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Opening Arguments

Body count

This letter to the editor in The Indianapolis Star raises an interesting point:

Like many readers -- who I'm sure are tired of criminals turning the streets of Indianapolis and those of other Indiana cities and towns into killing fields -- I eagerly read the article in the Sept. 3 Star, "Man kills robbery suspect.''

While I didn't take pleasure in reading that a man was killed, despite his status as a violent criminal, I was dismayed to see that The Star chose to end the article with the statement that the man's death was the 98th homicide in Marion County this year.

[. . .]

Categorizing his death as no different than that of an innocent child killed in a drug-fueled drive by shooting is reprehensible.

I don't know if it's reprehensible, but it's sloppy reporting, and most of us in the media have been guilty of it at one time or another. While "homicide" might be defined in the dictionary as the simple taking of a human life, the word does have a broader connotation in the context of journalistic accounts of crime statistics. It conveys the idea of bad people doing harm to innocent victims -- when the raw numbers go up, we believe we have a greater problem to solve. But the simple number of "homicides" masks a much more complex pattern of interactions.

Comments

Steve Towsley
Thu, 09/07/2006 - 10:23pm

Unless the Star also includes in their total-homicides-this-year statistic all justified shootings by police, I would say the closing line of their article is indeed sloppy journalism.

If the Star wants to take issue with this point, I would simply ask them if they've ever written a World War II piece characterizing the Axis dead as homicides.

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