MailBag: Tips for Covering Cops
A reporter friend writes: “I’m covering the police beat for the ‘burbs. Was wondering if you know of any resources or story ideas for the police beat.”
Dear Stephanie:
I’ll post below a handful of Internet links that you may find useful. But what comes to mind immediately is a tip sheet that Stephen Buckley, national correspondent for the St. Petersburg Times, prepared a few years back for Poynter’s News Reporting and Writing Fellows. He spent 11 months as night police reporter in the District of Columbia for The Washington Post. After covering cops, courts and education in the city room and the Maryland suburbs for three years, he joined the paper’s foreign service and served as Nairobi bureau chief from 1995 to 1998.
Best of luck,
Chip
Tips for Covering Cops
By Stephen Buckley
Cops are human, too, Part 1: Get to know them. Like everyone, they respond to reporters they know. So if you’re on the night cops beat, and things are deadly dull, go down to the police shop and hang out with the detectives. When you meet detectives you like, ask them out for a beer. Tell them a little about yourself. Ask them about their families. And of course, ask them about the work. Steve Aspinall, a detective from the St. Petersburg Police Department, said a reporter once called him in the hospital where he was a patient. After that, no matter what he was doing, he always returned that reporter’s calls.
Always go to the scene, Part 1: This is where you get the details that the public information officer can’t provide. The blood on the sidewalk. The howling, disconsolate mother. The stunned friends. Perhaps the eerie quiet that settles over the neighborhood. And most importantly, you sometimes find witnesses at the scene. They may be able to tell you only how many shots they heard or how loud the shots sounded, but you can’t write great stories without those kinds of details.
Always go to the scene, Part 2: You hear a shooting broadcast over the police scanner. It’s 1:30 a.m., an hour before you’re scheduled to go home. You’re exhausted. You call up the public information office (or more likely, the communications center, at that hour), and they tell you all they know is that a youth, apparently in his late teens or early 20s, was found shot to death in an alley in a bad neighborhood. You tap out a brief and go home to bed. You wake up the next morning and click on the radio to hear this: “A 14-year-old honor student was found shot to death outside a reputed crack house in southeast Washington early today. …” You throw up your breakfast. That’s actually a true story (well, not the throwing up part). So always, always, go to the scene.
Never assume people don’t want to talk: Sometimes, particularly after an especially horrifying crime, victims and their relatives — and a suspect’s relatives and friends — don’t want to talk. But many, many times, they do talk to reporters. Sometimes, they even talk for hours. The point is: Don’t try to guess. Ask. You never know.
Spend time in neighborhoods: Particularly those known for high crime. The temptation is to avoid these communities. The truth is that they often offer rich stories — stories of people trying to save their children; stories of people trying to drive out criminals; stories of people who’ve seen their beloved communities crumble. Get to know the activists, longtime residents, mothers (mothers talk because their top priority is to save their children; so they’re often willing to risk the scorn of neighbors by talking to reporters). The best police stories are almost always in the neighborhood.
Cops are human, too, Part 2: When the cops do something good, get it into the paper. Even if you think it’s just going to be a scrawny six-inch story buried deep in the Metro section, write it up. Police officers feel like they take a lot of criticism but rarely receive praise when they do something good. And they’re right. So when they make a key arrest or add some patrol officers somewhere, don’t ignore it. Writing — when it’s appropriate — about when the cops do something good is one easy way to build great sources and build lots of good will (that, sooner or later, you’ll have to draw on).
Know different sections: Develop sources around the department. The temptation is to spend most of your time hanging out with the senior detectives, the ones who handle the big cases. Spend time with the folks in the vice squad, the burglary section, the robbery section, etc. They’ve got good stories, too.
Look for patterns: Police departments often have daily logs that they allow reporters to go through. Go through that log. Check to see whether there’s been an unusually high amount of crime in a normally quiet neighborhood. Or maybe you’ll notice that a normally dangerous community turns quiet for a few weeks. Or maybe you’ll see that all the homicides in a neighborhood seem to have the same m.o. (i.e., three cases over a few months in which young professional women are strangled). Don’t wait for the cops to put those things together. Be your own detective.
Read police news in out-of-town papers: Often, crimes move in trends. If you live in Harrisburg, Pa., and you hear that heroin is making a big comeback in Pittsburgh, ask detectives if they’re seeing more heroin on the streets of Harrisburg these days. Crime-fighting strategies also move in waves. If you read that the San Jose, Calif., Police Department has started to employ something called community-oriented policing, make a note of it. Chances are lots of other departments have either started to do the same or are considering taking that route.
Cultivate clerks: Get clerks and front-desk sergeants on your side. Chat them up when you’ve got nothing to do. Offer to take them to lunch. Treat them the way you would a homicide detective. You won’t win over all, but you’ll win over some. Sometimes they’ll tip you off to something big happening (like a multiple shooting) or a major arrest. Sometimes they’ll get you a file you’ve been trying to track down for weeks. Sometimes they’ll patch your call through to homicide rather than hang up and tell you that the detectives are busy. As with clerks and lower-level officials everywhere, they respond to people who’ve shown them respect and courtesy.
Hotlist for Police Reporters
http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/
wkc/2001_seminar5.html
A seminar on covering police post-9/11 that may give you some ideas or contacts.
http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/cj.html
Dr. Cecil Greek’s list of criminal justice links. Greek is an Internet and media-savvy criminologist at Florida State University. His site is full of valuable information for police and court reporters.
http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/cjlinks/cj-flowchart.html
Navigate Dr. Greek’s site with an interactive flowchart that provides a graphic view of the criminal justice system.
http://www.ncvc.org/
The National Center for Victims of Crime. An important, and often ignored, perspective on crime and punishment. This site offers background information, news tips and other valuable links.
http://www.pressclub.org/events/nakaward.htm
This site lists winners of the Al Nakkula award for police reporting. See the kind of stuff they do and find models of excellence to study.
http://legacy.poynter.org/centerpiece/100801.htm
Anyone starting a new beat should be sure to read this article by Diana K. Sugg of The Baltimore Sun. As a cop reporter in Sacramento, she won the first Nakkula award and has gone to do distinguished work on the health beat in Baltimore.
http://livex.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=1184
Take a minute to review Poynter’s Crime Coverage bibliography.
Got any ideas/advice for a new police reporter? I read all e-mails sent to chipscan@poynter.org.
