Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Copspeak: 7 Ways Journalists Use Police Jargon to Obscure the Truth
________________________________________
Copspeak: 7 Ways Journalists Use Police Jargon to Obscure the Truth
By Adam Johnson [1] / FAIR [2]
July 14, 2016
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 [3] and Philando Castile [4], here are some
examples of how "copspeak" - or jargon used by police departments - is
internalized by journalists covering police violence, and how it affects the
public's perception of crime and police brutality.
1. "Officer-involved shooting"
Probably the most popular and most [5] frequently [6] criticized example of
copspeak, "officer-involved shooting" is a textbook example of what Robert
Jay Lifton called a "thought-terminating cliche [7]." 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 - justified or
not.
By describing an event alongside the person who did it without connecting
the two, "officer-involved shooting" vaguely alludes to what happened
without the emotional response this would normally evoke. "Such
phraseology," Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language [8]," "is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of
them."
On Sunday, Houston CBS affiliate KHOU (7/10/16 [9]) framed a police
shooting:
Man Killed After Officer-Involved Shooting in SE Houston
Beyond the term "officer-involved shooting," this headline is still opaque
to the point of inaccuracy. The man in question wasn't killed after an
"officer-involved shooting" he was killed in an officer-involved shooting.
The causal relationship between the two isn't 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.
After police are shot, a headline like "Police Officer Killed After
Civilian-Involved Shooting" would seem risible. In such cases, journalists
generally describe what happened in straightforward terms, as with NBC News
(5/25/15 [10]):
A New Orleans housing authority police officer was shot and killed while
sitting in a marked patrol car Sunday morning, according to police.
"Shot and killed" has far more clarity than "civilian-involved shooting":
One says who did the killing, the other obscures who exactly did what to
whom.
2. Passive and segmented language
Media also obscure responsibility in police shootings through the use of
passive language. A continuation of "officer-involved shooting," passive
language takes a simple act (someone shooting a person) and turns it into a
convoluted muddle.
Take the initial reporting of the Mike Brown killing. The headline of this
report from Fox's St. Louis affiliate (KTVI, 8/9/14 [11]) didn't even bother
to mention who did the actual killing:
Teenager Shot, Killed in Ferguson Apartment Complex
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:
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.
Even in the opening paragraph, there's 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's entirely unclear-by design.
3. "Suspect/subject"
Those who've been arrested, shot or had any interaction with the police are
routinely referred to as "suspects [12]" or "subjects [13]"-terms 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 - an arrest prosecutors
later deemed "illegal" [14] - but he was repeatedly referred to as a
"suspect" after it was revealed he sustained fatal injuries in police
custody.
. "Police say the video doesn't show officers using excessive force,
but they do suspect the suspect was brought to Maryland Shock Trauma with
injuries." -CBS Baltimore (4/13/15 [14])
. "The suspect ran, and police caught him, he said." - Baltimore Sun
(4/14/15) [15]
Here a man is arrested on a petty and illegal charge, shoved into a police
van and brutally injured, and he's referred to as the "suspect." Note that
the police officers - who would eventually be indicted after Gray died from
his injuries - are not referred to as "suspects," despite that fact that
someone was killed in their custody. "Suspect" is a subjective description
of prejudice, told entirely from the police department's perspective.
4. "Officials/sources say."
Frequently, journalists will present leaks obviously from the police as some
type of neutral analysis by attributing them to "officials" or "sources."
One of the sloppier versions of this device was from the New York CBS
affiliate last year (WCBS, 4/14/15 [16]) after supposed violence from Black
Lives Matter protestors:
Source: 2 NYPD Officers Assaulted During Protest Over Police Violence
Sources said two officers were injured Tuesday night, as police clashed with
demonstrators on the streets of Brooklyn in a protest against police-related
deaths and violent incidents throughout the country..
Sources told CBS2 one off-duty sergeant was assaulted on the Brooklyn
Bridge..
Sources said when his vehicle was blocked by protesters, he got out and a
verbal argument ensued with several demonstrators. Then, someone punched him
in the face, sources said..
Sources said police late Tuesday were still searching for those who attacked
the officers.
