{"id":255369,"date":"2016-07-11T22:45:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T22:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police-jargon-to-obscure-the-truth\/"},"modified":"2016-07-11T22:45:44","modified_gmt":"2016-07-11T22:45:44","slug":"copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police-jargon-to-obscure-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police-jargon-to-obscure-the-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Copspeak: 7 Ways Journalists Use Police Jargon to Obscure the Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

The close relationship between reporters and police is often marked by diffusion of language from the police PR team to the front page. In the wake of the deaths of Alton Sterling<\/a> and Philando Castile<\/a>, here are some examples of how \u201ccopspeak\u201d \u2014 or jargon used by police departments \u2014 is internalized by journalists covering police violence, and how it affects the public\u2019s perception of crime and police brutality.<\/p>\n

1. \u201cOfficer-involved shooting\u201d<\/h2>\n

\"WHOU:<\/a><\/p>\n

Probably the most popular and most<\/a> frequently<\/a> criticized example of copspeak, \u201cofficer-involved shooting\u201d is a textbook example of what Robert Jay Lifton called a \u201cthought-terminating cliche<\/a>.\u201d 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 \u2014 justified or not.<\/p>\n

By describing an event alongside the person who did it without connecting the two, \u201cofficer-involved shooting\u201d vaguely alludes to what happened without the emotional response this would normally evoke. “Such phraseology,\u201d Orwell wrote in \u201cPolitics and the English Language<\/a>,\u201d \u201cis needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Sunday, Houston CBS <\/b>affiliate KHOU <\/b>(7\/10\/16<\/a>) \u00a0framed a police shooting:<\/p>\n

\n

Man Killed After Officer-Involved Shooting in SE Houston<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Beyond the term \u201cofficer-involved shooting,\u201d this headline is still opaque to the point of inaccuracy. The man in question wasn\u2019t killed after <\/i>an \u201cofficer-involved shooting\u201d he was killed in <\/i>an officer-involved shooting. The causal relationship between the two isn\u2019t made clear at all, nor is the responsibility for the death clearly ascribed to the officer. We routinely see this rhetorical pretzel employed to obscure killings by police.<\/p>\n

After police are shot, a headline like \u201c<\/b>Police Officer Killed After Civilian-Involved Shooting\u201d<\/b> would seem risible.\u00a0 In such cases, journalists generally describe what happened in straightforward terms, as with NBC News<\/b> (5\/25\/15<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

A New Orleans housing authority police officer was shot and killed while sitting in a marked patrol car Sunday morning, according to police.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cShot and killed\u201d has far more clarity than \u201ccivilian-involved shooting\u201d: One says who did the killing, the other obscures who exactly did what to whom.<\/p>\n

2. Passive and segmented language<\/h2>\n

\"Fox:<\/a>Media also obscure responsibility in police shootings through the use of passive language. A continuation of \u201cofficer-involved shooting,\u201d passive language takes a simple act (someone shooting a person) and turns it into a convoluted muddle.<\/p>\n

Take the initial reporting of the Mike Brown killing. The headline of this report from Fox<\/b>\u2019s St. Louis affiliate (KTVI<\/b>, 8\/9\/14<\/a>) didn\u2019t even bother to mention who did the actual killing:<\/p>\n

\n

Teenager Shot, Killed in Ferguson Apartment Complex<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Was it by a friend? A gang member? Did a gun go off on accident? The headline gives no clue. The first paragraph was even more tortured:<\/p>\n

\n

A shooting in Ferguson has tensions riding high between residents and police. Saturday afternoon, a police-involved shooting occurred at the Canfield Green apartment complex in the 2900 block of Canfield. A teenager was shot and killed. An officer from the Ferguson Police Department was involved in the shooting.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even in the opening paragraph, there\u2019s no indication of who shot whom. There could have been a shootout involving a police officer and someone else, with this third party accidently killing Brown. It\u2019s entirely unclear\u2014by design.<\/p>\n

3. \u201cSuspect\/subject\u201d<\/h2>\n

Those who\u2019ve been arrested, shot or had any interaction with the police are routinely referred to as \u201csuspects<\/a>\u201d or \u201csubjects<\/a>\u201d\u2014terms that prejudice the reader by conveying a sense of criminality before the details of the case are known. Baltimore police detained Freddie Gray for a relatively trivial charge of possessing a knife \u2014 an arrest prosecutors later deemed \u201cillegal\u201d<\/a> \u2014 but he was repeatedly referred to as a \u201csuspect\u201d after it was revealed he sustained fatal injuries in police custody.<\/p>\n