Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot fatally by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman on February 26 as he walked, carrying Skittles and ice tea, toward his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community in Sanford, FL, a suburb of Orlando. This much we know (also, Skittles sales are up).
In the weeks since, the incident gained media prominence to the point of overtaking 2012 election coverage. Some of that reporting has been of the “he said-she said” variety, and some has been disputed (the Associated Press ran a piece last week pointing out ambiguities in the case). And pundits on all sides of the political spectrum have weighed in on everything from guns to US race relations.
But there has also been some solid shoe-leather reporting, on Florida pavement and elsewhere. The following is a guide to some of the better reports we’ve found:
Updating the facts
Of all the attempts at gathering information about the killing in one place, Mother Jones has done it particularly well, with an epically long, oft-updated explainer page. It’s a compendium of primary sources and reporting and (in a somewhat mixed blessing) also some opinion, organized in a question-and-answer format. It’s a great resource for tracking updates in both information and public reaction as they unfold. The Orlando Sentinel and the online site westorlandonews.com have also been devoting extensive resources to following the story.
The man behind the Mother Jones effort is Adam Weinstein, 33, Mother Jones’s national security reporter, who is based in Tallahassee and who, interestingly, has had a concealed weapon permit since he turned 21. Weinstein, with assists from DC-based colleagues, has been collecting primary sources and reporting and keeping abreast of other outlets’ coverage.
One useful innovation is a second page devoted solely to archiving primary sources—with the exception of the audio of 911 calls related to the case, which remain toward the top of the first page because of heavy demand.
But “within the first day or three of putting up an explainer,” Weinstein said, “you’re starting a conversation with commenters, readers, tweeters.” How it evolves “really depends on our readership, the attention people are paying to it, and what they want to know about the story.”
The reader-spurred updating leads to useful updates—at this point, 34 of them—but a page that, with the combined content and comments, becomes unwieldy. MoJo might consider making the updates available by topic as well as chronological order, since the additions aren’t always time-sensitive but, rather, reported responses to reader curiosity.
Weinstein said he’ll continue updating the explainer in the coming weeks, but that Mother Jones’s coverage of the Trayvon case will soon shift focus beyond the explainer monolith to long-form stories. “What we found is there’s a tipping point where it gets to be so large that what we do is we use the explainer as a forum,” Weinstein said. “Stories begin to need their own space.”
The police
A widespread perception exists at this point that, whatever happened between Martin and Zimmerman, the investigation of the Sanford Police Department was amateurish at best. The vote of no-confidence in Police Chief Bill Lee by the City Council certainly fostered that impression, as did the subsequent temporary removal of Lee from his post, and the recusal of state attorney Norman Wolfinger.
So we were surprised when, in a review of the coverage, we had a hard time turning up a comprehensive journalistic account of what the police actions actually were—and how they measured up to optimal (or even standard) police practices in the investigation of a suspicious death. Mother Jones’s Weinstein said last Friday that he, too, had not “yet found [a] big unified piece focusing on the Sanford police’s conduct.” (Update: but see here.)
The clearest crack at that story we did find is a good March 21 article by Frances Robles of The Miami Herald. Robles catalogues the leading criticisms of the department, tracks down police practices experts to weigh in, and gets on-the-record responses—some more persuasive than others—from the Sanford PD.
(Several of Robles’s items mention witness complaints about the investigation. A March 13 article by ABC News’s Matt Gutman offers a more incendiary formulation, saying that an officer “corrected” one eyewitness’s account to make it more sympathetic to Zimmerman.)
That Herald article appeared nearly two weeks ago, though, and important new claims have since come to light. Gutman reported on March 27 that the local department’s lead investigator, Chris Serino, wanted to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter on the night of the killing. That same day, CBS’s Mark Strassman, in a useful article that sketched a brief history of the investigation, reported that Serino pursued the charge for two weeks. And a day later, TheGrio.com’s Joy-Ann Reid reported that Wolfinger took the unusual step of consulting with local police on the night of the killing, as the decision to release Zimmerman was being made.
