JOURNALISM OF THE SAINTS: Characterizing Christen's death...

WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 2020

...as part of a "gruesome cycle:"
In yesterday's report, we offered background information on one of 61 events. Or possibly on one of only six.

We offered background information on the shooting death of Robert Christen. In September 2015, Christen was shot and killed by a police officer in Mora, Minnesota.

According to the Washington Post's Fatal Force site,
Christen is one of 61 people shot and killed by police officers in Minnesota from the start of 2015 on through to the present day.

Christen is one of only six such people the site describes as being "unarmed" at the time they were shot and killed.

Local reporting on Christen's death was remarkably poignant. Christen's mother, Pam Christen, described Christen as "such a wonderful son." More specifically, she was quoted saying this:

“When he was not sick, he was a very loving and wonderful person. He was such a wonderful son.”

So spoke a loving mother. Unfortunately, Robert Christen had apparently been extremely sick at the time of his death. He'd long been dogged by extremely serious mental illness, his mother was quoted saying.

She said she'd seen him hospitalized 50-60 times. She was quoted interpreting her son's behavior on the night of his death in the following way:
FAURIE (3/3/16): People who knew Rob told investigators that he had recently been struggling with mental health issues and were worried that his text messages and phone calls were hints at a suicide attempt. “He was very sick,” said Rob’s mother, Pam Christen. “My husband and I basically believe this was suicide by cop.”
If we can believe the things we read, Pam Christen didn't blame the police officer who shot and killed her son.

“I want it very clear that we hold no ill will against the police officer," Pam Christen was quoted saying. "She was put in a terrible position and she did what she had to do."

So it went as the hometown newspaper reported this shooting death. For more details concerning the incident, see yesterday's report.

We reviewed this incident because it was recently cited in a high-profile piece of journalism. We refer to a high-profile essay by Wesley Lowery which recently appeared online at The Atlantic—an essay which Lowery and The Atlantic's editors specifically describe as a "story."

For reasons which were never explained, Christen's death was cited by Lowery right at the start of his essay. Headlines included, the essay starts like this:
Why Minneapolis Was the Breaking Point/
Black men and women are still dying across the country...


MINNEAPOLIS—Miski Noor watched just the first minute of the video of George Floyd’s killing before closing the tab and walking the two blocks to join the protests already forming at the scene. The days since have been filled with a maddening sense of déjà vu.

Noor had joined the Movement for Black Lives in 2014, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The 34-year-old activist’s first protest was that December, a demonstration that shut down the Mall of America during the peak of the holiday shopping season.

Noor soon became intimately familiar with the gruesome cycle: The police killed someone. Activists protested. Small reforms were won. The police killed someone else.

In Minnesota, St. Paul police killed Philip Quinn, a Native American man in the midst of a mental-health crisis, in September 2015. One week later, a Kanabec County Sheriff’s deputy killed Robert Christen, a white former fullback for the Wisconsin Badgers who was enduring a mental-health crisis of his own.* Two months after that, in November 2015, Minneapolis police killed Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old unarmed black man. Hundreds poured into the streets.
According to Lowery's essay, Christen's death had been part of a "gruesome cycle" in which "the police" killed someone and than, after activists protested, "the police" killed someone else. As for the asterisk which appears at the end of the highlighted sentence, this explanation appears at the end of Lowery's piece:
*This article previously misspelled Robert Christen’s name and misstated the affiliation of the officer who killed him.
"Whatevs!" an experienced cynic might cry. Who cares about stupid sh*t like that when we're performing the type of work which is now being widely described as "the journalism of the saints?"

In fairness, everyone makes mistakes. Lowery's pair of mistakes suggest the possibility that he hadn't devoted a lot of attention to the details of Christen's death, which he decided to cite in his essay's fourth paragraph.

That said, our analysts say that a larger question arises in the passage we've presented—a passage which appears right at the start of Lowery's self-described "story." That larger question would be this:

In what way did these three incidents constitute a "gruesome cycle?" What point was Lowery trying to make by citing these deaths at the start of his essay, then linking them in that way?

Presumably, we'd all prefer that police officers never shot and killed anyone. Presumably, we'd all prefer that there would never be any such shooting deaths.

That said, what point was Lowery trying to make about the three incidents he briefly cites in that paragraph?

According to Lowery's account, two of those deaths arose out of mental health crises. Was Lowery suggesting that it would be better to send mental health specialists, not police officers, to the scene of such events?

