best projects to invest in are the ones that can address multiple issues simultaneously and successfully, and that’s what this is,” he said.  

NewVue officially purchased the three buildings in 2018 and began construction in 2023. B.F. Brown Junior High School was built in 1923 and sits across from the award-winning arts museum, along with the High School Annex built in 1869 and the City Stables in 1886.  

Capasso said the buildings were abandoned and neglected for years. Now, the 100-year-old museum will benefit from being located near a community of people who enjoy the arts.  

“We can't have boarded up buildings across the street from the art museum,” Capasso said. “We’re the only tourist destination in downtown Fitchburg ... We don't want people to go home and say, ‘I was scared to get out of my car.’ That's not going to happen anymore.”  

Key historical elements were preserved in the restoration, including several old classroom chalkboards for artists to use in their apartment units. The school’s auditorium has been turned into a gallery space, and residents can enjoy a soundproof rehearsal room and shared art studios. 

What took so long for the project to be completed? Dohan said convincing city government, remediating asbestos and lead paint in the building sites, and piecing together some 20 sources of local, state, and federal funding turned into a nearly 13-year endeavor.  

After a fire destroyed the old school roof in 2016, the city was faced with an insurance settlement and a decision. Instead of tearing the buildings down, Fitchburg decided to reinvest. But while the artist housing project has been supported by the last three mayoral administrations, Dohan said the city, which has shifted its focus on market-rate housing construction, was initially hesitant to allow more affordable housing development.  

He says the affordability component is key for the artist community, but there was also no other way to finance the project without the use of state and federal low-income housing tax credits. The development received over $21 million in federal funding. Roughly 70 percent of the units are deemed affordable, while the other 30 percent are workforce housing units for households that earn too much to qualify for subsidized housing but not enough to afford market rents.  

“Young people cannot afford to live within 495,” Capasso said. “The housing market is locked up, the rental market is extreme, and they're finding Fitchburg, and places like Fitchburg, to be much more desirable.”  

But the project hasn’t just attracted young artists driven out of high-cost Boston.  

A retired Bill Tolos and his wife Nancy moved into the building in May. Tolos was once a student at both the annex building and the junior high school where he went on to teach science for 34 years before it closed. The painter has lived in Fitchburg nearly his entire life, and he is a frequent visitor to the art museum. He said he’s found community at the FAC and feels like he’s “on vacation all the time.”  

“I wanted to be part of this art community and be able to share with other artists and have a studio, instead of painting on my dining room table,” Tolos said. “When the fire happened, as everybody else, I was heartbroken … from the ashes they raised this building, and I’m so glad they did.”  

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Midwest oat growers want a renaissance, but it will be hard without Big Ag

by Erin Jordan, The Gazette, Investigate Midwest
August 26, 2025

Note: This story has been updated to reflect that Practical Farmers of Iowa is based in Ames, Iowa — not Des Moines. Investigate Midwest regrets the error.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – Few people outside Quaker Oats know exactly what the Cedar Rapids factory is making when a sweet, wholesome smell wafts from the plant north of downtown. 

Locals call it a Crunch Berry day because Quaker – the world’s largest cereal plant – makes Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries, but the aroma could also be oats roasting for Oatmeal Squares or maple-flavored instant oatmeal.  

The oats fueling that sweet-smelling goodness come not from the rich Iowa soil near the plant, but from up to 1,000 miles away in Canada. For decades, the plumpest, most consistent oats came from the northern plains, but new field trials show food-grade oats can be grown in Iowa and Minnesota by farmers eager for an alternative to corn and soybeans.

Buying domestic oats would help Quaker save freight costs and avoid threatened tariffs on Canadian goods. It could also improve Midwest water quality and soil health ravaged by an endless corn/soy rotation. Expanding Midwest oat production offers economic and environmental benefits for farmers and local communities, advocates say. 

But agricultural companies and commodity groups don’t have financial incentives tied to oats because oats don’t require hybrid seeds, crop insurance or as much fertilizer. These big players aren’t opposing oats, but they aren’t cheerleading either.

The lack of support has left oat growers to be their own hype machines.

“We can actually pick our varieties and our production practices to provide a better product than Canada, not only on a protein level, but on an environmental impact level,” said Landon Plagge, a Latimer, Iowa, farmer and oat advocate. 

In May, Plagge and other oat farmers in Iowa and Minnesota loaded 100,000 bushels of their oats into a rail car bound for Quaker’s factory in Cedar Rapids. Three months later, they’re still waiting to hear what the grain giant thought of the domestic product. 

Iowa is a ‘donut hole’ for oat research

Baby boomers who grew up on Iowa farms remember growing oats to feed horses and other livestock. Iowans harvested more than 6 million acres of oats a year until the 1950s, according to Matt Liebman, an emeritus Iowa State University agronomy professor.

