Alain Stephens

Kendell Kelton (00:00):

Hi, I'm Kendell Kelton and I'm your host today on The Rough Draft. Featuring honest conversations with folks from across the creative industry, The Rough Draft explores the creative process, tools and resources used by some of the best in the business. From journalists to content creators and business leaders, we shed light on what it looks like to break into the industry, make mistakes, collaborate with others, and the essential tools that help us all along the way.

(00:24):

This week, I'm talking with Alain Stephens, a staff writer at The Trace, an organization of investigative journalists covering gun violence. Alain specifically reports on developments and firearms technology and the ATF. And as a military veteran and gun owner, his work has led to really important public safety, civil rights, and criminal justice reform. In this episode, Alain discusses his unique career shift from military and law enforcement to investigative journalism.

(00:53):

H. Thank you so much for joining us.

Alain Stephens (01:05):

Thanks for having me.

Kendell Kelton (01:06):

Yeah, no, I'm really pumped to be talking with you because, well, one, we've talked to a couple of investigative journalists so far on the podcast, but you have quite an interesting beat.

Alain Stephens (01:20):

Yeah, that's what I call the heavy metal beat.

Kendell Kelton (01:23):

And before we really jump into it, I actually just want to talk about your path before you jumped into journalism. What did you do before journalism? What led you there?

Alain Stephens (01:35):

I never thought I'd be a journalist. My dad was in the military. Both of my grandparents are in the military and they were like, "Yeah, boy, you're from Texas. You're going to the military." And so I ended up in the military. I started in the Coast Guard, and then I got into the Air Force. And then, just like so many people, I ended up being a police officer in North Texas. And so I'm this criminal justice guy. I studied criminal justice, I studied sociology, and that was the path that I was going towards and ended up moving down to Austin with the intent of becoming a federal agent. That was my plan. I always wanted to be more investigations. That was something that was always passionate for me. I applied to pretty much every three letter agency you could ever think of, and I actually was getting picked up by them and stuff, but the process was so long.

(02:37):

So during that time period, I had someone listening to podcasting and we were just listen to a podcasts where they were like, "Yo, I think you could do this." And it was like one of those things being like... "No, you talk like this all the time." And I was like, what?

Kendell Kelton (02:58):

That was also them being, "You talk a lot. You should do this for a living."

Alain Stephens (03:01):

They were like, "You randomly go off into these things." And I was like, "Man," but I was like, "All right, whatever. I'm not doing anything." And so I called up the public radio station in Austin. For some weird reason, they were just like, "Yo, we could use a volunteer to help book and produce and all this other stuff." I went to the public library in Austin. I got the NPR handbook on reporting. That was my quick week-long from law enforcement to journalists program.

(03:34):

I was enamored by the process of journalism, and I saw the power of journalism early on. I saw the response. I saw how people in the community would engage with journalists, how people would feel that these stories were important when I'm working in this public radio station. And for me, as someone who didn't really have a strong journalism background, I had an investigative background. And so I would go out as this producer and have these real human interactions to see society's problems and I could just empathize with them, and I empathize with them because these prior careers where I saw perhaps the lowest or the worst points in people's lives and really understood that it was something a little bit deeper than that.

(04:22):

And it bothered me when I would go back and go back to the newsroom and they were just like, "All right, what's the next news of the day? Let's go. We got the interview. Let's move on." No, I was also the first Black person they hired in this radio station in a decade, and the only Black public radio reporter in the entire state at the time, is also like, who are the types of people that are in there? And they're overwhelmingly white. And so I essentially was like, "How can I just do more impactful work? And more so, how can I get these editors to take me seriously?" What I would bring up these societal problems, I would be like, "Hey, let's bring up... We should look into the criminal justice system. We should look into juvenile incarceration. We should look into wage theft." And they would just roll their eyes, "You're not really from here. You're not really from this." And it forced me to become an investigative reporter.

(05:14):

What it caused me to do was it caused me to start going out and getting strong public records. And it caused me to just really have a strong proofing process because I knew that the only way I could get some of these projects greenlit as being this outsider, I would walk into the pitch meeting and be the only guy to do this and I'd just print out. We don't even need to print stuff out, but just as almost like a theatrical moment, just print out 100 pages and be like, "And it's here," and throw it down and be like, "It's all right here."

Kendell Kelton (05:47):

It's like you have to work that hard to prove the worth of the story.

