Sleuth it up

Recently we had a detective from the Springfield Police Department guest lecture during our 3-hour Reporting 1 class on a Wednesday afternoon.

John Umenhofer spoke at length about his experiences in Springfield--the "bad part of town" to a lot of Eugene types--finding dead bodies, arresting bank robbers, and interrogating serial rapists. We were supposed to learn interview techniques from Detective Umenhofer that might be applicable to investigative reporting. Umenhofer's lecture, however, consisted almost entirely of humorous and frightening anecdotes from the police beat. He told us about the time he found the deceased body of a man with a mental handicap who had clearly been neglected and forced to live in a tent by his apathetic family. It was the most disturbing story he told, if only because he couldn't stop laughing.

I'm painting Umenhofer in a bad light, which I didn't mean to do. The things I learned from the lecture weren't the things I expected to learn. He expanded on a few interrogation techniques that might have wider application-- such as "minimizing," where the investigator creates a comfortable environment for the offender to confess by minimizing the moral weight of his or her crime-- but the most valuable thing I learned was the importance of a good relationship between law enforcement and media. 

Umenhofer was eager to tell us how much he loves the bill of rights and Orwell's 1984. He explained the ideal symbiosis between journalists and detectives, where journalists hold the police accountable when it is relevant and fair and assist the police in passing along information to the public, and police officers are comfortable giving journalists the necessary information to keep the public informed. He recalled fond moments when the media chose the safety of the public over a juicy story, and negative moments when he was burned and misquoted by a lazy reporter. On our side of the river, in the land of tasings and party-raids, we tend to think of journalists and police officers with a "vs" in between. I often agree with criticism of Eugene police, though Umenhofer is right that a negative relationship doesn't create an environment conducive to accurate reporting or good police work.