"The suspect ran, and police caught him, he said." - Baltimore Sun ( 4/14/15)."Police say the video doesn't show officers using excessive force, but they do suspect the suspect was brought to Maryland Shock Trauma with injuries." - CBS Baltimore ( 4/13/15).Baltimore police detained Freddie Gray for a relatively trivial charge of possessing a knife - an arrest prosecutors later deemed "illegal" - but he was repeatedly referred to as a "suspect" after it was revealed he sustained fatal injuries in police custody. Those who've been arrested, shot or had any interaction with the police are routinely referred to as " suspects" or " subjects"-terms that prejudice the reader by conveying a sense of criminality before the details of the case are known. There could have been a shootout involving a police officer and someone else, with this third party accidently killing Brown. ![]() An officer from the Ferguson Police Department was involved in the shooting.Įven in the opening paragraph, there's no indication of who shot whom. Saturday afternoon, a police-involved shooting occurred at the Canfield Green apartment complex in the 2900 block of Canfield. The first paragraph was even more tortured:Ī shooting in Ferguson has tensions riding high between residents and police. Was it by a friend? A gang member? Did a gun go off on accident? The headline gives no clue. Teenager Shot, Killed in Ferguson Apartment Complex Louis affiliate ( KTVI, 8/9/14) didn't even bother to mention who did the actual killing: ![]() The headline of this report from Fox's St. Take the initial reporting of the Mike Brown killing. A continuation of "officer-involved shooting," passive language takes a simple act (someone shooting a person) and turns it into a convoluted muddle. Media also obscure responsibility in police shootings through the use of passive language. "Shot and killed" has far more clarity than "civilian-involved shooting": One says who did the killing, the other obscures who exactly did what to whom. In such cases, journalists generally describe what happened in straightforward terms, as with NBC News ( 5/25/15):Ī New Orleans housing authority police officer was shot and killed while sitting in a marked patrol car Sunday morning, according to police. We routinely see this rhetorical pretzel employed to obscure killings by police.Īfter police are shot, a headline like "Police Officer Killed After Civilian-Involved Shooting " would seem risible. The causal relationship between the two isn't made clear at all, nor is the responsibility for the death clearly ascribed to the officer. The man in question wasn't killed after an "officer-involved shooting" he was killed in an officer-involved shooting. Man Killed After Officer-Involved Shooting in SE Houstonīeyond the term "officer-involved shooting," this headline is still opaque to the point of inaccuracy. On Sunday, Houston CBS affiliate KHOU ( 7/10/16) framed a police shooting: "Such phraseology," Orwell wrote in " Politics and the English Language," "is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them." Probably the most popular and most frequently criticized example of copspeak, "officer-involved shooting" is a textbook example of what Robert Jay Lifton called a " thought-terminating cliche." It describes an act of violence without assigning blame and is almost never used for when a police officer is the victim, only when the police have shot someone - justified or not.īy describing an event alongside the person who did it without connecting the two, "officer-involved shooting" vaguely alludes to what happened without the emotional response this would normally evoke. ![]() In the wake of the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, here are some examples of how "copspeak" - or jargon used by police departments - is internalized by journalists covering police violence, and how it affects the public's perception of crime and police brutality. The close relationship between reporters and police is often marked by diffusion of language from the police PR team to the front page.
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