The Brief

When a young woman in Denver met up with a smiling cardiologist she matched with on the dating app Hinge, she had no way of knowing that the company behind the app had already received reports from two other women who accused him of rape.

She met the 34-year-old doctor with green eyes and thinning hair at Highland Tap & Burger, a sports bar in a trendy neighborhood. It went well enough that she accepted an invitation to go back to his apartment. As she emerged from his bathroom, he handed her a tequila soda.

What transpired over the next 24 hours, according to court testimony, reads like every person’s dating app nightmare.

After sipping the drink, the woman started to lose control. Her memory blurred. She fell to the ground, and the man started to film her. He put her in a headlock, kissing her forehead; she struggled to free herself but managed to grab her things and leave. He followed her out the door, holding her shoes and trying to force her back inside, but she was able to call an Uber, vomiting in the car on the way home.

She woke up at home, soaking wet on her bathroom floor, the key to her house still in her door. She continued vomiting for hours. When she came to, she reported the assault to Hinge.

Hinge is one of more than a dozen dating apps owned by Match Group. The $8.5 billion global conglomerate also owns brands like Tinder (the world’s most popular dating app), OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish. Match Group controls half of the world’s online dating market, operates in 190 countries, and facilitates meetups for millions of people.

Match Group’s official safety policy states that when a user is reported for assault, “all accounts found that are associated with that user will be banned from our platforms.”

So why, on the night of Jan. 25, 2023, was Stephen Matthews still on the app? Just four days before, Match Group had been alerted when another woman reported him for rape. A little more than a week later, he was reported for rape again. This time, the survivor went to the police.

None of these women knew that the company had known about his violent behavior for years. He was first reported on Sept. 28, 2020. By then, Match Group’s safety policy was already in place.

Even after a police report, it took nearly two months for Matthews to be arrested — the only thing that got him off the apps. By then, at least 15 women would eventually report that Matthews had raped or drugged them. Nearly every one of them had met him on dating apps run by Match Group.

On Oct. 25, a Denver judge sentenced Matthews to 158 years to life in prison after a jury convicted him of 35 counts related to drugging and sexually assaulting eight women, drugging two women, and assaulting one more for a total of 11 women. Attorneys for the women said much of that violence could have been prevented.

"It is shocking that for years after receiving reports of sexual assault, Hinge continued to allow Stephen Matthews access to its platforms and actively facilitated his abuse,” said Laura Wolf, the attorney representing the woman whose police report led to the arrest. Following best practices for reporting on sexual assault, the Dating Apps Reporting Project is honoring survivors’ requests for anonymity. Matthews’ attorney, Douglas Cohen, declined to comment. A letter that The Dating Apps Reporting Project sent directly to Matthews in jail went unanswered.

Match Group’s reach is so massive — its mission is “to spark meaningful connections for every single person worldwide” — that people are more likely to meet through its apps than out at the bars, at church or through friends.

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But Matthews' case shows that even as these apps have made it easier for us to connect with a seemingly endless pool of potential lovers, they have also made it easier for people who commit sexual abuse to reach a seemingly endless number of potential targets.

In 2022, a team of researchers at Brigham Young University published an analysis of hundreds of sexual assaults in Utah. They found attacks facilitated by dating apps happened faster and were more violent than when the perpetrator met the victim through other means. They also found that perpetrators who use dating apps are more likely to target vulnerable people. Almost 60% of sexual assault survivors self-reported a mental illness.

Match Group has known for years which users have been reported for drugging, assaulting or raping their dates since at least 2016, according to internal company documents. Since 2019, Match Group’s central database has recorded every user reported for rape and assault across its entire suite of apps; by 2022, the system, known as Sentinel, was collecting hundreds of troubling incidents every week, company insiders say.

Match Group promised in 2020 that it would release what’s known as a transparency report — a public document that would reveal data on harm occurring on and off its platforms. If the public were aware of the scale of rape and assault on Match Group apps, they would be able to accurately assess their risk. As of February 2025, the report has not been released.

Instead, as people continued to get hurt, the company dithered over what damning information should be hidden. “Do we publish only where we are required by law?” reads a slide in a 2021 presentation shown multiple times to Match Group employees as well as external safety partners. “Do we push back on how much we are required to reveal, or do we try to go beyond what is required?”

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No online space is risk-free. But while Match Group has long possessed the tools, financial resources and investigative procedures necessary to make it harder for bad actors to resurface, internal documents show the company has resisted efforts to spread them across its apps, in part because safety protocols could stall corporate growth.

“The obsession with metrics and having to stick with them is frustrating and potentially dangerous,” one employee wrote in 2021 after the company learned that the investigative news nonprofit ProPublica was planning a story. “This is not the way we were meant to work and people’s lives are at risk.”

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The same person asked their superiors: “‘How much would you personally pay to stop just one person being sexually assaulted by a date, one child being trafficked or one vulnerable person being driven to suicide by a predator?’ I feel that if I asked members of our staff that question individually, they would put a high value of their own money on it — but as a group nobody is ready to hear that yet."

Since 2021, Match Group has publicly promised to improve the safety of their products and share data, but company insiders say safety has not improved. A brief hiring spree sparked by congressional and media scrutiny has been largely scaled back, according to former employees. In 2024, the remaining employees from the central trust-and-safety team Match Group set up in response to increased scrutiny were let go and their jobs outsourced to overseas contractors. Facing pressure from Wall Street, Match Group removed CEO Bernard Kim in early February 2025 as he struggled to cut costs and end the steady decline in subscribers to Match Group’s most powerful app, Tinder.

Members of Congress have repeatedly requested data from Match Group on sexual harm. In February 2020, 11 members of Congress wrote to then-CEO Shar Dubey asking for details on how the company responds to reports of sexual violence. In July 2023, two Democrats, then-Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire and Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois followed up after we inquired on the status of their efforts. The company has still not provided the data.

In September 2024, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires consumers to be notified if they have interacted with a user on a dating app who has been banned for defrauding consumers of money or personal financial information. But the bill stopped short of addressing the issue of sexual assault on the apps, and it died in the Senate.

Our review of hundreds of pages of internal company documents, along with thousands of pages of court records, securities filings, and analyst reports, coupled with dozens of interviews with current and former employees and survivors of sexual violence found women who report being raped get no traction, while accused rapists like Stephen Matthews keep swiping — and assaulting.

Our own testing on Match Group apps shows that as of February 2025, not much has changed. Banned Tinder users, including those reported for sexual assault, can easily rejoin or move to another Match Group dating app, all while keeping most of their key personal information exactly the same.

The Dating Apps Reporting Project sent Match Group a four-page letter detailing our findings. The company responded with a short statement. The statement did not dispute that Match Group has carefully documented the extent of harm on company apps for years without sharing that information with the public. It also defended the company’s efforts to make platforms safe.

“We recognize our role in fostering safer communities and promoting authentic and respectful connections worldwide,” the statement provided by Kayla Whaling, senior director of communications, read. “We will always work to invest in and improve our systems, and search for ways to help our users stay safe, both online and when they connect in real life.”

The company said it vigorously combats violence. “We take every report of misconduct seriously, and vigilantly remove and block accounts that have violated our rules regarding this behavior,” its statement read. Our own testing found otherwise.

