Presuming they are talking about the same set of facts, what is the difference between the following two headlines?
A) L.B.P.D. ARRESTS 16 GANG MEMBERS SUSPECTED IN 13 SHOOTINGS
B) L.B.P.D. DEALS HEAVY BLOW TO VIOLENT LONG BEACH STREET GANG
If you were paying attention in Journalism 101 — or at least to your high-school English units on informative vs. persuasive writing — you recognize A as simply stating facts, whereas B goes beyond the facts by employing a colorful bit of inference (“deals heavy blow”), presumably to evoke in the reader a feeling about the facts in play.
But presume the claim made in B is true: the 16 arrests did indeed deal a “heavy blow” to the gang in question. Were the piece under B not a “straight news” piece, provided the facts are accurate, no one should be troubled. And even if B-piece were written as straight news, such a headline is not some horrendous breach of journalistic ethics.
But B is not a media creation: it is the headline of a June 13 LBPD News Release. There’s nothing scandalous here, but seeing the department spinning the facts a bit is a good reminder that in practice the Media Relations Detail of the Long Beach Police Department — and maybe every other police department in the country — does not exist solely to act as a conduit for information between the department and the public: part of its function is shaping public perception of the work the police force does.
That PD is composed of people, from Chief Jim McDonnell, right through the public information officers who staff the Media Relations Detail, and on down to the rookie beat cops and dispatchers. And I’m sure these people — like all of us — want to be well thought of, to be perceived as doing a good job, not only individually but also collectively.
Whether the LBPD is doing a good job is beyond the scope of this article (and, frankly, is a topic about which I’m not sufficiently well-versed to have a strong opinion). But clearly the department is understaffed and underfunded; and the LBPD’s own statistics indicate that over the last few months the crime rate has risen.
None of this may be the LBPD’s fault. But when crime in a city is on the rise, the perception of many residents is that their police force is not doing a good job.
In such a scenario, one can imagine the people on that police force — who, like everyone else, want to be thought as doing a good job — as being uncomfortable with that perception, especially if it’s unfair. But even if all officers do everything they possibly can to protect and serve, they cannot by dint of will and good intentions compel crime to decrease; therefore, despite their most heroic efforts, they may be powerless to shape public perception through changing the reality on the city streets.
That is not the only way to shape public perception, of course. And so when the LBPD has an ostensible success — such as recent arrests of 16 high-level members of the Baby Insane Crips — perhaps there is a temptation not merely to let the facts speak for themselves, but to spin the facts as triumph.
If that sounds cynical — after all, we may justly feel this is a triumph by the LBPD, a department that surely achieves small, unheralded triumphs each and every day in performing one of society’s crucial functions — I suggest perusing the LBPD News Release archive to see whether you can find, amongst the pieces about mass arrests, the location of missing persons, DUI checkpoints removing impaired drivers from the road, and detectives who “worked tirelessly” on cases, any such pieces promulgating LBPD failures — arrests that prosecutors refused to charge, operations that did not yield the intended results, officer misconduct and discipline.
Presumably such failures are part of law-enforcement reality. Yet the Media Relations Detail never reports them. I’m not suggesting they should, but merely pointing out that the LBPD reports on its activities selectively, with that selection skewed toward portraying the department in a positive light.
This skewing is exactly the kind of reportage we expect from the public-relations branch of any organization. It may not be all that important whether a police department takes part in this practice; but it’s good to remember that sometimes it does.
The vast majority of News Releases issued by the LBPD appear to be without spin — straight reportage of fact, requests for the public’s help with ongoing investigations, etc. But spin and bias happen within police department, just like with media outlets and any other type of organization you care to name. You get that sometime from people, with their egos and desires and foibles.
And while some people may tell you it’s “just the facts, ma’am,” there’s often more the picture than meets the eye.