But as Americans started eating more meat, demand increased for corn to feed the cattle, hogs and chickens. When ethanol was approved as a fuel additive in the 1970s, corn demand rose again. Now, about 45% of corn nationwide becomes ethanol. 

Like kernels around a cob, industries popped up to serve King Corn. Specialty seed breeders, co-ops that sell fertilizer and consultants who tell farmers how much corn to feed their hogs all benefit from expansion of corn acres.  

Still, Iowans harvested nearly 40,000 acres of oats for grain in 2022, putting it eighth in the nation behind North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Texas, Pennsylvania and New York, according to the Census of Agriculture. Oats harvested to feed animals and humans increased 12.6% in Iowa between 2017 and 2022. 

Iowa State University, a land-grant school with a powerhouse agriculture college, once had a distinguished oat breeding program. Kenneth Frey and J. Artie Browning developed a crown rust-resistant oat cultivar they shared with farmers as certified seed in 1968, according to the Agronomy Department’s 125th Points of Pride. 

But Iowa State hasn’t had an oat breeder since 2007 and doesn’t do its own oat trials. The university did partner with Practical Farmers of Iowa, a sustainable agriculture nonprofit based in Ames*, to hold oat trials at four ISU research farms.  

“Iowa is the donut hole,” Liebman said, referring to oat research in neighboring states of Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Illinois. 

Liebman, who retired in 2021, understands university budgets are tight and there’s no corporate constituency clamoring for oat research. 

“There's more money to be made in selling corn and soybeans,” he said, referring to ag companies. “With oats, you don't have to keep buying seed every year because it's not hybrid and it's not transgenic. It's much less lucrative.”

He’d like to see ISU prioritize research of oats and other small grains because of the benefits to soil health and water quality. 

Glen Ritchie, who started as ISU’s Agronomy Department chair in July, said he knows there is renewed interest in oats among Iowa farmers and that might affect research priorities. 

“We’re always looking for opportunities to provide the best value we can to the agricultural community in Iowa,” he said. “Oats are part of the discussions we’re having on that.” 

He’s seen it happen

Martin Larsen dipped his toe into small-grains farming in 2018, planting oats on a small swath of his farm near Byron, Minnesota. He was curious. Would his combine work for oat harvest? Could he get at least 38 pounds per bushel – the minimum threshold for food-grade oats? 

The answers were yes and yes. 

“I ramped up from there to the point I have a full three-crop rotation on 1,400 acres,” he said. 

Larsen has even invested in specialized equipment, including a header for his combine that strips the seeds from the top of the oat plant rather than running the whole stalk through the machine. This speeds harvest and keeps the stalk in place to reduce erosion.  

Other farmers want to know whether Larsen is making money from oats. 

“It’s always the thing we hear,” he said. “Soybeans, especially, can see an up to 10% yield bump because you’ve broken up the crop rotation.” 

Glyphosate-resistant water hemp vexes every Midwest corn farmer. When the weed wants to make its move in late spring, oats already have a lush green cover and the water hemp can’t compete. That means less weed pressure during the next corn round and less pesticide he has to apply, Larsen said. 

By planting red clover with the oats, the clover provides nitrogen to the soil, which feeds future corn crops with reduced fertilizer costs, he said. 

“So you really start to put all this together and it’s looking like the right thing for my farm,” he said. 

It’s also the right thing for protecting water quality, said Larsen, who is a conservation and feed lot technician for the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has asked Minnesota to develop a plan for reducing nitrate pollution to groundwater in southeastern Minnesota’s Driftless region. 

Nitrate in drinking water not only can cause blue baby syndrome, but studies – including some done in Iowa – show a link between ingesting nitrate from drinking water and cancers including colorectal, thyroid, bladder and ovarian. 

“We have to raise something different than corn and soybeans or raise corn and soybeans differently if we’re going to affect nitrates,” Larsen said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of data points of groundwater samples below oats compared to corn and soybeans, and it's black and white that oats will reduce nitrates in groundwater.”

Tests of groundwater under Larsen’s oat acres show up to 60% less nitrate than under corn acres. 

Farmers band together

While running a grocery store in Latimer for eight years, Anne and Landon Plagge were always thinking about what customers wanted to buy. 

“We were on vacation in Europe and we saw the proliferation of oat products on the shelves there,” Landon Plagge said. “Our (U.S.) consumer patterns tend to mirror that.”

The global market for oat milk was valued at more than $2 billion in 2020 and is projected to climb through at least 2028, especially with new shelf-stable milk. Beyond oat milk, there is oat flour for people trying to avoid gluten, and oatmeal boosted with flax and chia for people trying to get more protein. 

Plagge decided he wanted to grow oats for the segment of the U.S. population that wants an allergen-free, pesticide-free product. Grain Millers processes oats in St. Ansgar, Iowa, near the Minnesota border, but they grind wheat and barley, too, so the oats can’t be completely free of allergens, Plagge said. 

