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Drug-war anecdote: great narrative, thin meaning

By Mark Obbie

Today's Washington Post Magazine cover story reminds me of a put-down that my newspaper buddies and I had for a certain type of magazine story: "pretty writing." We meant that magazine artistes were infamous for reading the product of our original news reporting, and then swooping into town to write a feature that had lots of words but not much new insight or information. After stints at a weekly and then as a magazine editor, and now as a magazine journalism teacher, I am not so quick to dismiss what magazine writers do -- even if it is, at root, just pretty writing bolstered by a telling interview or two. A good magazine feature, particularly a narrative, can make sense of a blizzard of details, and provide perspective and point of view that engages readers and serves as a memorable summary.So it's with that mixed history that I approached April Witt's cover story in the Post Magazine. Weighing in at nearly 8,300 words, it's undeniably a good read, with a clear point of view on an important topic. A young, small-town mayor in suburban D.C.'s Prince George's County, Maryland, has his life turned upside down by a bungled police raid. The mayor, his wife, and mother-in-law are terrorized by a paramilitary SWAT team that conducted a "no-knock raid" on his home, slaughtering his two Labrador retrievers, after intercepting a box of marijuana being mailed to the mayor's home. The guts of Witt's story is the gripping scene she portrays, from the perspective of the mayor and his mother-in-law, as the cops brutalized them (the cops aren't talking, because they know they'll be telling their story in depositions). Witt's conclusions: the cops had done nothing to investigate the target of their raid, other than read the address of the pot delivery; ignored warnings that this might be another incident of drug dealers using unwitting innocents as drop points; and lied about the need to use such brute force. Though one-sided, the story does a good job on those angles. But it falters when it reaches for a broader point -- in the words of the deck headline, "What a SWAT team did to Cheye Calvo's family may seem extreme. But decades into America's war on drugs, it's business as usual." The supposed usualness of it is so thinly sourced -- a three-year-old Cato Institute report, a quote from an ACLU guy, and an offhand and vague mention of the frequency of such misdirected raids -- that the story marks a lost opportunity to examine whether drug police are generally trashing the Fourth Amendment and covering up botched raids on a widespread scale. The most unfortunate omission: only a glancing acknowledgment that many other victims of such tactics aren't nearly so media-friendly, or professional, or educated; and that gunshot victims in these raids aren't just limited to pets.Witt's and her editors' casual acquaintance with police reporting shows itself in a minor but telling detail: where she mistakes SWAT as an acronym for Special Weapons Attack Teams (though a few departments have used that construction, the common phrase is Special Weapons and Tactics). It's enough to make a cops reporter cringe -- and dismiss the whole thing as pretty writing.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on February 01, 2009 (boomark / email).