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Race a Factor in Chicago DUI Checkpoints

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Post-Trayvon, Media Outlets Look Harder at Police

Americans Have Own Visual Taboos, Cartoonist Says

U.S. Labeled Reporter a Suspected Terrorist

Google Says It’s Spending $150 Million on Diversity This Year

Darrin Bell Wins RFK Award for Cartoons on Police

Mark S. Luckie Leaves Twitter, NABJ Candidacy

“Fresh Off the Boat” Renewed for Second Season

Chicago Radio Veteran Ty Wansley Dies at 63

Short Takes

Post-Trayvon, Media Outlets Look Harder at Police

“Chicago’s Jefferson Park police district is drawn around a leafy residential area on the Northwest Side, home to about one-fifth of the city’s police officers and their families [access link via search engine],” Angela Caputo reported Friday for the Chicago Tribune.

“The district, which is predominantly white, also has one of the highest rates of drunken driving accidents and fatalities, but police haven’t set up a sobriety checkpoint there in more than five years.

“Seven miles due south, Chicago police have announced 10 roadside checks over the same period in the Austin district, a hardscrabble stretch along the city’s West Side that is predominantly black and where there were four times fewer alcohol-related crashes than in Jefferson Park.

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announces an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department on Friday. (video)

“A Tribune investigation found that in Chicago, 84 percent of the roadside checks were scheduled in areas populated mostly by minorities while roadways in areas with more DUI-related crashes that are predominantly white are checked less often, or not at all.

“Federal guidelines suggest, however, that when choosing where to set up checkpoints, agencies should use objective criteria, such as a high incidence of alcohol-related crashes. . . .”

An accompanying story was headlined, “Sobriety checkpoints yield thousands of minor citations but few DUI arrests [access link via search engine].”

The stories are part of a renewed eagerness to investigate factors that have surrounded the killings of black men by authorities since neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin in February 2012.

In September, Mark Puente of the Baltimore Sun wrote a “Sun Investigates” report headlined, “Undue Force,” with the further headline, “The city has paid about $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits claiming that police officers brazenly beat up alleged suspects. One hidden cost: The perception that officers are violent can poison the relationship between residents and police.”

In April, Kimberly Kindy and Kimbriell Kelly reported “Thousands dead, few prosecuted” for the Washington Post. “Among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged, a Post analysis found,” a headline read. “Most were cleared or acquitted in the cases that have been resolved.”

In March, the Post announced a new beat for Wesley Lowery, who had covered the aftermath of the shooting of the unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. “Wes Lowery is pioneering a new beat focused on a national issue of critical importance: the interactions between law enforcement officials and their communities.” On Thursday, Lowery reported that “In Fresno, a community-policing ethos builds ties between officers and residents,” as the headline read.

Puente and Doug Donovan of the Sun wrote last month, “Freddie Gray not the first to come out of Baltimore police van with serious injuries,” in the words of the headline.

Alexandra Zayas and Kameel Stanley wrote last month for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida: “A Tampa Bay Times investigation has found that Tampa police are targeting poor, black neighborhoods with obscure subsections of a Florida statute that outlaws things most people have tried on a bike, like riding with no light or carrying a friend on the handlebars. . . .”

Fusion’s Connie Fossi-Garcia and Dan Lieberman reported in December, “A three-month Fusion investigation that reviewed hundreds of pages of records from five police departments with body camera programs reveals that the way body cameras are used usually serve police more than citizens charging misconduct. And in the data from two cities provided to Fusion, there was little evidence police body cameras reduced police involved shootings or use of force incidents. . . .”

Several reports uncovered a lack of reliable statistics on police shootings.

Christine Byers and Walker Moskop of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in November, “Federal, state and local agencies license police officers to kill, if necessary, but nobody counts all the bodies or tracks what, if any, consequences might follow.”

A December report by Rob Barry and Coulter Jones of the Wall Street Journal “found that the FBI’s national tally of police killings didn’t include hundreds of such incidents from the six-year period they examined,” Shawn Shinneman reported in January for Investigative Reporters & Editors. “Barry and Jones received information from 105 of the largest police agencies in the country and found that more than 550 police killings recorded at the agencies from 2007 to 2012 didn’t make it to the FBI’s tally. . . .”

In December, Nikole Hannah-Jones of ProPublica examined the school from which Michael Brown graduated. In the words of a headline, “Michael Brown beat the odds by graduating from high school before his death — odds that remain stacked against black students in St. Louis and the rest of the country.”

