Mark Obbie's Blog, page 17
September 25, 2014
Shooting stats all a muddle
News coverage of yesterday’s release of an FBI report on “active shooter incidents” generally failed an important test: whether journalists know enough, or are conscientious enough, to put the numbers in necessary context. The issue? The FBI did not discover a rise in mass killings. Instead, its report focused on “active shooters,” a law enforcement […]
September 24, 2014
“A tremendous burden”
ProPublica’s Lois Beckett expands on her valuable Essence magazine feature story on post-traumatic stress disorder (which I blogged about here) in a Google hangout video chat with Aireana, the woman whose trauma she focused on in the story. Beckett’s focus — a response to what she rightly calls the “tremendous burden” on African-Americans in high-crime neighborhoods […]
More than just an anecdote
Punishment is so central to our criminal-justice system, so ingrained in us as a culture, that we rarely stop to question why it serves as the only justice offered to crime victims — and what else they need that they don’t get from the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of the person who hurt them. That’s […]
September 23, 2014
On the nightstand: Tuesday, 9/23/14
Today’s good reads in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on longform narrative stories on crime and original reporting on crime victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Robert Mentzer took a chance event — a recent parolee walks into the newsroom and wants to talk to a reporter — and turned it into a compelling […]
September 19, 2014
On the nightstand: Friday, 9/19/14
Today’s good reads in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on longform narrative stories on crime and original reporting on crime victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Tom Junod brings his original writing style — and a vast amount of original reporting — to a question we always ask after a mass shooting: How could […]
September 17, 2014
On the nightstand: Wednesday, 9/17/14
Today’s good reads in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on longform narrative stories on crime and original reporting on crime victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Nathaniel Penn gives voice to 23 men who tell of being raped while they served in the military, and how the military failed them. Interspersed among the quotes are […]
“Technicality” rides again
I’ve ranted before about the lame journalistic shorthand that blows off explaining the law with the phrase “on a technicality.” It is, by my way of thinking, one of the worst sins of legal reporting because it looks only at the practical result of what a court did. If we didn’t know better, we’d have […]
September 16, 2014
Closeup of Stewart case DA
I don’t pretend to have inside dope on the Tony Stewart case as it heads to a county grand jury. I’ve done no reporting of my own on it, and know nothing about the sport other than what I read in this excellent day-after racing-savvy analysis of the law as it might apply in this case […]
September 14, 2014
Two ways to react to a terrible crime
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the work of leading criminologist David Kennedy, of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control and its National Network for Safe Communities. Kennedy devised a method of intervening in gang violence and drug markets that has proven dramatically effective in several crime-ridden cities. Last week I visited the Los Angeles Police […]
On the nightstand: Sunday, 9/14/14
Today’s good reads in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on longform narrative stories on crime and original reporting on crime victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Sara Bernard wrote the Alaska story everyone should be talking about. Not the one about the Palins. This is about rape culture in remote northern Alaska, where victims […]