In the rest of Lowery's essay, there's little evidence that he was trying to make some such suggestion Instead, it becomes clear that he is, in the main, attempting to address claims of racism on the part of American police.

As the essay's first section ends, a photograph of Noor shows her in a t-shirt which says, STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE. Later, he quotes Noor saying this:
LOWERY: “We want justice for George Floyd, but we know justice isn’t enough,” Noor said. “That’s why we’re demanding bigger and bolder things. Now is the time to defund the police and actually invest in our communities.

“These systems were created to hunt, to maim, and to kill black people, and the police have always been an uncontrollable source of violence that terrorizes our communities without accountability,” Noor added. “Black communities have been and are living in persistent fear of being killed by state authorities.”
Noor seems to care deeply about such matters, as indeed she should. That said, we're evaluating the journalists here—Lowery and the Atlantic's editors.

For himself, Lowery refers to the United States as "the country whose police officers are carrying out the extrajudicial killings of black people." More specifically, he describes Barack Obama as "the former chief spokesperson for and political figurehead of the country whose police officers are carrying out" those crimes.

Stating the obvious, there's nothing wrong with examining the way American police officers and police departments have behaved, and are behaving, toward the nation's black citizens.

Lowery's essay was offered in the aftermath of the brutal killing of George Floyd. It's fairly clear that his chief focus involves the claim that police officers and police departments are deeply involved in the kind of misconduct described by Noor.

If he chooses to stand trial, former officer Derek Chauvin will have a chance to explain his conduct on the day George Floyd was killed. That said, it's hard to imagine what he could say to make his conduct seem less vicious that it looks on videotape.

Racial justice is a deeply important concern; it has been for a long time. That said, at least as a matter of theory, intelligent journalism is highly valued too, though it's a practice which is valued mainly in the breach.

After reading Lowery's essay, we looked into the facts surrounding the three shooting deaths he cites in his fourth paragraph. We'll only say this:

In the case of the late Robert Christen, the mother of the deceased says the officer did nothing wrong. In the other two cases Lowery cites, it's much less clear what actually happened—but it isn't clear than the officers in question did anything wrong in those cases either.

(For an account of the death of Philip Quinn, including dashcam videotape which is unhelpful in the end, you can just click here.)

Very few people are going to doubt that Derek Chauvin behaved in the most egregious way possible when he took the life of George Floyd. (It's also true, as mentioned above, that he still has a right to due process.)

For better or worse, other cases are harder to judge—until we turn the story-telling over to revolutionary figures like Lowery. Until we adopt the story-telling procedure we began describing, all the way back in 1999, as the "novelization of news."

Out of curiosity, we also checked Minnesota's data from the Fatal Force site after reading Lowery's "story." When we took a look at the record, this is what we found:

According to the Fatal Force site, police officers in Minnesota have shot and killed 61 people since the start of 2015. According to the site, ten of those people were black; an additional 37 were white. The full listing looks like this:
Shot and killed by police in Minnesota, 2015 to the present:
White: 37
Black: 10
Hispanic: 3
Native American: 5
Asian-American: 3
Middle Eastern: 2
Unknown race/ethnicity: 1
The site says that six of these 61 people were unarmed when they were shot and killed. Five were white, including Christen. The sixth unarmed person was, in fact, Jamar Clark.

The site says that at least 21 of the 61 victims had been involved in an episode involving mental illness. Some others had been involved in reams of ludicrous conduct.

Such ludicrous conduct will sometimes put police officers in very difficult circumstances requiring instant decisions. So it was in the case of Christen, who was apparently undergoing a major mental health breakdown.

Why was Robert Christen's death placed at the top of this "story?" Were readers supposed to assume that the officer whose affiliation Lowery misstated must have done something wrong in killing the person whose name Lowery couldn't spell?

Were readers supposed to assume that some act of misconduct by that (female) deputy must explain why this event had been part of a "gruesome cycle?"

Were readers expected to make that assumption? People, of course they were! In fairness to Lowery, it's possible that he hadn't ever checked to see how that event had gone down.

It's possible that he didn't know the first freaking thing about this part of his story. So it may tend to go when saints start practicing journalism.

When we read Lowery's story in The Atlantic, but especially when we read his featured essay in Sunday's New York Times, we thought of headstrong Diomedes being chastised by the much more experienced Nestor not far from the high walls of Troy. According to Homer, Nestor admired Diomedes' spirit, but he felt that his judgment might be somewhat poor.

