In The Dark - S1 E6: Stranger Danger

Episode Date: October 4, 2016

In the 1970s and early '80s, missing children weren't considered a policing priority. You couldn't even enter missing child information into the FBI's national crime database. But that changed quickly.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Previously on In the Dark. You know, we're talking getting him home. We did what we had to, what we felt we had to. Lots of kids that are taken are not taken by some caring person and taken to Disneyland. They're taken by someone who is into sexually assaulting children. And if you're lucky, you'll find the body in a field. We pulled out all the stops. We turned them upside down. Sometimes you just can't get it. A few weeks after Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped,

Jacob's mom, Patty, started getting letters from all over the country. Letters from kids. Kids who had heard about Jacob and wanted to tell Jacob's mom their own stories of violence and abuse. This happened to me, or my sister ran away, and this happened, and this, and it was like this growing, it's like a snowball. Before Jacob was kidnapped, Patty thought she understood how the world worked. The lives of kids, as she understood them, revolved around homework and

hockey practice and playing outside and getting into small and quickly resolved fights with friends. But Jacob's abduction and this deluge of letters forced Patty into a world she'd never imagined. It's bigger than Jacob. I knew that right away. that right away. This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I'm Madeline Barron. Today we're going to do something a little different. We're going to leave the dead-end road where Jacob was kidnapped 27 years ago, and we're going to look outward, far beyond this tiny town, far beyond Minnesota even, and see how the fear about what had happened to Jacob and what it seemed could happen to any child would grow and spread until it took the form of a federal law that would alter the lives of millions of Americans.

And to understand how all of this happened, we have to go back to the 1980s, to the world that Jacob disappeared into. Remember, a stranger... Can mean danger. Now I know. And knowing is half the battle. G.I. Joe! Back then, the idea of stranger danger was everywhere.

It was on TV shows and morning cartoons, on public service announcements, with unscientific and ever-changing numbers of how many kids go missing. If she gets into that car, that may be the last time you'll see Jenny. I'm McGruff, the crime dog. See those kids? Every day in this country, 60 kids disappear. Some run away, but a lot are kidnapped by strangers or even by people they know. Help take a bite out of crime. Child abductions and child abuse were one of the most popular genres of made-for-TV movies, with anxious parents,

My little boy was here. Yes. Did you see where he went? melodramatic acting, Which one of them hurt you? They all did. Miss Susan took pictures. and lurid plot twists.

But how did it happen that one day, and I'm off doing something for myself, you know, I don't know, I'm eating a Danish, and these people are raping our baby? This idea began to take root at the edges of the public's consciousness. That thousands of child abductors were out there, waiting to strike the moment we let down our guard, even though this is actually a really rare crime. And that fear, it grew into a kind of national hysteria.

This is not a Halloween fable. This is a real-life horror story. The faces of missing kids started appearing on milk cartons. Parents fingerprinted their children in case someone snatched them. Daycare providers were accused of performing satanic rituals on toddlers. A symbol of every parent's worst fear. An increasing national tragedy that's become a national scandal. I was talking to a man named Ernie Allen about what it was like back then. He's a national expert in child abductions. And back in the early 80s, Ernie was

one of the first people raising alarm about missing kids. He would go on to help found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This was a time, late 70s, early 80s, in which there were some horrendous cases involving the abduction and murder of children. Adam Walsh in South Florida, Eitan Pates in New York. These cases became iconic. You might remember some of them yourself. Eitan Pates snatched away on his two-block walk to the bus in Manhattan, the first time he'd been allowed to make the trip by himself. Adam Walsh, taken from a Sears department store and found beheaded,

two weeks later, in a drainage canal off the Florida Turnpike. Johnny Gosch disappeared from his paper route in West Des Moines, Iowa. It just frightened people and made people think something's going on, something is wrong. This is not about one sick city. It's not about one Jack the Ripper. This is happening to greater or lesser degrees in communities across this country, and America has missed it. By the time Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped in 1989, after a decade of hysteria,

the public and lawmakers were hungry to do something, anything, to protect children and put an end to child abductions. Right from the beginning, investigators on the Jacob Wetterling case were convinced the crime fit into the pattern of other child abductions, that the person who did it had a sexual motive. Investigators now say they plan to question every person in Minnesota who's ever been convicted of a sex crime or a crime against children. They want to know where those people were Sunday night when Jacob was kidnapped. The top FBI agent on the case at the time, Jeff Jamar, told reporters how this worked.

