Blue Lives Matter? Or, Police Reform — Chicago style

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Copyright 2015 by Eric J. Garcia, reprinted with permission.

Copyright 2015 by Eric J. Garcia, reprinted with permission.

Today’s Tribune report on Rahm Emanuel’s new choice for police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, is a good example of deadline reporting. By “good example,” I mean that it mostly channels the official sources, and so gets the story wrong. It stays within the frame delivered to us by the Mayor’s people: What is most important is pleasing the cops, whose morale has suffered from community outrage, and pleasing the black and Latino aldermen. And if you satisfy them, we’ll have “community consensus” and police will do their job.

Tribune Emanuel upends search

Both the police and the aldermen want an insider and so do we citizens, since we care so much about police morale.

The story’s framing is a present to the mayor: Choosing the right superintendent is the key step in police reform; the superintendent has to be an insider for the sake of police morale, and he has to be black because it’s mainly black people who are getting stopped, jailed and killed and mainly black people the mayor has to con (and the black vote, which he has to thank for two mayoral victories, which he may now lose forever). And everybody likes Eddie Johnson, who will “be very good in talking to the community.”

Some readers might wonder if police morale matters more than community outrage, or whether a department that needs to be shaken up can be reformed by an insider whom cops like. Is a faithful insider going to investigate police abuse and bust cops who lie on witness statements? Treat cops the way any suspect is treated? And there is that worry the mainstream reporter better not mention — if an insider has worked his way up into command, was he complicit in the pervasive abuses … or did he remain innocent of the “code of silence” and those nagging rumors of systematic violations of rights in the black community?

This administration perspective is reflected in the story’s choice of sources: 11 sources, not counting the anonymous sources “close to the administration” and “familiar with the process.” The sources are the mayor’s spokeswoman, the Police Board president, representatives of the Black and Latino Caucus in the City Council, and retired cops who worked with Eddie Johnson. All safely consenting to fit in the frame.

But where is “the voice of the people”? Could that be Father Pfleger? You might ask what Pfleger is doing in this story (maybe you thought it was a movement of black youth who drove Emanuel to fire Police Supt. McCarthy). Just like you might ask what he was doing (played by John Cusack) as the white savior leading a protest in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq. (Pfleger does get around.)

Why didn’t the Tribune interview anyone in one of the Black Lives Matter groups? Or maybe Brandon White, the only journalist to sue the city to get the Laquan McDonald tape, or other police reform activists, or academics who have documented and studied police corruption and reform efforts? Or hey, does the reader wonder what Laquan’s friends and family think, more than they wanted to know what Eddie Johnson’s friends think?

The Tribune has done some good work on abuses in the criminal justice system, so let’s hope they soon have something useful to say about “reform.”

I may be unfair to professionals who know more than I do … but, after all, I too am writing on deadline.

After I posted this, I saw the CBS News interview with Johnson. The reporter must have a sense of humor —and I won’t complain about this framing:

CBS News interviews Johnson

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