A 14-Year Old Girl, A Killer Cop, and the New York Times
Police killings inspire a special kind of copaganda.
Yesterday, news broke that the family of 14-year-old Valentina Orellana Peralta is suing the LAPD after an officer shot and killed her while she was trying on a dress in a changing room at Burlington Coat Factory.
The occasion provides a window to examine the reaction of the New York Times, whose coverage about the shooting remains one of the most egregious examples of copaganda that I’ve ever analyzed. As you read below, pay attention specifically to how the New York Times allowed police union lawyers and the department to spin the initial public narrative in the hours and days after the shooting—a period always critical to public perceptions—to help frame major decisions about criminal and civil liability and to paint the cop in a sympathetic light. It appears to have worked: to this day, the officer has yet to face any criminal consequences and appears to still be on paid vacation.
Perhaps more importantly, how the New York Times covers police violence is disturbing because even when it (infrequently) covers rampant police violence, it covers the stories as isolated individual incidents without the important context that would allow the public to understand the issue. Sometimes, like here, it’s just downright false. Here I dissect the paper’s two amazing articles on Valentina’s death in detail.
As an initial matter, many people pointed out the headlines about a mysterious bullet that killed a 14-year-old girl. Here was the NYT headline from the day of the shooting:
A week later, after a significant time to choose how it might cover this story, the NYT published a longer article that was a sensitive portrait of the cop who killed her, this time with the headline: “Officer Whose Bullet Killed a 14-Year-Old Girl Wanted to ‘Change’ the Police.”
The articles linked above point out all the myriad problems with headlines that subtly blame the bullet for Valentina’s death. These subtleties matter a lot for people’s visceral reactions to how violent the institution of U.S. policing is. But I want to focus here on the articles themselves, because they are incredible.
First, here is some background: An LAPD cop killed two people with an assault rifle in a Burlington Coat Factory, including a 14-year-old girl who was trying on a dress. These killings were part of a series of police murders in Los Angeles in 2021. I mention this because neither of the two NYT articles chose to mention the pattern of LAPD killings. In fact, LAPD shot 5 people that very same week before Christmas Eve that it killed Valentina. This is notable because, unlike with the paper’s coverage of low-level crimes by the poor, the paper actively avoided using terms like “surge” or “wave” to describe the large increase in Los Angeles police killings, and did not even suggest to readers that this incident was part of a recent pattern or historical reality of extreme rates of policing killings in Los Angeles. These are editorial choices.
Second as always with the New York Times, you cannot understand what it is doing without looking at its sources. Here are the entirety of the sources in the first NYT article by Michael Levenson about police shooting and killing Valentina:
The police said
The police said
The police said
Assistant police chief
Assistant police chief
Police chief
Assistant police chief
Assistant police chief
Assistant police chief
Assistant police chief
Attorney General
Burlington Coat Factory
And here are the sources New York Times reporters Jill Cowan, Giulia Heyward and Christine Chung chose to educate readers in its longer, primary article about Valentina’s killing after a week of reporting, in order:
Spokesperson for police union
Police union lawyer for the cop who killed Valentina (humanizing, defending him)
Person mentored by the killer cop
New person mentored by the killer cop
Attorney General
Professor (former cop, but this fact not disclosed)
Lawyer for Valentina’s family
Police union lawyer for the cop (again, twice more)
As always with the New York Times, ask yourself: Whose voices are prioritized? Who benefits from their point of view being presented as news? Was anyone with an opposing viewpoint critical of the punishment bureaucracy included? How did the reporter choose which voices to quote and which to ignore?
The second NYT article is one of the more problematic pieces of mainstream media I’ve read. The article is full of police union false information and goes out of its way to paint a sympathetic portrait of the officer who killed Valentina, ignoring actual facts that other media outlets chose to report.
To do that, the New York Times gives the first two and last two positions—the most important in the article—to the police union and to the lawyer for the killer cop, giving them an opportunity to spin the narrative. This privileging of cop misinformation by the Times is particularly shocking because the very last line of the article—defending the cop for following training and procedures when he killed the girl—is false, although the paper doesn’t fact check it or tell readers that experts disagree.
In fact, while the New York Times ignores it and even tells readers that the cop was just “following their training and procedure,” other media outlets noted that the cop who killed Valentina actually disobeyed the commands of the other officers on scene. What possible journalistic reason could there be to omit these facts but allow the police union lawyer to say the opposite? It’s worth comparing how the Times covered it with the link in this paragraph showing local journalists who actually just told readers what the various videos of the incident actually show minute by minute.