He recruited about 70 farmers, mostly from Iowa and Minnesota, to invest in Green Acres Milling, a $55 million oat-processing plant in Albert Lea, Minnesota. The plant, scheduled to open next year, eventually will process 3 million bushels of oats a year. This equates to about 60,000 acres of oats within three years, Plagge said. 

“They put their own cash into making the mill a reality,” Plagge said of the investors – including Larsen – who will get a premium price for the oats they sell to Green Acres. The mill requires oat growers to use a cover crop and to grow oats as part of a rotation with other crops.  

“That gives us the control of the raw materials supply coming in so we can provide a sustainably-produced oat with a cover crop for our brands and a diverse rotation for our brands,” Plagge said.

Who’s buying? 

While Quaker is several generations removed from its 1870’s origin in Ravenna, Ohio, Seven Sundays founders Hannah and Brady Barnstable sold their first bag of muesli – like granola, but healthier – at a Minneapolis farmers market in 2011. 

“We love oats,” Brady Barnstable said. “We think they are a huge unlock to change the agricultural landscape in the Midwest.”

Seven Sundays makes cereal and granola without dyes, artificial colors, allergens or refined sugars. They also buy only non-GMO crops grown without glyphosate. Their products, like Wildberry Protein Oats, have muscled their way onto grocery shelves, including at Midwest Costco stores. 

“We’ve been invited to the Costco Midwest managers meetings in the Chicago area to give presentations on what we’re doing in our supply chain to benefit soil health,” Barnstable said. But Costco wouldn’t stock Seven Sundays just for environmental brownie points, he said. “The decisions are driven by sales. Is it resonating with their shoppers? For Seven Sundays, it is.” 

Seven Sundays originally bought all its oats from Whole Grain Milling, in Welcome, Minnesota, but as they sold more muesli and cereal, Seven Sundays needed more suppliers, including some from Canada. By purchasing American oats, the company could avoid increased freight costs and skip tariff fears.  

“Our goal is to source as close to home as possible for all our ingredients,” Barnstable said. “I have heard that this new mill will have the capacity to provide us and many other customers with the oats we need to fill our full demand.”

Public push for sustainable products

But what about Quaker? The company and its parent, PepsiCo Inc., did not respond to several attempts to seek comment for this story. Just like Quaker doesn’t advertise what makes that sweet smell in Cedar Rapids, the firm isn’t saying exactly what factors into their oat sourcing. 

But we know price and availability of supplies are key drivers, according to PepsiCo’s 2024 Annual Report.

“Risk to our supply of certain raw materials is mitigated through purchases from multiple geographies and suppliers,” the report stated. 

Companies face pressure from consumers – particularly Millennials and Gen Z – who increasingly want to buy products that are good for people and the planet. A 2024 survey by PwC showed consumers are willing to spend almost 10% more for sustainably-sourced or produced goods.

PepsiCo and Cargill announced in July they will partner with Practical Farmers of Iowa to advance regenerative farming practices across 240,000 acres in Iowa. Farmers who sell their corn to Cargill – which produces ingredients for PepsiCo’s family of companies – will have access to advice, technical resources and incentive payments to “support their transition to regenerative practices,” the companies said in a joint news release. 

Cargill and PepsiCo want to drive adoption of regenerative practices on 10 million acres by 2030, the news release said.  

News like this brings equal parts frustration and hope for Larsen, the Minnesota oat farmer waiting to hear back from Quaker about the May oat shipment. “It seems like buying oats from their backyard would fit their narrative.” 

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

International Paper’s departure creates water challenges, opportunities

by Mary Landers, The Current
August 27, 2025

After guzzling more than 12.5 billion gallons of water just last year from the Floridan aquifer and the Savannah River to produce its paper products in Savannah and Riceboro, International Paper announced last week that both plants will be shuttered by October. Turning off those giant taps will take pressure off the overstressed Floridan aquifer, but for Savannah, the loss of a big surface water customer could mean rising costs for remaining customers, including residential ones.

About half of the water used at International Paper's Savannah plant comes from the Savannah River. The City of Savannah processes it at the Industrial & Domestic surface water treatment plant -- the only such facility in Coastal Georgia -- and sells it directly to big industrial users at a rate that covers its production costs. When the city loses a big customer, the costs shift to the remaining buyers.

And IP was a big customer. Last year the I&D plant produced an average of 42.5 million gallons of water a day. International Paper's Savannah plant used about 30% of that, 12.8 million gallons a day, so it paid 30% of the cost of running the plant, about $3.6 million, the most recent audit of the city's Industrial and Domestic water supply fund shows.

Without IP or another company taking its place, the facility won't need to process so much water. But the city won't save much money on reduced production because most of the plant's operating costs are fixed.

"You got to have the same number of operators," said John Sawyer, who managed the I&D plant and later headed up the city's water supply system before he retired in 2019. "That's a 24/7 operation. You got to pull the same maintenance on it. You got to do the same reports, the same testing. So all your other costs are essentially fixed. So it costs, with the exception of additional electricity and chemicals, it costs the same thing to produce 60 million gallons a day as it does to produce 20 million."