Tomorrow, we'll look at a reference Lowery makes in the second paragraph of his Atlantic essay. On Friday, we'll look at the inchoate mess the New York Times inevitably decided to publish last Sunday.

This is the way our discourse may tend to go when we practice the journalism of the saints. On the other hand, some will say that no major change ever occurs, in any society, without a few journalistic eggs possibly being broken.

Tomorrow: Lowery cites Michael Brown. Also, back to what Cobb said

32 comments:

  1. Yawn. Why so many words, dear Bob?

    The Lowery guy is one of many a liberal-hitlerian dembot ("my name is Legion, for we are many"), who will type anything to advance their liberal-hitlerian agenda.

    That's all, dear Bob. End of story.

    ReplyDelete
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  2. ...oh, and also, dear Bob, there is no such thing as "racial justice". Unless, of course, you're a Nazi.

    There's only 'justice' and 'injustice'.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The NRA and the 2nd Amendment already gave us the solution to the problems of racist and overzealous cops.
    IOW, the laws are already here. We need the will to use them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 1:06,
      Are you suggesting the "good guy with a gun" is mere fantasy, designed to get society to tolerate the wholesale slaughter of classrooms of 6-year olds, cynically trotted out by the marketing arm of gun manufacturers?

      Delete
    2. I'm suggesting that if 12:00 believes those constitutional remedies will work, he should prove it by using them himself. The victims of overzealous police cannot do it, since they are already dead.

      Delete
  4. Russia, if you're listening, stop blackmailing the President of the United States.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The details in a story written immediately when an event occurs are often revised in subsequent follow-ups.

    Somerby blames Lowery:

    "In fairness, everyone makes mistakes. Lowery's pair of mistakes suggest the possibility that he hadn't devoted a lot of attention to the details of Christen's death, which he decided to cite in his essay's fourth paragraph."

    His main sin was perhaps not attention but relying upon an original incorrect report.

    Somerby says that Lowery reminds him of Diomedes, but Lowery is 30 years old, not an impetuous youth. That makes Somerby's remarks patronizing and unfair. Lowery's passion comes from his situation in life as a black man, not his youth.

    Christen's mother may have forgiven the officer for shooting her son, but that doesn't mean we cannot call for better ways to handle suicide-by-cop situations, especially those involving unarmed citizens.

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  6. Why is Somerby trying to criticize Lowery's entire argument on the basis of 1 specific example when there are 61 cases?

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    Replies
    1. He isn't. Here's the takeaway:

      According to Lowery's essay, Christen's death had been part of a "gruesome cycle" in which "the police" killed someone and than [sic], after activists protested, "the police" killed someone else.

      TDH in his usual, charming but obsessive way, is criticizing a reporter for getting the facts wrong. If it was important enough to correct Lowery's misspelling of the victim's name and misaffiliation of the shooter, then it should be important enough not to include Christen in the "gruesome cycle" of Lowery's theme.

      As always, YMMV.

      Delete
    2. Those details have nothing to do with the larger argument. Further, there have been demonstrations by activists following suicides by cop, especially when the victim was mentally ill and there was strong feeling that a better way should have been found to help the person who wound up dead. That makes Christen's death an appropriate example because of the cycle, not because of the details of his case.

      But even if Somerby did find one example that contradicted that cycle, why is it that one example can negate the entire premise? There are still 60 other cases that presumably fit that cycle. The details of the report are irrelevant to all of this.

      Somerby raises this particular example in order to negate Lowery's claims (which are about Noor, as mh discusses below). A single counter or misfit example can only overturn Lowery's argument if he were saying that ALL such killings fit Noor's pattern, which he did not say. There are enough that do fit to make this a concerning problem.

      And yes, my mileage usually varies.

      Delete
    3. Those details have nothing to do with the larger argument.

      Did I say otherwise? Did TDH?

      Further, there have been demonstrations by activists following suicides by cop, especially when the victim was mentally ill and there was strong feeling that a better way should have been found to help the person who wound up dead.

      Really? When was this?

      That makes Christen's death an appropriate example because of the cycle, not because of the details of his case.

      Even assuming you can back up your claim, was there a "better way" that the cop could have taken in Christen's case?


      But even if Somerby did find one example that contradicted that cycle, why is it that one example can negate the entire premise?

      It doesn't. Do you really not understand TDH's complaint?

      Somerby raises this particular example in order to negate Lowery's claims (which are about Noor, as mh discusses below).

      And you know this how? Talking to Somerby?