Who are these "sources"? The NYPD or its police union, obviously. But if the
story had been entirely sourced to the NYPD, it would have read like a press
release. It's fair enough to let the NYPD's public relations team give its
version of events, but it should be clearly labeled as such instead of
presented as a Deep Throat-like insider revealing troubling information.
5. "Juvenile"
The term "juvenile" is used almost exclusively in the context of youth
crime, giving police and uncritical media an opportunity to criminalize
children or teenagers. This piece from the Washington Post (9/25/15 [17]),
for example:
Two Juveniles Are Accused of Setting an Oxon Hill Playground on Fire
Two juveniles are accused of setting an Oxon Hill playground ablaze in a
fire that produced columns of black smoke that could be seen for miles
Thursday afternoon..
Why not use the value-neutral "children" or "teenagers"? How is one supposed
to tell the difference between a nine-year-old and a 17-year-old? Everyday
language meant to delineate different ages is blurred into the catch-all
"juvenile."
This technique was infamously [18] used by the Baltimore Police Department
during the April 2015 protests following the death of Freddie Gray, when the
department tweeted, "There is a group of juveniles in the area of Mondawmin
Mall"-a declaration retweeted and referenced uncritically by several media
outlets:
What they failed to mention at the time, as did most media, was that the
"juveniles" in question were students who go through Mondawmin Mall every
day [19]-it's the main bus hub for thousands of students. By using the term
"juveniles," the Baltimore police and those who recited their tweet as
neutral information turned an everyday occurrence in West Baltimore into a
menacing activity in urgent need of martial crackdown.
6. "Discharged weapon"
"Discharged weapon" is another pseudo-official way of passively saying a
police officer shot at someone. The recent killing of Alva Braziel in
Houston provided a recent example, when Reuters (7/10/16 [20]) reported:
Police discharged their weapons and Braziel, who did not fire any shots,
died at the scene.
Did this "discharge" lead to the death? That connection is deliberately
unclear: The way the incident was reported, an unspecified number of police
officers "discharged their weapons" and afterwards Braziel happened to die
at the scene.
7. "Altercation"
Like "clashes [21]," "altercation" is a popular catch-all to describe any
violent exchange between police and civilians. The term has long been
criticized, being noted ten years ago [22] as a best-avoided piece of
"copspeak" by Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor and journalism professor
at University of South Carolina:
Altercation: Press for specifics. Was it a fight? An argument? A shoving
match? A shouting match?
One of the starkest examples of this euphemism's use came from the shooting
of Walter Scott by a South Carolina police officer in 2015, as FAIR reported
at the time (4/7/15 [23]). Before a video surfaced showing Scott being
gunned down in the back as he ran away from Officer Michael Slager, local
media were describing the killing as having taken place as a result of an
"altercation" - a term that implies parity of violence (WCSC, 4/4/15 [24]):
Police say an altercation then began between Slager and Scott, resulting in
a fight for the officer's taser.
The local ABC affiliate (WCIV, 4/4/15 [25]) would drop the "police say"
sourcing altogether and simply state the "physical altercation" as fact:
A man involved in a traffic stop that turned into a physical altercation
with a North Charleston police officer died Saturday after being shot by the
officer.
But the subsequent video showed no such "altercation"; rather, a police
officer was seen gunning down an unarmed man in the back in a scene the
Charleston chief of police later said "sickened" him [26]. Using the vague
phrase "altercation," local reporters perpetuate the misleading idea of a
struggle between two evenly matched parties.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst at FAIR. Follow him on Twitter
@AdamJohnsonNYC.