The time is ripe for a reporter to deliver a current, comprehensive account of the investigation that knits these strands together; makes clear what’s known, what’s alleged, and what’s disputed about investigator’s actions; spells out what an ideal investigation would have looked like, and even advances the ball by answering some outstanding questions. For example: are there any police photos of Zimmerman that might show his injuries—or lack of injuries—more clearly than the grainy surveillance video we’ve all been staring at?
Stand Your Ground
One of the better pieces on the general nature and effect of Stand Your Ground laws—of which Florida’s is said to be one of the most broadly drawn—ran Saturday in The Wall Street Journal. Joe Palazzolo and Rob Barry reported that:
At a time when the overall U.S. homicide rate is declining, more civilians are killing each other and claiming self-defense—a trend that is most pronounced in states with new “stand your ground” laws.
So-called justifiable homicides nearly doubled from 2000 to 2010, when 326 were reported, the story says. But the data have not been rigorously studied, Palazzolo and Barry reported, and criminal scientists don’t yet know whether the rise in ‘justifiable’ homicides “reflects killings that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, or if it reflects the fact that more killings might naturally fall into the “justifiable” category.
The story includes interesting stats on race and fatal killings, too. In most killings the killer and the victim are of the same race. In most killings in which the two are of different races, the victim is more often white. But in so-called justifiable homicides, the victim is more often black.
Sanford, Florida
The local context is helpful in understanding what happened in this case. Unsurprisingly, the Florida press has done best at supplying this context, though Mother Jones and The Daily Beast have also run stories that are worth your time.
One of the oldest incorporated cities in Florida, Sanford is 20 miles northeast of Orlando. According to the 2010 census, the city is home to 54,000 people—57 percent white, 30.5 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic.
Mother Jones’s Weinstein has the record on Sanford’s sad, storied, and far-too-recent history of racial tensions. Though many American cities share a strained racial past, Weinstein makes a compelling case that Sanford’s is particularly interesting, and that it lingers. This is a community whose founder had notions to send American blacks to the Congo; which incorporated, in ungenerous fashion, a neighboring black community in 1911; that chased off Jackie Robinson in 1947; and whose police force, in recent years, has come under attack for racial profiling and mishandling the investigations of several crimes involving black victims. This AP story has more on current dynamics between the police and blacks in the community.
Reuters has a fascinating story on how Sanford’s part-time mayor, Jeff Triplett, has found himself at the center of a national firestorm and how some of his decisions—particularly to release the 911 calls from the case—have been controversial with the city staff.
Florida papers have also reported that Sanford has spent $5,000 on crisis communications in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case.
The Retreat at Twin Lakes, the Sanford gated community in which Trayvon Martin’s father’s fiance lived, and where Martin was shot, was developed in 2004 and consists of 263 two-story townhouse units, a clubhouse, and a community pool. Much like the demographics of Sanford itself, the Retreat at Twin Lakes is relatively diverse—50 percent white, 20 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent black.
Like many communities in Florida, Twin Lakes had been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis. In a well-reported, and well-worth-your-time article, Tampa Bay Times reporter Lane DeGregory calls Retreat at Twin Lakes “a classic Florida story”:
Developers saw potential in the sandy acres east of Orlando and determined to turn them into an oasis. They planned a gated subdivision just 10 minutes from downtown — a cloistered community near the interstate, close to good schools, outlet malls and the magic of Disney World.
The idea, as always, was that people could live peacefully in a paradise where nobody could park a car on the street or paint the house an odd color.
Per DeGregory’s reporting, the cost of a 1,400 square-foot Twin Lakes townhome has fallen from $250,000 to below $100,000; 40 homes are empty in the community and half are inhabited by renters (George Zimmerman and Brandy Green, Martin’s father’s fiancé, among them). Indeed, Retreat at Twin Lakes homes are easy to find in foreclosure and real estate listings.
