Coverage with compassion
Being sensitive and respectful while reporting on criminal justice
A couple of years ago, I was working on a story about a mother, LaTanya Gordon, who lost two sons to gun violence in a four-month period in Chicago.
The main angle was to highlight how most inner-city murders are left unsolved. To this day, both cases haven’t been solved.1
During the course of my reporting, LaTanya and many others in the neighborhood told me exactly who they believed the shooter was. LaTanya was adamant that the same person killed both of her sons. The police, on the other hand, wouldn’t confirm that this person was a suspect.
Though multiple people disclosed the alleged shooter's name, I wrote the piece without naming the person. Despite the discussion among editors suggesting I reveal it.
To them, it would have been impactful to add the name and show how entire communities can know who a shooter is but the police still aren’t able to make an arrest. We would have also been the first to report the name.2
It’s a fair point but it shows some of the blindspots that exist when covering this topic. I don’t think the editors understood the kind of jeopardy this would put people in the neighborhood in. Like most people, they didn’t understand the dynamics.
If I published the person’s name and I didn’t get it from the police, then I obviously got it from community members and that can potentially be a problem. It could put the residents who spoke with me out in the open for whoever this shooter was.
Thankfully my immediate editor agreed with me from the jump and we didn’t reveal the name.3
Covering inner-city crime can be tricky but I think as journalists, we need to remember the people that are impacted by all of this carry a certain level of respect and compassion while we do the work.
Regardless of the topic, sometimes our focus in journalism is to just get the information out as quickly as possible or get the scoop or show everyone how smart we are. In today’s media climate, it’s easy to lose sight of someone’s humanity.
But we need to be extra careful when we report on all the terrible things that happen in poor marginalized communities. Our work can have real consequences.
Back in 2015, Isaiah Cicero, a 21-year-old from Brooklyn, was shot and killed over the summer. He was sitting in front of an apartment building with a friend when someone ran up to them, chased them into the lobby of the building, and shot at them.
If you look up the incident, you’ll find that many of the outlets that covered his death referred to him as a gang member. There wasn’t much more information provided about him, which makes his death pretty easy to dismiss for the casual reader.
The only problem was that he wasn’t a gang member, according to all the people I spoke with that knew him. The police designated him as a gang member and the other outlets just reported what law enforcement said.
It’s hard for the young Black men in his neighborhood not to have friends or acquaintances involved in gangs.
It turns out, Isaiah wasn’t even the target in the shooting. The shooter was after the person he was with, but Isaiah ended up getting killed. The point here is that there is a lot of nuance to all of this, and just simply reporting that Isaiah is part of a gang is harmful and, in reality, inaccurate.
It shows a real lack of compassion for Isaiah, his family, his friends and the entire neighborhood.
There’s this thought in journalism that it’s all about being objective.4 I kind of reject that. Any journalist who pretends to be 100% objective is lying. There’s nothing wrong with having opinions, but what you report needs to be truthful and fair.
For the journalists covering crime in the most vulnerable communities, I believe they have even more of a responsibility to be respectful of the people they’re reporting on.
I’m not saying we need to be sensitive to all the crime that goes on in these areas. There are downright vile and abhorrent situations that don’t require much compassion to cover. However, more times than not, many of the conflicts that go on around crime in the hood have a certain level of nuance to them. It’s our duty to cover them.
It’ll be hard to get a real handle on gun violence and violent crime in poor neighborhoods if the journalism around it isn’t sound.
Disclaimer: Any opinions shared are not the views of my employer.
Local outlets had covered this story as well.
Shoutout to the great Alex Rees!
As you’re probably aware, that is not evident in the 2023 media landscape.
Great work