Crime, Policing, & Gun Violence: Tips from Our Newsletter

November 4, 2021

Above is the initial headline attached to a New York Times story about the homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two men and wounded another during unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020. Rittenhouse’s attorneys argued that he acted in self-defense. At no point would a verdict in this case declare Rittenhouse a “hero” and it is appalling for the Times to suggest that, if found not guilty of homicide charges, a person who fatally shot two protesters would be declared a hero by default. This headline, which also made it to print, was quickly changed online to the version below. If the initial headline was attempting to lay out the defense’s position in this trial, the updated version does so more accurately.

 

December 9, 2021

This headline from CBS Dallas-Fort Worth made the rounds on Twitter, with special attention paid to how a tweet from the newsroom framed this as a feel-good canine hero story. Most pointed out how the story centers the K-9 officer, rather than the woman whose money was taken. As the story says, the woman was not arrested, yet her money was seized and “police say it will be subject to the civil asset forfeiture process.”

July 7, 2022

One of the core tenants of responsible reporting on mass shootings is to avoid glorifying the shooter. The reason is two-fold: media attention and notoriety is often one of the goals of a mass shooting and that attention can inspire copycats. The headline above, from TODAY, not only focuses on the Highland Park shooter, but provides unnecessary details that soften his image. The man’s childhood Cub Scout attendance does nothing for U.S. residents grappling with the gun violence epidemic.

There’s a lot that audiences do need to know in the aftermath of a tragedy like this, including information about the victims and how to help their families; how the gunman in question was able to obtain his deadly weapon; what the police response was; and how this could be prevented in the future. Another important angle of mass shootings is what the community affected by the tragedy thinks should happen next.

The headlines below, from Axios, NBC 5 Chicago, CBS News and Block Club Chicago, respectively, all focus on the actions the Highland Park community and their lawmakers want to take now. Stories that speak to that community response are particularly important, because they demonstrate solidarity with those impacted by amplifying what they think should change. This moves us closer to journalism’s ideals of helping society understand and solve its collective problems.

 

December 8, 2022

WNBA star Brittney Griner was released from Russian detention Thursday morning. Griner had been imprisoned for months on drug charges after less than a gram of hashish oil was found in her luggage at a Russian airport in February. U.S. authorities have been negotiating her release and were successful in arranging a swap for international arms dealer Viktor Bout.

There are many facets to this story that news organizations will want to cover. These include, among other things, Griner’s treatment and being sentenced to nine years in a penal colony, how authorities negotiated the swap, and the consequences of releasing an international arms dealer. The headlines below show how two outlets chose which to emphasize at first blush.

The headline above, from CBS News, emphasizes Griner’s name and release above all else, of course. But its second-order emphasis is on the prisoner swap, detailing its “1-for-1” nature and even naming the arms dealer, who is unlikely to be familiar to most audiences.

The headline below, from the Wall Street Journal, mentions the “prisoner release deal.” But the second-order emphasis here is on the detail that Griner was released not just from Russia but from a “penal colony.” This subtly emphasizes her treatment by authorities as the harsh life in Russian penal colonies has been the subject of recent news.

Neither of these headlines is inaccurate by any means. They simply serve to illustrate how newsrooms make slightly different choices in reporting a complex breaking news story.

 

January 12, 2023

Karon Blake, a child from Washington, D.C., was killed by an as-yet-unidentified man last week. The man shot Blake allegedly because he thought the 13-year-old was breaking into cars.

When the news first came to light, few details about the shooter were known. Multiple headlines, including the one below from Fox 5 in D.C., simply called the person “homeowner.”

To be frank, this is an incredibly strange noun to use to describe someone who shot and killed a child. Without evidence to support that the shooter’s homeownership status had something to do with the incident — initial reports do not make this connection, as far as I have seen — there’s no reason to choose that word over others.

We could speculate that reporters had only information from police sources to go off of and thus parroted the “homeowner” language. You may have noticed, however, that in this newsletter I’ve already used the words “person” and “shooter” instead, both of which would be appropriate given information from early articles. “Resident” might even be a reasonably assumed substitute for “homeowner.” In any case, The Washington Post used the word “man” in a report from the same day, citing police sources. The Buzzfeed headline below from two days later also used “man.”

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So we have to ask, what does the shooter’s homeownership status have to do with this incident? One could read it as an implication that the man was potentially defending his property. That frame comes dangerously close, in my opinion, to justifying his actions. It could also be read as juxtaposing the power of someone who owns property with a child accused of a property crime. The dynamic there speaks for itself. Either way, considering the lack of early details provided by police, the use of that moniker is certainly inappropriate when others were available.

