That was the first text I got on the morning of July 20. And my first thought was, “I’m really not in the mood to see a shooting today.”
I don’t know if it was premonition or the fact that sensational deaths have been such a regular occurrence lately, but either way, I was having a rough morning already and I dreaded the impending event I knew would occur the way most people dread seeing a “road work ahead” sign on the freeway at 5 p.m.
As subsequent texts came in I discovered it was a knife, not a gun, in the hand of the man who was standing at the corner of Broadway and Enos yelling at people, and then subsequently holding the knife to his own throat.
Then I got a text that simply read: OMG they shot him.
That was followed seconds later by various versions of the same text from others witnessing it in real time just feet away. For the people who had a front row seat and watched what happened unfold from beginning to end, the death of that man was astonishing. Many people captured the events in video but were nonetheless shocked by it.
As reporters we are somewhat jaded. We have to be; we see these things on a regular basis. I’ve seen my share of dead bodies, car wrecks, and police takedowns. I’ve sat alongside police with their guns drawn waiting for a barricaded suspect to leave a building, all in the effort of getting information out to an anxious, or scared, or simply curious audience. In essence, our jobs as reporters are to see those things and inform you about what’s going on. Those are not things that an average public should, or is prepared to, see.
The incident is significant for a number of reasons, all of which were immediately on the lips of the community as they processed it in its aftermath. Issues of mental health, race, police force, and police support were all discussed at length around the community. There were also conflicting reports about whether the man was suffering from mental illness. If he was, as police seemed to indicate in interviews, it underscores the shortcomings in our mental health system. If he wasn’t, as some media reports attribute the family as saying, then he was at least certainly mentally unstable at the time. A man that intent on harming himself likely wouldn’t refrain from harming someone else. No matter the diagnosis of his mental capacity at the time, it was overall a sad situation. And all of those issues surrounding it made it an important one to report on. But what about showing the man’s death to those who weren’t there?
As I watched the videos in the minutes immediately following the incident, my thoughts turned to the man’s family; did they know yet? Did he have children, and might they come across this? Would the public at large gain any value from actually watching this man repeatedly jab a knife in his belly prior to being shot by police versus reading or hearing about it from a news story? In a society conditioned by the internet to be hungry for information, the value in “putting it all out there” is certainly debated.
News media outlets were split on their coverage, with some airing or posting the most graphic of the footage and others refraining from doing so. Media have a responsibility to their audiences to gather and disseminate information while balancing what is newsworthy and what is sensationalism. Sadly, this won’t be the last time we have to weigh the value of what we share or how we share it.
The Canary sees too much. Brighten her day at canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 4, 2016.