A number of Retreat at Twin Lakes residents interviewed in Trayvon Martin coverage have called their community ‘safe’ and ‘family-oriented.’ According to DeGregory, Trayvon Martin was known by many of the young people at Retreat at Twin Lakes because he played football with them when he visited.
But similar to the ‘eyes on the street’ effect Jane Jacobs outlined in The Death and Life of American Cities, the effects of the foreclosure crisis—empty houses and high turnover in community—seems to have unsettled some Retreat at Twin Lakes residents and fostered a culture of petty theft and suspicion. During the summer of 2011, there was a string of burglaries in which laptops, PlayStations, bikes, a car, and jewlery were stolen from homes at Retreat at Twin Lakes. Mother Jones has posted some of the related incident reports, and they have been reported in coverage by the Tampa Bay Times, The Miami Herald, and the Daily Beast, which highlighted the following:
Last July a rental car was stolen from one townhome along with the car keys, which were inside on a dining room table. The resident awoke in the morning to discover her sliding glass door open. The car was eventually found abandoned. In August a PlayStation and videogames were stolen from another townhome. In September someone vandalized a townhome under construction. In December someone broke into a foreclosed townhome, stopped up a toilet and started the water running….
Three weeks before Martin’s death another Twin Lakes resident arrived home to discover a kitchen window open and a laptop and gold necklaces missing.
These incidents alarmed residents and strained relations between them. Robles’s article includes this telling line:
Problems in the 6-year-old community started during the recession, when foreclosures forced owners to rent out to “low-lifes and gangsters,” said Frank Taaffe, a former neighborhood block captain.
Much of the suspicion was directed at teenagers in the community, as DeGregory reports. Zimmerman, meanwhile, had a long record of calling 911—reporting pot holes, open garage doors, and anything suspicious—but DeGregory reports these summer incidents coincide with the period in which Zimmerman’s calls became more notably more concerned with ‘suspicious’ black males.
Zimmerman was not the only Retreat at Twin Lakes resident concerned about growing crime in the gated community. Per DeGregory: “In September, the Sanford police helped the Retreat start a neighborhood watch program. ‘Some residents called me wanting to do a startup,’ said Dorival, a civilian police employee. About 30 people came to the clubhouse for that first session, she said. ‘Everyone was enthusiastic.’ Zimmerman volunteered to be captain.”
Some stories have reported with a suggestion of illegitimacy that the Twin Lakes neighborhood watch group was not of the 25,000 registered with the National Sheriff’s Association. But while that is true, it is very clear the chapter had support and basic instruction provided by the Sanford Police Department.
Dorival has described to a number of outlets how she briefed neighborhood watch members at Retreat at Twin Lakes that evening. Per The New York Times:
She then gave a PowerPoint presentation and distributed a handbook. As she always does, she emphasized what a neighborhood watch is — and what it is not.
In every presentation, “I go through what the rules and responsibilities are,” she said Thursday. The volunteers’ role, she said, is “being the eyes and ears” for the police, “not the vigilante.” Members of a neighborhood watch “are not supposed to confront anyone,” she said. “We get paid to get into harm’s way. You don’t do that. You just call them from the safety of your home or your vehicle.”
Using a gun in the neighborhood watch role would be out of the question, she said in an interview.
Slate has a good explainer on Neighborhood Watch and their effectiveness here, and the Orlando Sentinel has a useful story on the relationship between the police and neighborhood watch groups.
Some outlets have described Zimmerman as a “self-appointed” neighborhood watch captain, but other accounts indicate that Zimmerman volunteered for the job, and that neighbors approved of him in the position. Accounts also indicate that while Zimmerman was violating neighborhood watch guidance, until the shooting of Trayvon Martin, some residents thought Zimmerman was doing a good job. Crime continued in the subdivision, and Zimmerman was credited with apprehending one suspect and thwarting crimes. “Interviews with neighbors reveal a pleasant young man passionate about neighborhood security who took it upon himself to do nightly patrols while he walked his dog,” writes Robles.