The remaining I&D direct customers typically have had to ante up to keep I&D running. That's what happened in the late 1990s when Stone Container shut down. It was using close to half the surface water the city processed, Sawyer recalled.

"Before Stone Container went down, the cost of water was somewhere in the $350 per million gallon range, something like that," he said. "Okay, as soon as Stone Container went down, the cost of water went to between $650 and $700 a million (gallons). That's what everybody was paying. So however much you use, you were paying almost double." The crisis lasted about 18 months, until the plant re-opened as Smurfit-Stone Container.

The surface water plant's other industrial customers in 2024 were BASF Catalysts, Savannah Acid, Savannah Foods, Arizona Chemical, and "Weyerhaeuser," a former name of the Port Wentworth pulp mill that International Paper operated under its Global Cellulose Fibers business and is selling to AIP. A city ordinance prescribes that the plant's customers cover its costs.

"On the one hand, that may sound fine -- 'well, it's just the industry's bad,'" Sawyer said. "But if the industries can't absorb that, if you're not real careful, you could find yourself with a domino effect."

Costs increases in Savannah could drive companies to favor other locations, he said.

"They compete with one another throughout the corporation," Sawyer said. That's true in IP's case where the closure of the Savannah and Liberty plants is coupled with an increased investment in its Selma, Alabama, location.

The City of Savannah itself is also one of the I&D plant's direct customers, buying an average of 11.3 million gallons of water a day from its own surface water treatment plant. The city then sells that water to other municipalities and counties and to its residents to recoup the cost of its production. In this way, the loss of water revenue from IP could increase residential rates.

In an interview with The Current on Friday, Savannah Mayor Van Johnson said city officials were grappling with the ramifications of losing one of its biggest customers for water. That was still the case Tuesday.

"City staff are assessing the impact of International Paper’s closure on our utility system," spokesman Josh Peacock wrote in response to an inquiry about water costs from The Current. "When the pertinent details are understood, the City will provide an update to the public when appropriate."

More water to share?

Together, the soon-to-be-shuttered Liberty County and Savannah IP plants use more than 22 million gallons of Floridan aquifer water a day. Both plants are among the largest groundwater users on the coast. Both have their own water withdrawal permits. And both sit in counties where groundwater use is fraught.

The Floridan aquifer is one of the most productive sources of groundwater in the world. But it has its limits. Heavy pumping in Savannah, largely from IP and its predecessors, reduced pressure in the aquifer and allowed salt water to begin seeping into existing wells on Hilton Head Island. That triggered stricter state regulations on groundwater pumping. In Chatham County, part of the state-designated "red zone," big users including IP have reduced their use of the Floridan aquifer over the last decade or so. In Liberty County, part of the "yellow zone," Floridan aquifer withdrawals have been restricted.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/0Tx6P/embed.js

IP's departure could allow thirsty communities to increase their water resources cheaply, but only if no new paper mill took over IP's permits and state regulators were willing to re-allocate the water IP was using.

"Our county governments in the yellow and red zone need to get their P's and Q's together and start applying for that allocation," said Phil Odom, a Liberty County representative on the Coastal Georgia Regional Water Planning Council.

When St. Marys Gilman/Durango paper mill closed in the early 2000s, Odom recalled, other permit holders in Camden County filed to increase the amount of water they could pump.

"It's like, if you can show a need, then you can get reallocated," he said.

But Sawyer, who represents Effingham on the Coastal Georgia Regional Water Planning Commission, would prefer to see the water stay in the ground.

"I don't know what they're going to do with IP's groundwater," Sawyer said. "But with the problems that we know we have in the aquifer today, and all of the efforts everybody has put in, to go out now and basically just bail out everybody that is making the efforts to save groundwater would be a travesty. Because you're just spitting on everything that everybody's done and all the money that's been put out there."

He allowed there could be an unusual circumstance where an increase in a permit would be justifiable. Tybee, where there are no easy alternatives to groundwater, is one example. But he doesn't want to see the groundwater spent.

"They need to just keep it in bank," he said.

Regulators will weigh in eventually. Large permit holders in the red zone had been expecting additional permit reductions in 2027.

"EPD is in the process of developing an updated strategy for groundwater withdrawal permitting in preparation for the 2027 reissuance of coastal groundwater withdrawal permits," EPD spokeswoman Katie Bloomfield said. "EPD does not currently have any proposals for future groundwater withdrawal permit limits. Any such proposals will be developed and considered through the strategy update process."

Spurred by the Bryan County Hyundai plant and the intense development associated with it, plans are already underway to increase the treatment of surface water in the Savannah area. The bulk of a $501 million water infrastructure package approved by the state legislature in March is headed to Effingham, to fund a new surface water treatment plant there. Savannah is updating the I&D plant.

