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 and Philando Castile, 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 frequently criticized example of copspeak, “officer-involved shooting” is a textbook example of what Robert Jay Lifton called a “thought-terminating cliche.” 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,” “is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
On Sunday, Houston CBS affiliate KHOU (7/10/16) 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):
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) 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” or “subjects”—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” — 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)
- “The suspect ran, and police caught him, he said.” — Baltimore Sun (4/14/15)
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) 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), 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 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:
There is a group of juveniles in the area of Mondawmin Mall. Expect traffic delays in the area.
— Baltimore Police (@BaltimorePolice) April 27, 2015
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—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) 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,” “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 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). 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):
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) 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. 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 for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
Thanks for calling out newswriters on their use of questionable terminology. This dovetails with my reaction to news stories that rely on emotionally-charged terminology to make a story seem more dramatic or an outcome more dire. A common device is to refer to female teenagers as ‘young girls.’
On the other hand, it’s a bit ironic to find that ‘suspect’ and ‘police-involved shooting’ have moved to the pejorative side of the ledger. I assume they were introduced to convey that (before a thorough investigation) we don’t yet know who’s to blame and so shouldn’t be naming perpetrators. That’s not to say that police and others don’t hide behind terminology or use it to close ranks.
Certainly, police sources should be identified as police sources, even where the writer doesn’t want to name names.
As a news wire editor, I am troubled by the leaps you make here.
An “officer involved shooting” does -NOT- mean the police officer shot a person. The person sometimes shoots herself/himself. When a journalist os told “OIS” that does not automatically mean the officer shot a person.
Passive language is a journalism no-no. But your second examples make assumptions of fact that no reporter would make. The examples you give, again, ASSUME the person was shot by the police. That may not have been known at the time those articles are written.
Third, use of the word “suspect” is in each of your examples attributed to the police. It is a reporter’s job to attribute facts of which he or she is not sure. If there is any evidence that the person is something other than a “suspect” — such as passerby, witness, victim, reporting party. etc. – that term is more specific and should be used. But often the word suspect is all we have to go on.
Fourth, “officials say” is often what we need to say when quoting more than one agency. If firefighters say the victim was in serious condition, and police say the crash was at 4th at Los Angeles streets, we have to go with officials to be accurate.
Fifth example: using children, teen, boy or girl, or whatever is every bit as perjorative against the police as you infer the use of suspect or juvenile is. Importantly, juvenile is a flexible term and can mean a person between 14 and 21 years of age. And most importantly, juvenile is the clinical term used by police, and if attributed to police, is the most-accurate word as well.
Sixth: on what planet does “discharged weapon” equal “shot someone” ??? That is a leap of faith that we reporters are not privy to. Guns go off accidentally, they go off when cars hit people, they go off when suspects grab them. Saying the policeofficer “shot” someone implies volition and action, not only is that not necessarily true, there is no way the reporter could know that at an early stage.
You got one thing right. Altercation is a crappy, imprecise word.
This screed is antithetical to the practice of good journalism, and below the normal standards of FAIR.
On Friday morning, Morning Edition used passive terminology in describing both shootings of the black males–“the gun went off,” for the man in Louisiana, and (wish I could remember exactly) but used very passive terminology for the man in Minnesota, and playing the policeman trying to justify the shooting. WTF. I was not surprised, even expected that they might dumb down the importance of the shooting and ramp up the rhetoric of the “peaceful protests” into “violent protests” without going into detail. The focus on the police “killing” black men was diminished while. They declined to connect the dots. Yes, Morning Edition and All Things Considered reportage offers a well-crafted bias narrative against ‘colored’ victims of police shootings. I expect to hear them use “some say” more often as their news source since very little of the reporting seems to be from people at the scene. Too bad for us, because I am not the only listener who has noticed the sinking quality of news their and other MSM reporting.
It seems you are justifying the use of such vague language because more facts are not yet known to the journalists at the time of reporting. Common sense says they should wait to report until they have more facts.
When I hear ‘officer involved shooting’ I read ‘Some racist thug cop has shot another innocent Black person.’
TeeJae, youre on the right track. Being a journalist says they should bust their ass until they find out what actually happened. That is a journalists job. Nobodys gonna tell you anything.
At the same time, I also understand (thanks to FAIR and other media watchdogs) the job of today’s “journalists” (of the mainstream media variety) is to serve Washington by reporting whatever “official narrative” has been crafted for public consumption.
Notice how Hans here disputes *every* single thing in this discussion except “altercation”? He would have disputed that too, but his dishonesty and typical news hack con game extends into attempting to make people believe he’s speaking objectively and that his bias isn’t 100%.
Seems like you are the one making leaps to justify your bias toward cops.
Hans:
No, actually this is a very good article. A lot of what you argue comes down to “the police said it so we have to run it that way.” And the result is that we look like a tool to the rest of the world.
