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A Free Press police reporter, he was young, green, and calling in to rewrite. He remembers those years, vividly, as if they were yesterday or the day before. The long hair and beard that made him look more like a hippie than a police officer. The 100 -- literally -- phone calls a day to neighboring police stations. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The partner who tripped over some drug dealers' heads. The subpoena he was served as a young reporter -- so young he didn't think to tell his editors about it. The trial-by-fire approach to the job. The court records available with a wink and a smile. The homicide officer who threatened to throw him out a fifth-story window. The fury at seeing the body of a murdered Free Press paperboy in the morgue. The unfettered access to police information.
A lot has changed since then. The police spokesperson is the gatekeeper now. The rewrite desk is gone. His hair isn't what it used to be. Even the morgue has moved to a swank new building. Kresnak traded murder and mayhem for editing and general assignment work in the 1980s. He's been the Free Press' juvenile justice reporter for the past 12 years.
But some things never change. The lessons of the police beat have stuck with him, 32 years later. "I think that you learn a lot of the basics on the police beat," Kresnak said in a recent phone interview. "You learn how to deal with sources. You get instant feedback from police. You're there every day. When I was there, I used to make the rounds: homicide, narcotics, organized crime ... Get to know people, treat them like individuals, treat them personably, and then you start getting phone calls from people."
It's something David Ovalle learned while covering sports at the University of Southern California. Then, it meant going to practice, talking to trainers, knowing the coaches' names -- something his college editors insisted on. Go to practice even if you're not going to write about it, they told him. And now he puts that advice to use in his new job as The Miami Herald's sole police reporter.
"Be visible," Ovalle said over the phone. "Put the time in, constantly be there, show that you actually care, go on ride-alongs, go through reports ... I would go to the officer-of-the-month luncheons, law enforcement awards banquets ... just to make yourself visible and to understand more what working as a cop entails."
Understanding the lives of the people you cover is half the battle, Ovalle said, and it helps to overcome what he calls a "natural distrust" between police officers and journalists.
Cultivating sources is crucial to any beat, particularly so on the police beat, where good relationships are necessary for circumventing bureaucracy, discovering trends and telling your readers a fuller story. But it's often the hardest part of the job, said David Heinzmann, police reporter at the Chicago Tribune.
"You have to understand and respect the culture of a police department, which can be a really complicated culture," he said in a phone interview. "You have to really know how to talk to police. You don't want to sound like too much of a cop ... they'll see right through it -- and you don't want to sound like a snotty newspaper reporter ... So you have to be straightforward and fair and earn their trust. Get beyond their suspicions of what a newspaper reporter is."
One of the best ways to show potential sources -- police officers, public information officers and other public-safety officials -- that you are serious about your job is to make every effort to understand their work. Learn the terminology. Understand what happens from the time a person is arrested to the time he or she goes to trial. Pay attention to nuance. Spend a few shifts on a ride-along. Get to know the clerks and the detectives -- in every unit of the department.
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"They took me to places, trying to scare me, and show me how tough things were," he said. "And it gave me some camaraderie with the night police reporter. He saw that I appreciated what he did ... It helped me understand the community better, it gave me camaraderie with the police reporter, and it also gave me credibility with my editors when I talked about the stories he was doing."
At The Wichita Eagle, reporters from across the newsroom are frequently pulled into police coverage. L. Kelly, the paper's crime and safety team leader, said it's humility, above all, that makes for a good police reporter -- and it's an essential quality for pinch-hitting on the beat.
"Don't be afraid to let people know that you're new to this and you might have a stupid question," Kelly tells reporters who are called on to her team for supplementary duty. "Don't assume that if someone is speaking jargon to you, that you'll be able to figure it out later ... When news breaks, it's going to be life-changing for [many] ... Accuracy is always really, really important, but you have to be even more certain of your accuracy on this one."
The daughter of a Wichita homicide detective, Kelly had stepped in for police reporters from time to time throughout her career. She'd never been a police reporter herself, and moved to the position of team leader after working as an editorial writer and columnist.
But in her 18 months as the crime and safety team leader, she has had an inordinate amount of experience training temporary police reporters on the fly: she started the position just as Dennis Rader, also known as the "BTK" killer, resurfaced in Wichita.
"I came back into the newsroom in August of 2004, and he had resurfaced with a letter to the Eagle in March of that year ... The investigation just kind of exploded in a public way in August, right after I got here," she said. Directing the coverage of this very national, yet very local case, fell to Kelly. "It was a real reporting challenge ... and a good example of us bringing people from all over the newsroom."
On that particular story, Kelly said, everyone was involved -- from the higher-education reporter to the crime team's veteran police reporters. Throughout the coverage, she played a significant role in the process, particularly when reporters from outside her team were involved. "I'd sit them down and say, 'Who told you this? How did you know it?' and 'Are you really sure that's what they meant here?' " she said. "Don't be afraid to go back and ask another question."
Acquiring that level of humility and understanding of your own limitations as a reporter can go a long way with a source, said Wayne Shelor, a former reporter and editor who is now the public information officer for the Clearwater, Fla., police department.
"It would make a world of difference if someone came over to me and said, 'Hi. My name is Bob. I'm 22 years old. I'm a college intern. I've never done this before. Can you help me?' " Shelor said in a phone interview. "I become instantly more open, accepting, available ... Honesty goes a long way. Nothing is more intelligent than a reporter telling a would-be source that 'I don't know what I don't know.' "
Shelor suggested that reporters participate in police departments' citizens' academies, spend time getting to understand the inner workings of the department and go on ride-alongs with officers.
The experience of the ride-alongs, the Register's Essex said, helped him to gain a better understanding of police officers' jobs, while developing new story ideas.
"Here, for the most part, nobody keeps track of people shot by police. And when homicide statistics are reported to the FBI by the states ... people shot by police aren't counted. And almost always the system is set up so that police shootings are set up to be justified ... and in some cases, that's the fox watching the henhouse."
But the mission of the newspaper -- and the police reporter in particular -- is to serve as a check on that power, Essex said. The sense of mission, on both sides of the reporting, he said, is powerful.
"It's a peek into the day-to-day drama of human beings," said Salt Lake Tribune justice reporter Lisa Rosetta. "Walk into a courtroom and sit in on a murder trial and it changes your perspective in many ways. It's rare to see the sorts of life-and-death confrontations every day. And it's important work. The justice system is vital to this country, and certainly people are interested in what happens and how it works. It's a privilege to do this job."
The Herald's Ovalle agreed. "The thing I like about crime reporting is it really gives you a snapshot into the rawest human elements of the human condition: jealously, greed, lust -- it's all there, and through it, you're able to find true nuggets of humanity," he said.
Understanding those basic human elements can ultimately be any reporter's best tool, the Free Press' Kresnak said.
"I think every reporter should do time on a police beat. Just so they can get the basics."
The Wild West days of covering crime and chaos may be over, but the lessons -- and significance -- of the police beat can stick with reporters as their careers move on, he said -- beyond the scanners, the badges, the lights and the sirens.
