ProPublica undermines sound science

OPINION:

The activist nonprofit ProPublica has appeared frequently in my social media feed over the past few weeks. One columnist at the Washington Examiner wrote that the group “has been so extraordinarily dishonest in the past we can’t trust anything they publish.” Another conservative commentator wrote that “every story of theirs I have looked into has been wrong or seriously misleading.” A sitting senator, the target of one of ProPublica’s attacks, even took the unusual step of publicly releasing evidence that undermined their narrative.

A few years ago, the name ProPublica would not have registered with me. Now, I read those comments and cannot help but agree. Earlier this year, investigative journalist Alice Hines published a piece with the group implying that Averhealth, the forensic drug-testing laboratory I lead, cannot be trusted to produce accurate results. The implication is flatly untrue, and the record shows it.

Governments at every level rely on private companies for everything, including toll administration and garbage pickup. For some of the most sensitive functions — drug testing for courts, probation monitoring, child welfare screening — they turn to a small handful of companies, such as mine, that are independently accredited to rigorous scientific and ethical standards.

This work is critical and morally weighty, and it is also our livelihood. Our reputation is all we have. That is why we have spent years upholding our integrity and why we are fighting for it now.

In roughly a decade of testing millions of samples a year for courts and agencies in more than 25 states, Averhealth has been faulted by regulators exactly once, on a single contract-compliance dispute with an agency in a single state, more than five years ago. A brief probation was lifted after several months, with no finding that any test result was affected. No court, regulator or plaintiff has ever established that an Averhealth result was wrong. The Justice Department examined other claims for years and found no basis to pursue any of them.

Nevertheless, ProPublica ran its piece — built largely on the account of a former employee who worked for us part-time for less than two months more than five years ago — and it has had exactly the effect a malicious article is designed to have. Agencies that had trusted us felt pressure to discontinue.

Competitors circulated it. The credibility of a critical public function, one for which Averhealth is among the few U.S. laboratories accredited by the College of American Pathologists, was undermined in a single news cycle by a story that never identified one erroneous result. We asked ProPublica to correct or retract it. It refused. So we have taken the matter to court, where the standard of proof is more than an anonymous source and a headline.

Organizations such as ProPublica start from deep opposition to private enterprise helping governments do their jobs. They also start from the view that court-ordered drug testing is itself the harm — that monitoring a parent or probationer is an intrusion to be resisted rather than a safeguard for the children and communities it protects, and for the people it helps hold accountable to themselves. Those prejudices are apparent in their coverage, and they infect the attacks on my company.

The realistic alternative to accredited private testing is not a flawless public system. A 2009 National Academy of Sciences report, still the field’s authoritative assessment, found that accreditation of crime laboratories is not required in most American jurisdictions and that most forensic disciplines have no mandatory certification. Averhealth holds independent accreditation by choice, under a system that rightly imposes strict standards.

The most recent federal census of publicly funded crime laboratories found more than 710,000 requests unresolved after 30 days and more than 1,500 unfilled positions. The history is one of specific collapses. Detroit shut its police crime lab in 2008 after auditors found a 10% error rate in one unit, 10 times what a competent lab tolerates. In Massachusetts, state chemists were caught falsifying results and stealing evidence in two separate scandals, one long undetected; more than 45,000 cases were dismissed. St. Paul suspended its police lab’s drug testing after discovering that the lab had never documented its procedures. San Francisco closed its crime lab in 2010 over crushing caseloads, insecure evidence and uncalibrated scales.

The sensible response to those failures is more oversight, higher standards and continuous improvement — the incentives we operate under every day.

I have spent my entire career on a laboratory floor — first as a site manager, then for 11 years as chief operating officer — before I became Averhealth’s chief executive. My company is audited, accredited and adversarially tested in court, as it should be when the stakes are this high. I do not ask to be exempt from scrutiny. I ask only that it be consistent: that the same standards be applied to the alternatives, and that the cost to public trust of irresponsible accusations be weighed, before deciding my industry is the problem, and before a single anonymous account is allowed to outweigh a decade of dependable results.

Helping people overcome substance use and sustain recovery, in partnership with the courts and agencies we collaborate with, is our reason for being. The families and communities that rely on us deserve our best, and they deserve a lot better from ProPublica.

• Dominique Hummel is the CEO of Averhealth.