1) Part of it is the changing dynamic of online. Used to be, if a reporter came to me with copy that said “officer-involved shooting,” I’d have said find out what the heck happened before turning this in again. Now, of course, there is an imperative to get it online. I understand that. But the problem is that the term often continues to be used long past when we can be more specific. (And OIS is a rather recent creation; how, pray tell, did we manage for decades before that? Fairly well, as I remember.)
(The note about “after” in the headline is well-placed. See that too much lately.)
2) I agree with you about the Ferguson lede. It’s ungainly, but given what was known, it should not have jumped to conclusions, and it did just say what was known. Early ledes on breaking stories often have to be a little messy, Problem is, you’ll see ledes like that hours after an incident (more cop-speak) when more is known. So the point is well-taken even if the example is not the best.
3) “Suspect” is seriously overused and dehumanizes the person. Suspect has a specific meaning — that point when authorities have a specific person or persons in mind for the alleged crime. Too often it’s used indiscriminately before that … and too often afterward as a journalistic shorthand when far better and more specific terms are available – man, woman, Gray, etc. Again, if you’re running online, for a short time you do have to rely on what the authorities have initially put out. But the problem is just indiscriminately using it. At the time of the examples used here, for instance, I believe there were useful alternatives.
And as the article points out, it sets up a disturbing caste frame — not once have I read about the officer in Tulsa being a “suspect.” It’s always “officer” or similar. We owe people better, whether we think they are the scum of the earth or not.
And, of course, compounding that is “suspected xxxx.” That just subtly suggests the person is what xxxx is. “A xxx suspect” is better.
4) “Officials say” can’t be avoided at times, as you note. But our readers/viewers/users should expect more from us than “sources.” We should provide some specifics (sources at 1 Police Plaza, sources in the mayor’s office) and even more specific, if possible, without burning the person. It’s one reason I train my students never to go off the record but to specifically say it is not for named attribution and then clearly negotiate the attribution to be used. The reporter should always press for the most specific. And, no, I don’t buy the “breaking news rush doesn’t give us time” argument heard in some quarters. I spent 30+ years dealing with a lot of breaking stories and always managed to get five seconds to make sure the person understood how I was going to refer to them. I think I burned someone once because of a misunderstanding, and have regretted it ever since (although it was a PIO, so my tears are somewhat restrained {grin}).
5) What you say about juveniles is exactly why it should be used judiciously – it is highly imprecise. No reason not to ask for specifics — and tell readers if authorities won’t provide them. No, it’s not pejorative against police. And that you refer to it as the “clinical” term highlights the exact problem — if we want to write “clinical” stories without specifics that bring them to life and actually inform (that does not mean sensationalism), don’t complain if your audience goes elsewhere.
6) “discharged” – Is there any way to actually think this is plain English and doesn’t make us sound like a tool? It’s like saying “I procured a new motorized conveyance” — I bought a car. “Fired” is a fine term.You can use it quite nicely without saying they killed someone. That an officer “fired” his or her weapon is a fact, just as much as fact as “discharged” the weapon.
7) You already know how I feel about “altercation.” :) Glad you do too.
Much of this, yes, is a product of the increased rush to get it out, though as a former wire service editor I can tell you the rush was just as great, especially on newspaper deadlines, back in the day of 66 words per minute. The difference now for the wire service is that it doesn’t have wire editors like you to serve as the ultimate filters. Used to be, of course, it was constantly streaming to you, but you had the benefit of the next newscast or the next edition deadline, allowing some cogitation. Now, that benefit is gone both for the wire-service stuff and the stuff a news org generates itself.
But that’s no excuse for some of the laziness that follows. No, not everything here is spot on,. But the overall point is well made — we need to think, not just regurgitate. Not only do I think this is an article worthy of FAIR, I think it is one that should be required reading for every journalist and journalism student — when they have time to cogitate, of course.
-Doug
I’m guessing that you’re one of those people responsible for this kind of mealy-mouthed reportage.
Your response seems predicated on a reporter filing a story in complete ignorance of the facts, yet certain enough, notwithstanding such ignorance, to publish unattributed police versions of “criminal” activity.
On the first issue, you seem to miss the point being made by Mr. Johnson. He suggests that sloppy, ignorant reporting is a disservice to the public, when the result is an opacity that feeds into popular prejudice, regarding something that even you assume “may not be known at the time those articles were written.” Following your logic, a reporter is constitutionally unable to simply state the facts she DOES know, but to fill in the blank spaces in the “story,” using language that is commonly understood to mean a criminal was shot during a police action. If the police are mum, why can’t a reporter so state that fact? Must she quote unidentified (police union, etc) sources to round off the rough edges of real time reporting?
Third: You claim that “often the word suspect is all we have to go on.” No, the English language has other words that are appropriate, such as “person,” “man,” or “woman.” Even you think “juvenile” works.