So what we're trying to do is find out where persons who have been convicted of this type of crime before were at 9-15 Sunday night. But it wasn't easy. Back then, the files of people convicted of sex crimes were spread out in boxes and small town police departments, sheriff's offices, courthouses. There wasn't a central directory of people convicted of sexually assaulting children. So when Jacob's mom, Patty, started asking some of the investigators who worked on the case if there was anything that could have helped, they told her, Patty, started asking some of the investigators who worked on the case if there was anything that could have helped, they told her, yes, there was one thing.

Knowing who was in the area would have made things move a lot faster, expediting, ruling out. It actually works to rule people out. If you know who's done this before and you have their name and address, you can go, where were you, right through the list much more quickly. What law enforcement and Patty had in mind was a private registry of the addresses of sex offenders, so they could quickly find all the sex offenders who lived in a certain area. Some states already had laws like that, but Minnesota wasn't one of them. states already had laws like that, but Minnesota wasn't one of them. So about a year after Jacob was kidnapped, with the case still unsolved, Patty pushed for a state law to create a registry in Minnesota. But there was no national registry. Patty worried that offenders could easily cross

state lines. I was at that point working closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and people were calling the National Center and finding out which states don't have sex offender registry. My brother's getting out of prison soon, and he's trying to decide where he should live. So it was like, whoa, we can fix that. So we did. We just did it. In 1993, about four years after Jacob was kidnapped, a U.S. representative from Minnesota introduced a bill in Congress, the Jacob Wetterling Act, that would require all states

to verify the addresses of sex offenders every year and to maintain registries of sex offenders. Patty envisioned the registry as something meant for law enforcement. It was not designed to be open to the general public. But then... Right before, you know, we were already closing in on finalizing the bill when Megan Kanka was kidnapped.

Megan Kanka. She was a 7-year-old girl from New Jersey who was raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender who lived across the street. Megan's parents didn't know the man was a sex offender. So they asked Patty if they could add one tiny, seemingly minor addition to the Jacob Wetterling Act. Just a couple of words.

So they added one sentence saying that law enforcement may notify community upon the release of a violent offender. May notify the community. It didn't seem like much. But I had this nagging thought in the back of my head from the first time I heard it. I had this nagging thought, what would the general public do with that information? heard it. I had this nagging thought, what would the general public do with that information? But I would be going against another victim family who saw another need. And I wasn't strong enough to say, no, I don't think so. The Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children Registration Act passed as part of the 1994 federal crime bill. It marked the beginning of a new way of thinking about sex offenders in this country.

And once the idea took hold that this group of people, sex offenders, should be registered and tracked, there was no going back. Two years later, in 1996, Congress passed Megan's Law. It took the idea of community notification, something that had been voluntary in the Wetterling Act, and made it mandatory. Now local law enforcement had to notify communities about most sex offenders moving into their neighborhoods. Today, America warns, if you dare to prey on our children, the law will follow you wherever you go, state to state, town to town. This is letting parents know that the fox is in the hen house. Are we mad and bitter? No.

But we're sick of seeing these people get all the rights and our children and the parents not getting any rights. From then on, it seemed like it almost became a competition. Who can pass the most restrictive laws on sex offenders? The drumbeat is intensifying to toughen up laws regarding sexual predators. The question is, can anything work short of life in prison or execution? Congress passed a law that said the most serious sex offenders had to be on the registry for life. By enacting this law, we're sending a clear message across the country. Those who prey on our children will be caught, prosecuted, and punished to the fullest extent of the law. Registries expanded to include people who commit all kinds of sex crimes,

not just crimes against children. Some people now end up on registries for texting a nude photo of themselves to their boyfriend or for peeing outside. Teenagers started being put on registries. It just kept going. More and more laws, more and more restrictions. Missouri state law requires sex offenders on Halloween night to turn off porch lights at 5 o'clock, stay inside until 10.30, and post signs like this that say no candy or treats can be found inside. One place has a law banning certain sex offenders from public storm shelters. The governor

of New York has even banned some sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go. Officials are worried about the luring component of the game. With 38,000 registered sex offenders in New York State, they fear it might be easy to fake an ID and stalk a child player. Earlier this year, President Obama signed international Megan's Law. It requires authorities to mark the passports of U.S. citizens who've been convicted of certain sex crimes against children with what they call a visual identifier, certain sex crimes against children, with what they call a visual identifier, presumably a stamp, though the government has yet to figure out what the exact marking will be. This marking of passports, by the way, is something we've never done before in this country, for any kind of crime.

