Ok so here's how you say this w/o DISMISSING activist concerns and w/o USING older black folks' voices to argue for the status quo: "Public Safety involves how communities are policed as well as how communities interface with police and black folks are not a monolith, obviously." https://twitter.com/kevrector/status/1105868737809473540

Also here's the often ignored thing: My reporting shows people in Black Baltimore want more cops to respond to calls, be present—they don't want more knockers rolling up and throwing their cousin or little brother against a brick wall traumatizing everybody

Or it's like "Clear corners—except that one, I know those kids and how they struggle. Also I really wanna walk to the store and not worry about getting hit with a pipe & robbed" The way to account for this is not to cherry pick one side—or turn it into an issue with sides at all.

Also: City wouldn't necessarily need MORE police if we stopped having what is essentially a counter-insurgency of plainclothes rushing around in unmarked cars, kicking in people's doors, etc. Put those cops in uniforms, stop them from soaking up resources.

Lastly, when you're a white reporter—this is applies to me too, obvs—the conversations you have with Black Baltimore are going to be different; it is white hubris to assume you're getting the truth and to not question the biases you bring when you talk to communities about cops

Media lesson for today: Corporate news—especially white reporters—perform "listening to the community" when a part of that community's saying something that already aligns with their generally shitty, profoundly basic centrist views on things such as law and order

ALSO: almost everyone in power, nearly everyone who gets to comment anywhere that's seen or heard—other than those grassroots organizing on their own time with their own (rented, bought, borrowed!) loudspeakers precisely bc no one gives them space—are calling for more cops.

sorry everybody, it's just that is just such a profoundly idiotic and insincere take; to suggest that the folks that aren't heard are the people asking for more police is just like, galaxy brain stupid b/w the corniest kind of white liberal signifying

and to a lot of people in communities in Baltimore who might be vocal about their concerns with police, they don't go to public safety events organized by the city with cops present and they see white reporters like me or Rector as the cops p much so they ain't gonna tell us

Big mistake is being a white reporter in a black city and believing that black people—or people in general!—who speak to you fully represent the city, that you're some objective vessel through which residents communicate and not someone whose whiteness enables profound bias