He may have left the Baltimore Sun many years ago, but Emmy-Award winning writer David Simon still burns with righteous indignation over the injustices of urban life.
So after learning that an unarmed, 61-year-old man in East Baltimore had been shot to death by a cop Feb. 17, the author of Homicide and The Wire was first stunned, and then outraged to find so little information about it in the local newspaper. Not the name of the cop who used lethal force, not the circumstances under which it happened.
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“At which point, one old police reporter lost his mind and began making calls,” he wrote in an op-ed column in the Washington Post.
It didn’t take Simon long to run headlong into a brick wall, though – a new policy by the Baltimore police commissioner to withhold the identities of officers who shoot and kill people.
Needless to say, he was not going to accept that, especially since the policy violated state sunshine laws.
Simon unravels the story himself and finds that the 29-year-old police officer, Traci McKissick, had had a similar episode involving a struggle over her gun in the past. That the officer, who is described as physically diminutive, had drawn her weapon in the passenger seat of a suspect’s car in 2005, and the suspect grabbed for it. In the ensuing struggle, a shot was fired into the rear seat, and eventually the suspect got the weapon and threw it out of the car window.
“And so on Feb. 17, the same officer may have again drawn her weapon only to find herself again at risk of losing the gun. The shooting may be good and legally justified, and perhaps McKissick has sufficient training and is a capable street officer. But in the new world of Baltimore, where officers who take life are no longer named or subject to public scrutiny, who can know?” he wrote.
Simon uses the case – a response to a domestic call gone bad – as a sort of morality tale to explain what it means that cities like Baltimore no longer have vigorous daily news papers.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.
Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. . . .
I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
It is a story to make you weep.
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