Researching & Reporting Crime?

Over the last few years there have been a num­ber of broad rang­ing report­ing and research stud­ies along with jour­nal­ist inter­views which seem to show crimes being com­mit­ted.

Most of these shows have been fea­tured around the so called War on Drugs…

They even appar­ent­ly inter­view drug users who are doing drugs live on cam­era.

This brings up a unique sit­u­a­tion where the jour­nal­ist appears to be enabling a drug user to con­tin­ue to use drugs.

Since it is com­mon knowl­edge that most peo­ple that choose to do drugs often find it dif­fi­cult to stop using drugs it is also fair­ly com­mon and more like­ly that many of these peo­ple who do these drugs often find that get­ting more drugs to do is a dif­fi­cult thing.

So it only invites the ques­tion is it eth­i­cal for a reporter to pay a drug user who once paid will then pro­ceed to buy drugs.

The reporter must know this is going to hap­pen.

The real ques­tion here is not only an eth­i­cal dilem­ma but also a legal dilem­ma. Now obvi­ous­ly there have been some cas­es where the reporter was charged with a crime but lat­er was either acquit­ted or the charges are then dropped.

This is a fine line and one that real­ly should be inves­ti­gat­ed.

Many of these peo­ple tend to be vic­tims of drug abuse or even oth­er abus­es. Report­ing this for mil­lions of peo­ple to view on live TV for enter­tain­ment… ???

Is that right? Is it legal?

It might be hard to answer those things but one thing seem clear these reporters are plac­ing them­selves in very dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions where orga­nized crim­i­nals often active­ly oper­at­ing at the time of the videos being taped, would tend to make you won­der what the reporter did to get the coop­er­a­tion of the (alleged) crim­i­nal.

You could say that it was a reen­act­ment, but clear­ly that is not the case with these sub prime TV shows.

It appears very real and you can some­times see how ner­vous the reporter actu­al­ly is.

The thing is when it comes to the seri­ous nature of both recre­ation­al drug use and sys­temic drug use where the per­son is total­ly addict­ed to the use of those drugs how far is too far?

Addi­tion­al­ly while film­ing these shows they are film­ing a crime!

They pay the per­son to get the drugs that they are going to film them to use live for the enter­tain­ment of peo­ple who watch this stuff on TV!

That would seem to be wrong and real­ly it is wrong.

This opens up a new avenue of ethics for report­ing for both the inter­net and for more tra­di­tion­al jour­nal­ist sources like news­pa­pers and broad­cast video.

It has been said that the inter­net pub­li­ca­tion is not real­ly a pro­tect­ed right under the con­sti­tu­tion as defined by free­dom of the press.

But is that still the truth now that 87 per­cent of infor­ma­tion is pub­lished dig­i­tal­ly and many are well respect­ed with a lot of repub­li­ca­tion’s.

So we are going to do a series of arti­cles about jour­nal­ists and the things that they are doing that are pro­tect­ed legal­ly and those things that they might be doing that are not well pro­tect­ed either because that jour­nal­ist is not part of the estab­lish­ment media.

What types of report­ing are eth­i­cal?

In this arti­cle it appears that there are some in law enforce­ment agen­cies that are pur­su­ing many types of what is com­mon­ly called a sting oper­a­tion.

Often these sting oper­a­tions are set­up to deceive a per­son that might not ordi­nar­i­ly engage in the crime that the law enforce­ment offi­cial would like to arrest the sub­ject of a sting oper­a­tion.

Now cer­tain­ly it goes with­out say­ing that when it comes to some­one that seeks to inter­act with under­age minor chil­dren those peo­ple should be arrest­ed.

But this also invites anoth­er ques­tion when does a sting become some­thing that becomes a prob­lem where the law enforce­ment offi­cial is turn­ing a nor­mal­ly law abid­ing cit­i­zen into a crim­i­nal?

Is that some­thing that could be a prob­lem?

Craigslist is a web­site that for many has become syn­ony­mous with mur­der, crime, adult ser­vices and just about any­thing else that you could pos­si­bly dream up and it is real­ly bad in some places.

But again is it ok for a law enforce­ment offi­cial to reply to a seem­ing­ly bor­der­line craigslist post and then lure that per­son into a com­plex set­up where the end result is often worse than what it start­ed out to be?

Obvi­ous­ly that is some­thing that a fair few peo­ple are look­ing at as far as research and as far as what is eth­i­cal for report­ing and for law enforce­ment.

We can eas­i­ly under­stand that any­one that appears to be will­ing to do things that would put many peo­ple in dan­ger would be some­one that needs some help and that might involve being arrest­ed.

But where does it end?

In a nation­al report that was recent­ly pub­lished regard­ing what is becom­ing more and more com­mon in law enforce­ment is the reverse sting oper­a­tion where some­one pos­es as a facil­i­ta­tor or a provider and they are actu­al­ly a police offi­cer who then pro­ceeds to cap­ture infor­ma­tion about the sub­ject in an effort to demon­strate that that per­son is about to com­mit a crime or is will­ing to engage in crim­i­nal activ­i­ty that is often just a mis­de­meanor.

Is it ok?

When the agent has to push the sub­ject over and over again in order to elic­it some form of evi­dence of wrong­do­ing just to get an arrest and a con­vic­tion turn­ing what might be an ordi­nary per­son into a crim­i­nal…

Yes, they call this entrap­ment!

But entrap­ment is dif­fi­cult to prove if you hap­pen to be the one that has been trapped!

What we seek to find out here is a sim­ple ques­tion.

At what point is it wrong for law enforce­ment to insert them­selves into an online post?

So we have reporters that appear to be pro­vid­ing mon­ey and the abil­i­ty to do drugs on cam­era for enter­tain­ment and we have law enforce­ment offi­cials that are engag­ing in ques­tion­able actions that appear to be a form of entrap­ment.

All of this in the name of a war on drugs that no one can win!

This so called war on drugs has been going on for many years pos­si­bly over 70 years of ongo­ing forms of pro­hi­bi­tion start­ing with alchol and end­ing with the sex­u­al behav­ior of ordi­nary cit­i­zens.

Is it ok to engage in adult behav­ior that oth­er peo­ple might find offen­sive and dis­gust­ing? Cer­tain­ly there are many nations where such behav­ior is pun­ished by death.

But more and more in this nation behav­ior is becom­ing a sub­jec­tive tool in which to arrest and con­vict any­one for doing any­thing that some­one else finds offen­sive.

That is the extreme end of this sit­u­a­tion and it is some­thing that has long been an issue.

Over the next few weeks we are going to take a cold hard look into orga­nized law enforce­ment activ­i­ties which deprive indi­vid­u­als of their lib­er­ty, mon­ey, sta­tus and just about every­thing else all because a cit­i­zen “Thinks” about doing some­thing with an adult that anoth­er per­son find offen­sive.

Obvi­ous­ly some of these things are offen­sive!

But does that make it some­thing that the police should be pur­su­ing with so much real crim­i­nal activ­i­ty going on and not to men­tion a lot of it going on as tele­vi­sion enter­tain­ment.

Lit­er­al­ly there are peo­ple that are com­mit­ting mass crimes by sup­ply­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple with drugs in this nation and they put it on TV?

More to come…