In the days since, police have revealed that the unnamed man is a D.C. government employee. That phrase has now taken over in lieu of the man’s name in many headlines.

 

January 26, 2023

After any mass shooting, newsrooms revisit the debate over whether ordinary individuals should be allowed to purchase and use deadly weapons. The headlines below are all from the Washington Post — from two separate stories.

This first headline, above, refers to the multiple mass shootings that have taken place in California in the last few days. The “limits” here are, presumably, the law’s ability to halt mass shootings altogether. By emphasizing what the law can’t control in a country overrun with guns, this framing comes very close to putting their overall use into question.

Oddly enough, this headline was updated Wednesday afternoon, a day after it was published, to:

I’d argue this version is actually worse. Instead of merely implying that gun laws might be ineffective, it baldly states it. This is a frustrating take considering media messages go a long way toward helping communities understand what change is possible — by framing it as possible instead of predetermined. This type of headline actually adds to the futility it describes.

An even worse earlier version of this headline, “California shootings came despite some of the nation’s toughest gun laws,” could easily be misread in an “I told you so” tone. I’m glad it was replaced, though its updates haven’t been much better.

The second headline, above, almost serves as an answer to the implied question of our first examples. No, in a country where estimates suggest there are 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, laws about the use of those guns likely can’t eliminate all violent and illegal use. But that doesn’t mean they don’t prevent a significant amount of violence and save countless lives.

To folks on either side of the gun safety debate, these two headlines might look “biased” to those points of view. But I would say the second story’s is the fairest as it assesses the realities of our laws without putting their mere existence into question.

 

February 16, 2023

A shooting at Michigan State University earlier this week left three students dead and 5 more people wounded. One of the Washington Post’s stories following the tragedy featured the following headline.

I would hope at this point that this wouldn’t need to be said, but I suppose it does: the common, utilitarian, and beloved practice of college open door policies is not what puts students at risk of being shot to death.

The number of guns floating around this country and our lack of political will to put safety before the profits of gun manufacturers puts students at risk of being shot to death.

Perhaps the reporters writing about what security measures can and can’t do to prevent mass shootings needed a new angle to write about. Perhaps they truly believe there is an ideal number of locked doors and armed security teams that would keep us all safe from gun violence. But, after reading their colleagues’ reflections on years of covering school shootings (a must-read, if you can manage it), I would hope they’d come to a different conclusion.

The headline below, from the Detroit News, provides a more impactful framing by emphasizing what communities want. As you can see, they’re not calling for more locked doors.

 

February 23, 2023

The Washington Post published the above headline earlier this week. The story describes how a lack of consistent data on police shootings makes it impossible to establish cause and effect. Reasonable enough. But the phrasing “nobody knows why” stopped me in my tracks. Well, I thought, that depends on what you mean by “knows.”

How do we know what we know? The field of epistemology (a very fun rabbit hole, if I may say so myself) seeks to understand this and to distinguish justified belief from opinion. Many arguments in journalism over objectivity boil down to this question: whose claims are evidence-based and whose are “biased?” In mainstream journalism, evidence is implicitly defined as empirical data or anecdotal data from those imbued with institutional expertise and authority. However, if you have data or expertise and you are particularly invested in a cause, that evidence might be dismissed as “advocacy.”

As the Post story explains, we don’t have empirical data that specifically links one cause to the rise in police killings across the country. But we do have data on the consequences faced by police involved in these killings (sometimes jail time, sometimes a raise) and data on how early police claims in these cases are often “misleading” (sometimes lacking detail, sometimes outright lies).

Other data we have includes:

• Police disproportionately kill Black people and 21% of all victims are in a mental illness crisis
• Trust in police has grown while trust in the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen
• White supremacist and militia groups have infiltrated U.S. police and law enforcement often fails to respond to racism in the ranks
• Police budgets have actually grown in many areas over the past few years
• Police unions work to obscure abuses of power and prevent reforms
• Training of U.S. police focuses on weapons, marksmanship, and a “warrior mentality” over de-escalation and communication

Again, we can’t use these data points to empirically point to what is driving this rise. But I think, as a society, we can put two and two together here. We can make some inferences about how police are trained, how they are shielded from accountability, and what ideologies shape them, and place that against the cultural background of polarization.