Starting in April 2024, The Dating Apps Reporting Project created a series of Tinder accounts that we subsequently reported for sexual assault. Soon after, Tinder banned the accounts, and we started investigating how easy it would be for a banned user to create new accounts.

Repeatedly, we found that users, soon after being banned, could create new Tinder accounts with the exact same name, birthday, and profile photos used on their banned accounts. Users banned from Tinder were also able to sign up for Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish without changing those personal details.

To get around the Tinder ban, we used techniques commonly suggested by online guides and forums that don’t require lots of technical knowledge to understand. We were able to verify three techniques that allowed banned Match Group users to repeatedly bypass being flagged when creating new accounts.

In its statement, Match Group cast itself as an industry leader in deploying technology to promote safety, including “harassment-preventing AI tools, ID verification for profiles, and a portal that helps us better support and communicate with law enforcement investigating crimes. … Every person deserves safe and respectful experiences. We are committed to doing the work to make dating safer on our platforms and beyond,” the statement said.

Sept. 28, 2020 — the date Denver cardiologist Stephen Matthews raped a woman who reported him to Hinge — is also the date Tracey Breeden was brought on as Match Group's head of safety and social advocacy.

Breeden was a flashy hire. “With Tracey coming on board, we are reaffirming our commitment not just to be safety leaders in the dating space, but across the entire tech sector,” then-CEO Shar Dubey said.

Sporting a trademark black leather jacket and short, slick-backed hair, Breeden went by the nickname “Tornado” during her 15-year career in law enforcement. What made her attractive to Match Group was her most recent job at Uber. She helped the global ride-hailing company revive its reputation after a series of scandals — from persistent reports of harassment of women employees to allegations that it was ignoring sexual assault that occurred during Uber rides.

Breeden spearheaded a safety report in 2019 that told the public what Uber knew about nearly every problem, including nationwide reports of intoxicated drivers, traffic fatalities, and incidents of sexual violence. The report became a key metric of success for the company.

In hiring Breeden, Match Group hoped to replicate this success across its portfolio of apps. "Corporations,” she said in a press release announcing her arrival, “have a responsibility to help ensure safe experiences for their users.”

Breeden’s team garnered public attention for its new safety measures, including partnerships with NGOs, optional AI-assisted photo verification, and a law enforcement portal where police and prosecutors can request data.

She also fostered a partnership with Garbo, a startup that offered low-cost background checks. It launched on Tinder in 2022. Experts point out that background checks are not always reliable as they pull from outdated databases, and research suggests that most people who commit sexual abuse do not encounter the criminal justice system. For example, Matthews had no criminal record.

During this time, Match Group invested $100 million into safety as a recurring cost, the company said, and boasted about Breeden’s “central safety team.”

Her team of veteran safety professionals referred to themselves as “The Avengers,” even donning superhero costumes at company events.

An Avengers Zoom background, displayed at a Match Group company event.

But Michael Lawrie called this “safety theater.”

Lawrie worked for Match Group for nearly a decade, shaping and leading a safety team for one of the company’s smaller brands, OkCupid. Sometimes working 80-hour weeks, he spent hours, even days, sniffing out savvy users who tried to thwart bans by creating multiple accounts.

Over a 30-year career in content moderation, Lawrie said, he saw many users like Stephen Matthews. “You're dealing with one repeat offender. I've dealt with god knows how many repeat offenders,” he said.

A yellow Post-it note on the side of Lawrie’s computer listed out some of his responsibilities: “Rape flags. … Investigate miscreants.”

Michael Lawrie, former head of user safety and advocacy at OkCupid.

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These days, Lawrie is trying to start an advocacy organization for content moderators and other front-line safety workers. But, he said, he’s done with dating apps.

“I don’t think they’re safe enough at the moment,” he said. “They’re gonna get worse. ... I’m hoping dating sites vanish.”

Lawrie said he was initially excited about Breeden’s hire. He said she spent her first few months on the job talking to each brand’s safety team, and told him that she was “very impressed” by the work OkCupid was doing.

Each of Match Group’s biggest apps provided their self-described strengths and weaknesses to Breeden’s team, according to an internal spreadsheet. At Hinge, these weaknesses included a “very rudimentary warning system with no targeted comms and no follow through” and “no way to find” the original profile “of a bad actor who has created multiple profiles.”

Breeden was confronted with an existential problem. “Our current ban categories won’t allow us to answer the public’s biggest question: Am I likely to be harmed on my date?” reads a slide in a presentation drafted by her team in April 2021. While each of Match Group’s apps had a system of reporting and banning violent users, the information was disorganized, and none of the apps talked to each other.

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Lawrie hoped Breeden would improve safety at the company. But he quickly grew frustrated that neither she nor Match Group leadership listened to his pleas for what they really needed to make platforms safer: to hire trained — and expensive — investigators and integrate powerful moderation tools across all the apps.

OkCupid already had those tools. Lawrie was using them every day. One of those was the Sentinel system, which had been up and running across Match Group’s apps for at least five years before Breeden arrived. It works like this: When a user is banned for something serious — like sexual assault — a case is created in Sentinel with the phone number and email address associated with their account. In interviews, multiple current and former employees described how those reports circulate through each of Match Group’s apps. The system is designed to ban anyone who uses that information. It also grabs the original profile’s IP addresses, photos and birth date.

An example of a case in Sentinel for a banned user. Sensitive information has been redacted by The Markup.

Such a system seems robust at first glance — but none of the Match Group’s apps require users to provide photo identification (the kind needed to buy alcohol or board an airplane), so once a person is kicked out, they can easily start a new account with different contact information. A quick search yields scores of online forums with clear steps and suggestions for how to rejoin the apps. In addition, internal company documents show information on IP addresses, photos, and birth date were not used to ban a user if they appear on another Match dating app.

Lawrie’s team at OkCupid knew Sentinel could only do so much.

So his team deployed other tools to fix its shortcomings, including one that could automatically ban a profile that was linked to a phone number, photo or URL that had been previously banned — even if the user made an account with a different email or IP address. This tool was designed to be proactive rather than reactive, so that the profiles of alleged perpetrators like Matthews would not resurface after they had been reported.

Internal company documents from 2019 and 2020 show thousands of reports of “serious physical assault,” abuse, or violence on OkCupid that were deemed serious enough to get users banned from all of Match Group’s apps. This is among the information the company kept from the public.

Breeden and Match Group leadership praised Lawrie and his team at OkCupid, he said, for their thorough investigative work and for handling some of the company’s most difficult cases. Yet, he said, Match Group never built out a skilled, experienced investigative unit at other brands like the one he headed up at OkCupid. Under Breeden’s leadership, he said, they faced pressure to speed up investigations and train outsourced labor to use complicated moderation tools.

A week after a damning article in 2021 revealed that content moderators with little training were asked to rapidly deal with violent sexual content across Match Group’s brands, then-CEO Dubey sent out an all-staff email addressing the controversy. She CC’d Breeden, acknowledging that the brand’s safety teams were not all on equal footing.

As Match Group prepared internally for the story to break, Lawrie was asked to write a report for Breeden outlining his team’s accomplishments “to make sure when Tracey describes and acknowledges what you are doing individually to celebrate the good work that you are doing.”

Lawrie used that report to protest.