The story goes on to offer testimonies from several neighbors who credited Zimmerman for improved security at Twin Lakes, but also quotes a resident who, fitting the description of the ‘suspicious’ characters Zimmerman targeted, was clearly made nervous and changed his behaviors to avoid the zealous watch captain. She interviews 25-year old Ibrahim Rashada:
“I fit the stereotype he emailed around,” he said. “Listen, you even hear me say it: ‘A black guy did this. A black guy did that.’ So I thought, ‘Let me sit in the house. I don’t want anyone chasing me.’ ”
For walks, he goes downtown.
That residents didn’t feel safe to move freely within their own gated community because of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain is a tragic irony, and in a smart blog post at BetterCities.com, Robert Steuteville argues that while gates are designed to provide a measure of security, they in fact worked in reverse for Trayvon Martin.
Well, the Columbia Journalism Review makes an heroic effort here to be objective but falls down slightly towards the end:
"That residents didn’t feel safe to move freely within their own gated community because an overzealous neighborhood watch captain is a tragic irony,"
I would strike the word "overzealous" as unsupported by the evidence and change the word "residents" to "at least one resident."
If we grade on the curve you get an A, since almost all other news sources have been much more biased than this.
#1 Posted by Luke Lea, CJR on Mon 2 Apr 2012 at 03:42 PM
Hmm. Where do I go to find good reporting on why this story is so much more important than the killings of those . . . nobodies . . . whose cases do not present an opportunity for bloviating chattering class people to make larger statements about American society than can be supported by, you know, reality? If CJR and Mother Jones are unaware that the greatest street threat to young African-American males is other young African males, or that interracial violence is decidedly more likely to feature this demographic as perpetrators, rather than as victims, I'd be happy to begin their education. I keep hearing about how liberals are 'reality-based', but they sure seem to be stuck in a circa-1963 Classic Comix narrative of race-relations in America, impervious to the reality of the streets in framing and vocabulary.
To interested consumers, you won't find the answer to the question 'Why is Trayvon Martin's life is fantastically more important to the chattering classes than the life of some all-night convenience-store clerk' in CJR or Mother Jones. Check out Tom Wolfe's 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' - from way back in 1987 - for the bigger picture.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 12:42 PM
Dude, didn't we just go over this?
Did you not read the Lowry link?
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 01:21 PM
As usual, Thimbles, your link misses the point - which is the huge amount of press attention this particular case has received, and the way the establishment press has worked to fit it into a narrative of 'young black males are in danger from white males on the street'. Do you really think you would know who Trayvon Martin was if the shooter had been black and as yet uncharged by the police? Be honest, now. Or if the victim had been white and the shooter black? Stuff happens every day without Soledad O'Brien getting her underwear in a bunch, without intense coverage by the networks, without front-page 'analysis' pieces in the NY Times, without large statements from third-rate academics about 'white racism' on NPR programs.
The question press critics repeatedly ask, and the MSM squirms to avoid answering, is what drives the selection of what is 'news', and how is it framed into a narrative? (It gets asked by the more marginal Left, too, but seldom on the topic of the social issues.) We saw an answer recently with the emotional coverage of the Komen Foundation's decision to withdraw a small subsidy from Planned Parenthood, when Andrea Mitchell and her sorority decided arbitrarily to make it a big issue. (In an irony probably lost on such irony-impaired types as Beltway lifers, donations to the Komen Foundation are down - thus curtailing the capacity of the Foundation to fund those breast exams that Mitchell pretended to be concerned about if PP's subsidy, which was about enough to cover Cecile Richards' salary, was withdrawn. Thanks, Andrea.) On the social issues, the people who decide what is 'news' decide on the basis of their own priorities, and those priorities are, among that demographic (urban, affluent) overwhelmingly selected and framed to conform to an urban-affluent narrative. It's them, it's their friends and co-workers, it's the air they breath. It's not even intentional, it's reflexive.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 07:45 PM
"and the way the establishment press has worked to fit it into a narrative of 'young black males are in danger from white males on the street'. "
I don't care what the stupid press narrative is. The real story is about how a man shot and killed a kid and, for some reason, the legal authorities saw fit to work against the interests of justice. There's something sick in Sanford.
