On Sunday, the Flint Journal ran a front page story "investigating" the now closed Flint Jail. The methodology of the investigation was to take a "typical" week, which they picked in May to look into whether the jail really was about arresting violent criminals.
First, there is no typical week for any jail, let alone a place as volatile as Flint. Let's pick one week at random of news coverage at the Flint Journal and use that to base an opinion of the overall competence and aggressiveness of the newspaper.
Pick the wrong week, one with say a bunch of corrections, maybe a down news period and you could come away with a completely wrong impression of the paper. So to start with, a week is not nearly enough time to make a judgement about any jail.
This was not an "investigation" it was a WAG - Wild Ass Guess.
Secondly, the Journal looked at about 250 arrests for that week. In the story they admit that 86 were for warrants that they could not determine whether they were for misdemeanors or felonies and whether for violent or non-violent offenses.
Heck, that's a third of the sample! With some records work, digging in court files, each and every one of those warrants could have been looked at and the status confirmed. Again, I'm sure there is little time for that kind of investigative work, even though it should be required for a story as potentially important as this one.
Thirdly, the assumptions are completely wrong. The article talks about how non-violent offenders rarely escalate into violent offenders.
True, but totally incomplete. What the paper didn't go on to look at is that many violent offenders are often involved in petty crime, so arresting someone on a petty crime, could, and often does, take a violent offender off the street. Albeit not for a violent crime, but for something else. The effect is the same, the bad guy is off the street. Off the street, means that he/she is not committing a crime, at least for a time.
I have no way of knowing if this was the reporter's idea or an editor's idea, but any decent editor would have demanded a much larger sample of time than one week.
While I am no expert on crime, I worked for two California police departments for 7 years in the 1970s and covered police and crime for 25 years for a couple daily newspapers, I think I have a little credibility on the issue.
And as much as I hate to agree with Mayor Don Williamson, he and others who urge the reopening of the jail are simply, right on. When people can get away with not paying for even minor crimes, avoid being arrested on warrants and know with assurance they won't go to jail for most anything short of a major felony you have a recipe for escalating crime. It's undeniable.
Heck, New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani got it and cleaned up his city by concentrating on the minor crimes that for years were ignored. For those of us who visited New York City before and after the major crackdown ordered by Guiliani we could see, feel and appreciate the difference.
What the article concluded about the City jail, is true of any county jail as well. Most of the people inside are serving time for misdemeanors or felonies reduced to misdemeanors.
Why was there no comparable investigation of the same week for the Genesee County Jail? Why not advocate letting all non-violent prisoners be released from any state jail if there is no effect on violent crime.
The conclusions are absurd and the readership, especially those in Flint, are not well served by such a cursory look at such an important issue.
The one clear anecdotal fact, which was mentioned in passing in the Journal "investigation" was that there have been many shootings and ten homicides, nearly half of the city's annual total since the jail closed July 11. Now there's a statistic to build an investigation around.
A serious journalism investigative piece such as this should take in months of data, something I'm sure the strapped staff does not have time to do.
Thankfully, the Detroit Free Press did not pick a week out of thin air to investigate Kwame Kilpatrick's phone records, they looked at them all. Now there's an investigation.
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4 comments:
Investigative reporting is dead at the Flint Journal.
I just had a conversation with a former official in the city of Flint who told me about how he had video tape of an appointee of Mayor Williamson, who was also the Mayor's choice for Register of Deeds in the primaries earlier this month, putting up her campaign signs for much of the day while on the clock for the city.
He showed it to the FJ, who said there wasn't a story there.
Even when the investigation is handed to them, they won't run certain stories. They have an odd sense of what is important to the electorate and their customers.
I can vouch for my brother being a Police Officer in the 70's. He arrested me for drunken bicycle riding when I was on leave between Nam and Europe. This was a joke for him but he did not know I was carrying a couple of joints of weed at the time. If he had had me booked into county jail I would have been toast.
Hey bro:
I probably didn't want to know what you were holding. I forgot you were around when I was a copper.
Hope all is well
J
When I was a stringer for a local weekly (in MA), I got calls all the time from people who had been rejected by the daily. On the other hand, they love running 'cute' stories about dogs and bunnies - the roles of the 2 papers were nearly reversed until the good editor of the weekly left and was replaced by a 'bunny' person. Now we get our real news from the Boston Globe.
That's sort of like people in Flint getting their news from the Freep.
Jim's brother - sometimes things are better left unwritten! lol
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