How can crime reporters push for practical change in their newsrooms?

Below is the second half of an edited excerpt of the conversation between Resolve editor Matthew DiMera and journalist Desmond Cole from May 2023. (Click here for part one).

Desmond Cole: 
When someone dies and police are involved, what we often get from reporters is just a transcription of [Special Investigations Unit] statements. In Ontario, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) is the group that investigates police when they’re thought to have done something wrong. 

Journalists are very, very trained around not getting sued, and then add that to the subtext of not wanting to get the police mad at you.

Reporting on a statement or press release from an official body is relatively legally safe to journalists. I know if officials can say them, then I as a journalist can say them. 

But when I go back to stories in the ’80s and ’90s of Black people who were harmed by the police, you saw a more aggressive reporting corps. You saw reporters on the scene actually asking questions of the police in real time and reporting that the police don’t want to answer. 

You saw reporters asking the SIU how long it took them to get to this scene where somebody was purportedly harmed by the police, and they said it took two hours, or they said they couldn’t tell us how long it took them.

These things are actually really important. When the police are thought to have done something wrong, they’re not supposed to continue investigating that incident. They’re supposed to stop and allow the oversight body to come in.

[This past May was] the third anniversary of when Regis Korchinski-Paquet died after police responded to her home at a high rise in High Park. I honour the continued struggle of her family. And I want to say rest in peace to Korchinski-Paquet. 

I was on the scene, Matthew, the night that she fell and died. And, it’s not nice to talk about. It was a really difficult thing to report on. But, one thing that I often reflect on from that day is that there were police everywhere.

And one of the things that the police were doing in the aftermath of Regis’ death, is that they were canvassing neighbors around her building in other buildings.

You’re not supposed to do that when you’re the police. You are not supposed to continue investigating because now you, as the police, are under investigation by the SIU.

But the way we’ve trained journalists, this is something that they don’t really catch. I didn’t see anybody reporting about the fact that police were visibly continuing to investigate. Let’s say somebody saw the police doing something to Regis that they weren’t supposed to, and now police are showing up at their door to be like, we need you to give us any information you have. We need you to give us any video footage that you have. 

This now becomes a huge conflict that could compromise an SIU investigation. Yet, I couldn’t find another reporter other than myself who reported that these things happened. I couldn’t find another reporter who reported on the fact that the officers who were inside Regis’ apartment when she fell to her death, collectively were seen leaving the scene before the SIU arrived.

Why were they leaving? If I harm somebody in the public with say, my vehicle and I drive away, that’s an additional crime. Why are the police collectively leaving the scene of this investigated crime now to go and do something else? 

These are important questions that even a new reporter can try to ask — one line, one indication to the public that there seems to be an unanswered question here. These things are valuable and can be followed up upon later. I know we’re gonna talk about this more, but young journalists are often put in situations where they don’t want to get in trouble.

They don’t want to do or say the thing that is gonna get somebody mad at them. I understand that impulse. I’ve gotten in a lot of trouble in my career. But why are you doing the job?

Are you doing the job because you think that in 10 or 15 years you’ll have the authority to ask the question that you don’t ask today, because I can tell you that’s not going to happen.

We have to create a culture where asking questions and being rigorous is actually just normalized. And that takes a little bit of courage sometimes, but it’s a very important part of this job. 

Matthew DiMera:
I want to come back to this because I think it’s really important that we talk about the practical ways we can actually change things — in ways that aren’t small incremental steps. 

But first, I want to raise a specific anomaly, because I think it goes against one of the basic principles that we’re all taught as journalists — which is you never take anyone’s word as fact. You question everything. 

You talk to all parties involved. Except when it comes to police. We do have an issue with this sometimes when reporting on government and other kinds of authority. But nowhere do we give as much leniency and as much room unchallenged to police narratives.

We do it when we mimic the language that they use in their press releases. As journalists, we’re definitely familiar with this language, but I’d say most of the general public is too:

Officer-involved shooting. 

Known to police.

These are very specific examples of police jargon that we have let into our reporting unfiltered and uncritically. There are very clear motives behind the specific choice of this language, specifically around the passive voice.

I was looking at recent Canadian headlines, to see what had changed — and it hasn’t really changed.

It’s a major failure of the news industry to not apply that very basic journalism principle.

You may want to use the press release as a source, but you need to talk to people at the scene. You need to talk to who else was involved. Often, there isn’t even an attempt. When I was looking at some of these stories — you can see how often the language of the press release is pretty much just copied verbatim.

Maybe a few words are changed here and there, but really so much of what we’re seeing is literally just stenography from the police.

Desmond: 
You jogged my memory, Matthew, about a story from The Globe and Mail in 2013.

Yorkdale Mall is an uptown, very nice mall in Toronto. So 10 years ago, there was a young man — I’m not going to say his name — he was 23 years old and he was shot dead in the parking lot of Yorkdale Mall. And the police responded to that. They were looking for the suspect who shot this man. And I want to read you a line from this — the fatal victim was described as his name, 23 years old, who was known to police. The other victim is also known to police, but in a very minor way. And that was a quote given by a police officer who was interviewed on the scene. And they’re not talking about a suspect in a shooting.

