What Does It Mean to “Report” on Law Enforcement?

February 8, 2024

Sheriff Mark Lamb shaking hands with Ali Bradley

This past weekend, the Border Security Committee of the National Sheriffs Association gave a press award (and challenge coin) to television anchor Ali Bradley of News Nation during the NSA’s annual conference.

“We wouldn’t be able to do our jobs without the sheriffs that we have been able to work with because you guys have been willing to give access and transparency,” she said, describing the sheriffs as “kind, compassionate, forgiving, and graceful.”

It’s not enough that law enforcement agencies employ public relations experts, produce multi-media marketing materials, and appear as talking heads on the news, but they also expect that journalists will cover all sorts of topics with an eye to the interests of law enforcement.

Just a few days later, I read a piece by Joel Simon, who has been researching the fraught relationship between journalists and law enforcement, including the large numbers of journalists who have faced arrest, violence, and harassment for their work. Simon argues that relationships between law enforcement agencies and journalists “have broken down.” While he acknowledges the rise of accountability journalism that tends to look at law enforcement with a more gimlet eye, he writes, “[T]here is a broad consensus that far fewer reporters cover the police beat.”

It used to be, this story goes, that daily news reporters would essentially embed within police departments and report what happened, usually people being arrested or crimes reported to the police. Now, law enforcement departments have their own internal press team who release information through social media, direct-to-consumer style.

This kind of day-to-day reporting indeed builds a rapport between police and journalists. But, I think, Simon is wrong to the extent he suggests those old-style relationships are over.  These relationships are ongoing; they’re just no longer with “mainstream media” reporters. They are the people like Ali Bradley.

Bradley plainly has a relationship with the sheriffs who advocate for reduced immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border. She regularly rides along with them, meets them for coffee, and promotes their media alongside her own. When she calls Sheriff Mark Lamb, she said, he pulls over to the side of the road and answers her call.

It’s not a novel observation to point out that the media is as polarized as politics. During my reporting in real MAGA country, people brought up news stories that I had never heard. Later in the evening, I would Google these stories, only to find that they were swirling in only far-right media, whether by Facebook or somewhere else far-right influencers gather. The far-right media has gone way beyond Fox News.

In my circle of journalists, we talk about being the “enemy of the people,” as Donald Trump once said. It is true that law enforcement officials consistently see me as the enemy. I have not faced the violence or intense harassment that many of my colleagues – particularly my colleagues of color – face. Many will call me an “advocate” as if this were a slur. Most ignore me, shutting doors in my face and allowing my emails and phone messages to drift into the ether.

For his part, Sheriff Mark Lamb, who so eagerly pressed a challenge coin in Bradley’s slim, pale hand, has refused to respond to multiple records requests I have made over the past two years. (One Texas sheriff, to whom I have sent multiple records requests through email, fax, and snail mail, has yet to acknowledge receipt of these requests. I don’t think he ever will.) Lamb hasn’t responded to my requests for comment (including both his office, a public, tax-payer-funded job he still has, and his Senate campaign) since I wrote a profile of him in 2021 for Politico. He didn’t like the story, I guess, although he did borrow the photograph for his social media – without giving credit to the photographer.

In a 2023 Pinal County Commissioner’s Meeting, Lamb decried journalists who sent him public records requests, claiming that they were onerous wastes of time. After a journalist wrote about how Lamb’s office may have misused funds, he protested, “We have more political activists than actual journalists.”

He went on to describe the story as “political activism” and a “hit piece,” blaming not just journalists but also residents of the county who spoke during public comment for “engaging in electioneering.” He then derided one public records request that asked for information on missing and murdered Indigenous women.

If you submit a records request to Lamb’s office now, he sends a form letter in response that cites Arpaio v. Davis, a 2009 case decided by an Arizona state appellate court, for the proposition that Lamb’s office is not required to fulfill records requests if his office deems the request to be too burdensome.

The choice of precedent is ironic. The case involved a series of public records requests by one-time Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for ALL email correspondence from certain court administrators that he felt had spoken out against him. He did the same with the then-mayor of Phoenix. Arpaio’s voluminous records requests were intended to be harassment against public officials who, he felt, were not sufficiently deferential. I suppose that is the power of law enforcement – to take official misuse of power and turn it into a tool to pursue personal grievance.