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Josiah Bates is a journalist, author and journalism professor.
He’s a reporter at The Trace, where he covers gun violence across the Great Lakes region. His reporting focuses on policing, prevention, and the systems that shape violence in American cities.
Born and raised in an old-school Caribbean household in Brooklyn, Josiah gravitated toward writing and storytelling long before it seemed “practical”. While friends and family lived for sports, he lived for the written word. English papers were the one place where school consistently made sense. A love of basketball came later, and with it a path into sports journalism at Pennsylvania State University. That path shifted in the early 2010s, as high-profile police killings and criminal justice debates collided with his own family history, pushing him toward reporting on crime, power, and accountability.
After earning his master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Josiah began his career through NBC and ABC News fellowships, working on projects for Dateline, NBC Digital, and 20/20. His first major reporting break came in 2018, when he became the first reporter at a major outlet to cover the police killing of Stephon Clark in Sacramento. In 2019, he joined TIME Magazine, where he spent years immersed in the criminal justice beat, reporting on gun violence, policing, prisons, and policy nationwide. His work earned him two New York Press Club awards, and in 2022, he was a finalist for a Deadline Club award.
That work led to his first book, In These Streets: Reporting from the Front Lines of Inner-City Gun Violence (2024). He later joined TheGrio before landing at the Trace, while also teaching journalism at Columbia and working on his second nonfiction book.
When he’s not reporting, Josiah plays in rec basketball leagues, works on screenplays (here’s a proof of concept for a pilot he co-wrote), and endlessly rewatches The Wire, still convinced he’ll catch something new.
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