As I racked my brain, my editor came up to me: Had I thought of anyone? We really needed someone on the ground in Cleveland. I texted Teddy Cahill, a baseball writer, a former high school classmate of mine, and another of my closest friends in Cleveland. He was home, and I thought he might know of some freelancers with breaking news experience. He didn’t, so I made an impulsive decision and gave Teddy’s number to my editor. “Call this guy, say you got his info from me, and ask him if he’ll go down to the protest. He’s good, he can handle it.” As I made my way back to my desk, I sent Teddy another text: “might have just given my editor your contact info.”
Within the hour, Teddy was headed to the protest—his first news reporting assignment in years, possibly since our high school days, when he ran the sports page and I was one of the coeditors. He was nervous but had cleared it with his editors at Baseball America, and started filling his notebook with quotes from the crowd of demonstrators gathering in the park where Tamir Rice had been killed.
About three dozen demonstrators gathered that night in the park. They joined hands in the rain for a moment of silence, then began chanting, “No justice, no peace,” as they marched across town toward the Justice Center.
The decision not to indict was “a burden on the family and the community. But at the same time, it’s a burden on the police department,” Angel Arroyo, an activist with the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance, told Teddy. The officer who killed Tamir, Arroyo added, is “going to have to live for the rest of his life knowing that a twelve-year-old boy lost his life. So it’s just pain all the way around for our community.”
The night came and went with no violence. Teddy spent a few hours snagging quotes before we sent him home. The next day the piece, written by the two of us and another Post reporter, ran on the front page. We made copies for our mothers.
CHAPTER THREE
North Charleston: Caught on Camera
A March morning had just turned to afternoon when my phone vibrated across my desk. At the time, I was screening my calls, deep into the reporting of our next big piece on police shootings. After Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, several reporters and researchers at the Post decided to spend a year tracking every on-duty police shooting in the country.
As 2014 gave way to 2015, I had hoped that I might be able to negotiate some time off—by that point I had banked close to a month off that the paper owed me after my nearly three-month stint in Ferguson. I was exhausted, beyond burned out. But instead of vacation, I found myself with even more work than before.
While we had all been in Ferguson, we constantly found ourselves running into the same frustrating dilemma. The civil rights groups and activists who had flocked to Ferguson were insistent that black men and women were being gunned down in the streets daily. The local police union and a routine stable of law enforcement talking heads insisted that these shootings almost never happened, and when they did, they were almost never unarmed black men (and besides, they usually added for good measure, Michael Brown had it coming for attacking an officer).
As a team of half a dozen Post reporters working in Ferguson through the grand jury decision, we continually fielded the same inquiry from our editors back in Washington: Who is right— the police unions or the activists? How many people are killed by police officers and how many of them are unarmed black men? These were vitally important questions. And, it turned out, no one really knew the answer.
Policing in the United States is a deeply decentralized institution, with more than eighteen thousand police agencies spread throughout the nation and accountable to no one but the local communities they serve. Despite the fact that police officers are the only people in our society given the near-unilateral right to kill other citizens, the federal government holds meager, and in some cases almost nonexistent, regulatory controls over them—local police departments are instead governed by state laws, municipal codes, and union contracts almost always negotiated well outside the public view and any scrutiny.
Because they are governed drastically differently depending on which state or local jurisdiction they serve, police departments also have very few standardized requirements in terms of what data they are required to report; as a result, at the time of Michael Brown’s death, there was no comprehensive accurate national data on how many police shootings occurred each year and who, exactly, was being killed.
We weren’t the first to notice this. For several years independent trackers—academics, criminal justice junkies, and a few police reform groups—had attempted to chronicle fatal police shootings, consistently finding that the number was northwards of a thousand people killed by the police each year (a figure more than double that which the FBI said occurred each year, based on a voluntary, self-reported survey it conducts of police departments).
At the time of Michael Brown’s death, the most robust effort to keep track of police shootings was that of D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the 29,000-circulation Reno News & Review, who launched his Fatal Encounters project in 2012. Working with an army of volunteers, Burghart built a database of news clips and coverage going back several years, tracking thousands of fatal police shootings. His effort relied on searching Google each day, recording each new police shooting, and following up later as more details were published or made publicly available through the individual police department. The effort, a herculean attempt at amassing data, was not a real-time, public-facing one. The closest attempt at such a thing was Killed By Police, a website that listed the names, ages, and dates of anyone who news clips revealed had been killed by a police officer. The website was invaluable, but the data wasn’t sortable and often included people who died of natural causes while in police custody or who were killed by off-duty officers.
“Don’t you find it spooky? This is information, this is the government’s job,” Burghart told me when I called him in October 2014. “One of the government’s major jobs is to protect us. How can it protect us if it doesn’t know what the best practices are? If it doesn’t know if one local department is killing people at a higher rate than others? When it can’t make decisions based on real numbers to come up with best practices? That to me is an abdication of responsibilities.”