“Most professionals aren’t judged on how many cases they can hurry through in an hour,” he wrote. The way Match Group expects its trust-and-safety and support teams to work “basically diminishes their skills and makes them production-line workers.” Breeden declined to comment for this story, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

Lawrie left the company in 2022 and said most of his small team that was ferreting out malicious users also left due to a negative workplace environment. He said much of their work was outsourced to contractors with little training and severe quotas.

He now cautions anyone using a dating app to understand that they’re not in the business of protecting users.

“You're on your own pretty much,” he said.

As Lawrie was getting pushed out of Match Group, Matthews kept appearing on the company’s apps.

One crisp fall evening in 2022, one of the Denver cardiologist’s old medical school classmates was on Hinge when her phone screen filled up with a familiar face.

Matthews was being promoted on the app as a Standout, a popular profile that Hinge’s algorithm thinks you’ll like. To match with a Standout, users must send the person a rose. They get one free rose a week, but they cost $3.99 a pop after that. His classmate did not send Matthews a rose.

Despite having been reported for rape to Hinge, Stephen Matthews' profile was still promoted on the app as a Standout, as indicated by the rose icon in the bottom right corner.

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By this point, Matthews had already been reported for rape at least once to Hinge. Court documents show that he had already allegedly sexually assaulted nine women and drugged 10. Not only did the apps allow him back on, they featured Matthews’ profile.

As the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on, people got tired of forking money over for dating apps. Match Group still made a hefty profit, but its growth flatlined. Its stock cratered, losing nearly half its value between October 2021 and April 2022. That month, an analyst from J.P. Morgan wrote that the firm had received more messages about “the underperformance of MTCH shares in recent weeks than any other topic.”

In May 2022, Match ousted Dubey and installed Bernard Kim as CEO, a former executive at the gaming company Zynga that popularized viral games like “FarmVille.”

While Dubey spoke frequently about trust and safety and worked closely with Breeden, Kim hardly mentioned safety when he began his time at Match Group, instead emphasizing the need for continued rapid expansion to drive long-term shareholder value.

Lawrie said that Kim, with his background in gaming rather than dating apps, had no interest in love. “He just wants to make money. He’s just there to increase profits,” Lawrie said. “If he's looking at a bottom line, then it's easier to have a lawsuit than it is to provide safety. I know which one he's gonna pick.”

Match Group declined to make Bernard Kim available for an interview. Messages sent to Kim directly went unreturned.

While the tension between growth and safety exists across the tech sector, it is especially high at dating apps companies where executives have to worry about constant churn — users leaving the apps when they are no longer looking for dates. Every time Match Group delivers on its promise, it also loses customers.

In February 2024, six dating app users filed what they hope will be certified as a class action lawsuit. They argue Match Group uses “addictive” features to encourage compulsive use while not leading to any real increase in off-app relationships. “The app is designed specifically to hook them, and to keep them paying subscription fees — not to help them find love,” attorney Ryan Clarkson said. Match Group filed to dismiss the lawsuit in September, noting in its quarterly report that it “will defend vigorously” against the allegations.

Despite Kim’s efforts, Match Group’s stock price continued to drop, and during that time, so did any mention of trust and safety. In over a year of quarterly investor calls, Kim only referenced safety efforts once.

Employees who pushed for these initiatives were forced out or laid off, including Breeden — a leader who was so convinced of her own invincibility that she showed up to an event wielding a Captain America shield.

Shar Dubey, left, then chief executive of Match Group, speaking with Tracey Breeden.

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Match Group fired its power hire in October 2022. Layoffs hit her team over the next several months. In February 2024, the remaining critical investigators and law enforcement liaisons on Breeden’s central safety team were shown the door.

Lawrie said group chats of former Match Group employees have been gossipping about the cutbacks.

“You're not gonna see them taking safety seriously ever again,” he said, adding that the only thing that he thinks might change that is legislation.

Four months before Matthews was arrested, a post on a Facebook group in Denver blew up, right around Christmas.

Over and over again, women furiously detailed negative experiences they or their friends had with Matthews.

Some women described him as “sketchy.” Others called him “terrible” and “not safe.” Multiple women told a similar, dark story: that they were offered drinks, blacked out and sexually assaulted.

The thread reached 150 comments. Two women wrote the same thing: that they had been waiting for someone to post about the cardiologist.

The flood of Facebook comments mirrored details in the police reports released the following year. Nearly all of the 16 women included in the district attorney’s initial complaints were offered tequila. Eight recalled playing Jenga. Six mentioned a hot tub.

As these stories circulated in this small corner of the internet in December 2022, the Denver cardiologist stayed on Match Group apps.

Those fortunate enough to know about the Facebook group — and who had the foresight to check for Matthews on it — would be saved from a bad date or worse. But the fact that he could still log into Tinder and Hinge left him with a pool of thousands of unsuspecting women whom he could — and would — continue to match with.

The Dating Apps Reporting Project is aware of four additional women who have accused Matthews of drugging and/or raping them who were not part of the criminal complaint. Each of these women met Matthews on a Match Group app during a single year between the summers of 2020 and 2021.

During the years Matthews was on their apps, Match Group hired and fired Breeden. It made loud promises on sexual violence, announced initiatives and product lines, and promised a transparency report. But it was not straight with the public, which meant the women matching with Matthews on Match Group apps were not aware of the risk they faced.

Match Group’s partnership with Garbo, the background check company, also fell apart in the summer of 2023. “It’s become clear that most online platforms aren’t legitimately committed to trust and safety for their users,” Garbo wrote in a searing blog post.

After spending so much energy talking about monetization, gamification and growth, Kim began to publicly acknowledge this problem. Speaking at the Citibank conference in the fall of 2023, he said the company was investing in new features to make sure “women have a good experience while they're in the product. They feel safe. They feel secure. Etc.”

The “etc.” does not seem to include increased transparency about safety. Instead, in May 2023, Tinder released a “female-focused package,” a curated list of “high-quality profiles.” It is unclear how Tinder determines these high-quality matches. Hinge’s Standout feature, which is similar, had previously promoted Matthews.

In fact, under Kim’s leadership, all mentions of a transparency report disappeared from the company’s annual impact report. Ironically, this was around the same time that new legislation in Europe required tech companies to disclose reports of “non-consensual behavior” and other issues. Match Group will be required to submit a transparency report to the European Union on the scope of harm on their platforms later this month. Lawmakers in India and Australia are also demanding transparency.

This is exactly the situation Breeden and her team pondered three years ago. “What if publishing in one jurisdiction sparks a requirement in another?” read a slide in the same internal presentation where Match Group’s trust-and-safety leaders wondered whether they should “push back on how much [they] are required to reveal.”

After Match Group published a disappointing earnings report in February 2025 that fell below analysts’ expectations, it also announced that Kim would be replaced by former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff. Tinder’s revenue, sales and subscribers had all gone down.

As Match Group struggles to reverse its decline, it’s also aware that its reputation is in the spotlight. Earnings calls and shareholder letters over the first three quarters of 2024 indicate that the company knows it is a business imperative to make women feel safer on its platforms. Match Group brought in a new vice president to head trust and safety whose job partly focuses on complying with increased global transparency requirements. The company is experimenting with requiring faces in photos and rolled out a “Share My Date” feature so you can be tracked while meeting up with an online stranger. On Tinder, it orchestrated a “major ecosystem cleanup” geared toward identifying fake profiles and getting scammers off the app.

