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Focus: We Keep Us Safe — Documentary
Focus: We Keep Us Safe

New Season “We Keep Us Safe” starting September 21, 2026.

In the summer of 2020, sixteen-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. traveled a thousand miles to join the racial justice movement of his generation. He arrived in Seattle during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, known as CHOP. Less than a week later, he was shot and killed there. The case remains unsolved. In this eight-part series, first published on NPR’s Embedded, KUOW’s Will James and The Seattle Times’ Sydney Brownstone track down key figures and eyewitnesses from the night of the shooting and surface crucial evidence that has never been made public.

We Keep Us Safe is a joint production of KUOW, The Seattle Times, and NPR’s Embedded.

Focus is KUOW’s home for immersive audio documentaries. Each season zooms in on a single story that challenges commonly held narratives about life in the Pacific Northwest and reveals something bigger about American society. Series include Adults in the Room and the Peabody-nominated Lost Patients.

Latest Episodes:

Lost Patients: The Way Out Apr 09, 2024

Show notes

After 10 months at Washington State's largest psychiatric hospital, Adam Aurand is discharged onto the streets of downtown Seattle — ejected into a world shaped by decades of deinstitutionalization and failure to build community-based mental health care. His mother rushes to save him before he gets pulled back into the "churn." A Seattle Times reporter tries to pinpoint where the discharge process failed — and the investigation leads her to new conclusions about the limitations of psychiatric care in the U.S.

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Lost Patients: Opening Apr 02, 2024

Show notes

In the middle of the last century, a movement to free patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals swept the U.S. This movement — deinstitutionalization — is widely blamed for seriously mentally ill people ending up on the streets. The real story goes much deeper than a loss of psychiatric hospital beds. It's about how incentives and decisions half a century created the dysfunction many people with serious mental illness are lost in today.

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Lost Patients: Nostalgia Mar 26, 2024

Show notes

After Carrie Davidson learned that her great-grandmother died in a psychiatric hospital, she spent years tracking down details of her life there. Was the asylum a refuge? Or a prison? This earlier era hangs like a shadow over our approach to care today. We peer into horror and nostalgia that surrounds our societal memories of these mental institutions — and try to sort out which narrative is true.

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Lost Patients: Against Their Will Mar 19, 2024

Show notes

Across the U.S., efforts are underway to make it easier to involuntarily commit people to psychiatric hospitals. It's a reaction to the sight of seriously mentally ill people on the streets and the cries of families who say it's too hard to get a loved one help when they're in crisis. But this gets at one of the most delicate questions our society has faced: When does our belief about what's best for someone override someone's right to decide for themselves?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lost Patients: Churn Mar 12, 2024

Show notes

Heidi Aurand has watched her son Adam spiral from one psychiatric crisis to the next for about eight years, bouncing between emergency rooms, jails, and homelessness. Now, after treatment at the state's largest psychiatric hospital, Adam was just released back onto the streets of downtown Seattle. A mother asks: How could her son pass through so many institutions and none are able to stop his decline?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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