I spotted this article while reading theTimes’s front page over my kid brother’s shoulder and knew I’d have to bookmark it. And read it. More than once — perhaps a dozen times.
In about 20 hours, I will become the night cops beat reporter for theStatesman Journal. It’s not a position I’d expected, to be honest — normally three-month internships would involve more general assignments, which I’ll still be doing. But Stacey’s leaving for Florida tomorrow, and you can’t run a daily newspaper without someone keeping an ear on the police scanner all evening.
Stacey Barchenger was my age when she took this job. Back then she didn’t know any more about law enforcement and criminal justice than I do. You wouldn’t know that if you’d watched her this past week, laughing on the phone with dispatchers, pounding out feature pieces on cold cases, and running out to crash sites like she’d been doing this all her life.
On Stacey’s last day this past Friday, just before I headed out the door, I finally asked her: “Were you scared when you first started out?”
“Yeah, of course I was. But you’ll learn by doing. You’ll pick it up in no time. And it’s an incredibly fun beat.”
“I heard someone say earlier that you’d had a rough time of it with some stories.”
“I did, yeah. It happens sometimes, though not very often. But the way I see it, people whose lives have been taken by other people? Their stories deserve to be told. They need to be told.”
It’s a sentiment I’d agree with wholeheartedly. If someone’s been violently ripped away from the world, the least we could do for that person is to humanize him or her — to make that person more than just a victim or a statistic. To let the community know just who and what it lost.
But it’s hard to look at a row of mugshots (taken for as many reasons as a law book can hold: meth possession? felony battery? aggravated murder? shoplifting? We’ve got it all, except maybe jaywalking, which isn’t on the books in Salem) and simply see a meth addict, an abuser, a murderer, a thief. That meth addict, abuser, murderer and thief are all people. People with mothers and fathers, maybe sons and daughters.
I wish the Timeshad provided a little more analysis in their piece on confessed criminals’ loved ones (what kind of services are available for them, if any? do any corrections departments in the United States have dealings with them beyond interviewing them for evidence?), but perhaps the stories of these people and their struggles were all that was needed, no further analysis necessary. I get the impression that the Timesmade a point to avoid one question in particular: Do you think he really did it?
“I hope you get more cynical on this job,” one future source told me last week. He was referring to recognizing meth-heads on the street (“if he looks like a meth-head, he’s a meth-head), but it’s about more than that. Yes, I’m a bit young and probably more than a bit naive. But I cannot forget that there’s always more than one side to a story.
And in this business, every player in a story is a human being.
Watching people recognize our apology brought me to tears many times. It was reconciliation personified.