Today the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on racism in Decatur, Ga. (AJC article is behind the paper’s paywall.) The article was published seven months after I emailed and texted Atlanta and Decatur reporters and bloggers about black men being racially profiled by Decatur police during a summer 2013 “crime wave.” None of my emails or texts received replies.
iMessage, David Rotenstein to Creative Loafing news editor Thomas Wheatley, July 18, 2013.
After I wrote an article critical of local media for ignoring the issue, it was killed by the editor of a regional blog. I emailed him once the new racial profiling allegations emerged and he replied, “Just guessing, but when this becomes a story, it will get covered.” In my opinion, it was a story last July. Had the AJC or Creative Loafing or the local AOL Patch covered it, perhaps Don Denard and other African American men might have been spared the humiliation of Decatur’s version of stop and frisk.
Here’s what I wrote back in July 2013:
The [AJC] cannot spare a reporter’s time to return emails sent after a reader learned about racial profiling in Decatur during a recent crime wave that seemed to piggyback on coverage of the Florida case where George Zimmerman was on trial for killing teen Trayvon Martin.
Last week I received a call from a Decatur resident I had interviewed in 2012 for an urban history project. He was returning a call I had made to him about reviewing video clips that a national history organization was planning to release on the web.
During the call he described an incident the week before. He is a 47-year-old African American man and Decatur native who lives in the city’s rapidly gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood. He told me that he had been driving home in his 1970s-vintage car along a residential street when a Decatur police cruiser passed him traveling in the opposite direction. The police officer made a U-turn and then followed the man for about ¼-mile, through two turns, to the man’s home.
After the resident pulled into his driveway, the officer made another U-turn and drove a short way beyond the man’s home where he stopped and began entering information into the cruiser’s computer. The man assumed it was his license plate and address and the man assumed that he had just been profiled because he was a black man driving an older, not-so-shiny car through a neighborhood that was experiencing a spike in home break-ins and armed robberies.
I emailed the AJC: a reporter who covers DeKalb County and the general tip line. No response. I texted a Creative Loafing reporter. No response. Both papers had reported on the crime wave and the impacts it was having on Decatur’s white residents, the people who were being robbed and assaulted. I figured they would be interested in reporting on how Decatur’s disadvantaged African American residents were being impacted by the same crime wave – something back when I was covering local news I would have pounced on as newsworthy.
A generation ago, Atlanta could boast of having great newspapers and a pathbreaking broadcast news outfit: CNN. Now the city is left with cable news that is a caricature of its earlier self and newspapers that are easily scanned and discarded into recycle bins. Atlanta is a city with a proud news reporting legacy yet its journalism institutions are sliding down a slippery slope of irrelevance.
Earlier this month I asked Dan Whisenhunt, aka “Decaturish,” to rethink how he was reporting on race issues in the city. Here’s the reply I got:
Reprint any of this and I will pursue legal action. Quit contacting me. If you don’t like my work, then don’t read it. I am going to take steps to file a harassing communications charge and seek a restraining order if you continue to bother me. This will be the last communication I expect to receive from you. Any subsequent communications will be reported to the authorities.
Kudos to the AJC for finally reporting on Decatur’s race problem.
Journalism. It ain’t what it used to be.
© 2014 D.S. Rotenstein
Shortlink for this post: https://wp.me/p1bnGQ-2sN