The Whitewater Register proudly proclaims that it’s in its 151st year, implying a place in our history, and entitlement to our respect, its present quality could never justify. Under editor Carrie Dampier, the Register is a fawning, uncritical paper. There’s no solid journalism in the Register, just laughable cheerleading, and ignorance of the challenges that face our community.
The May 24th, below-the-fold story on Police Day is an example — one of many — of cheerleading that descends to self-parody. Consider Dampier’s title, referring to the Whitewater Police Department, “What would we do without them?” No solid newspaper, of whatever size, and whatever politics, would run a fawning headline like that. Even the strongest, sensible editorial supporters of a police department would shy away from a headline that slips from praise to hero-worship.
No one questions that Whitewater needs a police force, but no rational person believes that the Whitewater police are the only thing holding the city together. If conditions are so bad that only the Whitewater police stand between us and ruin, then conditions are far worse than I had imagined. (And, if life is that precarious, then our police force has significantly exaggerated their own crime-fighting, and have concealed from us the threats that create our supposed dependency upon them.)
We are a small, common town, hardly beset by crime, and if our police force changed size by a few officers, we would all go on just as well. If a few officers were to go on vacation, or leave permanently, few of our fellow citizens — beyond the Municipal Building — would notice the difference. It’s false, but no doubt self-satisfying, for the occupants of our municipal offices to believe that this small town depends on them. On the contrary, the workers in our several municipal departments depend on the fourteen thousand residents of our city.
The body of the Register story is worse even than the headline. Dampier begins, as many high school term papers do, with an elegiac quotation. She quotes Ambrose Redman on courage: “Courage is not the absence of fear…but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” I have no idea if Dampier read this in the original, or found it from a book of quotations. It scarcely matters, because she then tells us that “Redman may not have been thinking of police officers when he wrote that…” but in her mind it “certainly epitomizes their calling.” If the police are not Redman’s intended reference, why not find an apt quotation?
(For all the praise she aims to muster, her theology’s bad: police officers have a vocation, but they do not have a calling. It’s fine to respect their work, but it is not a calling.)
Dampier goes on to note that “the WPD lost two exceptional officers to retirement in the last year in Dave Haberman and Larry Meyer, both of whom were honored last Friday.” Leaving aside Haberman, how exactly was Meyer exceptional? Dampier might have written about published reports in the Janesville Gazette on accusations of destroying evidence, or in The Week on attorneys’ claims that Meyer and the WPD were targeting Mexican immigrants. The charges are noteworthy. If (as I suppose) Dampier rejects them, why not at least mention and rebut them?
What will we do without Meyer? Whitewater will have a better reputation and police force. That better day would start sooner if the Register started publishing like a worthy newspaper rather than like a press spokesman for a city department.