ALAN writes:
These are the exact words that were posted at the St. Louis Police Department’s website:
“….officers are investigation a shooting that injured two 18-year-old males injured on April 9, 2026 in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood…..”
When I lived in that neighborhood sixty years ago, I could walk the streets any time of day or night and not get injured by “a shooting”. It was so long ago that there were even things like common sense and proofreading. We had two daily newspapers, but they never reported that “officers are investigation” anything or that people who were injured were injured.
Abstractions do not shoot people. “Shootings” do not shoot people, nor do they “happen”. People shoot people. And apparently those two young men were injured and then injured again. How redundant redundant.
Observe in this example:
a) Incompetent writing, reflecting
b) Incompetent thought or none at all
c) Attribution of responsibility to a non-existent entity
Such are the things police departments and TV stations now find acceptable to dish out to taxpayers. The blurb states the incident took place in the 4400 block of Pennsylvania Ave. Fox 2 “news” declared it was the 4500 block. KSDK “news” asserted both: The subhead said 4500; two paragraphs below that, it said 4400. It also reports “Police said one of the men could not have a statement due to his injuries….”
Maybe he could “have a statement” when he recovers? And imagine how hard it must be to tell two city blocks apart! No wonder law enforcement and journalism are such exhausting work.
This is what you get with DEI, sloganeering, all the super-duper high-tech gadgets taxpayers’ money can buy, and dumbed down standards across the board: Too stupid to write a simple sentence or determine where a crime was perpetrated.
Can’t you just hear the response? “But you are nitpicking. Those are only small mistakes”. If so, then what is the excuse for making them? If police accounts and news reports cannot be trusted to get small things right, why should we trust them to report the truth about crime or any other substantive matters? Are journalism and law enforcement made better by stupid people? Then why do they pay stupid people? Would police and newspaper reporters in the 1920s be gratified to learn their descendants have lowered standards far enough to accommodate people who can’t write a simple sentence or determine the exact location of crime incidents?
I remember clearly how those two blocks of Pennsylvania Ave. looked in the years 1965-’82. I walked those blocks countless times. My memory is confirmed by color photographs my mother took there in those years. Two things could not be less alike than the frame of mind of people who lived there then and those who live there (and get shot or knifed there) today. These are concrete consequences of the cultural revolution that people of my generation have witnessed since the 1950s, a revolution whose vocabulary and frame of mind nearly all journalists and police departments have absorbed as unconsciously as they breathe.
If only the decent people of St. Louis could have a statement. Better yet would be a body of citizens to investigation any police department and TV news departments that emit such nonsense.