I wrote a piece with the headline, “How Many Police Shootings a Year? No One Knows,” and after it was published, I stood with two of my Post editors, Vince Bzdek and Marcia Davis, and excitedly discussed how insane I thought this was. Burghart himself had suggested that perhaps the Post could undertake a similar effort. I thought he had a point, so I continued to survey the existing databases and made my initial pitch. “Can’t we do it? Couldn’t we count the shootings? And create the data?” I exclaimed with a level of earnest yet righteously indignant excitement that could only be channeled by a young newspaper reporter. “We should do it.”
Soon afterward, led by our national editor, Cameron Barr, editors and researchers at the paper began discussing how we might track fatal shootings, and how that would fit into a yearlong effort by the Post to hold police to account in response to the high-profile police killings and the protest movement they had sparked.
The first piece of the year was by my colleagues Kimberly Kindy and Kimbriell Kelly and examined every police shooting in the previous decade for which an officer had been charged with a crime. The piece, “Thousands Dead, Few Prosecuted,” revealed the specific set of circumstances required for an officer to be charged in connection with a fatal shooting—there had to be video, evidence of a cover-up (perhaps a missing or planted weapon), or fellow officers needed to have turned on the shooter and contradicted his or her story. Darren Wilson was never going to have been indicted. There was no video, no clear evidence of a cover-up; just the word of the officer against the legacy of a dead kid.
To follow up on that piece, we began combing through hundreds of police shootings that had so far been recorded in 2015, with researchers Julie Tate and Jen Jenkins methodically checking Google News each day for reports of new
shootings and then confirming the facts with firsthand reporting. We were looking for trends. Who were these people being killed? Were they mostly career criminals? Teens? The elderly? Gang members? Or just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time?
My job was to weed through all the armed white men—the largest subcategory of people killed by the police—to spot the story in the numbers. I was shocked at how many of these men were mentally ill or explicitly suicidal.
My buzzing phone nonetheless seized my attention.
At the other end of the line was Ryan Julison, a public relations guru who often finds himself close to the center of the stories I cover. Julison’s specialty is working as a PR consultant for attorneys and law firms, shepherding the stories of their clients into the scoop-hungry hands of national reporters. Often, local media becomes jaded or insensitive to police killings or incidents that may have racial implications. At other times, shrinking local newsrooms are just overextended. Perhaps they’ve got two police reporters tasked with covering dozens of major crimes a week, in addition to the police department budget and the broader politics of crime and justice. But if any case can be connected to a large theme or narrative—racial profiling, insensitivity, or the disproportionate number of deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of police—then the attorneys for the family can often interest a national reporter. Julison and others like him are the key step in the process that takes a death like Trayvon Martin’s from being a small blurb in the local daily paper to being the lead story on the national news.
Julison had been instrumental in turning the eyes of the nation to the death of Trayvon Martin, guiding the story to reporters who back then knew little of “Stand Your Ground” laws, helping reacquaint those reporters and by extension the public with these policies, which gave legal latitude to people who commit homicides in self-defense. I had worked with Julison a handful of times; he had been working with the attorneys who initially represented the family of Tamir Rice and had a month or two earlier pitched me the story of Mikel Neal, a black firefighter in Marion, Indiana, who alleged that one of his supervisors had tossed a noose at him.
But the story Julison had for me today was the biggest he would ever bring to me—and it wasn’t even an exclusive.
The weekend before, a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, had attempted to pull over a car with a missing taillight. As the officer ran the license and registration of the black man he had pulled over, the man bolted from the driver’s seat and ran toward a field about half a block away.
The officer, Michael Slager, first attempted to use a stun gun on the man, but for some reason, it didn’t work. The two men struggled over the stun gun, and then the black man made another run for it—a limp-jog that didn’t get him very far. Slager drew his weapon, lined up a shot, and put multiple bullets in the man’s back. Then Slager picked up the stun gun and set it near the dying man’s body.
The expiring black body belonged to Walter Scott, a fifty-year-old Marine Corps veteran who was behind on his child support and didn’t want to be taken to jail. Slager, a five-year officer, married with a child on the way, told his superiors that Scott had taken his stun gun and was about to deploy it on him. In fear for his life, Slager said, he opened fire.
Neither man knew at the time that Feidin Santana had been standing just feet away, recording the struggle between Scott and Slager on his cell phone.
“Before I started recording, they were down on the floor. I remember the police [officer] had control of the situation,” Santana would later tell NBC. “He had control of Scott. And Scott was trying just to get away from the Taser. But like I said, he never used the Taser against the cop. As you can see in the video, the police officer just shot him in the back.
“I knew right away, I had something on my hands.”
