NYT Perp Walks a Bronx Neighborhood

by Josmar Trujillo

“Sources” gave NY1 reporter Dean Meminger (Twitter, 9/29/19) an entirely inaccurate account of a NYPD “friendly fire” incident.

Two people died in a hail of bullets last weekend in the Bronx. One, a plainclothes New York City police officer, Brian Mulkeen; the other, Antonio Williams, accused of wrestling with the cop and possessing a weapon. It turned out to be the second case this year of a fatal so-called “friendly fire” incident, but the New York Times took its cue from law enforcement officials in shaping the early narrative around “gang violence”—impugning an entire neighborhood in the process.

In the early hours of Sunday morning (9/29/19), reporters began to post on social media about a police response to a shooting at the Edenwald Houses in the Bronx. “Sources” (almost assuredly unnamed police sources) told a Spectrum News NY1 reporter that “cops saw someone suspicious, approached him & he opened fire on them.” This was false.

As the police-led investigation continued, reports came in that Officer Mulkeen was possibly killed by his own gun during a struggle with Williams, whom plainclothes cops had reportedly chased behind the Edenwald Houses (CBS 2, 9/29/19). The implication was that Williams, the “shooting suspect,” had shot Mulkeen with the officer’s own gun.

Williams, we now know, didn’t shoot anyone.  All of the guns that were fired belonged either to Mulkeen or other police officers, not unlike a similar incident in February when an NYPD detective was killed in a barrage of 40 gunshots from cops responding to a robbery in Queens.

Despite the NYPD not releasing body cam footage that apparently captured some of what happened in this latest shooting, media reported that Mulkeen was yelling “he’s reaching for it!” in the video—ostensibly Williams reaching for a gun. Although he was accused of possessing a gun that was never fired, it’s still not clear Williams ever held a gun.

And yet as details continued to unfold (albeit through the police department, which controls the investigation, as the public should keep in mind), the Times put its spotlight not on what happened, but where it happened. You see, Edenwald Houses, like most public housing developments in New York City, has been deemed gang territory by the NYPD, despite growing criticism (including from myself ) about how the police loosely place the “gang ” label on communities of color, more specifically black communities.

The New York Times (9/29/19) later dropped “violence” from the headline, perhaps because the project in question has had a murder rate of zero for the past two years.

In an early teaser headline, the New York Times described the incident as a cop being killed in a neighborhood “struggling with gang violence.” The main story headline was changed from “Police Officer Killed in Bronx Project Scarred by Gang Violence” and then to “Police Officer Killed in Bronx Project Scarred by Gangs” (9/29/19). Perhaps the Times dropped “struggling” and “violence” because data shows Edenwald Houses has had very little.

Still, the Times readership was told that Edenwald was “plagued by gang violence despite military-style gang sweeps aimed at ending the bloodshed.” But was Edenwald actually plagued by gang violence? The housing development had zero murders this year and the year before, and has had only one shooting in that span, according to the most recent figures. The big statistic presented by reporters Ashley Southall, Ali Watkins and Jan Ransom was that the NYPD’s 47th precinct, which includes Edenwald, had seen shootings go up from last year. But the precinct covers a much broader area than Edenwald—it’s about five square miles—and it was not explained if those shootings were gang-related or not.

Reporters can apparently connect “gangs” to any and all violence as long as it happens in gang territory, which, notably, is a designation that only police are empowered to make—and one they impose on almost every predominantly black neighborhood.

A CUNY Law report revealed the devastating 2016 federal “gang” sweep had mostly ensnared people not accused of violence, half of whom weren’t even accused of being gang members (FAIR, 4/16/19). But describing it as “aimed at ending the bloodshed” makes the operation sound like virtuous policing and prosecution, not controversial at all, doesn’t it?

(For a more comprehensive and less police-friendly version of the #Bronx120 gang sweep, watch the short documentaries Trouble Finds You and Raided.)

When cops parade someone who’s been arrested in front of reporters, cops and reporters alike call it a “perp walk”  (Extra!, 7–8/99). What the New York Times did was essentially put the Edenwald Houses through a media perp walk, by insinuating to its readers that not only was Edenwald infested by gang violence, but that it had something to do with Officer Mulkeen’s death. The Times sprinkled the word “gang” eight times into its story, dedicating multiple paragraphs to strike home the gang theme–though it wasn’t even clear that Williams was a gang member.

This was the same type of fast-and-loose reporting that earlier led to the 2016 gang sweep, which was billed as the biggest gang takedown in the history of New York City. FAIR’s Adam Johnson (5/2/16) explained how media worked back then to tag dozens of mostly black young men as “gangbangers” on the say-so of the police department.

A day after Mulkeen and Williams were killed, the follow-up Times story (9/30/19) was more restrained in mentioning gangs, as it became clear that Mulkeen was killed by his fellow officers. Still, the early reporting underscores some fundamental flaws in our perception of gangs (which, yes, do exist) and criminal justice reporting more broadly: Media are too easily fascinated when the word “gang” is floated by police, and overly dependent on law enforcement for information.

What can be described as “police say” journalism is prevalent across mainstream media. Reporters pepper entire news stories with “law enforcement officials say,” “according to police,” “law enforcement officials tell us,” “according to police,” or other indications that they are passing along information provided by police. And because the police version of events is often the first, it’s likely to stick in the minds of the public.

Some will argue that this is unavoidable, but the effects of blurring the line between cops and media hits communities of color hardest. Running From Cops, for example, a six-part podcast that examined the long-running television show Cops, shows how media through the lens of law enforcement “portrays hard-luck communities and communities of color as more characterized by criminality than they actually are, and…reinforces conceptions of certain groups as being distinctly delinquent” (Vulture, 5/19).

Blurring the line between cops and media isn’t new to the New York Times. Their longtime police reporter and former police bureau chief Al Baker (who wrote a series of crime stories featuring “gang” violence) is now an NYPD spokesperson.

For the residents of the Edenwald Houses in the Bronx, the cop-on-cop bloodshed over the weekend may be a prelude to, of all things, more policing. Gang-focused reporting (further buoyed by media support for gang databases) could even pave the way for police to execute another sweep, like in 2016, leading to even more arrests and prosecutions under a media-enabled banner of fighting gangs.

You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] (or via Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Featured image: New York Times depiction of the Edenwald neighborhood in the Bronx.