In this issue of The Weekly Reveal:

• How calling the police for help with homelessness can entangle people in a criminal justice cycle that leads them back to the streets – or worse.

• Elon Musk makes a bid for Twitter because he’s a “free speech absolutist,” but previous Reveal investigations into Tesla and his reactions to them make us think otherwise.

• Join us on Reddit on Earth Day for an “Ask Me Anything” with reporter Will Evans.

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This Week on Reveal: How Living Outside Makes You a Police Target

Cities have long turned to police as the answer to make homelessness disappear. On this week’s Reveal, we go to Portland, Oregon, where unhoused people made up at most 2% of the population in recent years, but over the same time, they accounted for nearly half of all arrests.

• In 2020, more individuals were living outside than were staying in actual homeless shelters. The government first started collecting this data 14 years ago.

• Reveal looked at six major West Coast cities and found that people living on the streets are consistently more likely to be arrested than their neighbors who live in houses, even though those arrests are less likely to be for serious crimes.

Portland is one of 100 U.S. cities that has laws against lying down or sleeping in public places, according to the National Homelessness Law Center. And recent data shows the city receives calls about unhoused people an average of at least 80 times a day.

You’ll hear from reporter Melissa Lewis, who follows one man’s journey through the criminal justice system as he tries to disentangle himself from arrest warrants that keep accumulating. She talks with locals who are trying to build trust and connection with their houseless neighbors and others who are tired of seeing tents and call the police for help. And we learn the commitment that it takes to move off the street, one person at a time.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in December 2021.

🎧 Listen to Handcuffed and Unhoused online or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the News

🔷 “I made an offer.” It’s been a whirlwind April if you’ve been keeping up with the relationship between Twitter and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. First, he disclosed on April 4 a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder at the time. The next day, Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, announced Musk was appointed to the board of directors. By April 9, Musk had changed his mind about joining the board. No reason was given, but Agrawal said in a tweet Sunday that he believed it was “for the best.” Fast forward to this week, Musk on Wednesday made a bid to purchase Twitter at $54.20 per share, or about $43 billion, saying in a letter to Twitter’s board chairman that he believed in the company’s “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe,” and that’s why it needs to be transformed as a private company. 

But as this Associated Press explainer asks, what is Musk really doing as he guns for Twitter? He touts himself a “free speech absolutist,” but is he really?

In 2018, Musk issued a series of tweets about the entire journalism industry shortly after a Reveal investigation found Tesla prioritized style and speed over safety in its electric car factory, undercounted injuries and ignored the concerns of its own safety professionals. 

• Former safety professionals said that Musk’s distaste for the color yellow and beeping forklifts led to cutting back on those standard safety signals.

Musk and Tesla responded to our findings by calling us an extremist organization, rich kids in Berkeley and propaganda. Tesla was hit with a government investigation after our story published. We didn’t stop there and continued to report on Tesla through the pandemic, where workers told us the company risked lives by sending them to work in the shutdown. “How desperate are they that those cars are worth so many people’s lives?” said one paint department worker, who requested anonymity for fear of losing his job.

📄 Take a look back at more of our Tesla investigations. 
 

🔷 It’s Black Maternal Health Week. Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday convened a meeting with Cabinet secretaries and agency leaders to discuss the administration’s “whole-of-government approach to addressing maternal mortality and morbidity.” The White House also issued a presidential proclamation about the week, making it the second year it has done so.

In the United States, about 700 people die each year during pregnancy or in the year after, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of deaths for Black moms is three times higher than the rate for White moms. In 2020, as racial disparities in health came into the spotlight amid the pandemic, we dug into how the legacy of racism affects maternal health in the U.S. Listen to the episode on Reveal.
 

🔷 Spin from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: In his first shareholder letter as CEO, Jassy on Thursday said the company’s warehouse injury rates are “misunderstood” and there’s no “silver bullet” to fixing its numbers. We’ve been investigating Amazon’s workplace safety for years. Based on the company’s own internal records, we’ve found serious injury rates in its warehouses were more than double the national average for the warehousing industry. And, just as relevant, we’ve found that company executives profoundly misled lawmakers, the press and public about the injury crisis.

Reveal’s Will Evans says it’s not that complicated. Safety experts, regulators and former Amazon safety managers agree: The problem is Amazon is forcing its workers to work much too fast. If you fix that, you fix the problem. Until then, injury rates will continue to climb. Just this week, a new report shows the company’s injury rate jumped 20% in 2021.

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Do you have questions on climate change and corporate accountability?

Reveal’s Will Evans has led our reporting on Tesla and Amazon. Now, he’s focusing on how corporations are held accountable (or not) when it comes to climate change. His last two stories have included:

• How Amazon is drastically undercounting its carbon footprint

• How big-name companies like Google, Netflix and LinkedIn – which signed up to be climate leaders – were conspicuously absent from a climate action ad that urged the federal government to “ACT NOW” on the climate crisis

🗓️ If you have questions about his work or these areas of reporting, join us for an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit on Earth Day – Friday, April 22, at 1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT. Follow us on Reddit to make sure you don’t miss it.

Ending on a Good Note

🏆 ‘Mississippi Goddam’ Named Finalist for Peabody Award. The project was chosen as one of 60 nominees this year from nearly 1,300 entries.

🏆 ‘Into the COVID ICU’ Wins 2021 SABEW Best in Business Award in the Audio Category. The Best in Business Awards honor excellence in business journalism and attracted a record 1,277 entries from 194 news organizations.

🏆 ‘Handcuffed and Unhoused’ Wins Third Place in Audio Storytelling from Best of the West. “What I appreciated most about Reveal’s investigation into the policing of homelessness … was how effectively it humanized the people at the center of the problem,” one judge wrote.