As efforts to get tough on sex offenders picked up steam, Jacob's mom, Patty, was right on the front lines, with the parents of other abducted kids, pushing for more laws, for more restrictions. She met with President Clinton in the Oval Office, appeared at a news conference in front of the White House, and became a nationally renowned advocate for child safety. She even ran unsuccessfully for Congress three times on a platform of keeping kids safe. When her son was abducted 17 years ago, Patty Wetterling told herself she'd do everything possible to bring Jacob home

and everything possible to protect other families. From Minnesota to the U.S. Congress, Patty Wetterling forced gridlock legislatures to pass new laws to prevent child abduction, lock sexual predators behind bars, and keep our families safe. An ordinary Minnesotan with extraordinary courage. I'm Patty Wetterling, and I approve this message. But Patty couldn't shake that nagging thought in the back of her mind, But Patty couldn't shake that nagging thought in the back of her mind that maybe some of this wasn't such a good idea. She began getting another type of letter, letters from parents,

parents of kids who'd been put on sex offender registries. And one day, she went to Alabama to speak at a treatment center for kids who'd been convicted of sex crimes. I walked in, and there are all these kids wearing blue jeans and blue work shirts, you know, they're kids. And the youngest one had just had his 10th birthday and he was experimenting with a cousin or something when a relative walked in and was horrified and named him a sex offender. And I was so devastated by that.

And eventually, she even started going to prisons to talk to adult sex offenders to try to help them. I want them to see a personal side. And I don't need to be mean and angry and yelling at them. I want to show them a compassionate side of life. Patty thought more about all these sex offenders, about what all these laws and restrictions meant for them. She began to think about all this in a different way. She began to think,

I want these sex offenders to have a successful life. Because that would mean no more victims, and that's the goal. But we let our emotions run away from us achieving that goal. And some of these laws, the way Patty began to see it, were actually doing the opposite. They were making it harder for sex offenders to rejoin society in a way that was safe for everyone. You're screwed. You will not get a job. You will not find housing. This is on your record forever and ever and ever. Good luck. Today, the best estimate is that there are about 850,000 people

on sex offender registries in this country. That's about 1 in 400 people. There's something that I think is really important to remember here. These are people who have already served their time. Many have spent years in prison. And this is the only crime that we do this for. Murderers don't get put on a public registry. Arsonists don't. Thinking about all this, it sounded unconstitutional.

So I got in touch with a guy who has studied sex offender laws extensively, even written a book about them. His name is Eric Janus. He's a lawyer and former head of William Mitchell Law School in Minnesota. Janice told me that, yes, it's true, the state is not allowed to punish people after they've served their sentences. That would violate the Constitution. But sex offender laws, according to the Supreme Court, are not punishment. They're regulation. I think, and I don't mean this in any kind of provocative way, but it's like we're regulating nuclear waste. We're not punishing the nuclear waste. We are making sure that it's kept

away from us at a safe distance. And that's perfectly acceptable. And the law does that kind of thing all the time. It's not punishment, it's regulation. The problem is that these laws take that idea and apply that idea to people. And these laws treat people as if they are dangerous objects that have certain dangerous properties. Like hazardous waste. Exactly, like hazardous waste. If someone is hazardous waste, there's no safety measure that goes too far. But we'll take a little quick ride to the right. Let's go here.

Maybe not making it too obvious. A few months ago, we sent a producer named Rowan Morgarity to see where these laws have taken us. Rowan met up with this guy, Marcos, around a commercial area in Miami known as The Spot. But there's tents and a few cars parked out here. The Spot isn't a house or an apartment complex. It's just this outside area, a parking lot basically, next to some warehouses. And it's where some of Miami's sex offenders live. Marcos used to live here too.

