As part of our continuing effort to help the public understand why we do things the way we do, East Cobb News is running a short feature on an occasional basis that will give you a better understanding of what goes behind some of our news coverage.
It’s called East Cobb News Explainer, and we’ll start with a subject that we hear from readers about quite a bit: Crime incidents.
What we publish about those incidents, arrests, indictments and trials comes from a variety of sources: what police and prosecutors send/tell us, what readers ask us to check out and what we look into on a deeper level, beyond an arrest warrant or press release.
The availability of public records has been a factor in this coverage as well, especially with online access more commonplace to the general public.
East Cobb News has a few policies that guide our coverage that we want to stress to our readers: We do not publish mug shots based on early crime reports, and in publishing information about an incident or arrest, we attribute where we get that information.
The only exceptions are in the case of a suspect at-large whom law enforcement considers a serious threat to public safety. Those instances are rare.
This is important to clarify because of the principle of due process: Anyone charged with any crime, or who is even issued a traffic ticket, is presumed innocent. It is up to the state to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. A charge or an arrest isn’t an admission of anything; it’s a claim that has to be proven in court.
In the days before online media, newspapers and TV stations routinely ran mug shots of just about anyone arrested for a crime—many of those outlets still do, including in metro Atlanta.
But our policy at East Cobb News is to refrain from publishing mug shots unless or until someone accused of a crime is convicted or pleads guilty and is sentenced.
We can get mug shots with a simple open records request, but with the advent of “mug shot mills” in the digital age, that’s content that’s easily abused. Some years ago the Georgia legislature passed a law banning local jails from posting mug shots on their websites.
Unscrupulous entities scarf up those mug shots, post them on their sites and then extort the suspects who want the photos taken down—at a steep price. Images live forever online, and that was the understandable rationale behind that prohibition.
Unfortunately, state lawmakers are using that to justify a bill now in the Georgia General Assembly that would further limit public information about crime incidents in their communities.
SB 482 would restrict public access even to some basic arrest information, and the Senate has already passed the bill (you can read it here).
The bill states that:
“When a person requests a booking photograph, he or she shall request such photograph by identifying the first and last name of the individual in the photograph and submit a notarized statement affirming that the use of such photograph is in compliance with subsection (c) of this Code section.”
The underline there is mine. This provision also would apply to body camera footage, content that is all the rage in our video-obsessed time and which police gladly post on their own social media channels when it’s favorable to them.
This proposal goes too far, and The Augusta Press gets it right in this editorial arguing why this is not a good bill. It’s worrisome to think about what might be next.
Citizens have a right to know whom their law enforcement agencies are arresting, charging, indicting and trying and why. Go after the mug shot grifters, to be sure, but don’t prevent the broad public from knowing via responsible media outlets.
In Sandy Springs, city officials are being sued by a local news organization for refusing to produce full crime incident reports and other public records in a case that has dragged on for nearly three years.
Even in Cobb County, basic arrest warrants that we see sometimes have scant information. In responding to our request for information last week on a carjacking incident, Cobb Police issued only a brief statement, saying they had no suspects.
When we followed up to ask if they had a description of the suspect(s) and the car that was stolen, they didn’t respond, nor did they explain why they didn’t let the public know that there’s an alleged carjacker on the loose.
It’s important to treat all these cases with care, and when we publish a report like the above, we attribute everything to the source. We can’t, and don’t, take something someone else sees on social media, or hears through the grapevine, and just slap it on our site.
We have to verify it first, and publish only what we know to be true. It’s easy to assume guilt, and police have to conduct their investigations.
What to publish about crime reports and how has always been a delicate balance, and drawing that line is becoming more difficult.
Please reach out to us to explain how we give you East Cobb News. E-mail us at editor@eastcobbnews.com.
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- Police: Suspect in East Cobb carjacking ‘not identified’
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