"Do you really think you would know who Trayvon Martin was if the shooter had been black and as yet uncharged by the police?"
Potentially? Yeah. In fact if, I recall correctly, Zimmerman isn't exactly pink.
"Or if the victim had been white and the shooter black?"
Are you kidding. Do you really doubt this wouldn't become a story in "Obama's America", as Limbaugh phrased it?
Come on.
Now if you want to talk about the right's attacks on Planned Parenthood and how people of an insidious nature thought it would be fun to take over charities and use their clout to marginalize it, that's not really an issue I need to take on for myself.
I will say, by attacking PP and contraception in such obvious and nasty ways, the republicans have ensured that PP will have plenty of funding from the half of the population who is becoming more aware that their hard won status in western society is under attack.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 10:03 PM
Thimbles, please give me an example of a case in which the shooter was black and the victim was white, in which there was such a media uproar.
I'd also like to see some stats on rates of violence in Sanford vs. those of other cities. I believe the term for this 'outrage' is 'cherry-picking'. Where do you live, exactly, and is your community 'sicker' than Sanford by your own standards.
Rush Limbaugh is one side of the story; The NY Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the wire services, NPR, and the glossy New York magazines are another. Wanna trade? I'd take that trade when it comes to communications penetration.
When it comes to narrative of race and violence in America, the above-named new organizations are still in 'Who are you going to believe, us or your own eyes?' territory. You can't even concede the reality that everyone knows concerning the demographics of violent crime in this country. This is a major reason white liberalism has lost political influence since the 1960s. Politically-incorrect victims are nobodies to them. The party of compassion turns cold and deaf when there is no simple-minded liberal civics lesson that fits into a 'To Kill a Mockingbird' scenario.
#6 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 09:00 AM
"Thimbles, please give me an example of a case in which the shooter was black and the victim was white, in which there was such a media uproar."
I don't think there's been a case where a black person shot a white person while the black person was recorded on the phone with 911 being told to stand down, and then the police let the black person go because it was too ambiguous an act to be considered a crime under the guns laws, and then the police label the body a "John Doe" and slap him in the morge for three days despite having identifying materials such as his wallet and cellphone.
When that happens, I'll be sure to come back to you with measurements of the uproar.
"I'd also like to see some stats on rates of violence in Sanford vs. those of other cities. "
I've been calling for that since the beginning. Mother jones seems to be answering that call.
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/04/george-zimmerman-unlikely-ever-be-convicted-killing-trayvon-martin
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/trayvon-martin-sanford-racial-history
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 11:46 AM
Very convincing - if actual statistics on crime don't matter. For those of you who won't bother to go to the links, the Mother Jones story rambles with anecdotes, but does not actually produce statistics comparing rates of violence, rates of interracial violence, or anything else relevant to the large assertions about Sanford, about Florida, and about the United States being made by our friends the chattering classes.
This let's-pretend narrative about crime is a loser. Even liberal friends - usually women, a social worker, a professor in the social sciences - privately acknowledge their fear of physical violence from men generally, but from the Trayvon Martin demographic specifically. Even Jesse Jackson made some uncharacteristically lucid comments along the same lines some years back. This is not a justification for the killing of Trayvon Martin; after all, women fear men on the street after dark, and I'm a man, and I don't want to be shot for that reason in a sketchy situation. If the evidence is there that Zimmerman stalked and shot an innocent kid for whatever reason, then Florida has the death penalty for such cases. It's the tendency of the bloviators to start generalizing from this case that I find unreal. It is disgustingly demagoguic, but, see, it's OK if liberals do it.
