On police violence, it’s time to afflict the comfortable

Should a story about a man who was killed by police include the fact that he was formerly incarcerated or arrested? No. Yet time and again, news coverage of people living with a record of arrest or conviction includes mentions of that record regardless of whether it is relevant to the story. It’s long past time for that to change.

The fact that someone was once incarcerated or arrested is irrelevant to a story about the last moments of their life, and it should be irrelevant to a police employee’s decision to use deadly force. Police are supposed to make decisions, especially decisions that could kill someone, based on the situation in front of them, not one confronted by another law enforcement employee years earlier. If police were stopping, arresting, harming or killing people based on their previous record of arrest or conviction, that would be news worth covering: as a constitutional crisis and public safety scandal. Unless that is the case, it makes no sense for news outlets to mention someone’s record after they have been killed by police.

One in three American adults is living with a criminal record. People who have been arrested or convicted of a crime are people, no more, and no less. Like all people, they can be entrepreneurs, parents, social workers, lawyers, clergy and community leaders. Or they can be none of those things. When it comes to a government employee’s decision to kill them, it should not matter.

Yet time and again, stories about people with a record of arrest or conviction focus solely on their past involvement with the justice system, regardless of whether it is relevant to the issue at hand. In today’s America, that contributes to a world in which a person’s record becomes a scarlet letter that can haunt them at any time, even in stories about their deaths.

Most recently, one news story about a man’s death at the hands of Hartford police relied on an anonymous source to highlight the man’s past record — all without answers about why police tried to pull his car over, and therefore without any indication as to whether the man’s record was even relevant to that traffic stop. In 2016, a father, worker and Connecticut resident died after police tased him while he was trapped in his car following a crash. At least one news outlet discussed the man’s previous involvement with the justice system in its reports about his death. In that piece, a tragedy and questionable decisions by government employees became a story about a victim’s past.

There is one record worth looking at when it comes to stories about police violence: that of the government agencies involved. When someone does something as a police employee, they are acting on behalf of the government. In a democracy, the government’s track record is always a matter of public interest. But when it comes to policing, the government typically has much more information than the public. This contributes to a backward system in which the histories of everyday people who were hurt or killed by police are scrutinized twice as hard as the track records of the government agencies or employees who harmed them.

While the most recent Hartford story mentions that the police employee who killed the man had “no sustained citizen complaints and no disciplinary history,” for instance, that sentence does not tell the public much about that employee’s past job performance, or anything about how they behaved when they shot and killed someone. In almost all towns and cities in Connecticut, police themselves are in charge of investigating their own complaints, which means the vast majority of complaints go nowhere. While Hartford has a civilian review board, the police department still controls information and investigative powers, making it difficult if not impossible for that board to independently hold police accountable.

In Hartford, “no disciplinary history” also does not say much — Hartford’s police collective bargaining agreement states that records of a police employee’s oral discipline disappear after one year, written reprimands disappear after two years, and both kinds of discipline “will be disregarded in any future disciplinary action.” Under this system, the police department could routinely discipline an employee for hurting or threatening people but “disappear” that discipline within a year.

An oftquoted aphorism of journalism is that the newspaper’s purpose is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” But the full quote sounds a much clearer warning note regarding the power of the pen to uphold systems of injustice or tear them down: “Th’ newspaper does ivrything f ’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”

The comfortable, when it comes to the justice system, are seldom the people who are directly impacted by it — the people accused or convicted of a crime, survivors and victims of crimes, survivors and victims of police violence, and the loved ones of all three groups. Rather, the comfortable are typically the people who profit from the existing justice system, the government officials in charge of it, and the policymakers whose decisions can harm or help thousands of people.

In cases of police violence, rather than burying and roasting the dead or injured, it is up to all of us, including those with the power of the pen, to hold the comfortable accountable to the people.

Associated Press This still image from police dash camera video released in May by the Hartford State's Attorney shows Police Officer Layau Eulizier pointing his weapon at a car being driven at him by Anthony Jose Vega Cruz during an attempted traffic stop April 20 in Wethersfield. Eulizier shot through the windshield, striking Vega Cruz, of Wethersfield, who died two days later at a hospital.