"The $146,000,000 Georgia Fund loan will finance updating the Industrial and Domestic Water Plant, repairing the raw water pipeline, and constructing an elevated storage tank and pump stations," the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority said Tuesday in announcing the loan. "Due to unprecedented industrial and residential development, the demand for water has significantly increased and continued growth is anticipated."

Stress off the aquifer

Geology professor Jim Reichard expects to be able to see the effects of the IP wells shutting down. It happened before when the Durango (Gilman) paper mill shut down more than 20 years ago and water flowed to the surface nearby.

"When they shut down the ones down in St. Marys, there was a pretty immediate rebound in head, and we start getting artesian leakage in Cumberland," said Reichard, a professor of geology at Georgia Southern University who researches groundwater flow in aquifer systems.

This time he'll be looking on a Liberty County island.

"I work in St. Catherines, just within the edge of the cone of depression, and one of the Floridan wells I have been monitoring only needs to climb another seven feet or five feet before we'd have it at the surface again," he said. "So there may be enough to tip the balance, and we may see some artesian conditions in places that for decades we haven't seen."

He'll also be monitoring online data from the U.S. Geological Service about water supply wells in the region. (See this document for Reichard's links to wells to monitor.)

"They've got that whole network of wells throughout the coastal area, and that head should show up right away," he said. "I'll be looking at that when they when it happens."

From a hydrologic point of view the combined total of 20 million gallons a day is going to make a difference, Reichard said. "Yeah, it's going to help the state's efforts in the red zone," he said.

The aquifer's recovery could have big benefits for the ecology of the area, Ogeechee Riverkeeper Damon Mullis said. As Reichard anticipates, a healthy aquifer could allow groundwater to seep to the surface as it did before so many wells were drilled. That water that flows to the surface can supplement wetlands, including the salt marsh, and alter water temperature, Mullis said.

"Think about how fresh water input is so important for oyster reefs and Spartina grass," he said. "So there definitely could be some some environmental benefits if we allow the aquifer to continue to recover. This is a great opportunity to do that with some of this water budget it looks like we might get back."

The Ogeechee Riverkeeper, like the Savannah Riverkeeper, continues to advocate for prioritizing the use of the relatively pristine aquifer as drinking water and shifting industry to surface water. Aquifers protect water from pollutants like fertilizers and sewage spills that plague surface water.

"You know, use the aquifer for drinking and human uses and put industry on the surface water," Mullis said. "If we could do that, in addition to, you know, setting it up where the aquifer continues to recover, as it has done since 2006, I think that's a win-win for human health, water supply and the environment."

This article first appeared on The Current and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

‘They broke us down’: New Orleans teachers, fired after Katrina, reflect on lives upended

by Michelle Liu and Safura Syed, Verite News New Orleans
August 29, 2025

When Billie Dolce heard a storm was coming in August 2005, she gathered up the papers she thought she would need for the upcoming school year — learning plans tailored for her special education students at Colton Middle School on St. Claude Avenue, and her classroom attendance rolls. 

But she never had a chance to take roll call. Hurricane Katrina and the flooding caused by the failure of the federal levee system devastated the city, shutting down New Orleans schools and scattering students, teachers and their families. Months later, the Orleans Parish School Board fired Dolce and all 7,500 other public school employees, and Dolce never taught again at Colton. The papers she had safeguarded from the hurricane sat among her belongings for the next 20 years, until her husband finally burned them in their backyard this summer.

The firings signaled a drastic shift for public education in the city — and for the educators who made up its workforce. In the months following the storm, the state of Louisiana would take over most of New Orleans’ public school district, rebuilding and reshaping it into what would eventually become the country’s first all-charter school system. 

Teachers like Dolce looked on as the schools that had long anchored the city’s neighborhoods, and the identities of the city’s people, changed names and changed hands. The charter system did away with attendance zones, sending children to schools outside of their own neighborhoods. Schools were once under a traditional accountability system overseen by publicly elected school board officials. Now, unelected, nonprofit charter boards made decisions for individual schools.

“They broke us down,” said Dolce, now 73. “Everything. Not just Katrina's damage to homes and lives, but people's careers, their idea of how they wanted to plan.”

Those who supported the new system cited the poor pre-Katrina performance of the more than 100 city schools that were subsequently moved under state control, along with the school district’s troubled finances, as reasons for the takeover, or “reform,” as they called it.

In the following years, the reformers pointed to sustained “gains in a wide range of student outcomes,” including better test scores and college entry rates, as signs of their success.

Still, the mass terminations had consequences, veteran educators and community leaders say: for the city’s Black middle class, for its teachers union, and for the classroom experiences of its students. Seasoned educators walked away from their careers in New Orleans, feeling disempowered by the reforms, which effectively dismantled the labor power of teachers in the city. The makeup of the city’s educators became whiter and younger, with programs like Teach for America bringing in teachers with less experience, often fresh out of college. 

