By giving the police the power to control the flow of information, holes in crime reporting begin to appear.
For example, compare the way police handled the entertainment district shooting of Kwasi Skene-Peters with the killing of Andrew Loku. Both men were shot by police, but Skene Peters was wanted for murder and the need for police to use deadly force was clear. Journalists were granted full cooperation.
Loku, on the other hand, was a mentally distressed father who was shot by police in his own apartment building. In that scenario, police went into lockdown mode, granting journalists as little access to the crime scene as possible. The details surrounding his death remain clouded.
[...]
“What the public is interested in is not always synonymous with the public interest. People think because they want to see that they have a right to see it, and I don’t think that’s the case.”
And according to Doucette, Pugash isn’t alone in that belief: citing a meeting he and other journalists had with former chief of police Bill Blair last year on the topic of scanners going encrypted, Doucette said that Blair made a particular comment that he says “solidified the issue” for him.
“One thing that sticks out to me that I’ve never forgotten, when [Bill Blair] said, almost word for word: ‘The officers of TPS operations will decide what’s newsworthy’.”
I tried to ask Bill Blair if he actually said that. His staff told me he would not be talking about police matters now that he is running for Parliament.
