With the verdict this week in the Derek Chauvin case in Minnesota, the time seems right to talk about an upheaval in how news organizations report crime, a trend accelerated by Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd last summer.
Crime has been a staple of news reporting for as long as there has been news reporting, and for decades, very little changed in how it was reported. People have always been eager for crime news, and news organizations were happy to feed the appetite, especially because of the ease of extracting needed information from police officers and police reports.
Crime reporting, though, long has been a de facto exception to journalistic practices on sourcing. With most non-crime stories, journalists depend on multiple sources to get at the truth of things. With most crime reporting, police long have been the single source of information, and because of that, over time, journalists came to portray information provided by police as somehow more credible than many sources. If you put a “police said” at the end of a sentence, it must be true, right?
The relationship between police and reporters could be way too cozy. When I first came to The Plain Dealer 25 years ago, a longtime crime reporter regaled me with tales of the old days. Back when the coroner’s office was downtown, reporters, police and the coroner would play cards until a call came in about a murder, and then they would all head there. Reporters would accompany police through the crime scenes. That closeness, though, removes objectivity.
Another reason for the heavy reliance on police as sources is legal. Journalists have a nearly absolute protection in defamation cases if the information they quote is from official records, like police reports. Even when the information is uttered by a police official instead of coming from a police report, the protection is pretty high.
What we have come to realize more and more, though, is that police are as fallible as everyone else, and the information from police – spoken or in police reports -- should get the same skepticism as anything else we use to source stories.
Examples abound. Consider the shooting of a Cleveland man by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent this month.
The man arrived home and found two strangers sitting in a car in front of his house – a house that had been hit by stray gunshots in recent years. I think any of us would be perturbed by strangers sitting in a car in front of our houses. In many neighborhoods, if you were perturbed enough, you’d call the police. In this neighborhood, though, people don’t always trust police.
The man approached the two men in the car and, according to the police, raised his shirt to show he had a gun in his waistband, and one of the DEA agents jumped out and shot him.
Now get this: when police wrote a report on the incident, they listed the DEA agent as the crime victim. The DEA released a statement saying he “actively brandished” his gun at the agent. Look up the definition of brandish. Lifting your shirt to reveal a gun doesn’t fit it. And then the man who had been shot was charged with menacing and carrying a concealed weapon.
The DEA had the audacity during a press conference the night of the shooting to say gunfire was exchanged. It’s not true. But it was reported as if it were. The DEA also suggested that the man might have been attempting a carjacking or a robbery with no evidence of that.
This shooting stinks. It should be fully investigated. Determinations of who is the victim and who is the criminal should come from an objective investigation, not initial reports by police who look out for each other. But because the police said what they said in their police reports, that is how most news organizations reported it.
In newsrooms across the country, we are working to change our approach to situations like this. One way is by getting other people involved to talk to us. That can be hard. People don’t always trust us, in part because of the relationship we have with police. In this case, reporter Cory Shaffer persuaded the man’s mother to talk with us, which gave us the extra perspective of the history of trouble in the neighborhood and the doubts about the official police version.
The police versions can be subtle in how they mislead, too. Columbus police shot and killed a 16-year-old girl this week. But when the mayor discussed it, he called her a young woman. She was not a young woman. She was a teenager. A juvenile. A kid. Did calling her a young woman somehow lessen the horror of her homicide?
How often, after police kill someone, do you hear or see news reports about a “police-involved shooting.” That’s how police describe it, and reporters for too long have used that wording. It’s the antiseptic way to avoid saying police shot and killed someone.
Think about it. If a drug dealer shoots and kills someone, do you think the police report says “drug dealer-involved shooting?” Have you ever heard the phrase “carjacker-involved shooting?” Of course not. In those cases, police say the drug dealer, the gang member or the carjacker shot and killed someone. They reserve the antiseptic language for themselves, and too many reporters then use it.
The upshot of all of this self-examination is we are paying much more attention to how we report what is in police reports. I explained last week how we would no longer include the detail that a rape victim was intoxicated, a detail police often include in their reports. It results in victim-shaming.
We will, of course, continue to use police and police reports as sources, especially as we report breaking news, but we will be more judicious in how we use them and be diligent about finding other sources.
One more strategy we are using to more fully explore crime is through audio. Reporter Olivia Mitchell has produced two special episodes of our This Week in the CLE podcast to bring new voices to the crime discussion. The regular episodes of the weekday podcast are a discussion of the news of the day, but in the special episodes, Olivia speaks with Clevelanders about the impact of crime.
In her latest, she talks to people about two recent law enforcement shootings, the one involving the DEA agent and another in which Cleveland police killed a man who pretty clearly aimed a gun at an officer.
This kind of reporting gets away from police reports and explores the human side of the equation. That’s what we hope to do more of as we report on crime in Northeast Ohio.
"crime" - Google News
April 24, 2021 at 07:05PM
https://ift.tt/3niBavA
The evolution of how we report crime, and have you ever heard of a “carjacker-involved shooting?” Letter from - cleveland.com
"crime" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37MG37k
https://ift.tt/2VTi5Ee
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The evolution of how we report crime, and have you ever heard of a “carjacker-involved shooting?” Letter from - cleveland.com"
Post a Comment