Does that constitute “knowing?” Clearly not in a way that meets the Post’s editorial standards. But it explains why a phrase like “nobody knows why” feels so jarring to those engaged with this news. Do we have no idea why this is happening, or do we have many ideas? Perhaps some trends are too complex for a data-based conclusion that fits a newspaper’s idea of evidence. Journalists need to figure out how to communicate this type of knowledge to their audiences.

Either way, a discussion on the rise in police killings doesn’t need to determine a cause. The headline from The Guardian, below, does this well.

 

March 30, 2023

I frankly can’t think of a more irresponsible way to report on gun policy following a school shooting than the headline above from WSMV4 in Nashville. Of course, the actions of lawmakers representing an area where a tragedy has occurred are newsworthy. But you can report on a congressman’s statements without framing them as factual and definitive.

Regardless of polarization and trust issues in U.S. politics, constituents still must rely on their representatives to relay the realities of the political world in which they work. Their position alone confers authority and expertise. Thus it’s critical that journalists don’t amplify elected officials’ isolated statements when they’re factually incorrect, as Rep. Tim Burchett is here. There is plenty that Congress can do to curb the gun violence epidemic — the GOP just chooses not to do it.

Additionally, there is plenty of research that shows gun laws do make a huge difference and save lives. Studies have shown that state gun laws can help reduce the gun deaths of children, red flag laws are associated with fewer suicides by firearm, and licensing laws paired with background checks are associated with lower homicide and suicide rates. (There might be even more national research if the NRA hadn’t successfully campaigned Congress to block the CDC from research that would “promote gun control” in 1996.)

The headline above from CNN is a little bit better. It explains that there are in fact gun control measures that lawmakers could take action on. It also underlines that it is lawmakers who have the power to make this change.

It’s missing something, however, that Yahoo! gets right, below. Historically and currently, the blockade in U.S. Congress to passing legislation that could reduce gun deaths is the Republican party, not all “lawmakers.” Yahoo! calls them out by name and also uses the word “downplay” to describe their inaction as intentional. (In contrast, compare the use of lawmakers being “reluctant” above, like they’re considering a change.)

If there’s one thing we can do better as an industry to help our audiences understand and solve their collective problems, it is to be clear about accountability. Our frames and headlines must plainly state who has the power to make change and what systems are stopping change from happening.

 

July 6, 2023

Since it’s summer and school is out, I wanted to address a type of story audiences often encounter this time of year: “teenagers gather in a public space.” Stories in this vein often originate in big cities and range in seriousness from “crowds of teens annoy others” to news of property damage or even gun violence.

A Chicago story fitting this theme recently went viral for its hyperbolic headline, captured via Twitter, below. The headline from WGN9 was eventually changed — once it was repeatedly pointed out that the teens did damage vehicles and obstruct traffic but did not destroy an entire neighborhood.

I don’t point out this example to minimize the danger and damage that can occur during events like these. But it’s equally important that journalists don’t overstate the impact of teens gathering in public and feed a narrative that demonizes and even criminalizes them for simply existing. That’s especially true when the teens in question are primarily children of color, who are more likely to be victims of police brutality than their white peers.

The CBS Philly story below about a similar incident provides an example of how subtle language choices can support a harmful narrative. Both the headline and the body of the story use words like “minors” and “juveniles” to describe the teens — words generally not in your everyday vocabulary unless you’re in law enforcement. Use of such terms (instead of “crowds,” “youths,” or even “children”) needlessly applies an implicit criminality to hundreds of teens. Journalists should keep a close eye on the language they use to describe such incidents to avoid unthinkingly parroting “cop-speak.”

Editors should also assign reporters to uncover why these gatherings occur. Are there enough places in a given city for teens to socialize? Are they free? Are they welcoming? Or have they been closed due to understaffing, divestment, or general contempt for young people?

An op-ed from Philly’s Broad Street Review, below, provides a constructive additional angle to this seasonal story. (I particularly love its “eyebrow” heading.)

 

September 1, 2023

There’s nothing to compare this front page from The Daily Tar Heel to — it just simply has to be seen. The editors of the University of North Carolina’s student newspaper compiled texts received and sent by students during a harrowing lockdown following a campus shooting Monday afternoon. It is moving and disturbing and a simple yet brilliant way of expressing the traumatic ripple effect of gun violence. We are lucky to have such resilient, incisive minds joining our industry.

 

September 28, 2023

I tip my hat to writer Joshua P. Hill for the viral tweet that alerted me to this story.

As the old journalism adage goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Fact-checking and corroborating a source’s story are crucial steps in the reporting process.

