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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

A1: "Hispanic man in stable condition after shooting"

Mirsada Buric's police-blotter story today is good in that it covers a bit more ground than the bare police-report recitiations we often see from the Courier.

There's one big blue circle on my copy, however, around this:

The residents' inability to communicate with officers in English, hampered the investigation, ....
This is not in quotes, so it's presented as fact, and it speaks a strong bias. The neutral, factual version would be, "The language barrier hampered the investigation, ...," and given who is being served and who is serving, it might be useful to consider, "The officers' inability to communicate with the residents in Spanish hampered the investigation, ...." Never blame the victim.

That said, kudo to Mirsada for slipping this in at the end:

"There is some activity from time to time, but most of the time they don't cause that much trouble," she said.
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3 comments:

  1. leftturnclydeApril 11, 2007 at 10:33 AM

    a Better than usual police story from the courier .Good.
    As to the whole language thing , come on steve , "residents' inability to communicate with officers in English, hampered the investigation".yeah I bet it did . so what ? I agree with you that the courier is pretty rabid on the "get them meskins back where they belong " " stuff, but I think in this case its a small but significant part of a larger story.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steven AyresApril 11, 2007 at 11:45 AM

    Should I take it that you don't think the police force of a city with a significant Spanish-speaking population should have the ability to communicate in Spanish?

    ReplyDelete
  3. leftturnclydeApril 11, 2007 at 2:46 PM

    no thats not what im sayin at all.The police will eventually(hopefully sooner than later) have to develop the language skills to deal with folks who can't (or wont)speak english. its just that the real story here for me(after the attempted murder of course) is the seeming development of a "spanish harlem" type ghetto in prescott.Man thats gonna really piss off the chamber of commerce.

    ReplyDelete

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