True crime

Finally someone gets it.

This week, I hope that you read Elon Green’s excellent “The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime” over at the Appeal. It is largely about how segregation in journalism and in publishing created a genre that focuses largely on white criminals and almost entirely on white victims. The humanity and empathy at the core of the true crime genre is reserved for white people, and the stories involved are often not even based in fact, but in law enforcement fantasy. For example:

In 2006, when Slate’s Joel Anderson was working for the Shreveport Times, he took over the night cops beat. His white, female predecessor was friendly with the police, who noted that Anderson wasn’t as pretty. As part of his orientation, he was pressured to do a ride-along. “I had no interest in doing any of that shit,” says Anderson. It would soon be clear to him that police have a version of events that sometimes conflicts with the victim’s and the accused’s versions. It wasn’t his job to figure out which party was most credible. Cops, Anderson was told, were “the guardians of the truth.” To approach the beat any other way was to do it wrong.

Anderson, who was soon reassigned to city government, realized incident reports were, at best, subjective post facto versions of events, and “not necessarily a reflection of what happened.” (In 2015, it should be noted, the district attorney overseeing Shreveport’s county, Caddo Parish, said Louisiana should “kill more people.”)

More than once I’ve tried to jump on the true crime (podcast) bandwagon, only to recoil at the callousness with which most hosts/writers/journalists treat the subject. It’s all about relating the narrative as some objective “truth,” everything is black and white (mostly hwite), people are good or evil, they are guilty or they are innocent.

I was drawn to working in criminal law precisely because none of this is really true. “Crime” is a social construct that doesn’t overlap particularly well with most people’s moral values (people are arrested for marijuana, they are arrested for taking food or clothes from wealthy retail corporations, they are arrested because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and their skin is not white).

Further, the “truth” of what happened in the past is often completely unknowable, and the criminal legal system is more or less an exercise in a group of people determining the probability that one thing or the other happened. Innocent is completely irrelevant to the conversation in the criminal legal system: there’s guilty, and there’s something less than guilty. Mostly, even that distinction is irrelevant—and there are only degrees of coercion to force an acceptance of guilt.

I, like everyone else, listened week after week to the first season of the Serial podcast. Unlike most people, I thought it was terrible. It enraged me. The entire premise of the show is that there are a lot of holes in the case against Adnan Syed. He went to jail for decades based on flimsy evidence. There was all this hand wringing for weeks about whether he was innocent or not, but no one ever said that the fact that he wasn’t obviously guilty should be enough. In our system, you are not supposed to be in jail unless the case against you is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Serial brought up nothing but doubts, week after week, and no one bothered to spend time on the fact that doubt alone should be enough not to put a teenager in a cage and throw away the key.

Anyway, Elon’s story is great, please go give it a read.

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