“It was devastating,” said Beverly Wright, an environmental justice scholar whose uncle was a retired teacher at the time of the storm. “It was destabilizing for the whole community. For New Orleans in particular, it literally lit a match to the middle class of this city. … So much of the wealth that we had came out of working in the public school system.”

Now, two decades after the storm, Verite News spoke with more than a dozen educators to understand how the firings shaped their lives.

Dolce was the department chair for special ed at Colton, where she had worked for three decades. She was the kind of teacher who recognized the needs of her students and worked to fulfill them. She decorated her classroom with abandon, incorporated washboards and clothing lines into lessons about the water cycle, and brought in pomegranates and kiwis for children who’d never tried them before.

She was following in the footsteps of generations of Black teachers in the city. The city’s schools and educators reflected how the city’s Black communities had valued and championed education since the Jim Crow era, said the Rev. Brenda Square, who directed the archives and library at the Amistad Research Center at the time of the storm and who later worked to document city’s shift to charter schools. While some New Orleans schools still bore the names of wealthy 19th century slave owners and segregationists, others were named for Black educators and community leaders who had advocated for schools and students, like Joseph Hardin and Alfred Lawless. 

“We had generations of people who were denied the opportunity to go to school to be educated. It was illegal to teach our ancestors to read and write. So education was our opportunity,” said Square, who is Black.

Teaching also served as a steady middle-class job in a city where such jobs could be hard to come by, with a salary that could help buy a house in Gentilly or New Orleans East and put money back into the local economy. By the 2004-2005 school year, teachers made an average of $38,175, according to The Times-Picayune, or about $63,000 in today’s dollars. 

Barbara Shelby, a former school psychologist for the district who now works with Wright at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, said the city’s homegrown, veteran teachers were unique in the way they cared for their students. 

“Each school was like a family, and they nurtured the kids for generations,” Shelby said. “It wasn’t just a job. It was a calling. I mean, they put their whole heart and soul, their blood, sweat and tears into it.”

Grace Lomba worked as a teacher at Alfred Lawless for 30 years and a guidance counselor at Frederick Douglass High School for eight. Inspired by her own high school guidance counselor, Lomba said she wanted to pass on her good experiences to the next generation. 

“They just felt that they could really talk to me about anything, because they knew that whatever we talked about was private,” Lomba said. “We took our kids under our wings, and they trusted us, we trusted them.”

After the storm, Lomba retired. She missed friends and family who had left the city, she said, but most of all, she missed her students. 

One of Lomba’s former students, Valda Ridgley, remembers Lomba being “the best teacher ever.” Ridgley, originally from Chicago but with ancestral roots in Louisiana, attended Alfred Lawless Junior High for the two years she lived in New Orleans, between 1978 and 1980. She was enrolled in Lomba’s 7th grade honors English class. Ridgley said Lomba even took her to Catholic church after Ridgley, a Baptist, said she wanted to go to church with her teacher. 

The two have stayed in touch over the decades, supporting each other through illnesses and the deaths of loved ones. Even though it’s been 47 years since Ridgley was in the 7th grade, she said she will always think of Lomba as her English teacher. 

“She didn't talk at you, like, ‘I'm the teacher, you're the student, you listen.’ She actually talked to us and listened to what we had to say,” Ridgley said. “As the young folks say today, she met us where we were. She didn't talk to us like we were imbeciles. She talked to us like we had some sense.”

The shared identities between students and teachers before Katrina — being Black and from New Orleans — helped uplift kids and remind them that they were capable, Wright said. “I always knew that I could become a teacher,” Wright said, because she only had Black teachers growing up. 

By 2005, over 70% of New Orleans public school teachers were Black. Their organizational power was concentrated in their politically influential union, the United Teachers of New Orleans. UTNO’s collective bargaining agreements with the district allowed teachers to negotiate higher salaries and better benefits. The school district also had a transparent pay scale and protections that allowed teachers to stay in their careers for decades, unlike the relatively short-term placements that later became common through Teach for America. 

Not everyone saw that power, and those protections, as a net positive. A common line of criticism by the reformers was that the union protected bad teachers along with the good, limiting student and district progress.

Leslie Jacobs, a former member of both the Orleans Parish School board and the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, is often credited as one of the main architects of the New Orleans education-reform model. After Katrina, she was a hugely influential advocate of charter school expansion, and a critic of the local teachers union. 

In an interview, Jacobs told Verite News that before Katrina, teachers were caught in a failed system. Dismantling the collective bargaining agreement, a consequence of the turn to the all-charter system, wasn’t an intentional goal of the movement, Jacobs said, and the new system never prevented teachers from unionizing within charter schools. 

“It’s a true statement that I’ve never been a fan of collective bargaining, but I’m not banging on the table speaking against it,” Jacobs said. 

