Nipping at TCSO's heels

The conviction of Robert Bates closes an intense first year for The Frontier

“We could take the picture in the office, which is messy... but hey, that’s journalism.” Ziva Branstetter, editor in chief of The Frontier, spoke to me over her shoulder as she hunted down her team for a photo. 

The small office in the 36 Degrees North building was indeed cluttered, but above the ibuprofen and Nutella stood numerous journalism awards. The medals amassed (including Pulitzer finalist nominations) were impressive, but the team’s true trophies—the resignation of disgraced Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz and a manslaughter conviction for his buddy, former reserve deputy Bob Bates—were absent. In just the first year of its existence, the online investigative news start-up has made quite an impact on Tulsa’s power structure. Through relentless reporting in the wake of Bates’s killing of unarmed suspect Eric Harris during a sting operation, Branstetter and company helped expose the cronyism and corruption that plagued TCSO under Glanz’s watch.

Before lending her ear to whistleblowers, Branstetter covered film for her junior high school paper. In college, she got a taste of the pen’s power with an exposé on disproportionate athletics spending. Her post-college gig at the Tulsa Tribune saw her lean into her investigative calling, with one of her pieces resulting in the firing of an abusive jailer. After the Tribune folded, she moved to the Tulsa World where she spent over two decades as the paper’s enterprise editor before leaving to start The Frontier at the behest of former World publisher Bobby Lorton.

“Bobby told me he wasn’t going to attempt this venture without me,” Branstetter said in her commanding, news anchor’s tone. She accepted, and culled a journalist’s dream team from the World’s roster.

Stalking the halls of 36 Degrees North, Branstetter introduced me to her colleagues.

Staff writer Kevin Canfield, longtime city and government reporter, sat in a meeting room hunched over a laptop. Creative director Cary Aspinwall, who shares the Pulitzer finalist distinction with Branstetter for their coverage of Clayton Lockett’s botched execution, was grabbing a salad from the kitchen.

“I told Dylan the photographer is here,” Aspinwall said to Branstetter. “And of course, he’s wearing a sweatshirt.”

Staff writer Dylan Goforth, the youngest of the team, has earned the right to lounge in a sweatshirt. After all, he first reported the Bates shooting; more significantly, he broke the bombshell that TCSO employees were pressured to falsify Bob Bates’s training records. 

Year One

On April 2, 2015, weeks before Lorton would publicly announce the launch of The Frontier, 73 year-old reserve deputy Bates shot and killed Eric Harris during a gun sting. Bates claimed he mistook his gun for his taser when he shot Harris at point blank range. 

The incident was captured on a deputy’s body cam, and included a jaw-dropping moment in which deputy Joseph Byars responded to Harris’s cries that he couldn’t breathe with “Fuck your breath.”

The shooting made national headlines and sparked a series of protests. It also raised serious questions over the reserve deputy program, which seemed to grant unqualified, wealthy donors such as Bates the chance to “buy a badge.” Branstetter and Goforth dug in and reported the unfolding scandal, along with World reporter Corey Jones. 

On April 14, Bates was charged with second-degree manslaughter. He pled not guilty. 

Three weeks into the story, Branstetter and Goforth, along with Aspinwall and Canfield, left the World for The Frontier, where they continued to report on the fallout from the shooting. 

One of The Frontier’s first stories, published on medium.com while the publication’s website was being built, brought to light a 2009 TCSO internal report investigating complaints that Bates was receiving preferential treatment within the department.     

The details were damning: Bates, a friend of Glanz’s, appeared to be untouchable. The report found that supervisors had fostered “an atmosphere in which employees were intimidated to fail to adhere to policies in a manner which benefits Reserve Deputy Bates.” Furthermore, it appeared that Bates had not completed the training required of reserve deputies. 

I asked Branstetter how she felt when that information fell into her and Goforth’s laps.

