Without beat reporters, we don’t know what we don’t know

Since last Friday, I’ve been reporting on the story of the former mayor of a small town charged with 24 sex-related crimes, which have yet to be tested in court.

The story was broken independently by my own outlet and the Tyee on Friday. Shortly afterward, RCMP put out a media release confirming they had indeed arrested and released the ex-mayor nearly a month earlier, and they were now asking other potential victims to come forward.

Since then, a few people have asked me a variation of the question “don’t police always tell you who’s been arrested?” and the answer is no. They selectively choose which cases they wish to make public based on their own criteria. It’s not just a regular list they send out that media then reports on.

Although crime and court reporting are not my personal favourite things to do, I think it’s important people understand what role journalists, and especially journalists in your community play in letting you when things within the police and legal system happen that you may want to know about.

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Let’s start with the court. A lot of the time, in order to find out what is happening in a case and who’s been charged with what, you need to physically go to a court house to read documents and take notes. You cannot get them emailed to you. They are not posted online.

This is why someone like Mark Neilsen at the Prince George Citizen is so essential. He’s down at the Prince George court house daily, acting as a window into the justice system that doesn’t rely on anyone else to decide what the public finds out about.

Many aspects of what goes on in a trial can only be known by the wider public by having reporters sit in a room for hours at a time taking physical written notes and synthesizing them later for print. You can get rulings, but the nuance and details of testimony come from a person like Mark Neilsen being there day in and day out, acting as your eyes and ears. And fewer and fewer court houses across the country have Mark Neilsens these days.

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It’s the same with crime and emergency reporting. Much of what media– and, by extension, the public– find out comes by listening in on scanners or simply being in the city observing what is going on.

This is why you will see concerns raised by things like every emergency service in the Lower Mainland switching to encrypted channels that the public and media can’t listen in on. While there reasons behind the change, such as protecting patient names and addresses from being broadcast over public channels, there are also potential drawbacks.

For example, CTV News found that if not for media, residents near a large railyard fire in Port Coquitlam would have had to wait longer to find out what was going on:

“Telling residents near an enormous blaze would have been delayed by around 35 minutes if media weren’t able to listen to fire department communication, hear about the disaster, and inform viewers and readers through multiple channels.
“It’s not the only time official news of a major event has been delayed. The official word of the enormous crash on the Coquihalla Highway last week came at 9:16 a.m. – some 13 hours after it happened. It took the Richmond RCMP four days to tell the public about a fatality at a Richmond trampoline park, leaving some customers unaware of what happened.
“All of those events would have generated discussion on first responder radios, which have been monitored by media across North America for decades.”

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I read a joke recently about a small town that had no crime whenever the police communications officer was away. The joke being that the community had no local paper and therefore no one else who was providing this information to the public.

That’s the biggest challenge: we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what crimes aren’t being reported when the media communications officer is away. We don’t know that there is a thirteen hour delay in reporting a major crash until thirteen hours later. We don’t know police have opted not to reveal they’ve arrested the former mayor until media reports it.

They may have perfectly good reasons for all of this. But if we never find out, we never know we don’t know. And the fewer working beat journalists we have across the country, the more likely it is we never find out.