Santana waited a few days. He wanted to see how the police would explain the shooting. When he saw that the department was advancing a narrative directly contradicted by his own video, he reached out to an attorney who had been working with Scott’s family and gave it over.
“I can’t give you the video,” Julison told me excitedly. It had already been promised to the New York Times and ABC’s World News Tonight under embargo, to be published and aired that evening. “But I like you, and don’t want you to be screwed. Learn everything you can about a man named Walter Scott, and North Charleston.” Julison added before he hung up, “This video is even worse than Eric Garner.”
It was just after 4 p.m., so I had three hours.
I ran over to Mark Berman, who runs the Post’s national news blog. Within minutes we were both working the phones. The North Charleston police department wouldn’t give us much of anything, just the press release that they had sent out a few days earlier. But they promised to keep us informed.
As we kept scrambling, the department sent out a news release announcing a 5 p.m. press conference. We watched the live stream, and our jaws dropped as the North Charleston mayor and police chief announced that Officer Slager had been fired and would be charged with murder. The video wasn’t even out yet. Even though the New York Times had the video, they were still committed to their 7 p.m. embargo and didn’t immediately jump on the news that the officer had been fired. By a stroke of luck, Berman and I had gone from waiting to be scooped on a huge story to being the reporters who broke the news that the officer had been charged with a crime, and the first national news outlet to publish Walter Scott’s name. When 7 p.m. hit, the video immediately became one of the most viewed things that the New York Times published all year.
The preceding hours, frantic as we chased and updated the news, had been in many ways surreal. The impact of so many of the police shootings and other deaths at the hands of officers in 2014 and 2015 was derived in large part from the organic nature of the outrage. You would be going about your normal day when suddenly you were confronted by the image of Mike Brown lying on the concrete. It was another day at the office until suddenly someone tweeted at you the video of Eric Garner’s dying words: “I can’t breathe!”
But in this case I had been given a heads-up: I knew the name that was going to trend nationally hours before it did. I looked at the images of Walter Scott (just a handful were available at the time online), knowing that soon enough his face would be plastered across every news outlet in the nation.
Walter Scott was, in many ways, the “perfect victim,” as far as proving police impunity was concerned. He had committed a minor infraction, ran knowing he was going to face the heavy hand of the legal system, and was then shot in the back by a white officer—all of it caught on tape. While Slager, who as of this writing is still awaiting trial, said a violent struggle occurred before the video recording began, most who viewed the video of Walter Scott’s death could not fathom a context in which the shooting they were watching did not amount to murder. The response of the nation was once again outrage.
As I tweeted out more details as we knew them, an outraged tone began to overtake my language. While the video showed Slager setting the stun gun next to Scott’s body, I used the word “plant.” For the average person reacting to the video, it would have been a reasonable description. But coming from someone charged with providing fair coverage both to Scott’s family and to Slager’s, it was too charged a verb, ascribing motive and denying Slager the chance to provide his version of events. It was a mistake.
For months, for the most part, I thought, I had held it together. I had sent hundreds if not thousands of tweets since Ferguson began, and had been the constant target of online harassment for my reporting. But with a few exceptions (like the time I tweeted that an anarchist protester who pulled a knife as I attempted to report on a night of looting during the Ferguson protests was a “white punk”), I had tried to keep my personal reactions to the stories I was covering out of my Twitter timeline. If the facts of a case were compelling enough, the story would take off whether I relayed it emotionally or not.
I g
ot called into an editor’s office, and rightfully chided.
“The more emotional the story,” he told me, “the less emotional the reporter.” He was right, I knew, but I still walked out of his office in a huff.
In reality, it wasn’t about the tweet. I was acting out, having a tantrum, because I didn’t want to get on a plane to South Carolina. I was tired. The last seven months of my life had been a constant stream of black death. I spent my days cold-calling the families of those killed by police officers, and my evenings catching up on the hashtags and viral videos of police killings that I had somehow missed during the work day. The dead looked like my father, my younger brothers, and me. The way they were dehumanized by cable news talking heads stung me sharply, piercing the layer of emotional detachment I had learned to acquire since being thrust into the story in Ferguson.
I booked my flight for first thing the next morning and met a close friend and mentor, who was then an editor for a different section at the Post, at a hotel bar not far from our newsroom. I had yet to pack, but I also needed to eat something, even just a bite, to hold me over until morning.
As we sat at the bar, I was close to tears. I didn’t want to get on this plane, I didn’t want to spend days telling yet another story of a black man gunned down. Each story had drained me emotionally, and I wasn’t sure how much I had left.
“You’ll go,” my friend told me after listening intently. “Because you have to.”
I didn’t go home. I doubled back to the newsroom. It wasn’t that late yet, and I knew I could still get some valuable reporting done in the hours before my early-morning flight.
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