Silicon Valley media misses opportunity to provide context on George Floyd protests, riots.
Media and police experts, along with SJPD chief, provide perspective on how local media failed to provide contexst on the protests and riots that disrupted downtown SJ. Mark Lisheron reports.
In this current age of narrative driven media, snarling, defiant Jared Yuen was practically heaven sent.
The Mercury News, the San Jose Spotlight and San Jose Inside made the veteran officer the face of the San Jose Police Department response to the protests that erupted in the first days after George Floyd died May 25 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer while three others looked on.
A review of more than 600 items produced by the local media between May 26 and June 15 containing the name of Floyd shows clearly how Yuen, or more precisely, videos of Yuen, colored, shaped and relentlessly drove coverage.
The story the press told is narrated overwhelmingly by the protesters and leaders of progressive activist groups whose cause is presented as noble and courageous.
The three news outlets give wide berth for Police Chief Eddie Garcia to explain his decision-making in dealing with the protesters, some of whom became rioters, arsonists and looters.
Garcia repeatedly admits to the press he and his officers have made mistakes, but as he told Opportunity Now in an interview June 12, in the midst of the greatest chaos he’s seen on the streets of San Jose in his 28 years as a police officer, “my men and women responded admirably.”
Which makes Yuen’s outsized presence in the coverage difficult to reconcile. According to Garcia more than 1,500 complaints have so far been lodged against the San Jose Police Department. Nearly 1,300 of them were made against Yuen.
Although a count hasn’t been done, it’s likely that many of those complaints were made by people who saw one of several videos of Yuen shouting “Let’s get this motherfucker,” and “Shut up, bitch,” as protesters pressed in close to the line of officers on May 29. At least one of the videos had been shared on social media more than 10 million times before the week ended, according to a Mercury News story.
From the time The Mercury News first reported on the video May 30, Yuen’s recorded outbursts take center stage in coverage. On the same day, buried deep in a second story, is a report of another video, of a protester punching an officer and knocking him out. There were no attempts by any of the three print media outlets to identify the officer, his condition or find out what happened to his assailant.
Follow-up stories from the perspective of protestors and activists demanding that Yuen be punished followed. A summary paragraph of Yuen’s notorious exclamations made it into dozens of stories.
“One video shows the officer smirking, licking his lips and rocking back and forth, looking a little too excited to be facing off with protesters,” was the lead of a supposedly straight news story in San Jose Inside.
Yuen is invariably invoked by protesters interviewed by the three local outlets. “Many protesters, however, said the escalation felt needlessly driven by law enforcement,” The Mercury News reported. “Videos circulated online of San Jose officers yelling militaristic chants as they formed skirmish lines, and in one a San Jose officer getting into formation could be heard shouting, ‘Let’s get these motherf—ers!’”
Over the next two days until Mayor Sam Liccardo ordered a curfew, protests got violent and the coverage followed a pattern. Reporters quoted protesters who blamed the police for the violence. “I feel like they don’t listen to us when we’re quiet, so when we get rowdy they really want to start listening,” Terri’nae Williams, 18, of San Jose told a reporter.
Unnamed “critics” begin questioning the tactics of police and their arrests. Along with the stories of rioting are opinion pieces, like that of Sajid Khan, a Santa Clara County deputy public defender.
“Why do we need police at the protests against their very existence,” Khan asked. “Wouldn’t it be safer and smarter to just let our citizens and people express themselves and not pit them against already trigger-happy, testy, easily insulted armed cops whose careers and jobs are being called into question?”
Protesters who see front line officers as the enemy drive the narrative and the city and police administrations constantly react to them. This presentation necessarily establishes good guys and bad guys and makes clear who is whom.
“Jared Yuen is problematical because the video has been shown over and over again and referred to in story after story,”said Lowell Smith, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at La Sierra University in Riverside.
“It’s reprehensible language, nauseating. But the coverage never really focuses on the vast majority of officers. Overall, from what I’ve seen, the reaction of the officers has been great.”
