Welcome to Your Week in Knoxville, emailed every Sunday only to subscribers, from Knox News editor Joel Christopher. A selection of our best pieces from this past week are featured at the bottom of this newsletter.
Some of the most challenging reporting we do centers on policing, particularly in cases that raise the question of whether police acted properly.
The highest hurdle to clear with some readers in this type of reporting is completely divorced from the facts. A certain significant percentage of people come into any discussion about policing with a conviction that will never be altered by demonstrable truth. Those are the Blue Lives Matter and ACAB factions, and their driving force is tribalism. Our reporting on police accountability will never satisfy either of these groups.
Most people, however, care about policy. These are the people we have in mind – readers like you – when we report about police accountability. How do we ensure, especially at the local level, that we have law enforcement officers who are well-trained, cool-tempered and respectful of civil rights even in the hottest of circumstances? For most police agencies, that has proven to be a hard combination to guarantee in every officer.