Right here to my left, right behind, right just next to this lighting pole is where I was parked, right there all the time. Right in front of me, there would be a gentleman pitching a tent every night with a car in front of us as well. Marcos is a Marine Corps veteran. When he was 21 years old, he tried to meet up for sex with two teenage girls he'd met in an internet chat room. The girls turned out to be undercover officers. Marcos went to prison for seven years and got out last year. He's still on probation and wears an ankle monitor.

He asked us not to use his last name because he doesn't want to be threatened or harassed. When Marcos was getting ready to get out of prison, he started thinking about where to live. You know, you're like, oh, you know, it can't be that bad. It's got to be a place to live. It can't be that hard. But it turned out it was that hard. In Miami, where Marcos lives, sex offenders have to live more than 2,500 feet from a school and more than 1,000 feet from a daycare center or playground. That area right there, it's good for any sex offender to live in. Right where we were at maybe five seconds ago, it is not good for a sex offender to be in.

What's 1,000 feet that way? I have no clue, but the circle goes around and it's a crow fly, so that means that pretty much there's got to be some sort of school around there or some sort of daycare. Just think for a minute what this means. Imagine taking out a map of Miami and drawing a circle around every daycare center and playground, a thousand feet in diameter. Then drawing a larger circle, 2,500 feet, around every school, and then coloring in all those circles with a red marker. Once you're done, almost the entire map will be red. That's the map of Miami that Marcos has to work with for the rest of his life.

When Marcos first got out of prison, he managed to find an apartment that fit all the restrictions, and things were going okay. But then, about a year later... Someone must have seen the registry, and they notified the property that there was a sex offender living in the property. Obviously, you know, your face is plastered all over the internet. Anyone could punch in their address, and they'll know that you're living close to them. And, I mean, just that label itself, it says enough. You know, it's the worst label you could have, pretty much. The property manager gave Marcos 10 days to get out.

That's how he ended up at the spot. His probation officer told him about it. She said, look, if you don't find housing, this is where all the sex offenders are staying at. The first time Marcos went to the spot was in the afternoon. He wanted to check it out before it got dark. And I was like, wait a second here? You know, I'm thinking more of a safer area, I guess you could say. And yeah, I mean, it was surreal that this exists in the United States.

Forced homelessness, pretty much what it is. It's a makeshift prison. If you think about it, it's like one of those prisons in the future. But Marcos didn't have any other choices. so he found a place to park and moved in. Where do people go to the bathroom? To be honest with you, in my case, I went in a cup, in a Gatorade bottle that I had in my car. I mean, it's not safe to get out, obviously, at nighttime. At nighttime, there's no lighting at all here. You don't want to be going in and out of your car. You never know who's out there waiting for you.

Here's what seems especially absurd about this. The spot was where Marcos had to come to sleep. It guaranteed that when Marcos was sleeping, he'd be far away from children. But during the day, he could pretty much go wherever he wanted. Later on, as the night gets closer, you'll see a lot more cars here. I mean, it's a place that's packed, pretty much. From the first night he slept here, Marcos was trying to get out of the spot to find a house he could move into.

And Marcos was better off than a lot of people at the spot. He ran his own business. He could afford to buy a house. But when he looked at his map of Miami, the map he had to work with, with all the red circles around the daycare centers and schools and playgrounds, there were only about 80 or 90 houses in all of Miami-Dade County that fell outside those red circles. Not houses for sale, Houses, period. I was honestly looking. I was looking every day at the map where I could buy the houses. I told that to my best friend, who's my realtor. I told

him we're finding a needle in a haystack here. Marcos would look at his map of where he could live. Small pockets. Some pockets were as small as two homes. Some pockets were as big as 30 homes. And I would remember the pockets, I wrote them all down, and then I went on to silo.com, you know, the housing website. I would kind of like go off each other, kind of, you know, okay, there's nothing for listed here. Okay, now go back to this side. Where's more houses for sale? Boom. Kind of constantly going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, looking every single day. After three months of nonstop searching. Yeah, can you show me around? Sure. It's a new home.