      There are enough that do fit to make this a concerning problem.

      True. Nobody contests this.

      And yes, my mileage usually varies.

      You should get that checked out because I don't think you're firing on all cylinders.

      Delete
    4. It is obvious that Somerby considers Christen's case to be a criticism of Lowery because Somerby raised that case and then criticizes Lowery. Do you think he is talking about Christen for his health?

      Delete
    5. 'TDH in his usual, charming but obsessive way, is criticizing a reporter for getting the facts wrong. '

      TDH in his usual Trumptard way is nitpicking and cherry picking so he can attack liberals and defend his Orange Messiah.

      Delete
    6. Of course it's a criticism of Lowery, Anonymous @5:25P. Lowery got his facts wrong by making Christen's shooting part of the frame for his article's "gruesome cycle."

      It's possible to argue that the error is so slight that it's not worth considering or it's possible to twist yourself into an mh-shaped pretzel and say it's not an error at all. I don't see any other good-faith arguments in opposition.

      As always, YMMV.

      Delete
    7. @deadrat
      An error? Lowery’s examples included a Native American, a white man, a white woman, and three black men killed in Minnesota at the hands of police. He is clearly saying these are representative of a cycle (shooting/protest/reform). Noor’s greatest concern is the killing of unarmed black people at the hands of police, but that doesn’t mean the others aren’t part of a troubling cycle. How hard is this to understand?

      Delete
    8. How hard is it to understand that Christen's death isn't part of a cycle?

      Delete
    9. Deadrat, in California, there are protests when homeless and mentally ill people are killed by police, just as there are BLM protests. I can't speak about what happens elsewhere, but there is strong feeling that the police should be better trained when dealing with people who are deaf, autistic and otherwise different, as well, because encounters with police are often dangerous for such people too.

      So, yes, Christen's death can be part of a cycle too, because there is public protest whenever a needless and preventable death occurs. Just as there was protest after Sandra Bland died in custody, even though her death was a suicide (with no cop involved).

      You are being excessively literal again.

      Delete
    10. Perhaps. I'll have to reconsider my position. But I think there's a world of difference between the deaths that might be prevented if our social structures were better aligned to the humane and those deaths that are definitely caused by individual callous neglect or malign behavior. Not to the victims of course, but to people who want to change things.

      If only because the solutions are as different as the problems.

      TDH might be right or wrong on the issue, and I might be right or wrong in defending him, but my objection still stands to nonsense like TDH is trying to "negate" all of Lowery's claims because TDH thinks Lowery is a sloppy reporter.

      Delete
  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  8. I live in a predominantly white, well-armed neighborhood with security gates and patrols in a solid red state....

    All double-wides, I assume.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Here’s the key to Lowery’s piece:

    Noor soon became intimately familiar with the gruesome cycle: The police killed someone. Activists protested. Small reforms were won. The police killed someone else…”

    Lowery is telling the story from the point of view of Noor, and, by extension, other black lives matter activists.

    They see it as a “gruesome cycle” of killings “by police.”

    In this case, Noor, being a resident of Minneapolis, saw these events as they were reported in her local media. But there were others that she heard about, that Somerby fails to mention: Philando Castile and Justine Damond. (Damond was a white woman killed by a black police officer who got 12 years in prison for the killing.) A couple of incidents outside Minnesota are also mentioned.

    Somerby objects or seems to object to viewing these incidents as connected, or part of a pattern, and he seems to object to saying the killings were done by “the police” instead of, presumably, by individual police officers.

    That constitutes his main concern with Lowery’s piece. But his piece conveys the thinking of BLM activists, who do see a pattern and do view “the police” as a kind of tribal entity.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The word "cycle" is inappropriate. It seems to imply that killings led to protests by activists, which led to small reforms, which led to more killings, etc. The first two steps look OK, but certainly not the last one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You added the last one yourself, David.

      Delete
  11. Yes, we saw that enthusiasm in Tulsa, where the rally was a miserable flop.

    ReplyDelete
  12. So now Democrats are sneering at people who live in low-cost housing? Does that include public housing? It doesn't take much for these people to reveal themselves. They are mentally warped and morally bankrupt and to a person feign compassion to grift and obtain power for its own sake.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Low cost housing? Those tricked-out double-wides in @3:05P's imaginary neighborhood don't come cheap.

    And I may be mentally warped and morally bankrupt, but I've got a lifetime pass on criticism from anybody who voted for Trump.

    ReplyDelete

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