They’re talking about somebody who was shot with gunfire and survived, and saying that that person was known to police in a minor way. What does that mean? Does that mean that a police officer lives next door to the guy?

Does it mean that the police were unnecessarily stopping and carding and surveilling this person and then have non-criminal documentation of them, as would be the case with literally hundreds of thousands of men in this country, young men, particularly?

What is the purpose of even reporting that? If a police officer tells you that on scene, these are the kinds of things I encourage people to think about a little more.

I’ll give you a couple of other examples. When an off-duty police officer, Michael Theriault, and his brother Christian Theriault — when the Theriault brothers attacked a young man by the name of Dafonte Miller, a Black teenager, back in 2016, and beat him very badly. I saw a lot of news reports that describe what happened to Dafonte Miller as an alleged beating or an alleged assault. 

They were trying to say that the police officer and his brother are alleged to have beaten Dafonte Miller. But when you say alleged beating or alleged assault, you’re saying it as if the beating may or may not have happened. Yeah. Dafonte Miller lost an eye. We know the beating happened.

The allegation was whether or not the cop and his brother did it. But it’s a little nuance like that because we’re trying so hard not to say anything direct about police that it ends up misleading the reader.

You mentioned passive voice: An officer’s weapon was discharged. This is how the police oversight body uses language in their press releases — who are by the way, made up mostly of former police officers. The police officer doesn’t shoot somebody, the weapon discharges, and the suspect is, or the, the individual is struck by the bullet.

It’s passive. Reporters don’t have to use passive voice. You can just change all the language.

You don’t have to say, officer-involved shooting. These are choices. And I think that even for the young journalist, if you’re going to change things like this and then you’re going get asked a question, you can say, well, I’ve been reading about how the term officer-involved shooting is too passive and doesn’t actually inform the reader.

We have to take some accountability for the way that we use language in those situations.

Matthew DiMera:
I want to make sure we get enough time to talk about the next step. You were talking about the courage needed to push back against some of these established practices, and actually push for real change. Let’s address some of this and come up with some of the approaches that need to happen here.

I’ve been a party to this myself. I’ve left legacy journalism to do my own thing because pushing for that change just wasn’t happening. Putting your head down and working quietly and hoping you’ll get moved up into a position of power so you can change things later on — I can tell you it doesn’t work.

Desmond: 
So I just want to pick up on your last point about trying to move up, because I would never want to discourage anybody.

I work with fantastic people in all areas of journalism, in corporate media, as well as independent journalism. And it takes people from every approach, in every corner of the work that we do to try and make change. You and I happen to be doing it at an independent level, but not everybody is. I respect the work that people are doing across the board, but I want to say that the reason why it doesn’t work to say “I’ll wait 10 or 15 years, get into a position of power and then change things,” is because the obstacle to making real change isn’t just the person overseeing your work. It’s the entire system. 

For example, in the case I’ve been talking about, the entire police apparatus is going to come for you anytime you don’t tow the line. That’s where the real pressure is from.

It’s not just necessarily from your boss or your boss’ boss. It’s a societal expectation that for better or worse, the police are here to help us, and that you shouldn’t be too hard on them because they have a difficult job.

You talk about how we treat police so differently. One thing I never hear about most other professions is how hard they are.

But we always say it about the police. So even if you’re a senior management person, if you say something that the police don’t like, they’re going to be trying to get people to boycott your station.

They’re going to be writing angry letters, they’re going to be going and using their police associations to pressure you. It doesn’t ever stop because you get a little bit more entrenched. Let’s talk about how we can collectively do this, because I think another really misleading way that we have these conversations, Matthew, is that we, we make it seem as though the individual has to somehow overcome all of these structures by themselves, which is not true. We need labour organizing. If that’s the only thing anybody who’s listening takes out of this conversation, that’s what I want you to remember.

We need strong labour organizing, because if you only have 30 minutes to write a really complex story about policing, if you are not being paid properly or given the resources, if you’re being asked to be the camera person and the editor and the writer, and being in front of the camera, these are really hard conditions to make good journalism.

And so we need strong labour organizing, even for that intern who’s in the radio room, so that even if they’re not necessarily part of the union yet, there’s some interaction where they feel supported.

And I do think that even interns and very part-time people should have some kind of labour representation. I think it actually hurts any industry when there’s a cadre of people who aren’t given protections because they can be played off of everybody else, and the whole quality and pay of everybody else can be dragged down because well, look what we’re doing to these people here.

That’s how it works in every industry. So it’s important that everybody in a shop be part of union organizing. And I think it’s important for the Canadian Journalists of Colour and for the Canadian Association of Black Journalists to be part of that.

