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Rules of the Road: Police Reports

Police Reports

Key Takeaways:

• Standards vary widely, but most sites draw some sort of line at posting many of the names (and photos) in police reports.

• The line is often based on the severity of the incident or charge. Most sites say they also omit the names of minors.

• Some try to report only on "public figures," but that's a difficult distinction to draw.

• Some sites say they won't publish a name unless they can commit to following the case's progress and disposition.

• A few sites post whatever information the police provide, in full (as do some larger local news organizations).

• Google and search mean any online report can follow someone forever; one company's "sunset" policy deletes all police items after six months.

 

 Media has changed, the rules have not

 

I have carried with me the same rules that I generally followed in my previous work in old media. One of them is not identifying suspects until they're charged, with a few exceptions. Such as a confession. Although I don't go for that one as much – because, as people have pointed out, who says they've confessed, the police? What if they're not telling the truth?

I try to follow up on every case that's serious enough for us to have gone to the point of reporting charges. We also don't show faces until somebody's charged or goes to court.

That gets to be a problem for us in this one way. In this world where everybody's got their cellphone cameras or their surveillance cameras, sometimes we'll get a note from someone that says, I got this on my surveillance camera and want you to put up this picture, because this is the guy who broke into my car! And in one sense that's great, we're all about neighborhood watch. But on the other hand, unless their video or photo literally shows the person red-handed – they're getting there and the hammer is breaking the window on the car glass – I won't do that. Sometimes that's drawn a little bit of ire, because I can't just take their word for it. That still goes against the grain of innocent until proven guilty.

I can't control whether they put it on their own website. And they might come into the forum on my site and tell people about it – I'm not going to prohibit them from posting that. But I won't go for putting that person's picture in front of 30,000 or more readers if I don't have proof.

Sometimes doing that you feel like the person with their finger in the dike. I don't know if at some point in the future it'll be too late, no one can enforce anything like that, it's just all out there. I'll be really sad if it gets to that point.

 

 Search engine ‘juice’ hurts arrestees

 

We didn't want to start putting in people's names with DUIs. We found we had pretty good Google juice. And any time somebody got arrested, maybe it was something like shoplifting, if we'd put the names in, people would write to us later on and say, can you please remove this, because now every time anybody searches for me this is what comes up, and I've moved past this, my life is different – or, it turns out, I wasn't even guilty. You hear all these stories. And it became a nightmare of: what do you do? We also feel, do people really care about a lot of these smaller violations? Do readers really want to hear about Joe Blow who got arrested because he didn't have his headlight?

I don't feel entirely comfortable we're doing exactly the right thing. If the mayor got a DUI, you're not going to post it? Is it ethical to not do it for some people, but only for public figures? And who's that?

I think we typically try not to put the most boring stuff from the blotter in there. Sometimes that means we don't publish names, because those are a lot of the reports that end up having names. Another way of handling it is to link to a document at the blotter. You highlight or pull out the stories that are bigger, a burglary or something like that – they're looking for a suspect, this is the description. Then, if there's other stuff, link to the blotter.

We are a little more shared, and consumed in a different way, than the local newspaper was. So it's a tough one. I don't feel entirely comfortable we're doing exactly the right thing. If the mayor got a DUI, you're not going to post it? Is it ethical to not do it for some people, but only for public figures? And who's that?

We do really have a lot of Google power, and we don't want to use it to ruin somebody's life.

I'm almost more comfortable with just putting everybody in. But then people get upset! And we're a business. And we care. It does suck for someone to have something follow them around forever. We do really have a lot of Google power, and we don't want to use it to ruin somebody's life.

 

 Sympathy? Show me the documentation

 

Everybody looks at it from the alleged perpetrator's standpoint: you're tarring this person with this arrest record. [Issues of guilt, innocence or veracity of the police report won’t be determined until down the road.]  I look at it as, show me where you weren't convicted, and then we can talk about taking it down. But the flip side of that is, if you were convicted of something, is it really my place to hide that information from an employer who might find it?

People call up and say, "I want my name removed." I'd be willing to remove an arrest that proves to be completely bogus. But if the person was convicted of something, how much sympathy should I have?

Most recent one was a guy who called me from Pennsylvania, said he got busted for trespassing, the charges were dismissed, he wanted me to remove it. My standard response was: send me documentation and then I can make a decision. He hemmed and hawed, finally said he didn't have anything. I have a good relationship with the clerk at that court, so I said I'll see what I can get. What I found was, the charges weren't exactly dismissed – they were reduced from a misdemeanor trespassing charge to an infraction of disorderly conduct. I was going to update the post with that information but I never heard from him again.