Jacobs said well-run schools don’t give teachers cause to unionize, because their grievances can be easily remedied by principals, who have more power under charter schools than traditionally run schools. In recent years, teachers within a handful of charter schools have voted to unionize, despite strong pushback from charter leadership. 

Wright, and many educators, see the restructuring, which shifted power away from elected officials, differently. 

“They were really talking about Black power, the power over the school board, the power over the city,” Wright said. 

Reformers also pointed to the school district’s financial woes and its management problems, along with the low academic outcomes of many of its schools, as indicators that the system needed drastic changes. 

And in the years leading up to the storm, the district faced increasing scrutiny, with the FBI opening a branch within the Orleans Parish School Board offices to investigate bribery charges between contractors and school board officials, leading to dozens of indictments and convictions.

Before Katrina, the state’s Recovery School District, established by the legislature in 2003, had already taken over a handful of the city’s underperforming schools, tasking charter operations to run them.

After the storm, with the city’s schools effectively shut down, the state moved rapidly. Despite pushback from the teachers union and New Orleans lawmakers — who pointed out that parents displaced by the storm had no say in the matter — in November 2005, at the urging of Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the legislature passed a measure enabling a state takeover. 

The new law broadened the definition of what was considered a failing school, expanding it to include any school with performance scores below state average — but applied that new definition only to Orleans Parish schools. Shortly after, the Recovery School District took over 102 out of 117 city schools. By the end of the same month, New Orleans school board officials said that as a result, they would have to fire and terminate health insurance for 7,500 furloughed workers.

Teachers, like other residents of the city, had scattered across the country when the storm hit. Some remembered received letters informing them of their terminations. Others found out about the dissolution of the school system on the news, watching as officials dismissed thousands of New Orleans educators on television. 

“They say terminated, I say fired,” said Linda Pichon, a longtime paraprofessional at Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary.

With the loss of their jobs came the loss of health care and income. Family members who relied on that income and coverage suffered, too. 

Jackie Brown-Cockerham was in a Texas hospital when she found out she’d lost her job. She was there with her daughter, who was having stomach pains, but the insurance card that she had wasn’t working because she was no longer recognized as an employee. “OK, so what am I supposed to do for my child?” Brown-Cockerham remembered thinking as her daughter sat waiting for care. 

Teachers who stayed saw their coworkers leave the city for good, often finding better-paying jobs in the places where they’d evacuated, west to Texas and east to Atlanta. Still, some educators chose to work for the Recovery School District, taking a test mandated by the district’s superintendent to get rehired.

Yvonne Guice, who had taught pre-K at Crocker before the storm, was one of those who returned in 2006. Now, Guice found herself with 27 preschoolers in one classroom, trying to balance lesson plans with the needs of students who had lived through the storm. When it rained, the children gathered around Guice and cried. They wouldn’t let her turn off the lights during naptime. 

“You don’t know what they went through, you don’t know what happened, and so you just took it as it came,” Guice said.

By the fall of 2007, about half of the fired New Orleans teachers had returned to work in Louisiana public schools — in Orleans Parish and elsewhere, according to the Education Research Alliance. By 2013, just 22% of the fired teachers were still teaching in New Orleans, with an attrition rate higher than other districts affected by the hurricane.

Educators said that the leaders of charter school reform had villainized teachers, often laying the blame on them for a lack of resources and the district’s shortcomings.

“The least popular cause in town right now must be the resistance of some teachers and their union to the chartering of public schools,” declared James Gill in a November 2005 column for the Times-Picayune. 

“Indeed, there is so little sympathy for teachers who feel hard done-by that they might be well advised to pipe down,” Gill wrote. “After all, some of them must share responsibility for the shortcomings of a system that has long cried out for the kind of radical overhaul now in the offing.” (Gill died in 2024.)

“Every ill that the system was going through was the teachers’ fault,” said Cynthia Jordan, who taught at William O. Rodgers and John A. Shaw elementaries before the storm and later worked for the RSD.

Charter advocates argued that the job security and protections offered to teachers by the union and district didn’t help students. “At a charter, we all have to perform to keep our jobs,” said Sharon Clark, the director and principal of Sophie B. Wright High School in a 2012 report. “If teachers at Wright do not perform, I can free up their future to do something else.”

A couple weeks after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, the New Orleans school board held a meeting in Baton Rouge, where several board members attempted to replace then-superintendent Ora Watson with Bill Roberti, one of the consultants with the New York firm Alvarez and Marsal, which had been brought on to rectify the district’s financial woes before the storm.

The vote was split down racial lines, with the board’s three Black members defeating the effort that day. One of those members, the Rev. Torin Sanders, told the Times-Picayune that the effort, which would’ve demoted Watson, who is Black, in favor of Roberti, who is white, was “clearly” racially motivated. Both he and Watson have suggested state education superintendent Cecil Picard was behind the move. (Picard died in 2007.)