To be part of a strong labour contingent in journalism so that we can fight for the conditions that allow us to make good journalism. Not just these language choices or these reporting choices that I’m talking about, but just like the basics of a job and the fact that your boss has more power than you and you’re much stronger pushing back when there are lots of you who are organized and constantly thinking about these things.

That’s critical. We’ve talked a lot about the idea that it’s hard to take risks early on in your career.

And I believe that cultivating a little practice of taking risks and resistance is so important because it builds up your reputation. We were joking when we were having a pre-conversation, Matthew, about cancellations. I think I’ve been canceled about 50 times now.

Canceling is easy. It happens to me all the time. What’s so funny about it though is that if you are consistently doing good work, people are always going to come back to you in some form.

You will develop a readership, a listenership, you will develop an audience of people who are appreciating that little line that you changed to ask an important question that others didn’t ask.

I have received a lot of criticism from my industry, in part because I am very critical of the industry. But I have found my way back time and again, because I’m trying to continue doing work that I feel is important and that is missing in other places. And I think that that’s a lesson for people — doing journalism is about holding power to account.

Matthew DiMera:
You have to find ways to do that no matter what. I think when there’s such pushback, when there’s such pressure to produce so much, I think little things start to feel like wins sometimes. And so sometimes we’ve pushed for six months or a year and we’ve gotten a concession around a specific choice of language, and the newsroom is now going to let us change the way we refer to a certain thing. Your approach is really critical because building that practice and building that reputation of being critical is vital. It’s something we should all be working towards. Incremental change is slow and it’s imperceptible. And I think specifically when we’re looking at the effects of what bad reporting does to communities, what it does to individuals, to families, it’s destructive. It’s devastating. And so this is not just a question of labor.

It’s not just a question about our job practices and our pay and all those things, which matter and are important, it’s also the harm that we can do. We have a lot of power.

And if we’re not using it responsibly, if we’re not putting deliberate thoughts into how we operate and into how we use that power, what are we doing?.

It’s not just about my career. It’s how am I helping our communities? How am I hurting our communities? We called this session “Do No Harm,” for a reason.

I think that is something to keep in mind as you’re filtering your ideas of how to do your job. 

We don’t often have time, especially when we’re being asked to produce half a dozen stories in a day. So we don’t have the time to have these thoughtful conversations all the time. Which is why these things need to happen beforehand.

We need to know how we’re gonna approach some of these situations before we get there.  So when you’re on the scene in the moment and you’re thinking, “do I challenge the police? What is this going to mean? 

Those are things to have considered and, and be prepared for before you’re in the heat of it. 

Desmond: 
I absolutely agree. And I think that having labour solidarity, having even one colleague who you can bounce these kinds of ideas off of when it’s not like the critical moment to be making a decision, it helps you refine and improve your own practice. 

If I can end with an anecdote. There was in 2017 a story that I will never forget about a white woman in Mississauga who went into a clinic and demanded that her son be given a white doctor. Every major news outlet covered this story.

And they all did a very stupid thing, which I see to this day in mainstream media. They were given a video of this woman screaming at the staff, being extremely racist, saying, I don’t want a brown doctor, and all of these things. And every media outlet obscured her face.

They covered up this white woman’s face who was engaging in some very heinous and destructive behaviour. Ask questions, folks. Ask your boss, why do we cover that up? 

I’ve seen this in videos of Indigenous young people in Giant Tiger being followed by security. They give the video to CBC who then covers up the face of the security guards. In no other instance, can I think of that when somebody is alleged to be doing social harm or committing a crime, do we protect their identity.

Now, if the police had come and said, well, we’re looking for the woman who asked for the white doctor, every news outlet would reveal her face, but they wanted to protect her and give her the benefit of the doubt, because the police didn’t tell them that what she was doing was a crime.

CTV went even further. CTV did real journalism. They found out this woman’s name. They knew her name because they went to her house and they went to her neighbourhood and they interviewed all of her neighbours. And all of her neighbors were like, yep, that’s Nikki, she’s racist as hell. Talked to my kids this way, called my child the n-word. Her name was Nikki Samuel — I insist on saying her name because none of them would say her name or show her face. They went to Nikki Samuel’s house, knocked on her door, and when she opened the door, they blurred her face again. What did this woman have to do besides screaming in a clinic, in a public place about a white doctor, and terrorizing her community.

Does she have to punch a Black child in the face or something before we deem that her identity needs to be known? But when I would ask questions about this, there was this assumption that there’s some legal liability that does not allow us to name or show this woman’s face.

That’s never true of a Black kid who’s accused of robbing a liquor store. You can always show his face for some reason, even if it’s just an allegation, you could always say his name, but that’s because the police want you to, and we do what the police tell us. So ask questions where you work, why do we do these things? I’ve never seen us do this before?

Is there a policy critically that tells us that we have to do this? Because that’s our job as journalists, is to be able to ask the right questions. Sometimes maybe not standing up and saying, oh, I think that this is wrong, but asking the correct questions and doing so consistently is a way of opening up space for change.