Alain Stephens (05:51):

My first investigations, I paid for out of my pocket. I did what my editors were on. I did as absolute just what I call black ops, no support whatsoever. But what happens is is that they were good and they created impact and change and they start bringing in awards. And when those awards come in and when that outside recognition starts coming in, when community leaders start moving rules around, that is when I saw like, okay, there's something to this. And so I did that investigation, but there's a little bit of like, yeah, he got lucky. Every reporter gets lucky.

(06:37):

So I always tell people that what is harder than Michael Jackson making the Thriller album, it's making the Bad album. It's the follow-up. It's like proving that I'm not a one hit wonder. And that second investigation is what sealed the deal.

(06:57):

And I ended up doing a story about a juvenile who was arrested at 14 for essentially trying to defend his brother in a street fight down at Houston. Child of first generation migrant ended up getting 99 years on really poor paperwork. And it actually ended up being the entry wave for us to look at how the state for almost a decade was shuttling all sorts of juveniles off to the adult prison system using a legal loophole. But that one was one where, I mean, I was walking into prisons and my editors thought I was off sick. I had to take days off. I was paying for paperwork out of my own paycheck, but when that one came through, everyone shut the hell up and then other entities started throwing fellowships and partnerships and stuff at me.

Kendell Kelton (07:59):

You're with The Trace, and so what drew you-

Kendell Kelton (08:03):

... The Trace. What drew you to joining their team?

Alain Stephens (08:07):

One of my first major investigations was really into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and in that, I submerged myself into arms trafficking and gun crime and the type of records that existed there. No reporter was on this, whatsoever. I already, because of my background, had a really rich understanding of just firearms nomenclature, firearms identification and stuff like that. As I did this yearlong investigation, simultaneously, America was beginning to just have this visceral national conversation about gun violence.

(08:55):

As I am reporting on this, Parkland happens, and Sutherland Springs happened. The worst shootings in America are happening, and I want to put this in perspective. What is happening is America is having this conversation and asking these questions, and they're asking these questions of the media, and ain't nobody there knows how to answer it.

(09:19):

Suddenly, I ended up just rising into this moment where it's like, "Well, there is this one guy we heard of down in Texas," and that's how my name started ringing out. They're like, "There's this guy, and he knows about guns and he knows about crime. In fact, he spent the last year digging around, snooping around on every gun law, every lobbying effort, every arms trafficking case. He's already talking to the ATF. He's already getting sourced up in there. Use him." I started getting pulled out to do stuff on, "Hey, what type of gun was this in this mass shooting? How did someone get this type of gun? Could they prosecute the parent?" A lot of that stuff was what I started on.

(10:05):

The Trace is a nonprofit. That's their entire thing. That's all they do, 24/7. All their reporters, all their editors, just doing guns. I come to them at a journalism conference and I'm just like, "You need someone who knows these damn guns. You need a Western guy. You need someone out here who's grown up on it, someone who can get into that Second Amendment culture and someone who's not afraid of these things," and they were like, "Hell, yeah, let's do it." It was like a match made in heaven.

Kendell Kelton (10:39):

Well, investigative reporting seems like such a process, where you're always learning new things, having to absorb a lot of information. You mentioned earlier on that you would go do all the research, throw the hundred pages down when you needed to, but now what is your typical approach when you first start developing a story idea? Is it going right to the data? Is it going into the community? Can you give us a little bit of detail into how you get going?

Alain Stephens (11:14):

Yeah. This is one of the things I always talk about with movies and stuff, that movies never get investigative reporters correct. I want to get with a director, because they always have this thing where it's like we're these lofty inquiring minds being like, "Oh, we don't know what's going on," and we're just going to go out here and explore and ask questions and be like, "Huh, I never," and I'm like, "No, we're just like you guys."

(11:43):

Here's the thing. We know people are messing up. We know where they're typically messing up. We know where the rumors are, so we know like that person's slimy. The question is how can we prove it. That's what we're sitting around talking about, is how can we prove it. I tell people, "If you know there is a vault and there is information, proofing information, within that vault, and you know where that is, then the conversation isn't if that damning information exists, but instead, how do you acquire it." That movie is a heist, and that's what we do.

(12:27):

I look at this. What do Americans want to know? That is not only an inquiry of going out into the streets and seeing what information or problems exist, but also just talking to people about the problems, regular people about the problems.