“The state superintendent couldn’t stand me,” Watson said in an interview. “He wanted me out of there because he wanted his plan in.”

The meeting alarmed some of the board’s observers — including a group of principals and their attorney, Willie Zanders, who huddled afterward to talk about what had just happened. That day, the school board also voted to place all district employees on disaster leave. Zanders and the principals began to sense a shift in power.

“So we're meeting at the coffee shop, and we're discussing this, and the leaders of the principal group said, ‘We need to consider going to court to stop this,’” Zanders recalled.

Zanders’ and the principals’ challenge evolved into a yearslong court fight on behalf of all 7,500 fired employees — including more than 4,000 teachers, along with paraprofessionals, counselors, bus drivers, and others — over whether their firings had been legal.

In 2012, a district court ruled in favor of the teachers, finding that the school board had wrongly terminated them. An appeals court again sided with the educators, with damages estimated at $1.5 billion, a figure that could have bankrupted the district. The school board appealed the case up to the state’s highest court, which ruled against the teachers, and the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately refused to hear the case in 2015.

“I think this whole charter school transition has avoided putting the microscope on human lives that have been impacted and affected by this drive for change,” Zanders said in an interview, reflecting on the case.

Before the storm, it wasn’t uncommon for teachers to have personal connections with their students. Living in the same neighborhoods, they might have known a student’s aunt or parent before the child came into their classroom — or even to have taught that parent. 

“There was a standard you expected of your teacher, and there was a standard your teacher expected of you,” Jordan said. “I lived in the community with my students.”

Educators said that the loss of district schools disrupted the communal and economic fabric of Black neighborhoods, and took power away from citizens living in them. 

Now, decisions about how schools are run are determined by charter operators, each run by a private board unimpeded by the democratic process. For formerly unionized teachers, that amounts to less accountability over administrators. 

“We have no control over charter schools,” Wright said. “The people on the board, half of us don't know who they are, but that system has been removed from us, and our children are suffering because of the lack of participation of Black people in the system.”

Last year, OPSB discussed running more direct-run schools when it took over the failing Lafayette Academy, a charter school, to open the public district-run Leah Chase School — the first new traditional school it had opened since the storm. But more recently, the current New Orleans public schools superintendent expressed caution against opening more schools, given the district’s decreasing enrollment numbers and financial difficulties. 

Most of the educators Verite News spoke with expressed deep distrust towards charter schools and their leadership hierarchies, even if they returned to work in the new system. 

Pichon, a longtime paraprofessional, was first recruited into the job by a principal when she was vice-president of the parent-teachers organization for her children’s school, Thomas Alva Edison Elementary. She spent the next three decades working mostly at Crocker. Pichon was wary of the newcomers, people who hadn’t spent their lives teaching. In the turmoil following the storm, she chose not to return to the classroom.

“Drop of a hat, they’ll let you go,” Pichon said.

The splintered system also made it hard for the United Teachers of New Orleans to reorganize following the storm. Instead of negotiating contracts with one authority, OPSB, they now have to unionize and negotiate under dozens of different charter operators. UTNO’s presence, which once defined the district, is now limited to five unionized schools. 

Some educators decided to stay with UTNO, even without a contract, to retain certain union benefits. After the storm, the American Federation of Teachers — the national organization under which UTNO organized — tried to rebuild the union and recruit teachers. Lomba worked with the union to try to get veteran teachers to rejoin the union, but organizing was “a big task, because most of our people were not here,” she said.

Other educators said that without the power of a union backing them during disputes, they were hesitant to go back into the classroom. 

Dolce had always tried to advocate for her students and her colleagues, even when it meant pushing back against administrative decisions. After the storm, she heard from other teachers who had returned to the classroom and found that they could now be fired for speaking up.

“I knew I had not gone back for a reason, because I don't want ‘fired’ to be on my legacy,” Dolce said.

Dolce retired after Katrina, unwilling to go through the hurdles of getting hired by the Recovery School District, though she had planned to keep teaching for several more years. Still, she stayed busy — she tutored, phone-banked for the union and wrote individualized education plans for a friend who was trying to reopen Priestley Junior High, doling out her expertise when asked. She took part in the class-action lawsuit, attending court proceedings.

But she found it hard to let go of Colton. After officials finished renovating the school in 2013, Dolce wanted to see how it had changed, so she contacted administrators with the charter network KIPP, which now runs a school — KIPP Leadership — at the old Colton building. They agreed to let her walk around. As she made her way down the familiar halls, trailed by an employee, Dolce took notice of the upgrades, like touchscreen whiteboards and nicer desks. Finally, Dolce reached her old classroom, where the walls were freshly painted and the teacher’s desk was in a different spot.

She felt a sudden impulse to put her initials somewhere, as if she were one of her own students. Maybe under the ledge of the board, where no one would notice. “But I didn’t do it,” Dolce said. Instead, she turned around and walked away.

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

-30-