Kyle Hopkins. Photo courtesy Anchorage Daily News.
Kyle Hopkins, 43, is a reporter and editor at the Anchorage Daily News. Hopkins was a reporter on the series “Lawless,” a collaboration between the ADN and ProPublica that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer board called the body of work “a riveting series that revealed a third of Alaska’s villages had no police protection, took authorities to task for decades of neglect, and spurred an influx of money and legislative changes.”
“One thing that was really instrumental and important to me early in the reporting was learning about a lawsuit about 20 years ago by several tribes that were saying if the state wasn’t going to support local means of tribal justice than it had a duty to provide the most basic of public safety services in villages, in the same way that you can’t just not provide a school. Just because it’s remote, just because it’s expensive, doesn’t mean you can not have a school if there’s a community that needs one. So for me, I think the takeaway was I just wanted people to know more about how justice works and fails in parts of Alaska that a lot of us might never visit. And if these problems were going to continue, I felt like it shouldn’t be because people don’t know what’s going on. If they continue it’s because we’re choosing to allow it to continue, not because we don’t know it’s happening.”
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