But neither the cleanup nor tracking a date from your phone would have stopped Matthews — a man who never sought to hide his identity, who assaulted his dates in his own home — from finding and harming women.

Four years after Matthews’ first documented assault, he walked into a wood-paneled courtroom in Denver and was sentenced to 158 years to life in prison. “I will sentence. I cannot heal,” Judge Eric Johnson told the room filled with survivors and family members.

“Countless women have suffered and will continue to suffer,” said Laura Wolf, an attorney who represented the woman whose police report triggered Matthews’ arrest. “Hinge and other dating platforms have taken no steps to ensure the safety of the product they are selling, matching unsuspecting women to known predators without pause or concern.”

Match Group didn’t make it easy for the Denver prosecutors to convict Matthews. A search warrant was issued to Hinge in July 2023. Two months later, prosecutors were still empty-handed — with the judge in the case asking at a hearing if he needed to start “dragging people in to get stuff done.” It wasn’t until February 2024 that the Denver District Attorney’s Office said they finally received documents returned by Match Group.

Matthews will likely never leave prison. Match Group executives currently face no charges. But the company knew about Matthews, and it knows about thousands of other abusive users. It has the data that could help users avoid dangerous situations, but it hasn’t shared it, leaving millions of people in the dark.

Lawmakers around the world are starting to ask for answers from the most powerful force in modern dating. In June, Colorado passed a law, triggered by the Matthews case, that forces dating app companies to tell the state attorney general what safety measures they are taking to protect users. Although the law leaves room for the possibility of additional transparency in the future, it does not currently require the company to tell the state, or the public, how many people are raped or assaulted after using its platform. In the U.S., we’ve just scratched the surface. In most states, there’s little that requires Match Group to share information with you — or with Congress.

The reality is that if Stephen Matthews were released today, he could get right back on a dating app. Match Group knows this — and now so do you.

This story is a collaboration between the LAist and The LA Local. Agya K. Aning and Alain Stephens are freelance reporters.

On a clear winter night in 2019, Gerardo Gaona drove a white Ford Expedition to a homeless encampment in Pico-Union, stepped out, entered a tent and fired six rounds from his 9mm handgun.

Hector Valey, 24, was hit twice. Court records say he managed to make it out of the tent, dying nearby soon after midnight Feb. 23. Jorge Perez was struck in his right shoulder — his life likely spared only because the Smith & Wesson aimed at him ran out of bullets. Gaona got back into the SUV and sped off.

Two weeks earlier, on Feb. 9, police had responded to a shooting at the same encampment that left one person wounded. The same Expedition was spotted at the scene, and bullet casings were eventually linked back to Gaona’s pistol.

Gaona, now 30, was convicted of first-degree murder and premeditated attempted murder in 2022. He was sentenced to a minimum of 82 years in prison. The court described him as “a borderline serial killer who hunted homeless people in his neighborhood.”

He's not the first person in Los Angeles to target the city's most vulnerable. Unhoused people living here have been strangled, stabbed, set on fire and bludgeoned with baseball bats — often in plain view.

An investigation by LAist and The LA Local found that at least 278 of the city’s unhoused residents have been shot and killed since 2015, according to an analysis of data from the Los Angeles Police Department. Once rare, gunfire is now the primary means by which killers take the lives of unhoused people in the city.

However, our analysis of records from the L.A. County Medical Examiner shows that’s an undercount. We found an additional two dozen fatal shootings from 2024 and 2025 that do not appear to be included in LAPD data. Medical examiner records are not exhaustive either — the office estimates that about 20% of deaths among the county’s unhoused population aren’t reported to their department.

In 2014, the earliest year analyzed in this investigation, there were no killings of this kind. In 2022, there were 60. This surge reflected a national peak in gun violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, which experts have attributed to fewer social supports, rising gun sales, and an increase in joblessness, mental illness, and substance abuse. Following a decline, LAPD data show that fatal shootings of unhoused people stayed nearly the same between 2024 and 2025, even as overall homicides in the city last year fell by 19%.

The oldest shooting victim found in the medical examiner’s records was a 69-year-old man who, in 2024, was shot six times in an alley near the intersection of Interstates 105 and 110. The youngest was shot seven times, mostly in the back, during a drive-by in Florence-Graham that same year. He was 15 years old. Neither victim appears in LAPD data.

The LAPD didn’t return a request for comment about the gaps in its shooting data.

“This data underscores why Mayor Bass is so zealous about bringing people inside from the street and encampments,” reads a statement from Mayor Karen Bass’ Office. “When people are left on the street — which was the de facto City policy before Mayor Bass was elected — they are exponentially more likely to encounter violence.”

Drug overdoses, coronary heart disease, and traffic accidents remain overwhelmingly the most common causes of death among L.A.’s unhoused population. But fatal shootings have become a persistent danger facing the “unsheltered” portion of this population — the nearly 27,000 men, women and children who sleep on sidewalks, in tents or cars, under bridges, and other places not meant for permanent human habitation. It’s the biggest population of its kind found anywhere in America.

Unhoused people are both the perpetrators and victims of homicide. But LAPD homicide data shows they are far more likely to be the victims of violence: From 2015 through 2025, unsheltered people accounted for 16% of all murder victims in the city, despite making up less than 1% of Angelenos.

“Homeless people face, arguably, the highest victimization levels of virtually anyone in society,” said Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Among homicides in 2025 with unhoused shooting victims, the LAPD made arrests in all 16 cases, according to our analysis of department data. This is a dramatic change from 2023 — before the department changed its data collection methods — when the LAPD cleared just 48% of such cases by arrest for unhoused victims, and 74% for housed victims.

The LAPD did not return a request for comment about this significant change in arrest rate.

Court records and people who spoke with LAist and The LA Local attributed these shootings to gangs and the dangers of the underground drug economy. Other sources and legal proceedings point to a rise of “predators,” “outsiders,” or “vigilantes” — people who kill because they view unhoused people as easy targets and less than human.

There are “people who actually go out and target the homeless as some kind of badge of honor,” Levin said.

“As the numbers of people who are homeless rise, the number of vigilante activities have risen with it,” said Andy Bales, who ran the Union Rescue Mission shelter on Skid Row for nearly 20 years.

Throughout most of the country, a person’s housing status isn’t collected upon their death, which means that national data on the shootings of unhoused people is currently unavailable. However, advocates say this kind of violence is on the rise around the U.S. And with a growing share of Americans losing shelter, more people are at risk.

Predators and self-styled vigilantes

For decades, individual news stories have revealed the violence facing unhoused Angelenos. A UPI story from 1986 begins:

LOS ANGELES – Thousands of homeless street people are being urged to spend their nights in Skid Row missions or 'huddle together for safety' against a killer who has shot four men as they slept in lots and alleys.

The shooter, dubbed The Skid Row Slayer, would kill a total of 10 unhoused men before dying by suicide nine days after the story was published.

Years later, two elderly women took out life insurance policies worth millions of dollars on two unhoused men — before killing them in staged hit-and-runs in 1999 and 2005.

“They went out of their way to target men who had nothing,” said Bobby Grace, a deputy district attorney who prosecuted their case.

The perpetrators of the so-called Black Widow Murders were sentenced to life without parole.