(12:49):

One of the things is that if I brought up say a topic of gun violence to you, I find that regular people have way more interesting questions about this topic than I ever would predict to write up. The second thing I do is I write for a global type of audience. I'm writing to a space alien almost. I always tell people that for Americans, it's hard for us to understand gun violence because it's like trying to describe the outside of a car when you have been born, raised, and lived inside the car your entire life.

Kendell Kelton (13:37):

Yeah. Like you had previously said, everybody has vastly different experiences with guns.

Alain Stephens (13:43):

Exactly. I think sometimes the best way to do it is to almost just write on a Wikipedia page, for a nobody person reading this a hundred years in the future, like, "How did we get here," and then we more specific. "Okay, is there any documentation out there that can answer, prove? Is there any sort of data that could show this?"

Kendell Kelton (14:09):

Yeah. I want to talk a bit about the challenges, though, that you are seeing. Is it challenges in funding? Like you just said, nobody is funding for somebody to actually do longer-form investigations on these important issues? Is it that speed? What do you think the biggest challenge is right now for journalists?

Alain Stephens (14:29):

Yeah. I mean, so the first thing is the 24-hour news cycle, which is a creation of the media industry, is antithetical to good journalism. I think even longitudinally, when we look at it, the journalism industry has contracted, and that contraction probably has actually gone simultaneously with the invention of the 24-hour news cycle. Also, if we probably looked at the levels of American distrust, it probably also coincides with the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, and it kind of makes sense.

(15:07):

I'm very, very self-critical of my own industry. I think a lot of journalists are like, "Oh, well, who cares if a third of the country is just too dumb to get it?" No, that number's too high for me. We have to start looking internally and being like, "Where are we making mistakes and what are we doing?" Part of it is systemic, like I just told you, that damn every editor I speak to knows, "Oh, that's a good story and I wish we could do this, but we gotta feed the beast."

(15:37):

I'm like, "Kill the beast," and no one has the guts to do it. No one has the guts to just be like, "Listen." Maybe the best type of news show, and maybe the best thing we need, is just the one-hour weekly show, the one-night show that has really quality news. The thing is, people have responded to that. People are like, "You're crazy, Alain." I'm like, "Call me crazy, but YouTube's cleaning you up," right?

Alain Stephens (16:03):

I'm like, call me crazy, but YouTube's cleaning you up, right? You think that like, oh, no one wants news anymore. That's a lie. These people on YouTube have low overhead and they're doing news that is citations and everything else just as quality, and people are gravitating to them because they're doing stuff in depth and in niche. And they're doing the opposite of what you're doing and they're stealing your audience. And same with podcasts and stuff too. So I tell the legacy people like, "Don't be so high and mighty that people have to listen to you because you have a legacy banner head. And don't be so high and mighty that people don't want to listen to you because they're just too stupid to get it. The fact of the matter is you're talking about stuff that's not particularly irrelevant. You're not spending time and quality on it."

(16:47):

And the other thing that I found early on as an investigative reporter, and this is what [inaudible 00:16:52] other ones, is that you think you have these editors that are like your special forces, you're paid to go out there and fight the war. You have our full bone support. Here's the company credit card, here's the attorneys, whatever you need, go do it. And while that happens and the best investigative reports probably in the world does happen, I also tell people that a great deal of being a successful investigative reporter is advocacy internally.

(17:19):

I tell people that if you want to see a movie with a character that's an amazing investigative reporter, Jessica Chastain from Zero Dark Thirty is probably the most quintessential reporter because she stays on it for a long time, on the Bin Laden chase. But half the movie is her kind of explaining to a bunch of men why she needs to get the right resources to do her damn job. And that is so much of what I'm doing. I tell people, "Investigative reports also don't fall off trees." You get what you pay for. So if you pay for 10 or whatever, awesome hackers and data reporters and editors, and you put together some awesome team, you're going to get good stuff.

Kendell Kelton (18:05):

Well, speaking of really impactful stories, let's dive into your collaboration with CBS and the reveal on an investigation about police departments in the US selling their old weapons, which would in turn end up being used in crimes. How did this investigation come about?

Alain Stephens (18:31):

Before I was a reporter, I lived in Texas and I told you I was a police officer. So right before I went to the police academy, I needed to get a handgun for practice. And I had a person actually sell me a gun. No paper, just cash exchange, which is totally legal in Texas. And essentially I bought this Glock off of him and I asked him, I said, "Hey, where did this Glock come off of?" And he goes, "This used to be owned by a New Jersey police department."