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [27]
[28]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/media/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police-jargon-
obscure-truth
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/adam-johnson-0
[2] http://www.fair.org
[3]
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-lives-matter-protests-span-country
-fourth-day-n606556
[4]
http://www.startribune.com/marchers-block-i-94-to-westbound-traffic/38615877
1/
[5]
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/blogs/watchdog/2016/05/
24/officer-involved-shooting-term-taking-beating/84674784/
[6] http://www.wnyc.org/story/word-watch-officer-involved-shooting/
[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9#Thought-terminating_clich.C3.A9
[8] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/
[9]
http://www.khou.com/news/local/one-man-dead-after-officer-involved-shooting-
in-se-houston/268276262
[10]
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-orleans-police-officer-fatally-shot-
marked-car-n363946
[11]
http://fox2now.com/2014/08/09/man-shot-killed-in-ferguson-apartment-complex/
[12]
http://wjla.com/news/crime/police-shoot-at-suspect-in-maryland-no-one-shot-o
r-injured
[13]
http://www.kmov.com/story/30376392/shooting-investigation-underway-in-norman
dy
[14]
http://www.wsj.com/articles/baltimore-prosecutors-say-freddie-gray-arrest-wa
s-illegal-before-finding-knife-1432076045
[15]
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gilmor-homes-arrest
-20150413-story.html
[16]
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/04/14/demonstrators-march-across-brooklyn-b
ridge-in-protest-over-police-violence/#.VS5Cm5rVuJg.twitter
[17]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/two-juveniles-are-accused
-of-setting-an-oxon-hill-playground-on-fire/2015/09/25/d9407668-638f-11e5-b3
8e-06883aacba64_story.html?tid=sm_tw_pl&wprss=rss_crime
[18]
https://www.thenation.com/article/are-baltimore-police-using-twitter-public-
safety-or-propaganda/
[19]
http://fair.org/home/medias-baltimore-teen-purge-narrative-falling-apart/com
ment-page-1/
[20]
http://www.newsweek.com/alva-braziel-what-we-know-houston-police-shooting-47
9210?rx=us
[21] https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/656082911997902848
[22] http://www.jour.sc.edu/news/csj/CSJAug06.html
[23]
http://fair.org/blog-entries/media-were-already-running-with-police-fantasy-
when-video-exploded-it/
[24]
http://www.live5news.com/story/28720664/ncpd-traffic-stop-over-brake-light-l
ed-to-fatal-officer-involved-shooting
[25]
http://abcnews4.com/archive/officers-respond-to-traffic-incident-witnesses-c
all-shooting-in-north-charleston
[26]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/walter-scott-shooting-video-stopped-cas
e-from-being-swept-under-rug-family-says.html?_r=0
[27] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Copspeak: 7 Ways
Journalists Use Police Jargon to Obscure the Truth
[28] http://www.alternet.org/
[29] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Copspeak: 7 Ways Journalists Use Police Jargon to Obscure the Truth
Copspeak: 7 Ways Journalists Use Police Jargon to Obscure the Truth
By Adam Johnson [1] / FAIR [2]
July 14, 2016
AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to Google+More
AddThis Share optionsShare to Email
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 [3] and Philando Castile [4], here are some
examples of how "copspeak" - or jargon used by police departments - is
internalized by journalists covering police violence, and how it affects the
public's perception of crime and police brutality.
1. "Officer-involved shooting"
Probably the most popular and most [5] frequently [6] criticized example of
copspeak, "officer-involved shooting" is a textbook example of what Robert
Jay Lifton called a "thought-terminating cliche [7]." 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 - justified or
not.
By describing an event alongside the person who did it without connecting
the two, "officer-involved shooting" vaguely alludes to what happened
without the emotional response this would normally evoke. "Such
phraseology," Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language [8]," "is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of
them."
On Sunday, Houston CBS affiliate KHOU (7/10/16 [9]) framed a police
shooting:
Man Killed After Officer-Involved Shooting in SE Houston
Beyond the term "officer-involved shooting," this headline is still opaque
to the point of inaccuracy. The man in question wasn't killed after an
"officer-involved shooting" he was killed in an officer-involved shooting.
The causal relationship between the two isn't 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.
After police are shot, a headline like "Police Officer Killed After
Civilian-Involved Shooting" would seem risible. In such cases, journalists
generally describe what happened in straightforward terms, as with NBC News
(5/25/15 [10]):
A New Orleans housing authority police officer was shot and killed while
sitting in a marked patrol car Sunday morning, according to police.
"Shot and killed" has far more clarity than "civilian-involved shooting":
One says who did the killing, the other obscures who exactly did what to
whom.
2. Passive and segmented language
Media also obscure responsibility in police shootings through the use of
passive language. A continuation of "officer-involved shooting," passive
language takes a simple act (someone shooting a person) and turns it into a
convoluted muddle.
