Word: zekman
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Dates: during 1973-1973
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...police brutality for years. Last spring, Bliss became convinced that many accusations coming from blacks were true. He also suspected that police violence was not limited to the ghetto. Tribune City Editor Bill Jones agreed that the subject deserved full investigation and assigned Bliss three young reporters: Pamela Zekman, 29, a former social worker with four years experience on the Trib; William Mullen, 29, a rewrite man for most of his six years at the Trib; and Emmett George, 25, a black reporter who had joined the paper only a few weeks earlier after stints with U.P.I, and Jet magazine...
...team found that many victims and witnesses were reluctant to talk. Says Zekman: "People were afraid of the police department. We had to convince them that we were sincerely trying to pursue a social evil." Whenever this reticence was broken down, the team took extraordinary precautions to document material. To reduce the chances of reporting errors, key interviews were conducted by two newsmen. Injured victims were asked to provide medical records and given lie-detector tests. People with police records were dropped, as were witnesses whose accounts proved to contain even the smallest inaccuracies...
...month task physically and emotionally exhausting. Emmett George was shocked to discover that race was relatively unimportant in police brutality: "I found that there are a lot of black officers involved. Some of the most sadistic people were black, and those people need to go off the force first." Zekman was so moved by the case of the deformed boy whose mother had been beaten during pregnancy that she has arranged corrective surgery. The team rarely took a weekend off and usually worked double shifts. Jones last week was sending the four on vacations, hoping that their effort to police...