 

 Felonies are my line

 

I have a policy of not using names in most police cases. We publish minute, detailed stuff – a speeding ticket on Main Street. And I decided early on that my site was not about pointing fingers at all of us for the things that we do wrong, but more about capturing the general idea that people speed on Main Street, and where the speed traps are, how the police department is enforcing the law.

You really have a responsibility to follow cases through the court system. And what the heck, I'm not going to follow all the speeding tickets.

Now all of the media that I compete against, including several weeklies that publish the exact same data that I do, do publish names. So I look a little bit foolish. But I'm constantly trying to get people to understand that just because information's available from a public source doesn't mean we have an obligation to publish it.

Now all of the media that I compete against, do publish names. So I look a little bit foolish. But I'm constantly trying to get people to understand that just because information's available from a public source doesn't mean we have an obligation to publish it.

I draw two lines. One is that it has to be a felony or above before I will put someone's name in. And I do my best to follow up on the felony cases.  The other line is, I do not use the names of kids under age 16. If they're age 16 and it's a felony then I will use their name. Of course there's always an exception. Sometimes an incident is so high profile it begs to have the person's name.

We had an egregious example of this dilemma recently where a bunch of teenagers were having a party and they all got drunk and stoned and one of the kids fell out a second-floor window and was seriously injured. So I wrote about the case and have been following it closely. Although the names of several witnesses were made public in search warrants the police put out, I decided to adhere to my policies. I didn't use any names. Some of the other publications that I compete against published all the kids' names, their addresses and everything, and all of them were 16 or 17 years old. A couple of weeks later, the police issued citations for underage drinking and for providing alcohol to minors. Neither of those crimes meets my test for felony, so I still didn't publish their names – I said they're students at such and such a school.

I suppose you could make an argument that with this one, since it was covered so much by everyone else, I should just use names. But where do you draw the line? If somebody else uses it, is that a good enough reason to use it? I don't think so. I didn't even publish the name of the victim.

I don't feel like it's necessary for me to publish names just to publish names. There's not really a compelling community interest there. I think on the contrary there's a prurient interest.

This gets into a squishy area, but I also feel like people who are accused of something are embarrassed by it, their friends around them all know it. I don't feel like it's necessary for me to publish names just to publish names. There's not really a compelling community interest there. I think on the contrary there's a prurient interest.

I get some hate mail from people who wish I would publish every last name and the mugshots and everything. But I feel like, this is us. This is not some people in another place, or another town, in the big city nearby where you can look at it and have some bizarre satisfaction that people elsewhere are doing bad things. This is us. The community handles these things in its own way.

Another example: a case recently of a fellow in town who was accused of hitting his wife. Some acquaintances of mine know the guy – he works at the local college – and I got some emails saying, you need to write about this, put his picture in there! But most people don't know this guy. If he was a public figure, if it had been a member of the town board, I think it would've been a different story. So I didn't publish his name. I posted the address, domestic assault.

For a couple of weeks there was a campaign by some people to get this guy's name and picture on my website. People were really questioning my credentials as a journalist and member of the community and wondering if I am going soft and protecting people. I didn't want to cave into it. With any kind of a policy, you need to stick to your policy.

In the end, it was like five minutes in court, and the charges were dropped. I did follow it through – I wanted to know if I had made a mistake or not. I also wanted to be able to say to people, we need to be careful about this.

 

 Being mindful of who you spotlight

 

I didn't feel comfortable publishing the names. It's a small town. Everybody knows everybody else. You're not guilty till you've been convicted. It just seemed a little too intrusive to publish that information.

The one area that made me a little uncomfortable about not publishing the names was that a lot of the names, a disproportionate percentage, were Hispanic. I think it would have been interesting for folks in the community to know the character of the way that the laws were enforced in the community. But on balance I felt it was right to take the names out.

 

 A six-month sunset policy

 

Our police logs run in print, they also run online. In a week, that police log item in print will get recycled in the trash bin. Online, our police logs sunset in six months.

We really struggled with how to deal with this. I was working in a city of 86,000 people where police news and weird police news not only was very well read but got attention in our larger Boston-area markets. There are always those police stories in Somerville, Mass. It seems to be more extreme and weirder and sometimes funnier than you'll get in most outlets. We'll cover everything from the local prostitution bust to immigration enforcement arrests that touch a nerve.

What changed my mind was, a woman called and said: I'm a prostitute, I totally understand that you're going to put my name in the paper because I got arrested, but you should take it down. I said, why? She said, the cop lied. And there are details you have online that are not true. And I had a good long conversation with her about the whole ethics of her name being in a police log, how long should it be online. She's running a business, she knows it's a criminal enterprise, but her business is being affected by information that is not true that we put online as a result of her arrest.

The problem is, sometimes we're attributing things to a police report, which is not absolutely correct. And I've been a victim of crime where I've read the story after the fact and said, “Where'd you get that?” and they said, “Well, it was in the police report.” “What? No way!”

Stuff lives online forever, but we're going to have a policy of forgiveness.

It took this woman calling me to get it through my head. So I became one of the advocates in our newsroom for the six-month sunset policy. Stuff lives online forever, but we're going to have a policy of forgiveness. That's been in place about two years.

We do have cases where people will come to us and say: I was arrested, my ex-husband was saying I was abusing the child because he wants to win custody, but now my employer has seen it online – I need you to take it down so I don't lose my job. We will take it down if the case has been dismissed, or people can prove it is untrue. Those are the only folks who escape the six-month rule.

 

 Changing course on naming sex offenders

 

We never got down to the level of DUIs. We took the philosophy of, if it was worth posting, it's worth being part of the record. Our take would have been, if you're gonna take it down in a year anyway, why post it in the first place?

We did change our tack on one type of story: in the early days we would post alerts of sex offenders moving into a neighborhood. And over time we got turned around by our user base on that. We had a couple of really active users, people known in the community, who had either falsely been accused of sex crimes at one point in their lives, or it was the sort of thing where the 18-year-old guy slept with the 17-year-old girl and therefore got labeled a sex offender. Over time we just got convinced that there was not enough public good in posting these alerts versus the possible damage we were doing by not having the time to research each case. So we stopped that about three or four months into our launch.

 

 No names, period

 

We don't print the names of people who were arrested, and we don't put the race of people in it, so some of the racists are really upset.

We do a daily roundup, a summary of crimes, but we don't include the names. We've always had this policy.

 

 Until we can track outcomes, we won’t use names

Where I am, I've got this whole passel of faculty and bright students to deliberate together. And ultimately we came down with both a desire and a policy. The desire was to create a better tracking system so that you could essentially continue to report out however a case is adjudicated. That system, to my knowledge, does not exist. Certainly it does not exist in Columbia, Missouri. And therefore until we get such a system, we took out names from the arrest logs. Now we'll still run names of people arrested in full stories – but the presumption there is that, if it rises to the level of story, we'll continue to track it.

There's public and then there's public.

The principle behind this is simple: it's fairness. Fairness should be one of those core values of journalism. And it's not fair to put up that Tom Warhover has been arrested for X, Y, or Z, and then not say, Tom Warhover was found not guilty.

The argument is specious to simply dismiss it and say, well, the information has always been public. There's public and then there's public.

 

 When policies and principles conflict

 

This is the classic conflict in the first two of the core principles of the SPJ Code of Ethics: you seek truth and report it -- and you minimize harm. Sometimes they come in conflict.

This is the classic conflict in the first two of the core principles of the SPJ Code of Ethics: you seek truth and report it – and you minimize harm. Sometimes they come in conflict. Because seeking truth and reporting it causes harm. So you need to decide, OK, what if anything do we do to minimize that harm, or do we just decide that this truth is so important that it needs to be out there and cause whatever harm it causes?

The persistence of Google has changed the extent and duration of harm. The phrase "minimize harm" requires us to ethically consider the extent of harm. Because "minimize" is about the quantity and degree of harm. So the old "let the chips fall where they may" is a simplistic approach that's probably not worthy of the good journalists who say it reflexively. You do need to consider the damage. OK, how old is the suspect? How serious is this offense? How important is it that the public know about the offense and know who did it?

To say that we're not going to consider the impact of search is to say we don't care about harm. If we're journalists who follow that code of ethics, we do care about harm. So it needs to be part of the discussion. But it doesn't say, "cause no harm." We're not physicians.

 

 

 Ask yourself the right questions

People have a right to ask, if you reported that I was arrested, did you also report that the charges were dropped, or I was released, or I was found not guilty? And then when a search is done, what pops up first? If the charges always pop up first, I think you have a valid claim to go back to the news organization and ask them to rethink how they've archived the story.

In some other countries they don't put a name in until you're indicted or convicted. We have a low threshold here – all you have to do is be a "person of interest" and we'll put your name in, in many instances. So the question it raises is, are we re-victimizing somebody over and over?

I've been in cities where newspapers would run names of people arrested in a sting operation. You just know one narrow set of facts, you don't know anything else about the story, and to publish those names in the paper is pretty heavy stuff. It can and often is life-changing for those people.

 

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