Take the initial reporting of the Mike Brown killing. The headline of this
report from Fox's St. Louis affiliate (KTVI, 8/9/14 [11]) didn't even bother
to mention who did the actual killing:
Teenager Shot, Killed in Ferguson Apartment Complex
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:
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.
Even in the opening paragraph, there's 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's entirely unclear-by design.
3. "Suspect/subject"
Those who've been arrested, shot or had any interaction with the police are
routinely referred to as "suspects [12]" or "subjects [13]"-terms 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 - an arrest prosecutors
later deemed "illegal" [14] - but he was repeatedly referred to as a
"suspect" after it was revealed he sustained fatal injuries in police
custody.
. "Police say the video doesn't show officers using excessive force,
but they do suspect the suspect was brought to Maryland Shock Trauma with
injuries." -CBS Baltimore (4/13/15 [14])
. "The suspect ran, and police caught him, he said." - Baltimore Sun
(4/14/15) [15]
Here a man is arrested on a petty and illegal charge, shoved into a police
van and brutally injured, and he's referred to as the "suspect." Note that
the police officers - who would eventually be indicted after Gray died from
his injuries - are not referred to as "suspects," despite that fact that
someone was killed in their custody. "Suspect" is a subjective description
of prejudice, told entirely from the police department's perspective.
4. "Officials/sources say."
Frequently, journalists will present leaks obviously from the police as some
type of neutral analysis by attributing them to "officials" or "sources."
One of the sloppier versions of this device was from the New York CBS
affiliate last year (WCBS, 4/14/15 [16]) after supposed violence from Black
Lives Matter protestors:
Source: 2 NYPD Officers Assaulted During Protest Over Police Violence
Sources said two officers were injured Tuesday night, as police clashed with
demonstrators on the streets of Brooklyn in a protest against police-related
deaths and violent incidents throughout the country..
Sources told CBS2 one off-duty sergeant was assaulted on the Brooklyn
Bridge..
Sources said when his vehicle was blocked by protesters, he got out and a
verbal argument ensued with several demonstrators. Then, someone punched him
in the face, sources said..
Sources said police late Tuesday were still searching for those who attacked
the officers.
Who are these "sources"? The NYPD or its police union, obviously. But if the
story had been entirely sourced to the NYPD, it would have read like a press
release. It's fair enough to let the NYPD's public relations team give its
version of events, but it should be clearly labeled as such instead of
presented as a Deep Throat-like insider revealing troubling information.
5. "Juvenile"
The term "juvenile" is used almost exclusively in the context of youth
crime, giving police and uncritical media an opportunity to criminalize
children or teenagers. This piece from the Washington Post (9/25/15 [17]),
for example:
Two Juveniles Are Accused of Setting an Oxon Hill Playground on Fire
Two juveniles are accused of setting an Oxon Hill playground ablaze in a
fire that produced columns of black smoke that could be seen for miles
Thursday afternoon..
Why not use the value-neutral "children" or "teenagers"? How is one supposed
to tell the difference between a nine-year-old and a 17-year-old? Everyday
language meant to delineate different ages is blurred into the catch-all
"juvenile."
This technique was infamously [18] used by the Baltimore Police Department
during the April 2015 protests following the death of Freddie Gray, when the
department tweeted, "There is a group of juveniles in the area of Mondawmin
Mall"-a declaration retweeted and referenced uncritically by several media
outlets:
What they failed to mention at the time, as did most media, was that the
"juveniles" in question were students who go through Mondawmin Mall every
day [19]-it's the main bus hub for thousands of students. By using the term
"juveniles," the Baltimore police and those who recited their tweet as
neutral information turned an everyday occurrence in West Baltimore into a
menacing activity in urgent need of martial crackdown.
6. "Discharged weapon"
"Discharged weapon" is another pseudo-official way of passively saying a
police officer shot at someone. The recent killing of Alva Braziel in
Houston provided a recent example, when Reuters (7/10/16 [20]) reported:
Police discharged their weapons and Braziel, who did not fire any shots,
died at the scene.
Did this "discharge" lead to the death? That connection is deliberately
unclear: The way the incident was reported, an unspecified number of police
officers "discharged their weapons" and afterwards Braziel happened to die
at the scene.
