Re: Fairfax County Cops try to buy off the press with kiddie rides
Posted by:
Terrence Tirade
()
Date: March 13, 2013 01:56PM
Gunnardeed Wrote:
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> A journalist should report that the Fairfax County
> cops arrested 2,600 people for drunk driving last
> year. That is what a journalist should do. The
> role of the press, after all, is to report issues
> that need attention. But the role of the press is
> also to publicly hold government leaders
> accountable to the people and that can’t be done
> if government is using the media as a tool for its
> own self-praise or if individuals in government
> are using the press as a means of self-promotion
> to advance their career, to say, police chief as
> an example.
> The other vital role the press plays in a free
> society is to educate citizens so they can make
> informed decisions on pertinent issues and this is
> done by asking questions. As an example, in regard
> to the drunk driving story, a good journalist will
> ask, “How many of those arrests resulted in
> conviction?” because Fairfax County cops justify
> themselves through a body count. A good journalist
> would also ask:
> “In how many of those cases did the cop fail to
> show up in court?"
> “And how many of those cases were simply tossed
> out of court?”
> “Who was stopped? White people? Black people?
> Asians? Latinos? ”
> The good journalist should examine that side of
> the issue because racial profiling by the police
> is a serious national issue.
> The good journalist would also put the arrests in
> perspective. There are about 5,600,000 people in
> the greater Washington DC Area and in one year
> Fairfax County police arrested 0.0004 of them for
> drunk driving. In a county of 1,200,000 citizens,
> the 2600 arrests would total less than 0.002% of
> the population.
> Drunk driving arrests are down 2.5 nationwide in
> 2011 and 2012. In fact, in the past two decades
> drunk driving fatalities have declined by 35% in
> the general population and almost 60% in the teen
> driver population.
> So with those facts in mind, facts that were not
> covered in the story, why were there so many
> Fairfax cops trying to arrest drunk drivers on a
> recent Saturday night, enough so that “the
> lights atop Fairfax County Police Department
> cruisers along Leesburg Pike lit up the night sky
> like swarms of blue fireflies".
> Poor management seems to be the answer. Shouldn't
> the cops be doing something more productive and
> less intrusive to the community? (A community
> where less than 9% of the force lives.)
> The summation of the drunk driving story appeared
> to be one of two things; one that the story was
> that drunk driving is a non-issue because arrests
> for drunk driving are down. So what was the point
> of reporting this story at all?
> The other slant may have been a cop glorification
> feature piece which was based on the baseless
> claim by the Fairfax County Police that they
> lowered drunk driving in the county through
> sobriety checkpoints, directed patrols and
> business compliance checks.
> The problem is that slant discounts reality based
> on the facts above.
> But there was a story here if the journalist had
> taken it one step further, one step into the
> uncomfortable, and had asked the cops (and
> thereby the reading public) if they see any danger
> in randomly stopping citizens to find out what
> they can be arrested for.
> A journalist should ask if those random
> “sobriety checkpoints” touted by the Fairfax
> County cops, have a place in a democratic
> society. Should cops be stopping people they
> suspect of committing a crime based on magical and
> slightly scary “sixth sense” as one cop
> claimed to have, when it comes to spotting drunk
> drivers?
> Even more disturbing than that is the fact that
> the cop in question has an engineering degree from
> Virginia Tech but would have to work the third
> shift in a bedroom community “sensing” drunks
> on the road.
> The journalist could have asked the obvious
> question…..if drunk driving barely scratches the
> judicial surface then why are the cops turning out
> in force to address this secondary issue. This
> could have led to two very obvious answers, both
> are generally assumed to be true by the general
> public. One is that the cops are bored and
> don’t have much else to do and the other is
> money. Drunk driving fines range from $250 to
> $1,000, ($625 average fine X 2600
> fines=$1,625,000). All of that revenue is poured
> into the county coffers and eventually into the
> behemoth budget of the Fairfax County Police.
>
> Is there any truth to this commonly held rumor? We
> don’t know because the reporter failed to go
> that far. However, we do know that the cop who
> would rather work nights has a “lucky flower”
> in the car's visor.
> Move over Carl Bernstein, there’s a new
> gunslinger in these here parts.
> But it was Bernstein who said it best. The
> reporter’s job is to "achieve the best
> obtainable version of the truth" and, I would add,
> the best obtainable version of the truth for the
> public’s good and not for the benefit of the
> government’s profile. It is crucial that the
> press be an outsider and never, ever, under any
> circumstances share the same aims as government,
> the legislature, religion or commerce. The only
> responsibility the reporter has is to their own
> standards and ethics. This is no small thing
> because the free press is part of a larger right
> of free expression, a right that the public
> assumes that the press will help to protect.
> So in that light, a good journalist would ask
> “Is this story free PR for cops at the expense
> of the free press?” And if the answer, even
> vaguely, appears to be “yes” then that is a
> very serious infringement on the role of the press
> in a free society and should not be taken lightly,
> no matter how innocuous the story.
> The craft of reporting, and it is a craft, is
> found in the reporter's ability to research, to
> ask questions, to observe, to sift through self
> –serving propaganda disguised as news and then
> to place it in context so that the public can
> evaluate where the truth is. All of that makes the
> reporter the community's witness to the process
> of government. Crossing the line makes the
> reporter part of the government. So what was this
> drunk driver story?
> The press is a powerful instrument which must
> exist independently from the other main centers of
> power in society because, among other things, it
> is often in the best interests of those other
> power centers to control or quash the press.
> This rule of separation is especially true in
> dealing with the well-heeled Fairfax County Police
> Department, which is widely considered to be the
> least transparent law enforcement agency in the
> state of Virginia. The Fairfax County Police have
> failed, repeatedly, to show that they understand
> the simple truth that the free flow of information
> is a civic responsibility because information,
> even when it makes a department look bad, is the
> fuel of democracy. Instead, the department has
> mastered the art of avoiding public scrutiny by
> simply refusing to deal with the press….unless
> the press wants to do a fluff & kisses piece about
> them. And that’s what is wrong with plopping
> down the non-issue drunk driving feature piece.
> Reporting balanced news is vital to the health and
> well-being of a democracy as is the cop’s
> responsibility to inform the public that pays
> them. When journalists start backsliding down that
> very slippery slope by writing glory stories when
> the cops don’t deserve it, it is dangerous,
> unethical and sets a very bad precedent.
> It’s about integrity. If the reporter loses
> their integrity they have lost everything and they
> have lost it forever, for themselves and their
> publication and it is easy to lose integrity
> because the damn thing about a free press is that
> the fight to keep the press free never ends.
> Rather it is a battle that is never won because
> the prize is much too valuable for other powers
> not to want to control it and to manipulate it.
> And those battles to keep the free press free are
> rarely epic, rather they are tiny skirmishes, say,
> as an example, a police department noted for
> playing a one sided game, trying to get a local
> reporter to skim over the facts and avoid the
> comfortable questions and write what they want to
> see in print.
Dudde, just pay your ticket , get over it and quit hating, thats 20 minutes of your life you aint getting back.