"Who's in the Ambulance," four-month, computer-assisted investigation, involved trusted public servants: paramedics and emergency medical technicians. While at KNXV-TV in Phoenix, we discovered dozens of paramedics who had lied about their criminal history on their applications, despite laws requiring disclosure. News 15 discovered they were getting away with it because the state wasn't bothering to check.
On the surface, our report appeared to be a simple relational database story. Instead, it ended up being an extended exercise in improvising computer investigations with imagination and persistence.
Our first challenge was finding a "criminal" database to run against the EMT/paramedic database I had obtained from Arizona Emergency Medical Services. Unfortunately, after nine months of trying, efforts to get the state's corrections and jail database weren't going anywhere.
We figured the next best place would be the courts. After we acquired the index for the Maricopa County Court on nine-track, NICAR processed it into a FoxPro database format on two CD-ROMs.
A paperful society
Having separated the criminal from the civil cases, we were still faced with other challenges. In the index, for example, the first, middle and last names were all in one field. Not understanding string functions, we used Excel to parse the million names, about 26,000 at a time. Once separated, we joined the databases by first and last name, which brought thousands of matches. Normally, one major identifier would help narrow the matches down, but the index did not include dates of birth.
So photographer Jon Taylor, associate producer Matt Goldberg and I literally read a thousand cases, checking not only dates of birth but also charges and outcomes. We could access some cases online, but many others were only available the old-fashioned way: in files or on microfilm. After two months we finally had pinpointed about 60 cases to begin working with.
Ready to go with the story? No way. All this work merely got us to the starting gate. We still needed to cull the great stories from the stack of cases, verify facts, make more records requests, and track down offenders and victims. Most daunting, we had to find the video and graphics to make it all great TV news.
Mining for gold
CAR is another tool in your bag of tricks to flesh out the best stories. And that's ultimately what this is about. You can compile the facts you want with CAR, but if you can't or won't take the time to mine that information for compelling stories - especially TV stories - why should your audience care?
While our print colleagues can rely on documents and phone interviews to bring these stories to life, we must also have video. We need people talking on camera, must conduct long, drawn-out stakeouts, and use graphics when the video just isn't there.
The emotion is what makes our medium unique. Without these elements, you won't have a compelling story.
Struggling to find a compelling criminal to convince our viewers that the problem was real, I learned a great lesson about CAR: Don't let all your hard work blind you. Be willing to walk away. Only by admitting this did I find our "story."
The original database we had was of certified paramedics and EMTs. The worst cases would probably no longer be certified and so wouldn't show up in the data. While this seems obvious now, I was so determined to find the story in "my" data that I ignored my instincts.
Interstate hideaway
A friendly source within the agency rescued me by suggesting I request a list of revoked certifications. With that data, we uncovered a paramedic - not on my list - who had a criminal history, lied about his past, and got certified. And he then went on to steal from patients. He violated his probation, left Arizona and got certified in Florida, where he stole from patients again. We later learned he lied on the Florida application as well. On top of that, we tracked him to California, where he was doing it all again.
We already had the hard facts from the CAR work. And now we had the compelling story to make people care, to convince people that the system needed repair, that no one was checking the backgrounds, that people were slipping through, and that people were being hurt. Because we went beyond the CAR, beyond just the facts, it prompted action. legislators announced they would address the issue in the next session. Those voices included Arizona's House Speaker, who had opposed fingerprint background checks for these workers in the past.
It's hard to spend this kind of time on a story, but you don't have to drop everything to do it. You have to work smarter and be organized. For us, what made the tedium worth it was that we were pretty damned sure our competitors would never put this kind of work into a project and what we'd end up with would stand out from the pack. And it did.
Chris Heinbaugh can be reached at cheinbaugh@aol.com