"This is a human who is going to be homeless in two weeks.”

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Akron resident Amber Moreland and her sons were evicted in March despite the national eviction moratorium. Credit: Noor Hindi

Over the weekend, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri camped out on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in an overnight rally to demand President Joe Biden extend the federal moratorium on evictions. The pressure worked. On Tuesday, Biden renewed the eviction moratorium, which the federal government originally passed in 2020 to keep renters in their homes during the pandemic.

But the eviction moratorium might not be as ironclad as you think.

Over the last year, we’ve teamed with The Devil Strip ([link removed]) , a community-owned news co-op in Akron, Ohio, to understand whether evictions were continuing in the pandemic.

Reveal Investigative Fellow Noor Hindi spent months sitting in on the local eviction court and learned something surprising. Over the past year, evictions never stopped. Hindi reported the story for our episode this week ([link removed]) and also for a digital story exposing the reality ([link removed]) of renting amid the pandemic.

Here’s some of what she learned:
* Magistrate judges granted landlords the right to evict tenants, even when landlords didn’t follow the publicly stated rules and even when renters were the exact people the federal government was trying to prevent from being kicked onto the streets.
* Judges granted an average of nearly two evictions a day from April 2020 through March 2021. That’s a total of at least 665 evictions in the midst of the biggest public health emergency in a century.
* Judges granted at least 42% of the nearly 1,600 evictions that landlords requested over that 12-month period.

Read the full story ([link removed]) to understand how a health care worker like Amber Moreland could get evicted, even as everyone around her thought she’d be protected.

Born in Jordan, Hindi has lived in Akron since she was 3. She spent the last year in the Reveal Investigative Fellowship, which seeks to help diversify the ranks of investigative reporting and support local journalism. In addition to being a reporter, Hindi is also a poet. During the fellowship, she landed a book deal for her first poetry collection, “Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow,” with Haymarket Books. She talks here about the difficulty of reporting about housing in Ohio and how her journalism influences her poetry.

What did it feel like to sit through over 100 eviction hearings?

My first few days in eviction court, I didn't know what was happening. There was a lot of language that I wasn't familiar with – first cause of action, second cause of action, restitution – all these really complicated terms for simple things. I just was not familiar with the law. But eventually, I got more and more familiar with the procedures, and I was really sort of surprised. The pandemic was happening and there were distraught people in terrible conditions. They were either sick or getting laid off; everything was really unfamiliar and terrifying. And in the midst of that, I'm sitting in court and watching people get evicted, like one person after the next person after the next person. It was heartbreaking to see how the system could fail people again and again and again and again. And the justification was: This is the law.

What do you feel like you learned from reporting on all this?

I think that I learned about all of the ways bureaucratic systems, complicated language and reducing people to case numbers could be used to justify throwing people out of their homes. The court proceeds like a machine. This person is just a case number, like, 21-CVG-14563. It's super formal. It’s easy to forget that somebody’s life is at stake. But then there would be these really staggering interactions – someone would come to court and start crying or have a really long explanation. It would cause you to step back and remember again, “Oh, this is a human who is going to be homeless in two weeks.”

You’re also a poet. So does your reporting influence your poetry in any way?

It does in really big ways. The book that I started to work on this past year is actually related to housing and systems. While I was working on the eviction story for Reveal, that was when the forced evictions in Palestine were happening. There was this really interesting parallel of how little we recognize people's rights to be housed. Not just in small little Akron, Ohio, but internationally. So my second book is nonfiction dealing with the ways in which systems and laws reduce human lives into numbers and statistics.

Listen to the episode: The teen reporter, the evictions and the church ([link removed])

Read the story: Eviction moratoriums didn’t stop judges in one Ohio city from ousting hundreds from their homes ([link removed])


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** Meet the 16-year-old journalist who exposed Nazi connections to Kentucky police
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Last fall, Kentucky politics was upended by a bombshell investigative ([link removed]) report: While training officers, the Kentucky State Police had used a slideshow that quoted Adolf Hitler.

The reporters behind the story? Two teenagers working for the student news site of duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky: Satchel Walton and his younger brother, Cooper.

The brothers first learned about the slideshow from their dad, an attorney who was working on a case representing someone who had been shot by a police officer in eastern Kentucky. The legal team gathered the training slides that featured quotes from Hitler and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as part of the discovery in that case. When he saw the slides, Satchel immediately knew it was an important story.

This week’s Reveal episode ([link removed]) begins with their remarkable story. And I’d talked with Satchel last fall as he was working on his next investigation. Here’s some of what he told me:

“I thought that it needed to be out there and it needed to be out there quick. And so I said, ‘I can do that,’ ” says Satchel, speaking over Zoom from his family’s attic. “Louisville's been the center of protests about racial justice after Breonna Taylor was killed in March (2020). My thought was this was related to police training, the key part of which was that they were too aggressive and that they were racist in quoting Hitler and Lee.”

The brothers worked with a student editor and journalism teacher to report the story over two weeks. The hardest part was getting a response from the Kentucky State Police. That took “lots and lots of phone calls and emails” to get a comment, Satchel says. The Kentucky State Police said that the quotes were included for their “content and relevance” and that the slideshow had not been used since 2013.

After the Waltons’ reporting gained international attention, the Kentucky State Police commissioner resigned ([link removed]) . The governor’s office also launched a review ([link removed]) of all State Police training materials.

For his next story ([link removed]) , Satchel got some assistance from the Reveal Reporting Networks ([link removed]) , which among other things helps local reporters investigate law enforcement officers who are members of extremist groups on Facebook.

His story showed how a Kentucky law enforcement training video features a Nazi symbol in a clip produced by a neo-Nazi media company. To help with his reporting, we shared with Satchel information about specific Kentucky officers who have been involved with extremist groups online. “We could use that information to demonstrate that it's not just something that happens behind closed doors,” he says.

Satchel’s not sure whether he’ll go into a career in journalism – he has other interests, such as helping organize action around the climate crisis. But reporting these stories has felt important.

“I'm certainly dedicated to reporting the truth, to getting important information out to people,” Satchel says. “I also think having (President Donald) Trump, from when I was in sixth grade to now, talking about the ‘fake news media’ inspired me a bit to prove him wrong.”

Listen to the episode: The teen reporter, the evictions and the church ([link removed])
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This newsletter is written by Sarah Mirk. Drop her a line (mailto:[email protected]?subject=weekly%20reveal%20feedback) with feedback and ideas!

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