The Washington Post knows who gave Natasha McKenna repeated high-voltage shocks just before she suffered a fatal heart attack—but it isn’t telling its readers.
The Washington Post (4/11/15) ran a troubling story about an African-American woman who died after Fairfax County, Virginia, sheriff’s deputies repeatedly used a taser on her while she was already in shackles. The deputies administered four 50,000-volt shocks to Natasha McKenna, a prisoner at the Fairfax County jail who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, in an effort to force her into a chair for transport; minutes later, her heart stopped.
As law enforcement experts questioned by the Post noted, the incident raises questions about “why a taser was used on a restrained woman, how many times she was shocked and whether handling a mentally ill person with such force was the best approach.”
But the people who actually inflicted the shocks on McKenna were protected from such questions by the Post‘s reporting, because, as the article by Tom Jackman and Justin Jouvenal noted:
The Post is not naming the deputies involved because they are the subject of a criminal investigation and no ruling has been made on McKenna’s cause of death.
Regardless of whether the deputies are indicted or not, they are public employees under whose custody a community member died; it’s unclear why the public has no legitimate interest in knowing who they are.
John Geer, shot by a Fairfax County police officer and left to die, pictured with his daughters.
As the Post knows, the criminal justice system shows great deference to law enforcement officers and sometimes fails to prosecute them even when the appearance of wrongdoing is overwhelming. Last year, the paper ran an editorial (9/5/14) about Fairfax County police shooting a man, John Geer, in the doorway of his home and allowing him to bleed to death without medical treatment; the editorial had noted that more than a year had gone by with no indictments or any official explanation of the incident. So the paper’s apparent willingness to wait for the official investigation to reveal to the public what it needs to know seems misplaced.
It’s not as though the Post has a blanket policy against revealing the names of people involved in suspicious deaths. In 2012, the paper ran an editorial (11/26/12) about a death of a toddler, Prince McLeod Rams. “The cause of Prince’s death is yet to be determined,” the paper wrote, and “a criminal investigation is underway”—just as in the McKenna case. Yet the paper did not hesitate to identify the boy’s father, Joaquin S. Rams, as someone whom other family members had blamed for the child’s death.
Do law enforcement officials, who work for the public, deserve more deference when implicated in a violent death than regular citizens? That seems to be the indefensible attitude among news outlets and criminal justice officials alike.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post‘s reader representative, Alison Coglianese, at readers@washpost.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Why? Because we live in a police state. But the United Sheeple of America refuse to acknowledge it, content as they are to snuffle along with their snouts stuffed in the grass.
What else would we expect from a mouthpiece/tool of the dominating government and Corporate Wall Street elite? Authority is to be protected, right or wrong, and not the people they like to pretend to serve. I expect soon that the internet sites, such as fair.org, that like to keep us informed will soon be muffled or banned under the US Gov/Obama plan to take full control of the net.
Why? Because WaPo helps support the doublespeak/doublethink status quo with words, and they aren’t going to make life difficult for those who enforce it with violence.
Lisa is right that we now live in a police state, and Philip and Dave are both right that WaPo supports it. All the media support it, and, yes, It is only a matter of time before FAIR is silenced.
I would suggest that for their own sake and that of their families, those who comment here reconsider. This is my last comment on any blog, and I will only say that in my opinion, things are a whole lot worse than you good people imagine.
The Post is a propaganda mouthpiece and apology rag for the criminal US ruling class. Brutal , murderous thug cops are an important weapon in their arsenal of weapons against us, the working class (the 99% if you like) .