Gaona went on his shooting spree in 2019, according to court documents, “without any apparent provocation or reason other than ridding his community of its most vulnerable members.”

More recently, the LAPD arrested two people in May 2022 for allegedly shooting and killing a 69-year-old unhoused double amputee while he slept in his wheelchair outside of a McDonald’s in Gramercy Park. A jury found one of them not guilty at trial in 2023. The second person, Rubi Anguiano-Salazar, shot a 67-year-old unhoused woman, who survived, at a bus stop in the same neighborhood four days later. In 2025, Salazar was sentenced to 42 years to life in prison for one count of first-degree murder with a gun and one count of willful, deliberate, and premeditated attempted murder.

Over a span of 72 hours in November 2023, Jerrid Joseph Powell allegedly prowled the nighttime streets of Los Angeles, sneaking up on unhoused men and shooting them. One man was asleep on a couch. Another was pushing a shopping cart. The third was resting on the sidewalk. They all died. During that period, Powell allegedly killed another man in L.A. County who was not unhoused. Beverly Hills police arrested Powell a few days later in connection with that shooting after his car was identified from surveillance footage.

Powell has pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder. Criminal proceedings have been suspended while his case works its way through hearings to establish if he is mentally competent to stand trial, according to the district attorney’s office.

Last August, authorities say Vincent Wolf approached an RV parked outside his apartment building in Sylmar and shot and killed Travis Harker, 29. Wolf has pleaded not guilty to murder and is awaiting trial. Police said Wolf, 23, had vented frustration on social media earlier that month about homelessness and “corrupt politicians” failing to address the issue.

Benyamin Sadeh, an LAPD detective who investigated Harker’s killing, said he worked on a different fatal shooting in 2023 that seemed motivated by a similar sort of resentment.

“The victim wasn’t homeless, but he appeared to be,” Sadeh told LAist and The LA Local.

Sadeh said he’s not surprised LAPD data shows shootings of unhoused victims have remained consistent as homicides in the general population decrease.

“It’s a big problem for us,” Sadeh said. “A lot of people focus on the impact [of gun violence] to our communities, but it's also affecting people that are experiencing homelessness.”

Gisselle Espinoza is an LAPD commander and the department’s homeless coordinator. She disagrees.

“I don't have anything to suggest that there's a trend or a pattern with people pulling weapons on [unhoused people],” she said.

Numerous people living outdoors who spoke with LAist and The LA Local described having guns pulled on them as a regular occurrence.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman’s office doesn’t track the housing status of victims or people accused of crimes, an office spokesperson said in an email. “Our more than 800 prosecutors remain deeply committed to seeking justice and supporting every victim impacted by crime,” the statement added.

Most suspected shooters are housed

Jeff Wenninger spent 33 years in law enforcement, much of it with the LAPD, and he sees things differently from Espinoza. His résumé includes a stint in the department’s Rampart Division, which encompasses MacArthur Park, a hub of homelessness in L.A. He estimates that half of the attacks on unhoused people he saw there were of the predatory sort — but that applies only to instances where the assailant was caught, allowing their identity to be known.

“For lack of a better term, I’ll just call them ‘outsiders’ that are victimizing the homeless and seeing them as less human,” said Wenninger, who now provides expert witness testimonies and security consulting.

His estimate tracks with LAPD data, which includes the housing status of suspected criminals. An analysis of department records by LAist and The LA Local shows that in the killings of unhoused people, 83% of suspected shooters from 2015 through 2025 were housed.

“That's pretty concerning. I think law enforcement would want to say otherwise, that it's homeless on homeless,” Wenninger said.

Between 2015 and 2025, the number of unsheltered people in Los Angeles increased from roughly 18,000 to nearly 27,000, a rise of about 52%. The city is the epicenter of America’s homelessness crisis: It encompasses roughly 10% of the nation’s entire unsheltered homeless population, even though only about 1% of people in the country live here.

Local, county, state and federal levels have poured billions of dollars into addressing homelessness in the L.A. area, but progress has been minimal. Homeless advocates acknowledge that the persistence of this crisis has led to compassion fatigue, resignation, resentment, and dehumanization among some Angelenos. This loss of patience has at times expressed itself as protests, angry local council meetings and anti-homeless Facebook groups.

Jeremy Rosenprinz is a member of the volunteer-led homeless outreach group Ktown For All, and he’s familiar with such negative sentiments. “The problem is that when you live your life in public, there is nowhere for you to go. And so we're seeing people at their absolute worst,” he said.

Jeremy Rosenprinz, a member of Ktown For All, stands outside of Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Koreatown on Jan. 10. The all-volunteer group meets most Saturdays to deliver supplies to unhoused people in the neighborhood

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Agya K. Aning

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LAist and The LA Local

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Academic research shows that some people believe their unhoused neighbors deserve to suffer, and a 2024 study in Los Angeles County provides a glimpse into their struggles: 32% of homeless respondents said they experienced discrimination daily in the past month, while 16% said they had experienced violence. To be clear, these kinds of indignities can come from other unhoused people. They also come from housed individuals who’ve slashed tents and thrown their possessions into dumpsters.

“Being unhoused — it's like exile, basically,” Rosenprinz said. “When people are marginalized and demonized in the media and by our government, then it sets off a certain type of person who thinks that, 'Oh, like, maybe I'm even doing a community service to do violence against these people,'” he said.

“I think there's entire portions of the population who do not see the unhoused or people living in poverty as human beings,” said Soma Snakeoil, the co-founder and executive director of The Sidewalk Project, a street-based harm reduction organization.

Snakeoil co-founded the group in 2017. It’s led by and lends aid to unhoused, drug-using, sexual assault survivor, and sex worker populations. The Sidewalk Project operates a drop-in center on the southern edge of Skid Row, where there’s always someone standing watch behind a heavy rolling gate. With its cozy couches and multi-colored murals, the interior resembles an easygoing hostel. It serves as a haven for cisgender and trans women, offering them meals, hygiene kits, self-defense classes and a place to simply rest.

The Sidewalk Project helped Reilly, who was previously unhoused and preferred not to give her first name, get housing in 2021. They brought her on as an employee the year before that, and as the group’s community ambassador her roles include harm-reduction outreach, wound care, and violence interruption.

Reilly said she left an abusive household in the 1980s and made her way as a sex worker, living out of various hotels. She’s been attacked numerous times, she said, including a drive-by pellet gun shooting to her ankle that required 106 stitches. From the 15 intermittent years Reilly spent unhoused, she said she’s known several dozen unhoused people who’ve been shot and killed.

“If they have this need or desire to kill people, then this is the place to come,” Reilly said. “Because we're expendable.”

Reilly, who was formerly unhoused, stands before a mural at The Sidewalk Project, a drop-in shelter for unhoused cisgender and trans women in Skid Row on Jan. 9. The organization brought her on as its community ambassador and helped her get housing.

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Agya K. Aning

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LAist and The LA Local

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Gang threats in encampments

The Union Rescue Mission is a shelter that operates a faith-based recovery program in Skid Row. Men and women receive aid there in various forms, including detox, therapy, parenting classes, vocational training, and help finding housing.