Smith, who was an officer for 30 years before retiring to academia, said coverage fixed on Yuen’s actions. The stories are vivid, personal and one-sided accounts of unprovoked and indiscriminate violence against protesters. There are no corresponding accounts of the rock, bottle and punch throwing “war zone” from officers on the protest line described after-the-fact by police Capt. Jason Dwyer, commander of special operations.
Reporters in the field during protests and riots have easiest access to protesters and not law enforcement. From the representation in stories, it was clear that activist leaders made themselves readily available to reporters. Police administrators spent nearly three weeks reacting to and attempting to counter those stories.
During that time, the San Jose press did very little to place the actions of the police department in the context of what was going on in other cities like Minneapolis and in the history of the department and its relationship with the community.
Bob Rucker, a longtime newsman who has for 30 years been in the Journalism Department of San Jose State University, said, so far, the local media has served up precious little context.
By local media accounts, Garcia has delivered on the promises he made when he was named chief in 2016 for “a progressive administration that emphasizes de-escalation tactics before force, and focused recruiting to make the department better reflect the city’s diverse population,” according to a Mercury News story.
Staffing cuts have put news outlets all over the country in their own defensive posture, reacting to major events by flooding the zone with reporters recounting what’s in front of them. Most don’t have the time to look backward, forward or to either side, Rucker said.
“This department has made inroads in the various communities in San Jose and that’s largely because of Chief Garcia,” Rucker said. “What happened on the line during the protests wasn’t clear cut, it was messy. And if you don’t spend time making sense of it, you miss an opportunity.”
Whether it was staffing or editorial decision-making, the media missed an opportunity to explain the devolution of peaceful protests into the destruction of businesses and other property, mostly in downtown San Jose.
Of the hundreds of stories only a handful gave voice to the victims of the looting, burning and window-smashing. Not one story provided any kind of total damage estimate for the city or followed up with city officials or the affected business owners about what might be done to help make them whole.
In a story purporting to explain, what happened, The Mercury News leaned heavily on civil rights leaders and other activists for answers. Systemic racism and police provocation are the reasons. Looting, Walter Wilson, one of those civil rights leaders, said, is merely a byproduct of these. “If you want to talk about TVs being looted, then you’re asking the wrong question,” he said “It’s not about looting. It’s about murdering black people in the street. It’s about dehumanizing people.”
Until the past few days, readers also missed the opportunity to know what the police unions in San Jose and other California cities thought of all the upheaval and the calls to “defund the police.” Story after story mention reporters attempting and failing to reach union representatives for comment.
Garcia was careful not to speak for the San Jose Police Officers Association, but said he has worked closely with union leadership from the start of the protests to shape the tactics of the rank and file. He repeatedly used the word “partnering,” and said he was disappointed that the local media failed to mention the groundwork laid by the partners prior to the protests.
“One of the things that has really frustrated me is the suggestion that our efforts have not been community centered,” Garcia said. “That’s just not true.
On June 14 the San Jose union joined unions across the country running full-page newspaper ads calling for a national standard for police officers using force, a database to track officers fired for misconduct and other reforms.
Paul Kelly, president of the San Jose association, told The Mercury News, “The days of unions trying to block reform and new policy are gone. We don’t want to be the roadblock in change.”
The reporter gave the last word to an activist, Raj Jayadev, co-founder of a group called Silicon Valley De-Bug. “This is just the playbook of the police officers association. I give this document zero credibility,” he said. “This is a desperate act to distract the public.”
On the same day, The Mercury News ran a roundup driven, once again, by emotional first-person accounts of the victims of the chaos “as police unleashed an arsenal” on what the paper described as peaceful protesters. The story included the obligatory retelling of Jared Yuen’s outbursts on video.
Garcia has repeatedly told the local press that Yuen will be punished. He repeated that promise to Opportunity Now. Yuen has done considerable damage to the perception of the department out of proportion to everything that’s happened over the past three weeks.
He will not, he said, let the discipline be driven by the perception. “The officer is going to be disciplined, but it would be irresponsible and I will not allow emotions to dictate the outcome.”
Mark Lisheron is a longtime Austin, TX-based investigative reporter and media analyst for newspapers, magazines and for the last 10 years online publications including The Texas Monitor. He is @marklisheron on Twitter.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity.