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This two-part series examined the often-deadly relationship between mental health crises and calls to 911 in New Mexico.

As the state increasingly embraced an alternative-response model that sent trained behavioral health professionals to the scenes of non-violent 911 calls, we found an alarming trend: Albuquerque police shootings hit an all-time high, and a growing number of the people they killed were visibly experiencing a mental health crisis.

This series was honored in 2024 in the prestigious Best of the West Journalism Contest.

Photograph: Nadav Soroker/Searchlight New Mexico

Juvenile injustice

This four-part series examines conditions inside New Mexico’s largest jail for kids - mandatory strip searches, peeing in bottles and calls for food that are met with a SWAT team.

This reporting, which published over the course of nearly a year, led to the ouster of the jail’s warden, as well as surprise inspections from the governing state agency (which found even more deplorable conditions, including cameras pointed directly at the kids’ toilets and showers).

The first story examines conditions inside the facility. For the second story, I embedded for months with a support group for the mothers of murderers and profiled their sons as well as the sons they had killed. The third story is a direct result of the detained children themselves; around the holidays, they mailed me handwritten letters explaining their carceral experience in detail. The fourth and final story is a look into how the children’s Christmas Day request for something as simple as food prompted a heavily-armed SWAT team response and the release of misinformation that accused them of rioting.

Killer cops: inside a 10-year push for reform and 350+ police killings

For this series, I created (from scratch, thanks to non-existent public records) a database of every police shooting in New Mexico for the past decade. I then analyzed them and found an alarming trend: In some years, as many as 40 percent of those killed by police were visibly experiencing a mental health crisis.

Just two weeks after my first story published, the New Mexico Attorney General filed charges against a cop who had killed an unarmed Black man over allegedly stealing one can of beer from a corner store. The move was the first of its kind in a decade and followed closely on the heels of my investigative reporting.

I then counted the dollars and cents. As America’s deadliest police force, the Albuquerque Police Department has been under federal oversight for a decade, costing taxpayers some $40 million. Yet for all the ink spilled over its high-profile, long-running consent decree, police killings are on the rise. I looked into why that’s happening — and who the court-appointed independent monitor is. What I found: The person calling APD’s balls and strikes is prone to making basic math errors, using faulty figures and coming to conclusions that don’t add up.

For years, I covered Buckeye, Arizona — the fastest-growing city in the nation, nestled on the exurban fringe of metro Phoenix. For all its ambition, though, I noticed city leaders did not have a plan. When I asked where the water would come from to fuel this development, I was met with a shrug.

In this three-part series, I examine the unique conundrum Buckeye finds itself in: The beneficiary of Phoenix’s explosive growth (and with it, its skyrocketing tax revenue), but without a drop to drink.

This crucial piece of accountability journalism predated the historic Climate Contingency Plan adopted by the Colorado River states and represents one of the most grounded and realistic looks at the human cost of explosive growth.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey