Summary: Reporters are tasked with telling the story of a situation, collecting facts and being cautious in recreating events. When the assignment is covering the shooting of a person of color by a law enforcement officer, the stakes are even higher because every word written will be subject to scrutiny. A trio of organizations dedicated to social justice and improving race relations — Advancement Project (http://www.advancementproject.org), Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice (https://www.raceforward.org) and The Opportunity Agenda (https://opportunityagenda.org) — recently issued a series of guidelines and suggestions (https://www.raceforward.org/press/releases/best-practices-journalists-reporting-police-killings-black-and-brown-people) for reporters covering police-related shootings and deaths with the intention of helping reporters tell better, more equitable stories while keeping the history of racial tension in America in mind. “In a report Race Forward put out a couple years ago, called Moving the Conversation Forward on Race, a couple of things that we identified (that could be considered) harmful media practices include the problem of losing the system in writing the story,” said Rinku Sen, president and executive director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation, and the publisher of Colorlines, an affiliated news site. When reporters individualize what has happened, he or she might try to pin a story on whether the officer is racist or has a history of racist actions. “If the reporting doesn’t go beyond that one question, what was in the mind or heart of the officers involved in the shooting of a black person, for example, the reporting doesn’t get us to what the systems are like. There has, in fact, been a fair amount of decent reporting out of the mainstream media about policing as a system, but the initial stories after a shooting tend to not be about systems.” The high-profile deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and others has brought to light something Sen asserts has been going on, out of the public eye and scrutiny, for a long time. "We know that there’s a systemic problem that leads to the killing of black and brown people by police officers," she said. But it would be a false equivalent to say there’s a similar longstanding situation with law enforcement officers. “There is not yet evidence of a systemic war against the police.” The guidelines released by the three organizations include what could be considered some basic principles for good journalism, she said. Reporters and editors should not rush to find or publish the mugshot of a shooting victim. If the life of the person who was killed is investigated in depth without calling into question whether the officer who shot the victim has a history of violent incidents, any racist actions or comments and details about their life prior to joining the police force also must be brought to light. “What we get is a lot of shaming of the person who has been killed and a lot of silence or protection, protective quotes of the police officers involved,” she said. "That kind of representation of victims of police shootings without a corresponding representation and digging into the records of police officers creates a real imbalance in the coverage.”