Kendell Kelton (19:01):

In Texas?

Alain Stephens (19:02):

I'm not a journalist, but even then I kind of sat there.

Kendell Kelton (19:03):

Yeah.

Alain Stephens (19:06):

Well, I guess it got refurbished and somehow made its way down here into my hands where I have it still to this day. But I'm looking at this thing and I'm sitting here being like, all right, I'm a good guy, but what if I wasn't? This would be horrible for this police department. And that was always something in the back of my mind being like, man, I don't know if this is such a great idea. Fast-forward here, and to me working as a public radio reporter, and as I told you, people started hearing about me digging into firearms and my background, and I connected with Reveal and I actually told them, I said, "Hey, police sell their guns." And they're like, "What?" I said, "Yeah, their duty weapons. The ones they keep on their holsters, the really nice ones, not evidence guns, but the stuff that's in there, their stuff, they sell them all the time." And they're like, "Why?"

(20:01):

And I was like, "To get new stuff." And I have a question, I wonder how many of these guns are ending up in crimes. We wondered if there was any way to even find that out. And lo and behold, there is, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has a tracing database. Pretty much every time a gun is recovered by law enforcement in a crime scene, they write a little report up to the ATF and the ATF essentially creates a record of the origin point of that gun. Essentially, they find out how that gun ended up from manufacture to the crime scene as best they can. And so it'll say it went from Colt to Joe Bob's gun shipping to Matt's gun store to point of sale to Tom. And then they'll send an investigator out and Tom will be like, "I sold it to my cousin."

(20:51):

They have thousands of guns on these records and stuff. And we're like, okay, cool. So what we'll do is we'll go to the ATF. This is cake walk. This is easy. It's just basic documentation. We'll go to the ATF, we'll say, "Give us those records." And the ATF said, "Yeah, we used to give out those records all the time. In fact, we used to up until 2003 to an organization called the NRA." I make that face because a lot of times people look at the NRA and the gun space and they're kind of like, "Dude, I'm mad at the NRA because they say maybe insensitive things or whatever after a mass shooting." I'm mad at the NRA because they hide information like this. And I was like, "What?" And they were like, "Yeah, the NRA thinks that Americans are too stupid to take this information. They'll start suing gun companies and pointing fingers and stuff. So all of this is top secret."

(21:44):

And I was like, "So you mean to tell me that police weapons though are falling in the hands of criminals and I don't have the right to know that because the NRA lobbied for some obscure law?" And they go, "Yeah." And so I was like, "Okay, but can you just give me the raw number?" And then they just stopped responding. And so I kind of started digging into the law and I was like, wait a second. They can't tell me specific information, but they can give me that raw number. And that's why they stopped responding. They were trying to hide from me. And so I actually got an attorney and we sued the Department of Justice. We actually lost the first case because the Department of Justice said if we searched our computers, it would amount to the creation of a new document and that that's somehow illegal, but that was bad.

(22:38):

This is how crazy this stuff gets. But that was bad because that would then allow every other federal agency to point to the ATF precedent to be like, anytime anyone asks us to search our computer records, we could tell them no. We could point to Alain Stephens and a stupid ATF request. And so this caused Washington Post and Electronic Frontier Foundation, all these people to write amicus support. Because essentially like the ATF and the NRA lobbying was about to shut down the whole public records. And so we won at the Ninth Circuit, we found out that police guns were being found in crimes, and we found that 52,000 of them had been recovered in about a 10-year span. And that's what they were fighting so hard to hide. The fact that they have found thousands of former cop guns, cop guns that we as citizens, taxpayers have paid for, being used by murders, criminals, God knows who.

Kendell Kelton (23:40):

And then how did CBS get involved?

Alain Stephens (23:43):

So I got this number and that took five years of litigation to get, and I'm watching a court case and they finally kick out this number, 52,000 guns. And there's no specifics. We actually don't know who's actually been hurt by this. That's part of it. Everything else is redacted and obscured because the NRA-

Alain Stephens (24:03):

... that's part of it. Everything else is redacted and obscured because of the NRA. So we just know there's a massive body of weapons that have hurt a ton of Americans. We just don't know where those Americans are at. And so I meet with a guy who works for CBS at a conference named Chris Hacker, and Chris Hacker is like this data reporter guy who wears glasses and looks exactly like you would expect the type of guy who would do this type of mission, who was like, "I think I can help you find some of those guns that have hurt Americans, some of these former cop guns." And I go, "How?"