Then things get weirder. The New York Times trots out an expert. This expert is a Bowling Green State professor who we are told by the NYT “studies police violence.” His opinion is sympathetic to the cop, laying the groundwork for a narrative about how hard the case is to prove against the cop because the cop was in a chaotic situation.
What doesn’t the Times say? First: the “expert” professor is a former cop! This is part of a pattern I’ve noted in the New York Times to launder pro-cop viewpoints through neutral “professors” without telling readers:
Second, note that the New York Times specifically chose this "expert" to float talking point that convicting this cop would be hard in this case. It offered no contrary expert, even though many exist. It’s subtle, but the news can shape what we think simply by limiting the range of views to which we are exposed.
This is how police union spin is made through huge, expensive PR departments that taxpayers fund. The New York Times also doesn't tell readers about massive police marketing budgets in Los Angeles used after police shootings! It’s inconceivable to me that news editors do not find it relevant to tell readers that the LAPD employs at least 25 full-time PR staff as part of an operation that immediately mobilizes after shootings like this to shape stories, connect reporters to “experts,” and limit which facts are reported to the public.
But it gets much worse. The core of the article is a sympathetic profile of a “good guy” cop who loves children and the community. And the story of Valentina’s killing is told as an isolated random tragedy that happened to a good guy—not part of a historical and recent alarming orgy of police violence in LA. The NYT chose to print this article without a single source who has a critical take on systemic police violence. It is entirely devoid of anyone making systemic critiques about police violence or connecting this to deeper structural issues about our society’s investments. The New York Times does what a lot of prominent media does: it finds examples of “good cops” doing things like taking presents to kids or playing sports with troubled youth. It’s part of a massive copaganda effort to create the myth of the “good cop.”
Then things get even more bizarre. The New York Times portrays the cop's Twitter profile as caring about racial justice and mentoring kids as the killer cop tries to “confront head-on the issues of racism and policing.” This is a stunning misreading of the killer cop's tweets. Other journalists who dug into the cop's tweets showed consistent apology for violence. His twitter is deranged, pro-police union nonsense. He repeatedly defends police brutality and uses pro-Trump talking points, including voter suppression and strange fascist mythologies. I hate to do this, but I think the force of these points just can’t be understood unless you read the NYT piece alongside another better piece by local journalists. I sincerely hope NYT editors will take the time to do this.
Notice how the local journalists more accurately describe the shooting. That is just an example of good journalism. The facts of the video are devastating and reflect an unhinged reaction by the cop, who disobeyed what every other cop on scene instructed. The local article quotes an expert who says the shooting “never should have happened.” NYT reporters chose to ignore that.
But what the New York Times did is even more sinister. The article portrays the cop as a "community policing"-focused crusader against racism and police brutality and as a paragon of LAPD's "community policing" efforts, but it gives none of the background on the violence of "community policing." "Community policing" like this is standard counterinsurgency developed by colonial military forces to pacify native populations (particularly in Africa and Asia), brought strategically into the U.S. under the marketing banner of “community policing.”
In fact, residents of Los Angeles impacted by LAPD violence had *just produced* a comprehensive report on the history of “community policing” in Los Angeles. The facts are nearly the opposite of the rosy picture the New York Times portrays. It is one of the great contemporary community-based histories and analyses of police violence and who benefits from it, but it’s exactly the kind of compelling, rigorous perspective excluded by the NYT. In this way, year after year, the paper allows police to launder some of the most brutal systemic police violence as some kind of well-meaning reform.
At the end of the day, setting aside the most blatant misinformation and spin, the article's core premise is dangerous. We can't understand police violence by delving into the personal motivations and character of the cop who shoots a girl, or by quoting the openly fascist cop union, or by giving the cop’s lawyer space to workshop a defense. That’s not important news. It’s propaganda. We can only understand this systemic violence by giving people the broader historical and contemporary context, critical perspective on the role of police, and facts that can enable them to understand why, despite decades of “police reform” and a summer of uprisings in 2020, police shot more people in 2021 than 2020 or ever before.
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This post was built from a Twitter thread published on January 4, 2022.
Wonderful, educational piece for me. Every time you imply ‘It gets worse’ it really does!! Thank you Alex
The graph is compelling. As well as your list of sources.