Investigative Reporters & Editors is preparing more journalists to report such stories. Mark Horvit, executive director, told Journal-isms by telephone Friday that IRE’s June convention will feature three or four panels relating to police conduct, bearing titles such as “The Divide: Race, Economics and Law Enforcement,” “Covering Police Shootings in Ethnic Communities” and “Covering Policing from Shooting to Community Relations.”

The Justice Department is on a parallel track. In March, it “called on Ferguson, Mo., to overhaul its criminal justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in so many constitutional violations that they could be corrected only by abandoning its entire approach to policing, retraining its employees and establishing new oversight,” Matt Apuzzo and John Eligon reported then for the New York Times.

“In one example after another, the report described a city that used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics. . . .”

On Friday, new Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced that the Justice Department had started an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department to determine whether it engages in systematic discrimination, civil rights violations and excessive use of force, as Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Richard Pérez-Peña reported in the New York Times.

Friday’s stories in the Chicago Tribune suggest that local news media have much to investigate in their own communities.

“U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, a Democrat whose 7th District covers a large swath of the West Side, said he’s gotten an earful from constituents complaining about stop and frisk, but he’s never associated the practice with DUI,” Caputo wrote.

” ‘While we need to be trying to detect the use of alcohol while driving, the results show something else … patterns and practices of setups, stings, overreaction and discrimination,’ Davis said.

“A pattern of setting up roadside checks along racial lines, experts say, raises concerns that police could be using the special patrols as a pretext to stop people in certain neighborhoods, which is a potential violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and unreasonable search and seizure prohibitions under the Fourth Amendment.”

Quoting Richard Kling, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Caputo added, ” ‘The problem is you have a blanket net hoping that you’ll catch someone,’ Kling said. ‘But you’re also ensnaring a lot of innocent people.’ . . .”

Americans Have Own Visual Taboos, Cartoonist Says

Kevin Kallaugher, who draws editorial cartoons for the Baltimore Sun and the Economist magazine under the pen name KAL, had a reminder for those who frame publishing of images of the Prophet Muhammad as a free-speech issue: “Here in the U.S., we have a lot of taboos as well,” he told a Washington audience on Thursday.

They were gathered to see Kallaugher accept the Herblock Prize, a $15,000 tax-free award for excellence in memory of Herb Block, the legendary cartoonist who drew for the Washington Post from 1946 until his death in 2001.

Asked afterward to identify those U.S. taboos, Kallaugher told Journal-isms that “it starts with offensive racial stereotyping,” and mentioned drawing African Americans as monkeys or Israelis as people with hooked noses. He also cautioned about guns and abortion as cartoon topics. “Though not taboo subjects, they are venues of great sensitivity laden with high emotions,” he said later by email. “As a result, one must be braced for strong reactions from irate readers when venturing into those realms.” 

Kallaugher went on to mention matters of taste. What might be acceptable in Europe, such as depicting bathroom functions, would be considered tasteless in the United States, he said.

The point is, Kallaugher told the audience, do you want an effective cartoon? “When you use inflammatory metaphors, your message is lost,” he said.

The issue of depictions of Muhammad has arisen again after a contest to see who could draw the most provocative cartoon of the prophet ended outside Dallas Sunday with the death of two assailants. On Tuesday, the PEN American Center held a literary gala honoring two members of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that published cartoons of Muhammad. Their publication led to a January massacre at Hebdo’s Paris offices that left 12 dead, including five cartoonists. 

Some 200 PEN members signed a letter of protest saying the award crossed a line between “staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression,” the New York Times reported.

U.S. Labeled Reporter a Suspected Terrorist

“The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata,” Cora Currier, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman reported Friday for the Intercept.

“The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

“A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a ‘member of Al-Qa’ida’ as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he ‘works for Al Jazeera.’

“The presentation was among the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“In a brief phone interview with The Intercept, Zaidan ‘absolutely’ denied that he is a member of Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. In a statement provided through Al Jazeera, Zaidan noted that his career has spanned many years of dangerous work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and required interviewing key people in the region — a normal part of any journalist’s job. . . .”

Google Says It’s Spending $150 Million on Diversity This Year

“Whether it’s building self-driving cars, a fleet of balloons to blanket the world with the Internet or tiny particles to detect cancer, Google is known for thinking big — really big,” Jessica Guynn reported Wednesday for USA Today.

