A three-part Monitor series titled “Shots Fired,” that examined the clash between police who respond to calls for help and those in a mental health crisis, won a first-place award in the national Excellence in Health Care Journalism contest.
Written by reporter Teddy Rosenbluth, the series won in the Public Health category among small news outlets.
The annual awards will be given out by the Association of Health Care Journalists on April 30 in Austin, Texas.
The contest drew 439 entries from around the country with 14 winning first place awards.
“We were thrilled to see so many journalists continuing to produce sterling work in 2021, which was the grueling second year of the pandemic,” said Tony Leys, a Des Moines Register reporter and AHCJ board member. “Many pieces focused on COVID-19 concerns, but reporters also kept digging into the countless other vital areas of health care coverage.”
The “Shots Fired” series began following national scrutiny about police use of deadly force. Rosenbluth reviewed every police shooting in New Hampshire during the past 10 years and started to see a pattern – the person who was killed by officers was almost always in a mental health crisis.
At the same time, New Hampshire has an eroding mental health system where the number of available beds in the state’s only mental hospital are often filled for weeks. Those seeking help often sit in an emergency room for weeks waiting for treatment.
Rosenbluth found police had little training on how to de-escalate encounters with individuals in a mental health crisis. Even so, mental health-related calls often consume the vast majority of their time.
Rosenbluth meticulously documented how these two issues intersect in the state, often with deadly consequences.
Rosenbluth reviewed hundreds of pages of government records, interviewed family members, and spoke with police and mental health experts to determine why mental illness played a disproportionate role in deadly encounters. Most importantly, she tried to address how the problem could be improved for both those with a mental illness and police.
“After combing through the product of several public records requests, I determined that more than 60% of people shot and killed by New Hampshire police over the last decade had a mental illness – a statistic that had never been reported before,” Rosenbluth wrote in the contest entry. “Interviews with law enforcement, family members of victims and mental health advocates revealed that this statistic represents a breakdown of the state’s mental health system, which has failed to help people before they reach a point of crisis.”
Rosenbluth is one of two Report for America corps members currently working at the Monitor.
“We believe the series represents some of the very best reporting by the Monitor last year and it identified an issue of immense community-wide importance,” Monitor Editor Jonathan Van Fleet said.