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mekka okereke :verified: | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @3bd57d4d 

If someone has lied to you hundreds of times before and you found out after the fact, you should not just believe them the next time they give you a statement and print it as fact. This concept is not complicated.

Journalists stating that they cannot corroborate the information yet, and that their source is unreliable and a known liar, is also not complicated.

I'm not going to waste time pretending that it's difficult to find *hundreds* of cases of police having lied to journalists.
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mekka okereke :verified: | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @3bd57d4d 

Tomorrow, if Minneapolis cops said that a Black man went into "medical distress" and died of "natural causes or a drug overdose," every major newspaper in the US would print their statement unquestioningly.🤦🏿‍♂️

Even though they know that the 1st statement cops give after an incident is usually a lie. Even though they know that this is the 1st statement that MPD issued after George Floyd:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210331182901/https://www.insidempd.com/2020/05/26/man-dies-after-medical-incident-during-police-interaction/

So yeah, Black folk not trusting US news reporting about us, is rational.
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Jonathan D. Cope, Esq. | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @af2dd916 Just on a personal note, not only do I never give credence to a newspaper article reporting the police, I never assume the truth of the statements in a police report. I could tell you stories, but that's another story .  .  .  .
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mekka okereke :verified: | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @3bd57d4d 

Same!

But that's not good enough for me. Because most white people in this country do believe these lies printed about Black folk. And there are a lot of these white people. And they vote. So the disinformation is very effective.

Yes, I want more people to be able to see through the disinformation. But I also want the disinformation to not exist.
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Jonathan D. Cope, Esq. | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @af2dd916 Your preaching to the choir. Amen.
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Jonathan D. Cope, Esq. | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @af2dd916 I'm not particularly disagreeing with you. I base my comments on my experiences from reading countless offense reports, cross-examining or deposing police officers and preparing them to testify when I was a prosecutor. I've represented newspapers and discussed these very issues. For them it's largely an issue of money. But, you raise some interesting issues about how police action is reported. Perhaps they should report on police action like they do Trump's actions.