Andy Bales watched the population of Skid Row rise dramatically during his 20-year tenure, which ended in 2023. Over the years, he said he witnessed countless acts of violence, including being within earshot of a fatal shooting. He said he also saw gangs set people’s tents on fire for crossing them or failing to pay debts.

“Skid Row is the worst man-made disaster in the US,” Bales said.

A great deal of being unhoused revolves around simply staying safe, so those living outside often band together to look after one another. However, homeless encampments can be ripe for violence and exploitation, including being used as cover for drug-dealing operations.

Detective Sadeh said “a lot” of the violence he’s seen was related to the drug trade, including gangs who wanted unhoused drug users to buy from them exclusively.

Eunisses Hernandez, a City Council member representing parts of Los Angeles with large unhoused populations, said she’s aware of violence in and around encampments.

“I have certain encampments where there's regular [gang] shootings,” Hernandez said.

Identifying the exact degree of gang involvement in these crimes is difficult. In 2020, the LAPD withdrew from CalGang, a statewide database used to track gang affiliations, after an internal audit found that officers were falsifying records. Other law enforcement agencies in the state are still prohibited from using records generated by the LAPD, which made up about a quarter of the data.

Court records show that assumed rival gang affiliations can be a significant factor in violence against unhoused people.

On a late night in early 2018, two members of the Avenues gang were out looking for rivals and eventually made their way to a homeless encampment in Montecito Heights. They entered a tent where they found Daniel Duarte and Douglas Garido. The intruders asked the two men where they were from, meaning, What gang do you belong to? Duarte said he was from Pasadena, and Garido said he had no affiliations. Suddenly, one of the men shot Duarte, 31, in the back of the head. He died at the scene, while Garido, 34, was shot twice and survived. According to court records, neither of them belonged to any gang.

A year later, Bradley Hanaway was sleeping under bleachers in North Hollywood when three members of MS-13 approached him, asking to see his tattoos. Mistaking one for the symbol of a rival clique, court records state, one member shot Hanaway almost instantly, killing him. He was 34 years old.

Guns on the street

California’s gun laws, long considered the country’s strongest, require proof of residency to legally own a firearm — a difficult task for anyone living on the streets of L.A. Further, federal law prohibits gun possession for anyone convicted of a felony or involuntarily committed to an institution for a mental disorder or severe substance use. During the city’s 2025 point-in-time count — an annual tally of unsheltered people — 26% reported having a serious mental disorder, while 30% said they had a substance abuse disorder.

Still, there are plenty of ways to obtain a firearm illegally, such as stealing, bringing them in from states with less restrictive gun laws, and straw purchasing, which involves buying a gun on someone else’s behalf.

“Everybody has a gun, mostly people who are not supposed to have guns,” Detective Sadeh said. “They’re out there, they are easily obtained, and they change hands very quickly.”

From 2015 through 2025, the LAPD seized more than 80,000 illegal firearms, according to its annual crime report. Last year, it recovered 8,650, over a thousand more than in 2024. The department has reportedly recovered guns from encampments, among other locations.

Sadeh said that ghost guns — untraceable firearms manufactured at home, assembled from kits or some combination of both — are also prevalent in the city. Last year, the LAPD recovered 876 of them, down from a peak of 1,921 in 2021.

LAist and The LA Local spoke to an unhoused woman living in Koreatown, who said that gun ownership among people on the streets was common in her neighborhood.

“On this street alone, on the average, there's four or five guns, right here from that block to that block,” said the 57-year-old woman, who said she was an Army veteran and former police officer. She said there were gunshots almost every night, mostly coming from gang activity.

“Between Alvarado [Street] and Vermont [Avenue], what, there’s four active gangs right here? Well, five if you include LAPD,” she said.

The veteran, who wasn’t comfortable giving her name, already knows her way around firearms.

“Even though we're not supposed to [have guns],” she said, “I'm considering one, ya know?”

Zackery "Turdle" Melton was shot and killed in Venice in April 2025.

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Courtesy Melton's family

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Solving the murders

On April 2, 2025, Zackery Melton, 28, was shot and killed in Venice while defending a friend from her abuser in Westminster Dog Park. Melton, known to most as “Turdle,” was unhoused and beloved by the wider Venice community.

Melton’s heroism apparently made quite the impression: His father, Mark Melton, said detectives told him they were going to solve his son’s case because he was “one of us.”

Detectives spent more than five weeks tracking down Melton’s killer. LAPD arrested Tyrone Jones, 46, on May 9, 2025. Just over a year later, at the end of a 16-day jury trial, Jones was convicted of first-degree murder and seven other charges. His probation and sentencing hearing is June 18.

Given that about half of the fatal shootings in our data went unsolved, the response to Melton’s death appears to be an exceptional one.

Coming soon: Melton’s story in Part 2

Unhoused Angelenos say getting justice in general, much less for serious crimes, is difficult. Their personal anecdotes about interacting with the LAPD often include being ignored, not believed, disrespected or treated like a criminal.

Current LAPD detectives and Wenninger, the former lieutenant, said that unhoused people’s reluctance to come forward can make it difficult to solve their murders. They also pointed to staying in touch with unhoused people throughout the legal process, which can take months or years, as another complication. These factors may partially explain why the department’s clearance rate of fatal shootings of unhoused people can be substantially lower than that of housed victims — but only partially.

Wenninger said that officers would sometimes treat unhoused people as a nuisance, wishing not to interact with them because of their lack of cleanliness. Some also didn’t see the point in helping unhoused people.

“The department answer is that ‘every life matters,’” he said. “But in reality there's a finite amount of resources, and determinations have to be made on where those resources are going to be spent.”

When investigating homicides with unhoused victims, Wenninger said officers would sometimes say “no human involved.” The infamous phrase came to light during the Rodney King saga of the early ‘90s, when transcripts of chatter between LAPD officers revealed that they used the shorthand “N.H.I.” to refer to crimes with both Black victims and perpetrators. It’s been used for crimes involving sex workers as well.

Espinoza, the LAPD homeless coordinator, said she had never heard of that phrase. “And if somebody ever did say that, then they would be held accountable.”

She said the department takes all crime victims seriously.

“We provide the best service, whether the person lives in an affluent area, or whether it's someone that lives in Skid Row,” Espinoza said.

Wenninger also remembers LAPD officers questioning why they should care about delivering justice for unhoused victims if their families don’t care.

Karen Webb, Melton’s mother, has heard such comments many times. “And every time, it stabbed me in the heart,” she said. “Like, he was 28. What was I supposed to do?”

After his death, she reached out to the press and took to social media, commenting under numerous and sparse local news stories about her boy.

“I had to change that narrative,” Webb said, “because though he was homeless, he was so much more than just that.”

Additional reporting by Jordan Rynning

On July 1, a host of new student loan changes from last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will kick in, including the end of a short-lived Biden-era repayment plan, the start of two Republican-designed repayment plans and strict new borrowing limits for some students.

There's a lot to parse, and not every change will impact every borrower. So we've designed this story to make it easy to find the guidance that does apply to you, or to the borrower in your life.

To get started, click on the student loan status that best describes your situation below:

• You're enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan

• You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and no plans for new loans

• You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and future loan plans

• You're a new undergraduate borrower taking out loans after July 1

• You're a new grad school borrower taking out loans after July 1

• You're in graduate school right now. Do the new loan limits apply to you?

