Newspaper death watch: The Wire edition

It’s well-known that David Simon, creator of the HBO series The Wire, was an old-school crime reporter in Baltimore. Well, a little while ago, he decided that newspapers today weren’t doing the same quality job that he used to.

So he went back on the beat, tracking down a story about a police officer involved in shooting an unarmed suspect — an officer that the police department decided didn’t need to be named.

From his story in the Washinton Post:

On Feb. 17, when a 29-year-old officer responded to a domestic dispute in East Baltimore, ended up fighting for her gun and ultimately shot an unarmed 61-year-old man named Joseph Alfonso Forrest, the Sun reported the incident, during which Forrest died, as a brief item. It did not name the officer, Traci McKissick, or a police sergeant who later arrived at the scene to aid her and who also shot the man.

It didn’t identify the pair the next day, either, because the Sun ran no full story on the shooting, as if officers battling for their weapons and unarmed 61-year-old citizens dying by police gunfire are no longer the grist of city journalism. At which point, one old police reporter lost his mind and began making calls.

It’s interesting to read his characterization of those old days in the press, when he says newspapers were “feared rather than pitied” and when he carried a judge’s home phone number, so he could enforce Maryland’s public information laws in the face of recalcitrant police officers.

How things change, though. Now, Simon points out, a newspaper that used to carry three or four crime bylines no longer has the manpower to fact-check police statements — statements that, as he quickly finds out, don’t always stand up to the truth.

And he’s not optimistic about bloggers stepping up to fill the gap, either:

I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

The article, in its entirety, is both thrilling and sad. I wish it were longer. But it’s long enough. Read it. And then start thinking about what, possibly, could support investigative journalism in the future.