I mean, the main thing is that it was good for my residence restrictions. Marcos finally found a house that met all of the restrictions for sex offenders and moved in. It's this, what you see right here, which is nothing but a blanket, pretty much. It's better than sleeping in a car, which is what I was doing for the past two months and a half. Marcos says this whole experience has made him feel like an outcast. I think, like I said, the main thing I want to get across is the unfairness to not just me,

but the other guys that have no way out. And something that I did 10 years ago will haunt me for the rest of my life. 10 years ago will haunt me for the rest of my life. But I hope that people realize that these laws serve no purpose. These laws are there just for further punishment. Nothing else. You can trace all of this, all these laws, the laws affecting Marcos, the spot, the passport markings,

the Halloween restrictions, directly back to a few especially dramatic abductions of children by strangers. The goal of all these laws was to protect kids from these kinds of crimes. And so the obvious question is, did they work? Did they reduce the number of kids getting abducted by strangers? Jacob's mom, Patty, had the same question. Is it working or is it not working?

You can't pass legislation and then 20 years later strengthen it without any proof that it's doing what it was set out to do. So I went looking for that proof. I brought in Will Kraft, a data reporter I work with. Hey, Will. Hello. So thanks for coming in. No problem.

And I asked him to try to find out whether fewer kids are getting kidnapped by strangers these days now that we have all these laws. This is the most perplexing journey I have been on. You'd think this would be pretty easy to figure out, that you just go to the FBI and say, FBI, how many kids are kidnapped by strangers every year? And they'd say, glad you asked. Here's our annual report on that very topic. The FBI's website even says, get in touch with us if you want archive statistics. Get in touch with us if you want archived statistics.

So Will got in touch. The FBI said, submit a FOIA request for the data. FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act. It's the formal way you request records from the federal government. So I submitted a FOIA request. It was rejected. I submitted a second FOIA request. And then a FOIA negotiator got in touch with me and said, we can't give you the information that you want. They say it's too difficult to gather all of it and would take a

really long time. Who is they? That's a good question. I asked, who is they? And the FOIA negotiator said, I'm not allowed to tell you. And then I pressed her on that and I said, well, I want to know, is this the people who have gathered the data? Is this the custodians of the data? And she said, I would really like to tell you more, but I would get in trouble with my bosses if I released any more information about this, basically. She wouldn't tell me that either. It's very strange. She did eventually tell Will that the information on this was in paper documents stored in boxes. She basically said, I cannot tell you where and I cannot tell you who is in control of it. You think you were

asking for like the nuclear codes? Yeah, I mean. So far, the FBI has refused to let us look inside those boxes. And even if they did, we still wouldn't be able to figure out whether fewer kids are being abducted these days. That's because the whole process of local law enforcement reporting missing kids to the FBI is voluntary. A lot of local agencies don't do it. There's no national requirement. There's no national standard for how these things need to be reported. I kept looking into this, and eventually, I found out that Congress

actually does require the Justice Department to conduct what it calls periodic national incident studies to find out how many children go missing and how many are found. But in the past three decades, the department has only done two of those studies. The first one looked at 1988. It sampled 83 law enforcement agencies and estimated that 200 to 300 kids in the United States were abducted by strangers that year. The second one looked at 1999. It sampled more than 4,000 agencies, and it estimated that 115 kids were kidnapped that year. But these numbers don't tell us anything, because they're only two years, and they use different methods of counting. So you can't compare them.

The federal government actually says not to. This is like shining a flashlight into a cave. You see a small number of cases and you get a few details, but there's so much still left in the dark. Yeah. And you don't know, like, if you were to shine it in a different area, like, would you be looking at something completely different? Yeah, because this is not this is this is not in any way a scientific study of this.

There are just so many caveats. These numbers are useless. Will and I spent six months researching this. And in the end, we came up with almost no data on what lawmakers, the media and pop culture have led us to believe is one of the worst threats facing children in this country. We spent a lot of time doing work that can basically be summed up by the shrug emoji. It's like, eh. That's so depressing. Yep. A few months ago, before the Wetterlings found out what had happened to their son nearly 27 years ago,

I went over with our producer, Samara, to talk to Patty Wetterling. Good morning. Hi. Thanks. It's finally spring, huh? We wanted to talk with her about how she feels now, about the laws that she played such an important role in creating, especially the one that started all this, the law that requires all states to have registries of sex offenders. Do you check the registry periodically?