Fourth: “If firefighters say the victim was in serious condition, and police say the crash was at 4th at Los Angeles streets, we have to go with officials to be accurate.” NO. You have to say that “firefighters say…and police say…” Hiding who said what is not honest reporting.
Fifth: You write, “…using children, teen, boy or girl, or whatever is every bit as perjorative against the police as you infer the use of suspect or juvenile is.” I believe the author thinks that use of the term “juvenile” is a pejorative used to objectify the “suspect” [your word, not mine], and NOT the police. I seriously doubt that Mr. Johnson thinks that the use of those terms result in defaming the police.
Sixth: The article cited the Reuters example, “Police discharged their weapons and Braziel, who did not fire any shots, died at the scene.” On planet Earth, that sounds like the cops shot their weapons and killed someone. How do you interpret that language on YOUR planet?
As you are an editor, please check your spelling (os, perjorative) and your syntax. And in “Fifth example,” you might want to review the difference between the words “infer” and “imply.”
Circle the wagons, Hans, circle the wagons.
Thank you for well reasoned reply to Leigh. Discharged makes it sound like an accident. We saw the policeman shoot the man four times while he was on the ground. Either Leigh has the worst “nose for news” or she posits propaganda to the detriment of all of us close listeners.
I think you’ll find that Steve was replying to Hans.
Perhaps we should describe what happened in Dallas in the following way:
There was an altercation that led to several officer-involved shootings. Weapons were discharged, 4 officers died at the scene, one later at a local hospital.
On a tangential note, FAIR should do an article on the officers who were “involved” in the weapons discharges in Dallas. Some of them had interesting backgrounds. Most seemed to be former military. One guy was in it for the “thrill” of police work, and bragged that he “owned the night.” Another did a stint as a mercenary for notorious military contractor DynCorp, and loved to post messages on social media mocking Black Lives Matter and criticizing President Obama. This stuff was briefly up on MSN, and then scrubbed clean within hours.
A good article but every time some progressives cite Orwell, I cringe. This was a man who called UK empire “democracy”, (non-perfect, yeah, but NOT because it was a colonial empire where the great majority of subjects had NO say about how governed them) , and he did it in a preface to a propaganda piece, the preface meant, by the way, very likely to Ukrainian Nazis getting safe haven after the WWII from “democratic” Western powers.
Adam Johnson, on the job.
When I hear ‘officer involved shooting’ I read ‘Some racist thug cop has shot another innocent Black person.’
“Was it by a friend? A gang member? Did a gun go off on accident?”
That’s often the point. They writer uses passive voice to avoid saying who did it before he or she knows who did it.
*The*
A little late to the party, but: please stop referring to non-LEOs as “civilians.” Unless you’re speaking about the military police, LEOs are just as much civilians as the rest of us. LEOs use “civilian” to distinguish themselves from the citizenry they police, and that is a huge part of the problem. When we use “civilian” in the same manner we accede to that us/them distinction and to the militarization that has begotten it.
Excellent!!!
Does anyone remember this “blast from the past”? The subject assumed a “defensive” position/ posture. Raising your hands to protect your head (or body) from a severe ” baton” beating is a defensive position. The implication is that you should ignore instincts towards self preservation and take the beating like a slave. Any movement can be considered aggressive. Even the uncontrollable flinches and spasms during the beating are treated as aggression. You will be beaten until you stop moving. Question: when does a night stick/billy club become a baton? Answer: When cops need them to “conduct” extra judicial beatings.
I’m running around trying to clear up grammar misinformation that’s spreading around here. All of the uses the article describes are bad, and the reasons the authors had for writing these sentences are worse. However, the fault isn’t with the passive voice. The passive voice can be used for very powerful statements. When JFK was shot, the NYT’s headline was the passive sentence “Kennedy is killed,” not because they wanted to hide who did it, but because Kennedy was the person who mattered to their readers, and they wanted to use a sentence structure that would put him first.
Because of common confusion about grammar, this article indicts the passive when it’s not even used. Consider the example given above, “Police discharged their weapons and Braziel, who did not fire any shots, died at the scene.” You write that “discharged” is passive; it’s not. It’s grammatically active. If it were passive it would be “the weapons were discharged by the police.” A clear version of the sentence could be passive (“Braziel was shot by the police”) or active (“The police shot Braziel”). I would even argue that for people who align themselves with the victim, the passive sentence is superior, because it centers Braziel by placing him prominently at the start of the sentence.
In “Officer Involved shooting,” the passive is used, but the fault doesn’t lie there. We can make the description just as inaccurate while using the active: “A shooting that involved an officer”. The active can be used just as well as the passive to hide agency.
Please continue to point out where news sources do this, but don’t fault the passive when it’s not even being used and when the passive does not in anyway inherently align itself with power structures.