zlacker

>>colinp+(OP)
It's a bit frustrating that a large portion of articles just refer to "police" as a singular group. This article is about the Memphis Police Department.

If a ring of doctors were caught illegally selling organs, we wouldn't title an article "Doctors have been selling organs for years". If bank tellers in a specific city were taking some money off the top of deposits, we wouldn't write "Bank tellers have been stealing money for years".

I'm sure there are some national issues with policing in the United States, but most police organizations are local. It's very unlikely that every local organization is bad, and even if they were, it would be very unlikely that every local organization is bad in quite the same way.

I don't think headlines like this help us balance the discourse. There's no concerted effort by police nationwide to spy on black reporters and activists. This is about a problem in Memphis, Tennessee. The content of the article doesn't imply anything beyond that. The title is extremely sensationalized, and many people will only read that far.

>>rdgthr+yd
> There's no concerted effort by police nationwide to spy on black reporters and activists.

But there was, wasn't there? And one could argue that what Snowden revealed about the NSA hints that there still is.

> In his new book, James Comey describes his deep admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. and decries the FBI’s treatment of him as “a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history.” Shortly after he became FBI director in 2013, Comey instructed the entire workforce of the FBI to read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” one of Comey’s favorite writings. He created a curriculum for new agents to “remember how well-meaning folks lost their way,” and introduced an exercise for the new recruits to visit the King memorial, pick one of the quotes inscribed on the marble wall, and write an essay “about the intersections of that quotation and the FBI’s values.” On his desk at the bureau, Comey kept a copy of the letter authorizing the wall-to-wall surveillance of King as a reminder of this “shameful” history.[1]

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/24/james-comey-mlk-martin-l...

>>nexuis+Op
Sure, there might be, there might not be, but regardless this article doesn't even suggest at the possibility of something like that going on. If this was a story about Snowden's hinting at it, sure, the title makes sense. If this article discussed the FBI's targeting efforts as being racially motivated, the title makes sense. But this is an article about the Memphis PD.

The title is a dishonest representation of the content of the article. That's what I take issue with. Nothing more, nothing less.