JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

I wrote last month about the Kansas City Police Department’s embarrassment at the abject breakdown a few years ago in the children’s unit, where many investigators basically stopped working, with then-Chief Darryl Forte apparently turning a blind eye.

Well, as bad as that was, we can be thankful we haven’t experienced some of the problems the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has encountered.

Most recently, a 29-year-old officer shot and killed a 24-year-old female officer during a variation of a Russian roulette game.

This situation defies logic and imagination…

While Officer Nathaniel R. Hendren was at home but on duty early on Jan. 24, he and an off-duty officer named Katlyn Alix got to “playing with a gun,” as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it.

“According to the statement of probable cause, Hendren and Alix were playing with firearms. Hendren took all the bullets out of a revolver and then put one back in. He spun the cylinder, pointed it away and pulled the trigger.

“The gun did not fire, court records say. Alix then took the gun, pointed it at Hendren and pulled the trigger. Hendren then took the gun again and pulled the trigger. This time it fired, striking Alix in the chest.”    

Hendren is now charged with involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action. In addition, police say Hendren and his partner, who had left the room just before the fatal shot was fired, had consumed alcoholic beverages while on-duty.

Alix’s funeral was held Wednesday.

Other St. Louis police problems in recent years, according to the Post-Dispatch…

:: Four officers were indicted on federal charges in connection with the beating of an undercover officer during protests in St. Louis in 2017 and were alleged to have mistreated protesters.

:: Four former officers were charged with taking bribes from a chiropractor’s wife in return for nonpublic accident reports the chiropractor used to solicit new patients.

:: The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office blacklisted 28 officers in 2018, banning them from bringing cases to the office for charges.

…Protect and serve? Not much.

**

There was a touch of irony in The Star’s story Thursday about Stark Pharmacy being ordered to pay $9.5 million to settle a federal health care fraud lawsuit.

Star reporter Andy Marso didn’t note the irony, probably because he didn’t know about it or didn’t have space. In any event, Stark — now under different ownership — was the pharmacy that bought out pharmacist Robert Courtney after Courtney was convicted of diluting cancer drugs and, in the process, making millions of dollars and contributing to the deaths of some patients.

He began diluting drugs in 1992 and was exposed by a pharmaceutical company salesman in 2001. Courtney was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. He’s incarcerated in Texas, and his earliest possible release date, according to Wikipedia, is November 2027, when he will be 75 years old.

Pharmacist Howard Stark stepped in, bought out Courtney and ran the operation until 2000, when he sold it. The current managing partners — the ones who will have to pay up — are Steven Baraban, Gary Gray and Steven Schafer.

The development has left Howard Stark fighting to keep his good name. Marso quoted him as saying, “I am in no way connected, financially or anything, since 2000.”

**

The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, ran an interesting interview last week with Jill Abramson, who, in 2011, became the first woman executive editor of The New York Times. She was fired three years later, primarily because she turned out to be a poor manager. She now has a book out titled Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution, in which she writes about the newspaper industry being turned upside down in the last decade or so.

One of the questions the Guardian put to Abramson was whether President Trump was “the savior of news.”

Abramson responded: “The trouble is that not every news organization has witnessed a Trump bump. He has been a bonanza for cable and the best national newspapers. But the bleak part of the picture is the death of local papers. The fact that there are state capitals with very few or no watchdogs directed at them is a terrible development for citizens. It weakens our democracy.”

Regarding the shift away from giving “equal weight” to both sides of stories relating to Trump, Abramson said…

“(T)hat’s been torn away. I think the willingness to call him (Trump) out – the Times has used the word “lie” – is a healthy thing. The duty of journalism is to supply readers with the truth.”

…With Trump’s constant bloviating, that’s hard to do. The wall of shame that the nation’s best papers — The Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal — have built around Trump is one he’d like to knock down. So far, he’s losing that wall battle, too.

Note: Thanks to Jim North, my good friend and longtime neighbor (on the last street we lived one and the current one), for sending along the link to The Guardian story.