Why Does WaPo Protect Identities of Cops Who Tased a Shackled, Mentally Ill Woman Until She Died?

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http://fair.org/blog-entries/why-does-wapo-protect-identities-of-cops-who-tased-a-shackled-mentally-ill-woman-until-she-died/

Why Does WaPo Protect Identities of Cops Who Tased a Shackled, Mentally Ill Woman Until She Died?

by Jim Naureckas

Natasha McKennaThe Washington Post (4/11/15) ran a troubling story about an African-American woman who died after Fairfax County, Virginia, sheriff’s deputies repeatedly used a taser on her while she was already in shackles. The deputies administered four 50,000-volt shocks to Natasha McKenna, a prisoner at the Fairfax County jail who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, in an effort to force her into a chair for transport; minutes later, her heart stopped.

As law enforcement experts questioned by the Post noted, the incident raises questions about “why a taser was used on a restrained woman, how many times she was shocked and whether handling a mentally ill person with such force was the best approach.”

But the people who actually inflicted the shocks on McKenna were protected from such questions by the Post‘s reporting, because, as the article by Tom Jackman and Justin Jouvenal noted:

The Post is not naming the deputies involved because they are the subject of a criminal investigation and no ruling has been made on McKenna’s cause of death.

Regardless of whether the deputies are indicted or not, they are public employees under whose custody a community member died; it’s unclear why the public has no legitimate interest in knowing who they are.



As the Post knows, the criminal justice system shows great deference to law enforcement officers and sometimes fails to prosecute them even when the appearance of wrongdoing is overwhelming. Last year, the paper ran an editorial (9/5/14) about Fairfax County police shooting a man, John Geer, in the doorway of his home and allowing him to bleed to death without medical treatment; the editorial had noted that more than a year had gone by with no indictments or any official explanation of the incident. So the paper’s apparent willingness to wait for the official investigation to reveal to the public what it needs to know seems misplaced.

It’s not as though the Post has a blanket policy against revealing the names of people involved in suspicious deaths. In 2012, the paper ran an editorial (11/26/12) about a death of a toddler, Prince McLeod Rams. “The cause of Prince’s death is yet to be determined,” the paper wrote, and “a criminal investigation is underway”–just as in the McKenna case. Yet the paper did not hesitate to identify the boy’s father, Joaquin S. Rams, as someone whom other family members had blamed for the child’s death.

Do law enforcement officials, who work for the public, deserve more deference when implicated in a violent death than regular citizens? That seems to be the indefensible attitude among news outlets and criminal justice officials alike.

Messages can be sent to the Washington Post‘s reader representative, Alison Coglianese, at [e-mail]. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

This piece appeared on FAIR's website (4/13/15).

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