(Which brings us to a side issue that reality-impaired media liberals have forgotten to consider: some of the inspiration for these laws came out of the cases of battered women charged with shooting their abusive partners. Something that wouldn't occur to the Soledad O'Brien mentality.)
You dodgy response about the media-driven hysteria when the shooter is white and the victim is black vs. the dead silence in the cases where the roles are reversed is creative, which I expect, but also sadly instructive of the denial that exists when it comes to race - maybe a continuation, rather than a reversal, of older ways of thinking?
#8 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 12:51 PM
The thing about Sanford is that it's not just one community. There's Sanford and then there's gated Sanford and gated Sanford is a much different place.
If you want to keep talking about this incident as if the controversy is over the act or the ethnicity of the actors, I don't know what to say.
The people who are really looking at this story see that the controversy is in the response of the authorities according to the assumptions of the neighborhood. If we cannot trust the judgement of our security agents, and we obviously can't since they found justification to let this hot head go, then we need to get to the root of that problem and solve it.
If you're not interested in solving that problem, then what is your interest? Pointing at liberals and mouthing "Ha Ha! Black kids die all the time, stupid libs! Trayvon's just another body on the statistical pile! Ha Ha!" ?
Sorry Nelson, but that's not an interesting conversation to me.
#9 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 01:35 PM
Thimbles, CJR advertises itself as a journalism review. CJR and others are simply unable to answer the key question of 'Why is this murder so much more important to journalists than thousands of others?' without giving away the frozen 1960s political narrative behind the all-out coverage. In this case, the 'narrative' rationale for the heavy coverage is unusually far from reality. That's all.
#10 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 04:58 PM
A killer angle Taibbi covers in the way some crimes are policed and others aren't:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mike-bloombergs-new-york-cops-in-your-hallways-20120403
"We have two definitely connected phenomena, often treated as separate and unconnected: a growing lawlessness in the financial sector, and an expanding, repressive, increasingly lunatic police apparatus trained at the poor, and especially the nonwhite poor.
In recent years, as Wall Street firms turned into veritable felony factories, we had pundits and politicians who cranked out reams of excuses for one white-collar criminal after another and argued, in complete seriousness, that sending a rich banker to jail "wouldn't solve anything" and in fact we should "tolerate the excesses" of the productive rich, who "channel opportunity" to the rest of us.
On the other hand, we've had politicians and pundits in budget fights and other controversies railing against the parasitic poor, who are not only not "productive" enough to warrant a break, but assumed to be actively unproductive (they consume our tax money and public services) and therefore sort of guilty in advance.
When I read this "Clean Halls" story I immediately thought of the various robosigning scandals. If even one law enforcement official had been able to take just one stroll through, say, the credit card collections office of a Chase or a Bank of America at any time in the last decade, he would have seen rows of cubicles full of entry-level employees whose entire job was to sit around all day long, right out in the open, forging court documents. Whole departments attended to this job for years and years and somehow nobody with a badge ever got a whiff of it.
But in New York, we have cops cruising through private buildings, checking bags full of ketchup 200,000 times a year. Makes sense, doesn't it?"
Security state for the 99%, free for all for the 1%.
The defining charecteristic of crime in our time is the percieved victimer's position on social strata relative to the victim. If the victimizer is a serial forger in a bank or a trigger happy neighborhood watcher in a gated community, we don't see crime.
If the victimizer is a bunch of hippies in Zuccoti park who dare shout at bailed out wall street bankers, the riot police will intervene.
Two worlds, no justice.
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 7 Apr 2012 at 02:48 PM
No - Justice.
This is not a sustainable model for a society.
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 7 Apr 2012 at 11:26 PM