• You're enrolling in a short-term job training program and you'd like help paying for it 

• You're interested in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

• You're a parent interested in helping your student pay for college

You're enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan

After a few contentious years of paused payments and a legal battle that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden-era Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is officially ending.

If you're one of the more than 7 million borrowers still enrolled in SAVE — the most flexible and generous income-driven repayment plan — you may have already gotten a notice from the U.S. Department of Education warning you that you'll have to switch plans soon. Well, you'll likely be getting another note from your loan servicer, starting a roughly 90-day clock.

If you don't act, the department says it will enroll you in one of the least flexible repayment plans.

Financial aid experts have told NPR that this effort, beginning July 1, to push millions of borrowers into repayment and into new plans that will cost more than SAVE, could exacerbate an alarming rise in student loan defaults – especially considering that many borrowers enrolled in SAVE precisely because their low incomes qualified them for a $0 monthly payment.

What are your repayment plan options? You've got lots. Keep reading.

(Back to the top.)

You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and no plans for new loans

Whoever you are, whatever your story, whether you enrolled in the SAVE plan or not, you're in good company: About 43 million Americans hold about $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt.

As long as your loans were issued before July 1, and you have no plans to borrow any more money, you'll have quite a few repayment options, including one brand new plan. They are:

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Jenn Live for NPR

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Standard Repayment Plan

• How it works: This plan divides your loan balance into equal monthly payments (plus interest, of course) over a 10-year period. If your loans have been consolidated, they may be spread out over a longer period, up to 30 years. 
• The upside: Monthly payments are all the same, predictable as the sunrise. 
• The downside: Payments can be pretty high relative to income-based plans. 
• A note for borrowers: Republicans also created a new version of this Standard plan, called the Tiered Standard Plan, but it's not available to borrowers with only older loans. 

Graduated Repayment Plan

• How it works: Monthly payments start out low, but as the name suggests, they increase every two years and are spread out over a 10-year period. As with the Standard plan, borrowers with consolidated loans may qualify for a longer repayment term.
• The upside: It allows borrowers to start small, and, ideally, as your payments increase over time, so too does your income and your ability to keep up with them.
• The downside: Over time, your payments could grow, even double in size.

Extended Repayment Plan

• How it works: Monthly payments can be either fixed or graduated, but there's one big difference. Payments can last up to 25 years, instead of the common 10 years. 
• The upside: Twenty-five years makes for smaller monthly payments.
• The downside: You're paying a lot in interest over the long run. 

The plans above do not take a borrower's income into account when calculating a monthly payment. So-called income-driven repayment plans do — and come with a few other perks:

Income-Based Repayment (IBR)

• How it works: If your loans are older than July 1, 2014, your monthly payments are based on 15% of your discretionary income and spread over a 25-year period. Anything left after that is forgiven. For loans taken out after July 1, 2014, monthly payments will be based on 10% of discretionary income and spread over 20 years before the remainder is forgiven.
• The upside: Loan forgiveness!
• The downside: Twenty to 25 years repaying a loan is a long time.  

Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR)

• How it works: ICR bases monthly payments on a larger share of a borrower's discretionary income — 20%. Borrowers also have to make payments over a relatively long period of time — 25 years — before they can qualify for forgiveness.  
• The upside: Up to now, for Parent PLUS borrowers, this was often the only income-driven repayment plan they could qualify for.
• The downside: It will generally cost more each month than its fellow income-driven plans.
  
• A note for borrowers: This is arguably the least generous member of this plan family. It's also being phased out by 2028, so, if you do enroll, you'll have to change plans again in two years.

Pay As You Earn (PAYE)

• How it works: PAYE's terms are similar to what newer IBR borrowers enjoy: Payments are based on 10% of discretionary income over a 20-year period, then the remainder is forgiven.
• The upside: Switching to PAYE, for now, could mean two years of lower payments.
• The downside: Like ICR, Republicans voted to shut down PAYE by July 1, 2028; so you'll need to switch plans again within two years.   

Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP)

• How it works: RAP bases monthly payments on a borrower's adjusted-gross income (AGI). The more you make, the higher your monthly payment. For example, a borrower earning $30,001-$40,000 can expect a monthly payment around $75-$100. Earn $50,001-$60,000 and it jumps to $208.34-$250.  
• The upside: RAP waives any monthly interest that exceeds the plan's monthly payment. It also comes with a principal-matching payment that makes sure lower-income borrowers see their loan principals go down each month. And, for parents and caregivers, it allows you to slash $50 from your monthly payment for every dependent in your household.
• The downside: Unlike IBR, ICR and PAYE, RAP requires that borrowers be in repayment for 30 years before any remainder is forgiven. By then, there'll be little if any debt left. And, a nerdy but important facet: This plan isn't indexed for inflation, which means modest income gains could trigger big increases in monthly payments. 
• A note for borrowers: This is the new kid on the block for legacy borrowers. You can enroll starting July 1.

We recommend using the department's Loan Simulator — or maybe this one, developed in partnership with The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit — to see which plan makes the most sense for you.

You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and future loan plans

So, you've already got some loans, and you're planning to take out more. The good news/bad news is you won't have a lot of repayment options to choose from.

Any borrower who takes out a loan on or after July 1 will be limited to the two new repayment plans created in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) or the…

Tiered Standard Plan

• How it works: Like the original Standard, the new Tiered plan divides a borrower's principal and interest into equal monthly payments over a set period. Again, predictable as the sunrise. What's different is that that period of time grows with the size of the debt.

  • Owe less than $25,000 — repay over 10 years.
  • Owe $25,000-$49,999 — repay over 15 years.
  • Owe $50,000-$99,999 — repay over 20 years.
  • Owe $100,000 or more — repay over 25 years.
• The upside: A longer repayment period for larger balances means smaller payments.
• The downside: Longer repayment periods also mean, well, a long-term relationship with debt.  

You're a new undergraduate borrower taking out loans after July 1

Hello, fresh face! Welcome to your higher education adventure. Let's be honest, you're probably not thinking much about your repayment options yet. You're headed to school, and we wish you well.

As you get on your way, here are a few things to keep in mind: Lending limits haven't changed for undergraduate borrowers. Dependent/independent undergrads are still limited to borrowing:

• $5,500/$9,500 in their first year
• $6,500/$10,500 in their second year
• $7,500/$12,500 in the third and subsequent years

In total, dependent/independent undergrads can borrow up to $31,000/$57,500.

When it does come time for repayment, you'll likely have just two options to choose from: Either the Repayment Assistance Plan or the Tiered Standard Plan.

You're a new grad school borrower taking out loans after July 1

Many of you probably have undergraduate loan debt, though hopefully not too much. And for the moment, you're probably not thinking about repayment since you're headed back to school. We wish you well!

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Jenn Liv for NPR

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Still, there are a few things to keep in mind: As of July 1, lending limits change dramatically. Until now, grad students could borrow up to the cost of their program. Your program costs $40,000 a year? You could borrow $40,000 every year. Soon, though, you'll be limited to $20,500 a year and a total of $100,000. That's a big difference.

Only a small group of so-called "professional" degrees will be exempted from these lower limits and qualify instead for $50,000 a year in loans, or $200,000 in all. These degrees fall into 11 categories: chiropractic, clinical psychology, dentistry, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, podiatry, theology and veterinary medicine.

