Winter 1996
Moving in on the Beat
By Richard Chin
Staff Writer
St. Paul Pioneer Press
In my first venture into civic journalism, I woke up in the middle of the night to slap a cockroach I felt crawling on my forehead. That was the worst thing that happened.
That and having the rear window in my car smashed in.
Last fall, I was a part of a team of reporters, photographers and editors doing a project on fear of crime in the Twin Cities for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Money from the Pew Center helped fund some newsroom travel to find out how other communities were combating crime. It paid for a large survey of Twin Cities residents on crime concerns.
It also paid the rent on an apartment in Frogtown, one of the neighborhoods in St. Paul with the most crime problems. I lived there a month, writing a diary of my experiences that we ran in the newspaper. I got the idea after hearing that The Charlotte Observer had done something similar.
In pitching the idea to my editor, I wrote: “The cost, I reckon, will be comparable to a couple of the trips we’re making to see what the crime situation is like in another city. Why not see what it’s like here?”
During my month in Frogtown, I saw drug deals, fights and domestic violence. I heard gunshots. Someone threatened to beat me up once. I was afraid a few times.
But except for the cockroach and the window, nothing really bad happened to me. As the month passed, I found myself less likely to notice the houses that were problems and more likely to see the majority that were maintained.
At the beginning, I was apprehensive when I saw a group of young men blocking the sidewalk in front of me. By the end of the month, there was a good chance I had met some of those men on the street before and interviewed them. Being able to nod hello made all the difference. Now they were my neighbors.
Many days, I walked the two miles from Frogtown to the newsroom downtown. Talking to people as I walked, I found lots of interesting things besides crime: the roosters kept by immigrant families, lending a rural touch to the center of the urban core; the white cop who spends his off-duty hours shooting pool in a black bar; white, black and Asian families complaining about friction between the races even as their kids played together.
We don’t get those stories spending our days in the office, talking by phone to our usual sources. We middle-class reporters don’t live in neighborhoods like Frogtown. Unless we’re going there to cover a crime, Frogtown is usually only glimpsed through the windshields of our cars as we commute home or head to an interview with someone who matters.
My experience made me wonder if reporters couldn’t follow the example of police departments who are using community policing to get their officers out of patrol cars and closer to neighborhoods.
Maybe we reporters should get away from our desks and literally walk a beat in the community we’re covering. I know I want more of my stories to be about the lives of ordinary people who aren’t crime victims or grieving relatives. I know from my time in Frogtown that they want to talk to us.
And they have some good stories to tell.
That discovery is the best thing that came out of my first foray in civic journalism.