(24:35):

And so we start talking and we were like, listen, what if we do a massive public records request and then we go through every single court record, we go to all of these police departments across America and get receipts of guns that they have sold, right? Those receipts will include serial numbers, make, model, and caliber, and then we will run those thousands of serial numbers against every single criminal court record in the United States. And the guy built a robot to do it.

Kendell Kelton (25:03):

Oh my gosh. Well, and there's this amazing... And we'll link to it in the show notes, in the article there's actually an amazing graphic of where you can see everything in the US from this public records request.

Alain Stephens (25:21):

And so that took us another two years to build this robot, comb through all this stuff. And this took me... So this is now a team that's blown to like 10 people or something.

Kendell Kelton (25:30):

Wow.

Alain Stephens (25:31):

And finally it culminates in us finding some weapons that had hurt Americans. And yeah, it was wild because we actually went to this mom who, her son was killed in Indiana, and the case is still open. And we told her that, "We just wanted to let you know what the detectives, what the ATF, what no one would tell you is that the gun that was used to kill your son came from a police department way out in California." And this is something that a lot of other law enforcement entities didn't know about. This is a lot of stuff that the public didn't know about. And so when we reported this, we've had 14, 15, 16, maybe even up to 20 stories replicating it locally. Everyone's sniffing out now seeing if their...

(26:25):

And that's another thing I like to do. I love to drop the data out to let people in their local communities see, right? Because a national reporter, but there's something even more specific about taking it to the local reporters and saying, "Hey, check your guys too. Ask the same questions." And this has caused police departments to stop the practice. This has caused a couple of... I know for a fact one particularly large state has contacted me on background and are getting rid of this practice.

Kendell Kelton (27:01):

I think that, as you said, the real world impact of stories like this of policy change and I think the hope is societal change, right? Like trying to help influence that when you can.

Alain Stephens (27:17):

Well, I say it like this because as a journalist, we can't advocate for anything, right? I don't advocate for any sort of gun policy, but what I do advocate is for transparency. And what I tell people is that a lot of these police weapon sales happen in secret. They didn't happen with community consent. And so more so I raised it as this question, I'm not going to change your mind on what you think about whether it's moral for police to sell guns or not. The thing that I say is, it should be a decision, however, that is made by the community for the police, not by the police for the community. And even more so the more scary thing that I kind of have told police departments is this, "You guys are playing with fire, because it took me seven years to track down this gun. Don't make it take another seven before the next major American mass shooting is linked to your police department."

(28:15):

And that's what I also kind of tell people. For all journalists out here, there's something to be said just about our existence. I've had tons of people who have worked in capitals and stuff like that and say that just you snooping around, even if it didn't materialize in a story, has scared us into being right, to doing right. And that's something that other nations don't have. If you talk to other nations who have weak state support structures, they're like, "What happens to suss out corruptions?" And they're like, "Well, we have journalism." There's a reason why when you look at other countries, they kill journalists too when things are wrong. That's one of the first things they kill because they do keep people honest. And so even when you're not reporting, you're kind of reporting.

Kendell Kelton (29:05):

Wow, that was a beautiful articulation of why what you and others do are so important. So I want to thank you for that and also for joining us today. Alain, can you please tell our listeners where they can find you, follow your work?

Alain Stephens (29:22):

Excellent. Yeah. You could find my reporting at thetrace.org. and also you can listen to my podcast, The Gun Machine, on wherever you get your podcasts.

Kendell Kelton (29:35):

Which is amazing. I listened to it. I did not know I was going to take such a deep 18th, 19th century history lesson i those episodes. It was great. It was very fascinating.

Alain Stephens (29:50):

And I'm on social, on X, on Insta at Alain Stevens, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S.

Kendell Kelton (29:57):

We will link to some of the stories that we mentioned, also the podcast, The Gun Machine, and then link to where people can connect with you. So thank you again for joining us. It's been awesome. Thank you.

(30:13):

Well, that's it for today's episode of The Rough Draft. To learn more about our guests and to find links and resources related to the conversation, check out rev.com backslash podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to rate and subscribe in order to stay up to date with the latest episodes. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to seeing you again on the next episode of The Rough Draft.