Citation

Buckler K, Casas C, Gilmore EL. J. Crim. Justice Pop. Cult. 2021; 21(1): 16-40.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, University at Albany, School of Criminal Justice)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Use of force on and shootings of citizens by police officers received substantial national media attention in recent years, particularly since the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson incident that captured the nation's attention in 2014. The issue was reignited in the spring and summer of 2020 with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and Jacob Blake. Concurrently, several high-profile ambush-style shootings of police officers by citizens in New York City, Dallas, and Baton Rouge, for instance, have garnered national media coverage. Little attention in the academic literature has addressed how incidents of firearm related deaths and injuries from police-citizen interactions are covered by news media. The available studies are limited because, owing to difficulties in securing data from police departments, they utilize media databases to identify coverage rather than beginning the analysis with a list of events that occurred in a specific geographical jurisdiction. Additionally, the prior studies show a tendency to focus on media coverage of high-profile cases. Lastly, there is little to no attention in the extant literature on localized media coverage of these cases that occur in a specific urban jurisdiction. This study addresses these gaps in the literature by examining all police-citizen shooting events that occurred in Harris County, Texas (Houston), from September of 2015 through June of 2019 where a citizen or a police officer was killed or injured by firearm. News articles on each event that were published in the Houston Chronicle were collected and analyzed. The study examines the factors that make some of these events more or less newsworthy than others. Newsworthiness is conceptualized as case specific factors that make the case appear marketable to readership and as themes in national and grassroots coverage that enable a specific case to be linked to past items that appeared in the news.

Language: en