No. It doesn't do me any good to know the registry. I know they're out there. So, no, I don't check registries. Do you think that any public registry is a good idea? You ask hard questions. I think the way it was set up at the beginning can be a helpful law enforcement tool, much as, the same as, when you get pulled over by a state trooper, they got your entire record, man. They know what you've been up to. And if it's been a lot, they may be more likely

to issue the ticket than the warning. And it's all there. Your neighbors don't know that. Most people don't know that. And the rest of the world doesn't need to know that. It's hard to, it just seems like where we're at right now, it's like... We're stuck. Right now we're stuck. Because it's a trap. We want people to be angry about sexual assault. And then when they're angry about it, they want to toughen it up for these people, you know, these bad boys who do this. And what,

if we can set aside the emotions, what we really want is no more victims. Don't do it again. So how can we get there? Labeling them and not allowing them community support doesn't work. So I've turned 360, or no, 180 from where I was. Patty wanted her legacy to be a world that was better for kids, a safer, happier world. But she said she worries that what all those laws have actually done is make people reject that idea and instead view the world as fundamentally violent, dark and suspicious, with danger lurking behind every corner. It's all the fear. I think fear is really harmful in this topic.

You're more likely to get struck by lightning than to get kidnapped. But the fear of sexual abuse, especially with parents, is huge. And they think that making their kids scared is going to keep them safer, and that's absolutely not true. It's probably the opposite. And Patty told me the reality is kids are much more likely to be harmed by someone they know than by a stranger or a registered sex offender. It is somebody who knows the family knows the child. The teachers, the coaches, they are in our community, and it's not somebody jumping out from the bushes.

Here's what seems so remarkable to me about this. Patty's own experience is of her son being taken by a stranger in the dark. It really is that nightmare scenario. And yet what she's telling us is that we should not be making any more laws based on what happened to Jacob. But we did talk about Jacob. We talked about Danny Heinrich. By that point, Heinrich was already known to the public as a possible suspect in Jacob's kidnapping, but he hadn't confessed yet. I just want to say this after all of our hours and hours of conversing. Most of the offenders, most of the suspects that we have had were never on a registry. Danny Heinrich that they have now, he wouldn't have been a registered sex offender.

Danny Heinrich had never been convicted of a sex crime. Even if all of these laws had been in place back then, it wouldn't have mattered. None of them would have alerted authorities to Heinrich. And even when Patty learned all the awful things that Danny Heinrich had done to her son, she didn't ask people to be more vigilant or pass tougher laws. Instead, she asked people to play with their children, to eat ice cream, to laugh, and to help their neighbors.

She asked people to celebrate living in the kind of world where Jacob lived, to eat ice cream, to laugh, and to help their neighbors. She asked people to celebrate living in the kind of world where Jacob lived before he was kidnapped. A world where people weren't so scared of each other. Next time on In the Dark. Crimes are being committed that were unsolvable for the education and background of the individual is holding the position of sheriff. The murder shocked the rural Stearns County community and left state crime bureau investigators and sheriffs puzzled, searching for some fragment of reason behind the slayings. All at once we're locking doors.

Yeah, yeah. He started having a gun in the house. What has changed in those 40 years? Nothing has changed. So the problems that were back 40 years ago or beyond are still with us today. But there has to be an element in there to have accountability. And when accountability is not there, disastrous things happen. In the Dark is produced by Samara Freemark.

The associate producer is Natalie Jablonski. In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter, with help from Hans Butow. The editor-in-chief of APM Reports is Chris Worthington. Web editors are Dave Peters and Andy Cruz. The videographer is Jeff Thompson. Thanks to Rowan Morgarity for his reporting in Miami. Additional reporting for this episode by Will Kraft and Emily Havik. Our theme music is composed by Gary Meister. This episode was mixed by Johnny Vince Evans. Go to inthedarkpodcast.org to watch a video of Patti Wetterling talking about how she's changed the way she thinks about sex offender registries and to find ways to get help if you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted. Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. And they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr, and Eternal Father.

And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism, exploring themes of justice, identity, and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers, as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge, and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films at newyorker.com slash video. Hi, this is David Remnick, and I'm pleased to share the news that I'm Not a Robot, a live-action short film from the New Yorker's Screening Room series,

has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. This thought-provoking film grapples with questions that we can all relate to about identity and technology and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I encourage you to watch I'm Not a Robot, along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films, at newyorker.com slash video.