“Now the Internet giant is digging into its mountains of cash and tapping some of the world’s smartest minds to take on another serious and elusive challenge: cracking the code on the lack of diversity in the technology industry.

“Google is raising the stakes in its bid to attract more women and minorities, Nancy Lee, Google’s vice president of people operations, told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview.

“Last year Google spent $115 million on diversity initiatives. In 2015, it’s planning to spend $150 million on a far-reaching campaign that stretches from inside the walls of Google into the industry at large, Lee says. . . .”

Darrin Bell Wins RFK Award for Cartoons on Police

“Darrin Bell has just won the 2015 RFK Award for Cartooning, the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights is announcing this afternoon,” Michael Cavna reported Thursday for the Washington Post.

“Bell, whose editorial cartoons are syndicated by Washington Post Writers Group, won the award for a portfolio that largely focused on deaths at the hands of police in New York and Ferguson, Mo. . . .”

Cavna also wrote, ” ‘Darrin Bell’s work in 2014 projected a unique point of view — as a black man, he’s ‘been there’ — on the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown,” Amy Lago, Bell’s editor at WPWG, tells Comic Riffs. “And he applies that empathy to all who are disenfranchised and powerless.

Cavna added, “In other RFK Journalism categories, Post photographer Michel du Cille is being posthumously recognized for International Photography, for his portfolio ‘Ebola: A Desperate Struggle.’ Du Cille died last December in Liberia, while reporting on the virus’s toll.

“NPR News, ProPublica, PBS Frontline, the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald are among the other 2015 journalism winners.”

A spokeswoman for the RFK Center told Journal-isms Friday that the news release was sent out prematurely, was taken down and would be updated.

Mark S. Luckie Leaves Twitter, NABJ Candidacy

Mark S. Luckie, a digital journalist who joined Twitter from the Washington Post three years ago, is leaving the social media company — and nipping in the bud his campaign to became vice president-digital of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Luckie told Journal-isms by telephone on Friday that he is self-publishing a novel about historically black colleges and universities and wants to devote time to publishing and promoting it.

“I’ve been working on it for three years in my spare time,” Luckie said. A graduate of Bethune-Cookman College, Luckie, 32, said his novel “talks about things people talk about behind closed doors.”

Luckie and Benét J. Wilson were certified as candidates for the vice president-digital position on Monday. However, once he leaves Twitter, Luckie said, he would no longer be working as a journalist. “I’m anticipating a possible move away from the industry (which is still TBD) so I’m recusing myself,” he said later by email.

Luckie inaugurated the Twitter position of creative content manager for journalism, joining that organization from the Post, where he was national innovations editor. After joining the Post, he sold his blog 10000Words.net to WebMediaBrands Inc., owner of the Mediabistro blog network, for an undisclosed amount. He previously self-published “The Digital Journalist’s Handbook.”

Chicago Radio Veteran Ty Wansley Dies at 63

“Longtime Chicago news anchor, talk show host, and commentator Ty Wansley passed away Wednesday evening at the age of 63 from congestive heart failure, as announced by his radio station, WVAZ-FM,” RadioInk reported on Thursday.

“Wansley had most recently served as the information director for iHeartMedia’s Chicago Urban Network. In his over 35 years in Chicago, he had been heard on stations WBMX, WJPC, WVON, WLS, WJJD, WGRB, WGCI, and WVAZ. Prior to his years in Chicago, Wansley was heard on KWK, KATZ, KKSS, and KMJM in his native St. Louis.

“In a statement given to Radio Ink this morning, iHeartMedia Chicago Market President Matt Scarano said: ‘Chicago lost a legend in Ty Wansley, News and Information Director, WGCI-FM, V103 and Inspiration 1390. Over his vast career, Ty interviewed community leaders, mayors, congressmen, governors, and presidents with ease. He most enjoyed his interaction with listeners and the community. We will all miss his passion, wit, and friendship.’

“Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also issued an official statement . . . “

Robert Feder added on his blog about broadcast news, “Beyond his success in urban radio, Wansley caught lightning in a bottle in 1993 when he teamed with former Chicago Alderman Ed Vrdolyak at news/talk WLS AM 890. ‘This will be the greatest boon for race relations this city has ever seen,’ Wansley said of the unlikely partnership, which scored high ratings and headlines on WLS and later on the former WJJD. . . .”

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