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Reporting on crime
?Every week, dozens of reports enter our e-mail in-basket from the good people at the Durham Region Police Service. Some of them tell about various community programs in which the police participate, several of them will relate the facts about traffic accidents which the members have attended, but most of them give details on crimes which have recently occured in the region, or past ones in which arrests have been made.
Being a pretty Uxbridge-centric publication, the first thing we do upon receiving these e-mails is to quickly scan them for any possible local connection. In the vast majority of cases, there is none, so we hit the “delete” key.
We are, of course, fortunate to live in a fairly low-crime environment up here on the Moraine. Many of us may have made the decision to make this our home partly for that reason. There is a bothersome amount of petty crime such as vandalism, which threatens property more than it does the safety of us or our children. But very rarely do shots ring out (as they did a few years back in Coral Creek) or brazen robberies occur (such as have happened at Mac’s Milk, Rutledge Jewellers or PACE Credit Union in recent memory). When they do, they make us wary for a while, but we soon happily settle back into a blissful existence where we walk the streets at night unconcerned or leave our doors unlocked while we pop out for groceries.
Because of that low crime rate, the Cosmos spends very little of its editorial space on crime reporting. Community newspapers down in Oshawa or Ajax have reporters whose entire “beat” is crime and the courts; they get to know their police contacts very well. But if we hired a reporter for that beat alone, she would spend most of her time twiddling her thumbs.
Despite the infrequency of crime stories in these pages, however, it’s important that we have a policy on how we’re going to treat them. And our policy is this: that we will give you only the facts, but we will give you as many facts as we can. In a small community such as ours, rumour can be very destructive and very misleading, and particularly where criminal charges are involved. Our job as we see it is to eliminate those rumours as much as possible by telling as much of the story as we can.
Which brings us to the story on page 10. Because the woman charged is in this instance a fairly well-known member of the community, some readers might think we should withhold her name. We don’t know if that’s why another regional newspaper did exactly that, even though the police news release divulged it.
The name of the woman charged is an important fact in the story; we see no reason to withhold it if the police think it’s appropriate to release it, and plenty of reasons to release it if we’re given permission. We think our readers are aware enough to realize that just because the woman has been charged, does not mean she is guilty. If she is later exonerated, we’ll be very happy to tell you so.
In the case of traffic accidents, we will publish no pictures, and usually spare you the gory details. But where crime is concerned, it’s our duty to give you the facts as they emerge. You can consider that a promise.