7. "Altercation"
Like "clashes [21]," "altercation" is a popular catch-all to describe any
violent exchange between police and civilians. The term has long been
criticized, being noted ten years ago [22] as a best-avoided piece of
"copspeak" by Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor and journalism professor
at University of South Carolina:
Altercation: Press for specifics. Was it a fight? An argument? A shoving
match? A shouting match?
One of the starkest examples of this euphemism's use came from the shooting
of Walter Scott by a South Carolina police officer in 2015, as FAIR reported
at the time (4/7/15 [23]). Before a video surfaced showing Scott being
gunned down in the back as he ran away from Officer Michael Slager, local
media were describing the killing as having taken place as a result of an
"altercation" - a term that implies parity of violence (WCSC, 4/4/15 [24]):
Police say an altercation then began between Slager and Scott, resulting in
a fight for the officer's taser.
The local ABC affiliate (WCIV, 4/4/15 [25]) would drop the "police say"
sourcing altogether and simply state the "physical altercation" as fact:
A man involved in a traffic stop that turned into a physical altercation
with a North Charleston police officer died Saturday after being shot by the
officer.
But the subsequent video showed no such "altercation"; rather, a police
officer was seen gunning down an unarmed man in the back in a scene the
Charleston chief of police later said "sickened" him [26]. Using the vague
phrase "altercation," local reporters perpetuate the misleading idea of a
struggle between two evenly matched parties.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst at FAIR. Follow him on Twitter
@AdamJohnsonNYC.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [27]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[28]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/media/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police-jargon-
obscure-truth
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/adam-johnson-0
[2] http://www.fair.org
[3]
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-lives-matter-protests-span-country
-fourth-day-n606556
[4]
http://www.startribune.com/marchers-block-i-94-to-westbound-traffic/38615877
1/
[5]
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/blogs/watchdog/2016/05/
24/officer-involved-shooting-term-taking-beating/84674784/
[6] http://www.wnyc.org/story/word-watch-officer-involved-shooting/
[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9#Thought-terminating_clich.C3.A9
[8] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/
[9]
http://www.khou.com/news/local/one-man-dead-after-officer-involved-shooting-
in-se-houston/268276262
[10]
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-orleans-police-officer-fatally-shot-
marked-car-n363946
[11]
http://fox2now.com/2014/08/09/man-shot-killed-in-ferguson-apartment-complex/
[12]
http://wjla.com/news/crime/police-shoot-at-suspect-in-maryland-no-one-shot-o
r-injured
[13]
http://www.kmov.com/story/30376392/shooting-investigation-underway-in-norman
dy
[14]
http://www.wsj.com/articles/baltimore-prosecutors-say-freddie-gray-arrest-wa
s-illegal-before-finding-knife-1432076045
[15]
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gilmor-homes-arrest
-20150413-story.html
[16]
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/04/14/demonstrators-march-across-brooklyn-b
ridge-in-protest-over-police-violence/#.VS5Cm5rVuJg.twitter
[17]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/two-juveniles-are-accused
-of-setting-an-oxon-hill-playground-on-fire/2015/09/25/d9407668-638f-11e5-b3
8e-06883aacba64_story.html?tid=sm_tw_pl&wprss=rss_crime
[18]
https://www.thenation.com/article/are-baltimore-police-using-twitter-public-
safety-or-propaganda/
[19]
http://fair.org/home/medias-baltimore-teen-purge-narrative-falling-apart/com
ment-page-1/
[20]
http://www.newsweek.com/alva-braziel-what-we-know-houston-police-shooting-47
9210?rx=us
[21] https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/656082911997902848
[22] http://www.jour.sc.edu/news/csj/CSJAug06.html
[23]
http://fair.org/blog-entries/media-were-already-running-with-police-fantasy-
when-video-exploded-it/
[24]
http://www.live5news.com/story/28720664/ncpd-traffic-stop-over-brake-light-l
ed-to-fatal-officer-involved-shooting
[25]
http://abcnews4.com/archive/officers-respond-to-traffic-incident-witnesses-c
all-shooting-in-north-charleston
[26]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/walter-scott-shooting-video-stopped-cas
e-from-being-swept-under-rug-family-says.html?_r=0
[27] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Copspeak: 7 Ways
Journalists Use Police Jargon to Obscure the Truth
[28] http://www.alternet.org/
[29] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
