Recapping criminal justice reporter Samantha Max’s most impactful work at WPLN News

WPLN News listeners know Samantha Max as the voice behind the station’s reporting on judicial system in Nashville and the Behind The Blue Wall investigative series.

After spending three years at Nashville Public Radio, Max is now moving on to be the public safety reporter at WNYC in New York City. Before saying goodbye to the WPLN newsroom, she gave one last interview to This Is Nashville on Friday to recap some of her most memorable reporting.

This Is Nashville Host Khalil Ekulona: How did you get started on the criminal justice beat? 

Samantha Max: I grew up in Baltimore, where it was just a topic of conversation always, and my freshman year of college was when Freddie Gray died while in police custody. So the summers after my freshman and sophomore year of college, I was interning at the local public radio station in Baltimore. In that first summer, everything was very fresh. So I was actually interning on the midday daily show then, and we were bringing in the police commissioner, the mayor, to talk about what was going on. Then the next summer, all the officers or several of the officers who were involved were going on trial.

In Maryland courtrooms, you can’t bring technology. You can’t bring a phone in or a laptop. So it was my job, while the real salaried reporter was in the media room typing up his stories, I was the little intern in the courtroom, scribbling down notes, running them out to the media room and watching one trial after the next of these officers and seeing them get acquitted. Thinking about just this case and this moment that had really changed how people thought about the relationship between the police department and the community in Baltimore, I just felt like I had a lot of questions and I wanted to understand more (about) how policing works and how accountability works when something does go wrong.

KE: How did you come to WPLN?

SM: I came to WPLN through a program called Report for America. My senior year of college, I was applying to newsrooms across the country. I applied to 75 newsrooms. I had a very intense spreadsheet. But the job that I really wanted was this new program that was just getting started called Report for America that was recruiting young local reporters to small newsrooms across the country. Basically they would pay part of their salary (so it) would be easier for the local newsrooms to bring people on and to keep local news alive. So I spent my first year at a small paper in Macon, Georgia, learned a lot. And then my second year I was staying with the program. But there was an opportunity to come to WPLN, and I came partially shout out to Meribah Knight. We had had a mentor in common who he said, ‘You have to work with this woman.’ I had just binged all of The Promise. I said, ‘I need to work with her.’ So she was really a huge draw for me to come, and now she’s a mentor and great friend. … I’ve stayed this whole time because I’ve just loved being here and loved covering what I cover.

KE: You covered the pandemic and during the earlier stages you did a lot of reporting on how COVID was impacting prisons and those incarcerated here in the. How did you find Tracston Neal’s story? 

SM: I found Tracston’s story actually soon after I got to Nashville. I was going to lots of different community events, and I had gone to this criminal justice reform town hall. And I had met this man named Calvin Bryant, also known as Fridge around town, who had been incarcerated on a really lengthy sentence for a drug-free school zone charge. His sentence got commuted, and he had really become an activist since getting out of prison, but still had tons of friends and connections still in the prison. So he’s someone that I kind of kept in touch with during my time at WPLN. Whenever I was looking for someone who is incarcerated or recently released to interview for a story, I would often reach out to him.

After COVID really started spreading, I reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to do a story about people being released during COVID and what that’s like for them.’ So he connected me with Tracston and we ended up staying in touch for about a year. So I did that first story just a few weeks after he was released, and then from there, every few weeks he would send me video diaries of what was going on in his life. So when he got his driver’s license, his first Thanksgiving at home, when he had a baby, and we just kept in touch that way. I ended up doing about eight months later, a follow-up story where I just kind of wove together all those different video diaries he had sent me.

KE: What were some of the challenges to telling that story?

SM: I think, just in general, prisons are really difficult to report on because you can’t just go inside and see what’s going on. There are literally barbed wire gates, lots of walls trying to keep you out, keep information out. Also, just in the society that we live in, unless you are personally touched by prisons, I think people have very little knowledge of what it’s like or honestly empathy for people who are in prison. It was always really important to me to connect with currently and formerly incarcerated folks and their loved ones to understand how it affects them in their day-to-day and especially during the pandemic.

I mean, it was scary for all of us living through the early days of the pandemic, but when COVID was starting to spread and people could not get in touch with their loved ones, it was just a really scary time. But I mean, Tracston was he was like a journalist dream because he just I would give him a prompt, I would give him a question. And he just was always like, so happy to tell me a story. So I really appreciated that in him.

KE: What was it like to report on Behind The Blue Wall?