You can learn more about these grad school loan caps at this link, including why they have many advocates worrying about an eventual shortage of nurses and other healthcare providers.

You're in graduate school right now. Do the new loan limits apply to you?

This is complicated. The Education Department is making some exceptions for grad school borrowers who are in the middle of their higher education adventures. You may be exempted from the new loan limits if:

1. You were enrolled by June 30, 2026.
2. By then, you also have to have received a loan for your program.
3. And you have maintained enrollment in the same program, at the same school.

If you do qualify to be exempted from the new limits, the department's website says you can lean on the old loan limits — i.e., borrow up to the cost of your program — for either three academic years or the difference between how long your program is supposed to last and how long you've already been enrolled, whichever number is smaller.

You're enrolling in a short-term job training program and you'd like help paying for it

One of the biggest changes going into effect on July 1 is an expansion of the traditional Pell Grant for low-income students to include what's known as short-term workforce training.

A Pell Grant is essentially free money from the federal government – unlike a loan, it does not need to be paid back. For 2026-27, the largest grant a student in a traditional program can qualify for is $7,395. Awards for short-term training will likely be prorated for the program's length.

This expansion of Pell is meant to help workers learn new skills to become, say, a certified nursing assistant or a welder. For the first time, students will be able to get federal help paying for these training programs, which last between eight and 15 weeks.

The first, most important step you need to take to qualify is to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). You can't get a Pell Grant without it.

One huge caveat: This expansion is so new that many current training programs may not qualify. And because it comes with some pretty strict federal guardrails, some never will.

It will take states and the federal government some time to figure it all out, so you'll need to be patient. And while you wait, fill out the FAFSA!

You're interested in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

Greetings (aspiring) public servants.

The good news for you is that the program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) still exists. It's a policy quid pro quo: If you pledge to work full-time (at least 30 hours a week) in public service — as a nurse or police officer or school teacher, etc. — for 10 years while making 120 monthly payments toward your student loans through a qualifying repayment plan, then whatever debt is left will be forgiven by the U.S. government.

Which plans qualify for PSLF?

In the income-driven category, IBR, ICR, PAYE and the forthcoming RAP all qualify.

We recommend using the department's Loan Simulator to see which plan makes the most sense for you, i.e., which plan has you paying the least over the next decade.

The other question you may have is: Wait! Didn't I see stories about how the Trump administration is changing the PSLF rules, maybe making it harder to qualify?

Good memory! Yes. Here's one of those stories.

Effective July 1, the department says it can deny loan forgiveness to workers whose government or nonprofit employers engage in activities with a "substantial illegal purpose." The job of defining "substantial illegal purpose" belongs to the education secretary. Last year, the department offered this short list: "terrorism, child trafficking, and transgender procedures that are doing irreversible harm to children."

In late 2025, several large cities, including Boston and Chicago, sued over the rule change, worried that the administration might try to use a city government's politics to exclude its public workers from PSLF. The fight over this rule is very much still playing out, so stay tuned.

You're a parent interested in helping your student pay for college

The Parent PLUS program will see a few key changes take effect July 1. Here's what to know:

• First of all, there will be new limits on how much parents can borrow. Parent PLUS loans will be capped at $20,000 per year, per dependent child, with an aggregate cap of $65,000 per dependent. That's a big change from the previous rules which allowed PLUS loans up to the cost of a program. 
• Repayment is also seeing big changes. Parent PLUS borrowers who take out a loan after July 1 will no longer qualify for any plan that bases their monthly payment on their income. They will only be able to use the new Tiered Standard Plan. This also means future Parent PLUS borrowers will no longer be able to qualify for either a plan that offers forgiveness after a set period of time or for PSLF. 
• For Parent PLUS loans that were taken out before July 1, borrowers' best bet for a long-term, income-driven plan is IBR, but only if you consolidate your loans first, make one payment on the less generous ICR plan (which, like PAYE, will be phased out in 2028) then switch to IBR. If this is news to you, it may already be too late. The Education Department's website recommends borrowers start this process at least three months early to make sure their new consolidated loans are issued before the July 1 deadline.

Edited by: Nicole Cohen and Nirvi Shah

Copyright 2026 NPR

California is almost done counting ballots — but the key word is almost. Election officials are now moving onto the ballot “curing” phase and are sending notices to voters for verification.

If you received a letter in the mail, it doesn't automatically mean your ballot has been rejected, contrary to misinformation circulating online. Ballot curing is a normal part of California’s vote-verification process and a safeguard to make sure you actually cast your mail-in vote.

Here’s what you should know about how it works and steps to take to make sure your ballot gets counted.

What is ballot curing?

If your ballot needs to be cured, that means the mail-in envelope has been flagged for a signature issue. That could be because it looks off (that is, it doesn’t match what’s on your state record) or it’s missing entirely.

Your county registrar will send you a letter that asks for your signature to attest that you returned the ballot and that it’s your name on the envelope. (The mismatched signature and unsigned envelope letters can be separate in some counties — but L.A. County combines it.) You’ll also have to provide your address. These steps are required under state election code.

You can reply to that notice via phone, email, mail, fax or in person. If you’ve received a letter in Orange County, follow the steps here. For L.A. County, follow the steps in your letter. Here's an example of what the combined letters look like for both counties:

The privacy of your vote is protected during this process. The state election code requires the ballot return envelope to stay sealed until the registrar can verify the voter’s signature. LAist has also confirmed this with the L.A. County registrar’s communications manager Mike Sanchez and Aimara Freeman, a spokesperson for Orange County's registrar.

Why do I need to do it?

Your registrar is giving you an opportunity to fix a discrepancy, which helps ensure only registered voters cast ballots.

It’s important to cure your ballot by the deadline because your vote won’t count without it. The registrar must receive it no later than 5 p.m. June 24.

L.A. and Orange counties have about 24,000 ballots to cure as of Wednesday, according to the California Secretary of State.

A very small portion of ballots gets rejected each election statewide. The Secretary of State reports that 0.93% of ballots — or 122,480 votes — were not counted in the 2024 general election, for example, mostly because signature issues weren’t resolved.

How are signatures verified and flagged?

Signatures are compared to the ones in your voter registration record. Because of California’s Motor Voter program, that could come from the DMV. If you’re curious what your local registrar has, you can ask to review the signatures in your file.

We cover in detail how the verification process works here, but this is the gist:

• In L.A. County, a device compares your signatures first. If it’s mismatched or missing, a human then reviews it.
• In Orange County, humans do the comparison and review.

Three election officials have to agree that a ballot signature is “significantly” different from the one on record for it to be pulled, according to state code. To verify your signature, officials consider spelling, signature slant, letter characteristics and possible explanations for discrepancies — for example, trembling hands or rushed writing.

The ballot gets pulled for curing when officials challenge it — that is, they determine it needs extra verification. State law requires notices for this to be sent by first-class mail by the next business day after a challenge.

Second notices may also arrive by phone or email. You can choose a preferred secondary method through the Secretary of State’s “Where’s My Ballot?” tracking service.

As a reminder, Tuesday was the last day for ballots to arrive by mail, as long as it was postmarked by Election Day. So if you haven’t been notified that your ballot’s been counted yet, you should check on it.

Here’s where to do that for L.A. County. Orange County has a similar tool that you can find here.