The media have taken a tragedy in Dallas and run with it. When compared with the fairly muted coverage of a police officer’s murder in Fort Worth, Texas, the contrast is stark and damning.
The two recent tragic stories involving Texas police officers occurred within a one-week period. On Sept. 6, a white female Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, apparently mistook the apartment of her neighbor, a black man, Botham Jean, for her own, and fatally shot him. Claiming she mistakenly took Jean for an intruder, she has been charged with manslaughter.
On Saturday, we learned that a Fort Worth undercover officer, Garrett Hull, had succumbed to his wounds, having been shot in the head during a shootout with a trio of armed robbers. Police report that one of the gunmen, Dacion Steptoe, a black man, fired the fatal round that struck Hull in the head. Steptoe was then killed by another officer.
In Dallas, self-promoting civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, no stranger to slinging arrows before all the facts are in, is now representing Jean’s family. He immediately pronounced that Guyger, who wasn’t immediately arrested, was receiving overly favorable treatment.
He then recklessly lit the racial fires by adding that black people have been killed for “driving while black” and “walking while black,” and now while “living while black when we are in our apartments.”
I once had a bright, young African-American undergraduate student of mine directly challenge me in class. The course I taught at St. John’s University was titled “Sociology of Deviance,” and we were debating the complex topic of police shootings. An officer-involved shooting had just occurred in Charlotte, N.C., where a 43-year old African-American man had been shot by a police officer when he exited a vehicle armed with a handgun and ignored officers’ commands to drop the weapon. The fact that the man was fatally wounded by an African-American cop mattered little. This was just two years after the summer of unrest, when an “unarmed” black man in Ferguson, Mo., Michael Brown, was shot by a white police officer, touching off a summer of protests, riots, and assassinations of police officers across the nation. Charlotte braced for protests, along with the attendant riots and looting.
“Come on, professor,” the inquisitive student politely chided me, following my lengthy explanation of why Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Brentley Vinson had not been charged in the shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott. “You know that young black men are being slaughtered across the country by white cops. Happens all the damn time. It’s all over the news.”
“But the statistics don’t back that up,” I gently responded. “Look, I definitely think we can criticize police when they make mistakes. But, unfortunately, they’re not given the benefit of the doubt, of late. And, if you actually studied the available statistics, you would be surprised.”
He seemed genuinely taken aback and immediately countered with: “But, professor, don’t you watch the news? All that I see is unarmed, young men of color getting gunned down by cops.”
And he was right. Of course, that’s all he saw represented on news broadcasts. And there’s a reason for it. Editorial decisions at almost all media outlets are made by folks with a particular worldview. Far more “newsworthy” are causes, issues, and angles that reinforce that view. And the trope that is racist white cops hunting down and executing unarmed men of color is just one of those views.
It matters little that none other than the Washington Post found in 2017 that of the 987 people killed by police officers who exercised fatal force, there were 68 confirmed to have been “unarmed.” And of those considered to be unarmed, 13 were Hispanic, 20 were African-American, and 30 were Caucasian. And of course, the Washington Post is quick to point out this is an overrepresentation of African-Americans compared to their percentage of the U.S. population.
They conveniently ignore the overrepresentation in criminality rates that African-Americans account for. In 2016, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (a compilation of annual crime data in the United States) shows that black people comprise a whopping 52.6 percent of all arrests for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter and 54.5 percent of all robberies. Is this not a disproportionate representation of criminality and patterns of offending from 13.4 percent of the population?
Would it not also stand to reason that these statistics would engender a greater percentage of interactions with law enforcement, especially if we smartly position cops in high-crime areas, many of which are comprised of minority communities?
Retired FBI assistant director of the criminal division Ron Hosko now serves as president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. He tells me that recent FBI statistics indicate that police officers are subject to some 58,000 violent confrontations with noncompliant subjects each year. With that number of dangerous encounters, in the vast majority of instances, law enforcement truly is a model of restraint. And keep in mind, how we define “unarmed” is up for debate. Michael Brown was “unarmed” when it was determined that he attacked police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson. Not possessing a gun or knife at the onset of an encounter with police doesn’t mean a subject can’t be considered dangerous and the officer’s life not be placed in jeopardy.
Hosko wrote a column about the Dallas shooting for the Daily Caller and surmised that “officer fatigue” (Guyger had just completed a 15-hour work day and parked on the wrong garage level) may ultimately play a role in any jury decision about the charges against her. He described the victim, Jean, as “the antithesis of men whose lives have been lost in violent encounters with police, so many of whom led lives of crime, or who attacked police and others, or who engaged in acts which plainly risked their own lives or the lives of others.”
It’s an absolute tragedy all around, it appears. But the press has kept the story on the front page. Not so much with the murder of Officer Hull in Fort Worth.
We know the media can set agendas and focus public attention on certain areas while giving other narratives short shrift. Where it pertains to what the media elects to promote and what it chooses to essentially ignore, truth be told, we already know what sells newspapers, causes viewers to tune in to broadcasts, and encourages clicks online. A particular race trope must be reinforced.
And, as my St. John’s student once so earnestly surmised — it must be true, since “it’s all over the news.”
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University.