SM:  It was definitely really intense, but it was so eye-opening for me. The way that it all started was two weeks after I had published Deadly Force — which I had spent the past year looking into this one case of a shooting by a police officer here in Nashville — just two weeks after I wrapped that project, I got this email with this poorly formatted press release that was like, ‘We are having a press conference about allegations of sexual misconduct and racial discrimination in the police department.’ I was like, ‘That sounds interesting.’ I was actually supposed to be off that day. I was supposed to be taking time off because I’d like worked through a weekend and (News Director) Emily Siner was like, ‘Let’s just have Blake (Farmer) cover it.’ I was like, ‘No, I think I should probably be at this.’ And it turned out that at that point, 19 current and former employees had come forward with allegations of misconduct of fellow employees that had treated them wrong, some sexual abuse, some racial discrimination, some gender discrimination. I was just like, ‘I want to know who these 19 people are.’

So I first reached out to Monica Blake, now Monica Blake-Beasley, a former officer who had gone public. She had alleged that she had been assaulted by a fellow officer and that she had then been retaliated against. … I reached out to her, and we had a great interview, and she told me that this was much bigger than just her. So she started putting me in touch with people, and then after each interview that I did, I would just say, ‘Who else can I talk to?’ Suddenly one interview became two became, five became — at this point, I’ve talked to 25 people, a lot of them that I still kind of am in and out of touch with.

I think a lot of my reporting is focusing on how the police department relates to the community — shootings by police, misconduct by police — but then getting to know these officers, a lot of whom were women and people of color, who had gone in because like many officers, they wanted to help people, but also because they wanted to be the officers that they didn’t see growing up. They wanted to be able to relate to people who looked like them and for them to feel like they had representation in the department. These were people who are really trying to make the department better and change the culture from within. And when they tried to do that, they felt like they were retaliated against, like they were pushed out. A lot of them, their lives were destroyed. I mean, a lot of them really suffered with mental health issues, lost their jobs, lost their careers. Some were hospitalized.

If these are the people who are charged with trying to help people and their own colleagues are hurting them, it just made me think, well, what does that mean for the community? We often hear this phrase, “the thin blue line,” and that you back the blue, you protect your fellow officers. But I was not in this case. I was seeing officers hurting each other. So I was just trying to understand, what does that mean for the public?

KE: You spent a lot of time working with Gideon’s Army, and in that, you created a lot of relationships with and connections with the community. What does that mean to you as a journalist and as a person?

SM: It’s both my favorite part of the job, but I think also the hardest part. I think that I just I connect really strongly with people. Even, you know, sometimes the police officers that I’m reporting on that are accused of really serious things, I still feel a connection to everyone that I meet. And Rasheedat Fetuga, the founder of Gideon’s Army, was one of the first people that I met in Nashville. I interviewed her for that before the podcast about police shootings back in 2019, and as I was kind of learning about the work that she was doing. I was just fascinated, and she was someone that I just kept in contact with and kept picking her brain when different things were happening.

For years I had talked to her about, ‘You know, I’d love to just kind of follow around the violence interrupters, see what you guys are doing.’ COVID happened, different things came up. We weren’t sure logistically how it was going to work. And finally, last fall, she let me tag around with them for a few weeks in October and November. I got to be out with them at night, during the day, during their trainings, and it just really helped me kind of see their work on a different level. This thing that’s kind of become a buzzword, “violence interruption,” what does that mean? A lot of the times you can only really understand these buzzwords that officials are throwing around if you can really be out in the field seeing it. But that also means kind of imposing on people’s private and personal space. So it’s just been really important to me to build those relationships with people. Sometimes that means having five unrecorded off-the-record phone conversations or meetups with someone before we ever do a formal interview. Because then when the time comes down to it, they trust me and and they know that the story I’m going to do it might expose some difficult things, some things that make that even them uncomfortable, but they know that I did my best to be accurate and fair.

KE: What are you looking forward to with this new gig at WNYC? 

SM: I’m just looking forward to being out in the community more. That’s one of the things that I also love most is just being out in the field. … So I’m just excited to be in a new place and just let the community be the experts in and take me in and take me under their wing and, you know, be on the subway platform, be at church, be wherever people are. … I think my whole purpose is going to be trying to understand, do people feel safe in this city? I’ve spent a lot of time at WPLN kind of bigger picture looking at these institutions, policing prisons, the courts. And now I’m going to be able to kind of take that to the next level and see: OK, how are these institutions actually affecting people in the day to day and how do people feel about it?