Crime Reporting Quotes

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents, and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law.

I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.

Just as the telephone may be used both to report a crime to the police and to conspire to commit one, so too may the Internet be abused to interfere with the rights of others, national security or public order.

Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

When I was reporting crime... I never had the sense of clockwork conspiracies or some kind of imposing order of evil. What I sensed was things just sort of falling apart.

About 25 years ago, I started out as a reporter covering politics. And that sort of just evolved into organized crime, because organized crime and politics were the same thing in Boston.

When the government takes video of people in public places, the images should only be kept as long as they may reasonably be needed to investigate a crime. After a few days, if there has not been a report of a crime, they should be destroyed.

I read the papers, and I watch the news a lot. I watch 'Dateline' and '48 Hours.' And I think we have a tendency to become terrified of one another, thinking that there is a serial killer that is on either side of you.

Our media, which is very open and report on really everything, tend to exaggerate the crime issue...This is why one gets the impression that we have much more crime than other countries.

People will be able to raise their concerns: what are local officers doing about the drug dealing in the local park? What's happening about the pub where all the trouble is? And the police will have to respond.

The Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time.

Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.

Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there's a murder or a fire or the marines land in Nicaragua, the police and the newspapers holler 'get Capone.'

I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.

Let's not kid ourselves. You pick up 'The Washington Post' and find O.J. Simpson on the front page; 'serious journalists' covered Anna Nicole Smith.

The only thing that gets reported are the tragedies. But it rarely gets reported when somebody actually uses their Second Amendment right with a gun to protect themselves against a criminal.

I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.

I'm a reasonably accomplished journalist. I've worked as an investigative journalist, I've done crime beat stuff.

If something is stolen from you, don't go to the police. They're not interested. Don't go to a psychologist either, because he's interested in only one thing: that it was really you who did the stealing.

When 'The Washington Post' ran the first national story about FBI profiling in 1984, no one outside of law enforcement recognized the term.

They put up this bloke's picture on Crimewatch UK with a phone number and said 'Have you seen this man?' Well my auntie rang them up and said 'No'.

The best crime reporters don't mind charging in - but they also know how to do it as decent human beings.

When an accident or a crime happens, there's a period of time before the yellow tape goes up, before the official response becomes formalized. That allows the nightcrawlers to get very close.