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Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.
Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.
That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.
When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.
Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.
I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again
The assailant is on tape saying "I got that white girl, I got that white girl" as he walks off the train after the attack. Maybe he was mentally ill, maybe he was motivated by racial animus, or maybe it was a bit of both? Perhaps interviews with the assailant will reveal more, but right now Trump and the FBI are really trying to downplay the racial angle and make it about cash-free bail and repeat violent offenders. They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.
From a broader perspective, this incident has highlighted some awkward realities of inter-ethnic crime rates that have largely been banished from mainstream discourse. Twitter is no longer a representative sample of mainstream opinion... but it's the now the incubation chamber for right-wing messaging, and the Overton window there has significantly shifted in the last few days. The video is really powerful, I would put it above the George Floyd footage in terms of emotional impact. Or course it won't have the same amplification, given how national media coverage appears to be grudging at best. The NYT article on the topic is absolutely ridiculous - they try to equate honest reporting on a serious crime to fabricated reports of crimes leading to a riot in the 1800s:
Definitely a stretch in the raw legal terms of it, but I like the idea.
Murder in the US is overwhelmingly the result of strained interactions between males 18 - 34. If a man gets murdered, they're very likely to have known their killer and to have had a recent dispute around drugs, money, respect / social esteem, or a woman via love triangle. For women who get killed, the stats are even crazier - something around a 90% chance their killer was a previous or current romantic partner.
Random acts of lethal violence like this one truly are rare and shocking. I like the idea that, for such cases, we ratchet the punishment up to eleven. This isn't to say that we should shrug at "normal" murders. "Murder stay murder," to quote the Wire. But I like throwing a terrorism or federal level hate crime charge in there. I know deterrence theory for criminal punishment is one of the wobbliest concepts out there in terms of efficacy, but if a random act of violence gets a no-buts-about-it life sentence with no parole, I have to imagine that would have an effect...For those in control of their faculties.
Which brings up the point about the culpability of schizophrenics, drug addicts etc. There's a lot of landmines here in terms of personal liberties and the slippery slope power of the State to lock people up for being cooky, but the alternative (and current) situation is that sane society carries around this socialized risk of literal death that is also quite obvious and easy to mitigate; DeCarlos Brown had a decade long rap sheet, which included prior armed robbery and assault. Jordan Neely (of the Daniel Penny incident), IIRC, had been arrested over 100 times in NYC. The stats are almost a pareto distribution; "top" 1% of criminals are responsible for 63% of convictions per NIH - it's darkly ironic that that's being published by the National Institute for Health. When these big red alarms keep going off, eventually it rises to the level of a literal public health issue to not intervene with these individuals.
Deterrence Theory of Punishment works exceptionally well, if there is a high certainty of punishment. It's not necessarily the severity of the potential punishment that matters, though of course life in prison for shoplifting would probably reduce the shoplifting rate for the week it would take SCOTUS to strike the law down as an 8th Amendment violation, but the certainty of punishment that matters. Quoting part of a journal article here that jives with my own understanding of the matter:
Page 4. The article goes on to list a few different studies that have come to this conclusion, which I won't bore you by repeating because to the best of my knowledge this is not particularly contentious. To provide an n=1 personal anecdote, there's a section of road I used to drive that had a speed limit of 35mph. This was perceived as a ridiculously low speed limit. A driver could very easily go 55 safely, and indeed many, many people did, because why not? There were no intersections, no red lights, no stop signs, no school zone, no earthly reason for the speed limit to be 35 that anyone could see. Presumably there was some very good reason for it to be so labeled, but it was not immediately apparent as to why so most people went much faster. The county (presumably) installed a series of speed cameras along the road. For a few weeks, the road went at a very sedate pace because everyone knew that if they went over 40mph they'd be getting a ticket in the mail. This lasted until everyone knew where the cameras were, at which point traffic began to slow down approaching a known camera location, and then immediately speed back up after. A measurable change in criminal(ish) behavior due to certainty of punishment. It didn't matter that the fines were relatively minor, perhaps $40, nobody wanted the hassle.
So all this to say, while treating random acts of lethal violence far more seriously may reduce the incidence rate of random acts of lethal violence, it won't do so as long as people think they can get away with it, or aren't thinking about the consequences at all. Certainty of punishment breeds compliance.
This is very insightful, thank you.
I am reminded of listening to Rafael Mangual on Coleman Hughes' podcast. The stat he related (which made me literally rewind the podcast) was that the average state / federal prison inmate (not jail) already has over six felony convictions before they are incarcerated. They went on to discuss how this is a direct result of more lenient probation and deferred sentencing / alternative sentencing "reform."
But, as your article points out, think of the incentive and messaging we're sending to criminals. You can learn the robes of armed robbery, drug dealing, even assault, and you get to play on easy mode the first half dozen times. Of course this is going to backfire.
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