“Fear and excitement and an absolute determination to see that story through,” she said. Acting on that determination, The Frontier steadily nipped at TCSO’s heels, breaking most major developments in the year following the shooting, which included:

•Glanz and his supervisors encouraged the “liberal” use by jailers of Staph Attack, a cleaning product made by Pure Bioscience, which Glanz owned stock in. He also issued press releases touting the benefits of the product, and endorsed it at corrections conferences. 

•While Glanz ran large deficits in jail operations, he and his employees spent more than $500,000 from 2013 to 2015 on travel and training, most of it from jail funds. Those expenses included Glanz’s stay at a $500-per-night resort where guests were transported by horse-drawn carriages.

•Former Maj. Tom Huckeby, who played a major role in protecting Bates within the department, was accused of using racist language and treating black jail employees unfairly. Seven employees sued the sheriff’s office in part over Huckeby’s alleged abuse; all seven suits were settled, costing the county $1.2 million. 

•Glanz and interim sheriff Michelle Robinette provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about TCSO’s jail rape statistics, excluding several documented cases of rape and sexual assault by detention officers and at least 13 allegations of inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse. 

•Judge Caputo, assigned to the Bates trial, failed to disclose apparent conflicts of interest before the trial. He recused himself shortly after The Frontier highlighted these conflicts.

•Bates held the dubious honor of being one of only two reserve deputies to shoot someone, and the only one to be involved in a fatal shooting. He also had six documented instances of using force on the job. In one instance, Bates pulled a gun and taser on a naked-and-handcuffed suspect, teasing him and asking why he was moaning until an officer told him to stop. 

The Aftermath

In the fall of 2015, a grand jury impaneled in the wake of the Harris shooting to investigate TCSO indicted Glanz on two misdemeanor charges. One was in relation to the falsified training records, and the other was for driving county owned-and-fueled SUVs while off duty. 

Glanz resigned immediately to avoid termination, and an emergency election for Sheriff was held. The Frontier organized a candidate forum with the League of Women Voters, and Branstetter acted as emcee.

On April 28, a year after The Frontier first launched, a jury found Bates guilty of second-degree manslaughter and recommended a prison sentence of four years. 

Branstetter is aware that The Frontier’s first year was heavy on TCSO coverage. In a satirical piece called “Future headlines,” The Tulsa Voice’s Andy Wheeler jokingly accused The Frontier of “dancing on the grave of Stanley Glanz’s career.” Branstetter found the dig funny, but told me she looks back on the reporting with pride.

“I’m glad we didn’t stop. I think Bates would’ve had a far friendlier judge in Judge Caputo,” she said. “And I don’t think the case would’ve got to a charge if we, and the media in general, didn’t keep this in the spotlight.”

Though the TCSO scandal consumed the bulk of The Frontier’s first year, it’s not the only significant story it broke. 

One of the bigger stories involved Tulsa spinal surgeon Dr. Steven Anagnost, who was under investigation for a series of botched operations that left patients injured or dead. The Oklahoma State Board of Medical Licensure had been trying to revoke Anagnost’s medical license since 2010; The Frontier found evidence that then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to whom Anagnost had made campaign donations, pressured Gov. Fallin to intervene in the state’s investigation. The piece resulted in the Oklahoma Democratic Party filing an ethics complaint against Fallin.

The Frontier was recently profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review for its unconventional business model, which is ad free and supported by subscribers for $30 a month. Although it’s pricey, the kind of in-depth investigative journalism The Frontier specializes in is often cost prohibitive for news organizations that are bleeding ad revenue thanks to Facebook and Google. Lorton has referred to the project as something of an experiment to see if there’s an audience willing to support an increasingly rarefied form of public service journalism.

Over the next year, Branstetter and company plan to further diversify their content while maintaining a focus on criminal justice. The team is ready to lay the Bates and Glanz saga to rest, but with recently elected Sheriff Vic Regalado already under scrutiny for campaign finance practices and another sheriff’s election just around the corner, it looks like The Frontier may not be done with TCSO any time soon.

For more from Mitch, read his article on the open forum for Republican candidates for Tulsa County Sheriff.