One of the key elements of good journalism, is a refusal to create a narrative, and instead simply report accurate facts. That is it. Facts. That is the one, and only objective one should have in the reporting business.
In a sense, as a diarist I am a prosecutor. I am trying to express what I believe to be truth, and in order to do that, I need to present fact based evidence that is irrefutable. Therefore, you might notice I often reference the word opinion, or "appears to show" in cases where I can not fully present to you a position of inarguable fact.
The Berkeley, MO case is very disturbing, because of course another young African American male is dead, for various reasons. The primary debate centers on whether he pulled a gun, and if the video conclusively shows that. Here is my opinion-it appears to me after viewing it that he is indeed raising his arms in a position consistent with possessing and wielding a firearm.
I use those words because it looks to me as if that the kid raises his arm shoulder first, a gun pointing raise, rather than the punching motion of a hand merely pointing. This is an opinion. I can not present to you a claim that this proves he pointed a gun, for the simple fact that I can not make out a gun.
What does concern me is the adventurism some amateur reporters are engaging in regarding the accusation of a planting of a weapon by the police. This is extremely dangerous speculation, as powder keg does not accurately describe the tension in the area, and indeed, the country, and reckless, and unverifiable speculation can combine with the toxic mix of resentment and mistrust and get people hurt.
It is entirely possible for obstructions of justice such as the aforementioned accusation to have occurred, and it may have happened in this case, but I also know that people leverage twitter to earn for retweets and videos, and in fact, I supplement my own income with my investigative videos, but try to be very careful about the tone and veracity of what I present. So I do understand how the game is played, and because of that my fear is cleverly edited pictures inflamed the populace.
Be it a news station that rigs a narrative about killing police, or individuals making up their own facts to benefit from a story, all of us have a responsibility to take a deep breath and resist the urge to react and establish opinions until we are comfortable the facts, as best as is possible, are in.
But there are other disturbing facts to present to you about the latest case. The officer claims to have been making a routine check. OK, but why? In other reporting, there was a claim that there was a report of larceny, which would of course make the action of pulling the kids over more justified, to an extent. If the second scenario is the truth, then we need to make sure that the descriptions of the suspects reasonably match those of the victim and his friend.
We need to be sure that he did not just randomly pull over the first African American males he saw, and we particularly need to know if the first scenario, a stop and frisk, was in play. When cops use terms like a "routine check", people have a tendency to go "OK, he was doing his job." Well, not so fast. It is not a cop's duty, nor is it within the boundaries of our civil rights statutes, to capriciously check on people based upon profiling. In white communities, often allergic to black people, this may seem perfectly normal. It is not. And it is not right.
We also need to make sure that the young man himself was not threatened by an overzealous officer trying to intimidate. There are a lot of things we need to make sure of, including that we do not allow our general leanings on these matters to color our view of the facts. What we are in the process of doing once again, is returning to our corners of either, "Doing his job cop", or "Dirty, murderous, racist cop." The truth may be one of either of these or something in between.
But it is our willingness to allow for the potential of something in between that will determine whether we can heal as a nation or tear apart permanently. Those who profit off of journalism, and in turn these sorts of stories have to maintain a commitment to social responsibility and decency. It is surprisingly easy to make stuff up and have it accepted as fact, and get tweets, and exposure, and earn.
But then you have to live as part of the problem, when the solution is the only thing that will keep from consuming our nation. Money, and power, can't be a substitute for peaceful unity.
-DB