Yet, all too often, rehashes of public statements are published as complete news stories. The most generous justification for this habit is that what is considered “newsworthy” in these cases is not whether a statement is true, but that the statement was made, or that it was made by an important entity. In that case, the public deserves to know what that entity has said as soon as possible.

The obvious problem here is that if journalists make the argument that anything said by a certain entity is inherently newsworthy, then they are absolved of the need to actually determine whether their claims are true before amplifying them. A statement might not be true, but the fact that the Very Important Person said it is true, so we’re in the clear, so to speak.

That’s how we get headlines like the one from CBS below. Target recently announced that they will close nine of their over 1,900 U.S. stores. Their public statement included the words, “we cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime….” Instead of using quotation marks or attribution to couch this statement, this headline uses “because,” which makes Target’s claim read like objective fact.

But it’s not objective fact. It’s a statement made by a large corporation that could be true or false.

Why does the veracity of Target’s claim matter? For the past few years, headlines about rising retail theft have proliferated — including regurgitated corporate statements like these. This coverage has increased public perception that this is a rising threat. This has led lawmakers from California to Pennsylvania to bolster law enforcement and consider legislation that would worsen punishments for perpetrators. In other words, similar claims have impacted public life by shifting resources and laws. We should know whether they’re true — and, as is journalistic best practice, we should not take one source’s word for it.

What other information should be considered alongside Target’s claim? For starters, the latest National Retail Security Survey “found the effect of theft on retailers’ bottom lines is about the same as it has been for years,” CNBC reports. Other research on the topic shows claims of a retail theft crisis are murky at best. CNBC also reports that “Target’s business has struggled for more than a year with company-specific challenges, including a glut of unsold inventory, backlash to its Pride merchandise collection and a pullback in consumer spending.”

It may be impossible to determine the objective truth here — maybe Target has a decision-making paper trail to uncover, or maybe it doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean its corporate statements should be taken at face value and amplified.

The headline from the Washington Post below does a good job of balancing this. The fact is that stores are closing. The reason for doing so is unverified, so it reads that Target “blames” it on theft, leaving the truth up for debate.

 

November 2, 2023

As the saying goes, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Sadly, this rings true for journalists who haven’t learned the lessons of prior coverage and its criticisms.

Back in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, two wire service photos of the resulting crisis sparked a conversation on language and framing. The Los Angeles Times recounted the story in 2017:

“One from Associated Press photographer Dave Martin showed a young black man wading through water while holding a bag and a case of soda. The accompanying description stated that he was ‘looting.’ A second photo from Chris Graythen for Getty Images showed a similar scene, but this time it was a white couple clutching bags of food. Their actions were labeled as ‘finding.’”

The difference in these terms is the level of sympathy elicited for the subject. “Looting“ implies criminality while “finding” in this context implies innocently gathering goods for survival. Based on U.S. history, I think I can reasonably suggest systemic racism played a role in the labels given to each photo.

I use this example pretty frequently in my workshops on news and language. You may understand, then, why the headline from Politico below caused me dismay.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is well documented. More than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed in the past few weeks and innocent civilians are in dire need of aid. Using the word “loot,” traditionally defined as pillaging for the spoils of war, is an incredibly cynical and unsympathetic way to frame people stealing for survival.

I much prefer the simple rephrase used by CNN in the headline below. “Take” is a pretty neutral verb in this situation; it doesn’t imply criminality but does suggest the goods weren’t willingly given. The use of “basics” underlines the life-sustaining nature of the items people were searching for.

The final example below, from the BBC, I think does the best job of illustrating how dire the situation truly is. It uses the phrase “break into” to imply that the actions described may not have been lawful, but still manages to focus on the real story here: people are desperately searching for aid. This isn’t stealing for stealing’s sake — as we might think of with the word “looting.”

This headline doesn’t sensationalize the events it describes by centering crime. Its priorities are clear: audiences need to understand how bad things really are. It’s the difference between, “Look, these people committed a crime” and “Look, things are so bad these people had to commit a crime to survive.”

 

February 15, 2024

Donald Trump is in the midst of so many legal battles that they’ve necessitated their own public shorthand. Unfortunately, news media has given the title “hush money trial” to a criminal case Trump faces in New York. The Guardian’s example is above, but any quick Google search will surface many similar results.

But this trial is not truly about paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels — it’s about falsifying records to cover up criminal activity.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. said in his initial statement on the indictment, “The People of the State of New York allege that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

The phrase “hush money” implies a scandal, but not necessarily fraud or criminal activity. I would have loved to include a headline that used a clearer phrase — perhaps “falsified records trial” — but I simply couldn’t find one that fit the bill. The “hush money” phrase is seemingly ubiquitous. The one exception I found was the headline of an opinion piece from The Daily Beast, below, which is an attempt to correct the record.

