When a newspaper tries to do something to please readers, it often stumbles over other readers who are not so happy with the results.
Crime Alert is a regular feature in The Bee’s Metro Section that most folks appreciate as an effort to get criminals off the streets.
But not everyone sees it that way.
The Bee stoops low when it publishes pictures of pitiable petty thieves and drug addicts on behalf of the police department, according to Michael Monasky of Elk Grove. Monasky was incensed that The Bee included in the weekly lineup of bad folks a local musician whose crime was listed as “Unlawful possession of controlled substances.”
“These people need medical treatment and social services, not a posting of their sad mugs and bad habits,” Monasky said. But The Bee has a newspaper and a cultural position to sell.
According to a statement by Sheriff Lou Blanas published on the Internet home of Crime Alert, “The mission of the Citizens’ Crime Alert Program is to assist law enforcement in the identification of criminal suspects and to reward those citizens providing information leading to the arrest of criminals-at-large …. I cannot express the value the Citizens’ Crime Alert Program has been in solving crimes and allowing members of the community to feel just a little bit safer knowing that some criminals are being taken off the streets.” Crime Alert is a joint effort of the Sacramento Police Department and the sheriff’s office.
Managing Editor Joyce Terhaar explained that the Crime Alert feature was an outgrowth of another anti-crime program in The Bee. “Clearly we do this as a public service, in the tradition of the previous public service program, Secret Witness. That program was dropped in the early 1990s. The space used for the Crime Alert comes from The Bee’s recently tightened news space.
“Law enforcement folks are not always happy with the frequency of Crime Alert items in The Bee. They’d like to see them more often.”
“We have, at times,” Terhaar said, “been unhappy with what they have supplied us with because the crimes did not seem to meet the threshold we have for putting something in the paper….”
A meeting was held recently in which Bee editors and law enforcement folks worked on improvements, specifically making sure the focus is on serious criminal suspects, not petty criminals, according to Denice Rios, the assistant city editor who supervises law enforcement coverage.
A check of the Crime Alert’s “most wanted” folks last month shows a mix of suspects wanted for crimes ranging from bank robbery to possession of drugs. Almost half were drug-related.
Comment: Crime Alert reflects an uneasy partnership between law enforcement and the newspaper. The items are clearly not news, at least by traditional definitions.
The Bee is in an awkward position. While the newspaper is trying to be a good citizen and cooperate with police, it has essentially handed over the decision on what it prints to law enforcement officials who decide which suspects to feature in Crime Alert. That’s not normal and represents a compromise between independent journalism and good citizenship.
Reader Monasky argued that “Johnny Guitar” Knox is no more a felon than the local librarian, and no possible threat to anyone but himself. He feels The Bee should be required to say penance for its sins against addicts. I’d suggest that The Bee take a harder look at the tradeoffs of providing news space where law enforcement authorities decide content, and devote that same space and energy to doing a better job of reporting major crimes and how criminals are dealt with by the system.
I suspect Crime Alert is easy to publish because it requires little effort and creates good public relations, but those are not good rationales for deciding news.
Most people support Crime Alert programs and Neighborhood Watch and a lot of other good efforts in the community. Maybe a place could be found for it in advertising or promotional space in The Bee where other non-profit organizations could benefit from visibility. It could be labeled as a public service announcement from law enforcement, and move out of the news columns.
Bad day in Carmichael
On Sunday, July 22, several Bee readers in Carmichael noticed something strange about their Sports section. They couldn’t read it.
For reasons not clearly understood, the Carmichael area seemed to be the center of a cosmic disturbance that ate the ink off the sports page. Marian Pickens, Mary Kelperis and Roy Mouse Weichold all mailed in clippings that could barely be read, as did Bill Jetton of Sacramento.
All maintained a sense of humor about the washed-out, smudged or torn pages they delivered back to The Bee.
“Chris Webber doesn’t interest me,” Weichold wrote, “so no biggie.” Webber does interest Kelperis, who was happy he was staying with the Kings, and requests that Bee sports writers not pick on him in the future. She said we could ignore the bad copy of her paper. “As long as it arrives on time I am happy.” Pickens found the paper unreadable, and provided clipped evidence.
Jetton passed along another section that looked as if a gopher had taken a bite out of it.
All the tear sheets will be passed to the production folks, gopher bites and all.
Attribution, or not?
Doug Carlson noticed a comment, without any attribution to the source, that said a crime victim was “snatched at random Nov. 8 from her Rancho Cordova neighborhood.” “Without knowing what the perpetrator was thinking at the time of the abduction, the use of random seems inappropriate,” he said. “It may have been a stalking.” That’s a reasonable criticism. Even if the act was reported as random in earlier stories, or by the police, the reader of that one story has no way to know the authority behind the statement.