 

February 22, 2024

Earlier this month Nex Benedict, a nonbinary 16-year-old from Oklahoma, died the day after they were beaten by classmates in a school bathroom. I use this phrasing based on an interview with Benedict’s mother at The Independent, who said “she was called to the school that day to find Nex badly beaten with bruises over their face and eyes” and that Benedict collapsed at home the next day before being rushed to the hospital where they were pronounced dead.

On Wednesday, local police released a statement which reads, in part,

“While the investigation continues into the altercation, preliminary information from the medical examiner’s office is that a complete autopsy was performed and indicated that the decedent did not die as a result of trauma.”

The Benedict family also released a statement, which reads, in part, “While various investigations are still pending, the facts currently known by the family, some of which have been released to the public, are troubling at best.”

The ultimate cause of Nex’s death is unclear at this point, but it is difficult to imagine it is wholly unrelated to the bathroom altercation. The headline above, from Them, does justice to this tragedy by connecting the dots without making unsubstantiated claims.

When details like these are both murky and highly consequential (as they are for the students involved in said altercation) it is crucial that journalists revisit how they typically choose whose voices are determinative and authoritative.

Reporters must place their decisions about whose testimony is given the benefit of the doubt against a backdrop that includes the following:

1) Oklahoma’s recent treatment of LGBTQ+ youth

For this context, I turn to the report from Them on Nex’s death:

“Sue Benedict told The Independent that other students started bullying Nex at the beginning of the 2023 school year. The Independent notes that in May 2022, a bill requiring public school students to use bathrooms that match the sex on their birth certificates became law in Oklahoma.

The LGBTQ+ advocacy group Freedom Oklahoma, as well as numerous progressive and LGBTQ+ media outlets … pointed out that Benedict’s death comes as Oklahoma’s head education official, state superintendent Ryan Walters, continues to embrace anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policy. In January, Walters pushed an emergency rule to prevent students from changing the gender listed on their school records. Last month, he also appointed Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ platform Libs of TikTok, to the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s advisory council overseeing the state’s school libraries, despite Raichik not even living in Oklahoma. Last year, a Tulsa elementary school received a bomb threat after Raichik shared a video with the name and school of a local librarian. In 2022, Raichik similarly targeted a teacher in Benedict’s school district for openly supporting LGBTQ+ students who weren’t accepted by their families. The teacher later resigned following harassment.”

2) Historic relations between police and LGBTQ+ communities

A brief set of relevant facts:

• As the Urban Institute wrote in 2020, “American sodomy laws and laws regulating gender presentation perpetuated LGBTQ oppression for decades. Throughout the 20th century, it was common for police across the country to infiltrate and attack queer community spaces and businesses.”
• According to a 2020 poll, “71% of LGBTQ+ people between the ages of 13 and 24 say that they trust the police ‘not too much’ or that they have no trust at all. That compares with just 25% of cisgender, white, straight, male respondents.”
• The Prison Policy Initiative reported in 2021 that LGBTQ+ people “are overrepresented at every stage of criminal justice system, starting with juvenile justice system involvement.”

3) Histories of inaccuracies or falsehoods in police statements

Many publications, from USA Today and CNN to The New York Times, The Grio and Salon, have reported on the dire consequences of false or incorrect police statements. Though historically treated as a neutral source that is accurate by default, police reports should be treated by journalists like any other source. Details should be corroborated and placed in context, not amplified as if they are inherently factual.

That’s why I have an issue with the headline above from Oklahoma’s News on 6. It leads with the quote from police about the unreleased autopsy and then lists both the Owasso police and Benedict’s family. This could easily be read as if the Benedicts are the source of — or at least are in agreement with — the initial quote, when the family’s statement actually implies the opposite.

I’m not suggesting that the police statement is inaccurate. I have no reason to believe it is. But when dealing with incomplete information, reporters should not amplify any one party as the impartial, objective, single source of truth above another until there is further clarity. Doing so risks biasing the public toward one telling of events before all of the details are known.

That’s why I prefer News Channel 8’s headline, above, which focuses on reactions to the statements without strongly preferencing any singular voice. Alternatively, the version from 2 News below highlights the police statement but clearly lays out the source of the information and qualifies it by calling the report “early findings.”

No matter what further details are revealed, Nex’s death is a tragedy. To honor their memory, journalists on the story must refrain from relying too fully on any one source to provide the facts and continue to investigate.