Oftentimes, when a crime occurs, the narrative originates from the police. That narrative is then spread through the media to influence public opinion which can expedite justice… but more often fuels falsehoods.
Oftentimes, when a crime occurs, the narrative originates from the police. That narrative is then spread through the media to influence public opinion which can expedite justice… but more often fuels falsehoods. In this episode, we break down the role the media played in Warren’s case and question the relationship between media and police. We hear from actor and activist Kenderick Sampson, who shares his experience reshaping narratives around safety and policing in Hollywood.
This podcast includes graphic discussion of a violent death. Listener discretion is advised.
The “Uprooted" podcast is the companion to the new discovery+ series “Uprooted,” streaming exclusively on discovery+. Go to discoveryplus.com/uprooted to start your 7-day free trial today.
Find episode transcripts here: https://uprooted.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-3-making-the-news
Dallas Lip:
Now, when I left the scene, my expectation was essentially that there was gonna be a cataclysm cause I was convinced it was a lynching.
Alicia Garza:
You'll remember Dallas lip from episode one. He's the EMT who first responded to the scene where Keith Warren was found hanged. After he went home that day, he remembered thinking that this case would be huge.
Dallas Lip:
I was expecting other people were gonna see this and that there was gonna be a huge upheaval in the media and in the community. And there was gonna be a massive investigation and that this was essentially just gonna take over.
Alicia Garza:
But that night, as he flipped through the evening news, he couldn't find any mention of the case.
Dallas Lip:
So I'm like flipping back and forth thinking it's gonna be like one of the first stories, nothing. And then that night for the late news, I did the same thing and still nothing. And then the next day I got up and was looking at papers and the news and nothing, and just essentially nothing came of it.
Alicia Garza:
Investigative reporter Dell Walters says that from the beginning, it was clear that Keith Warren's case was not going to be taken seriously, neither by the police.
Del Walters:
If you are a cop in Montgomery County, how in the hell do you get pictures of a young black man hanging from a tree and that not send alarm bells all the way up through the hierarchy of the police department?
Alicia Garza:
Nor by the media.
Del Walters:
The fact that it wasn't covered speaks to the racism of the time. I mean, imagine that this was a young white kid hanging from a tree in a black neighborhood.
Alicia Garza:
Del understood how one party the police influenced the other, the media. The fact that Keith's death was immediately ruled to suicide. Although the evidence suggested otherwise essentially stalled the story from gaining any traction. Why would any journalist bother to look further into a suicide?
Del Walters:
This set off so many different alarm bells inside our own unit that we found that impossible, that they did not look at it more seriously. And it was offensive.
Alicia Garza:
I'm your host, Alicia Garza, and you are listening to Uprooted the companion podcast to the Discovery Plus series about the Keith Warren case. In this episode, we'll take a look at the role the media did and didn't play in this case and the function of the media in influencing justice. Later in the episode, we'll hear from activists and actor, Kendrick Sampson, who will offer some ideas around reimagining safety and share how he is affecting change from Hollywood. This is Uprooted. By the time Del Walters had even heard about Keith Warren. It had already been six years since Keith was killed.
Del Walters:
Nobody knew that this had taken place until 92.
Alicia Garza:
For Del. It all started with a voicemail
Del Walters:
And I never will forget the voicemail. When I came into the studio into the office at the time it said, um, Mr. Walters, we think we have pictures of a boy being lynched. That's enough to get your attention.
Alicia Garza:
In a strange series of events. Keith's mother Mary Couey had been robbed inside her stolen purse were crime scene photos of Keith hanging from a tree. By the time they made their way to Del Walters. He had no idea who the boy in the photos was or who they were connected to.
Del Walters:
So we had these photos of a young man who had been hanged. And at that time we didn't know where he was. We didn't know where the hang hanging had taken place or even that it was in the DMV.
Alicia Garza:
The only other piece of evidence he had to go on was a sliver of a check still in the purse. It said Couey Deckman Lane.
Del Walters:
So we cross referenced. We found Mary Couey. And I remember the call, you know, and, and how do you ask somebody? Are you missing your purse with photographs of a young black man hanging from a tree in them? And she said, that's my son. And I said, what happened? And she said, that's what I'm trying to figure out.
Alicia Garza:
Del learned from Mary Couey that she had spent the last six years trying to find answers about what happened to her son from 1986 to 1992, she did anything she could to gain information. She filled binders with police reports and newspaper clippings. She posted flyers asking for information about the case. She tried escalating the investigation to the FBI Yet, despite all her efforts Keith's case remained ignored entirely by both the police and the media. That is until that message appeared in Del's voicemail.
Del Walters:
And that's where the journey began. The first stories were, how did this happen? How did we not know it happened? And those were the original stories. And then after that, they branched out into who killed him? Was it a lynching? And, and yeah, I mean, it grew from there.
Alicia Garza:
Dell has been an investigative reporter since the 1970s. He has a sharp memory for the details of the pieces he's worked on during the past four decades. When he thinks of Keith's case, he sees it as
Del Walters:
The one that got away. Keith is always gonna be the one that haunts you.
Alicia Garza:
Because he knows that had the police done more, had they kept doing their job and looking further into the story. The news media might have done more too. And those two forces combined could have helped Keith's family find answers. But what he most keenly remembers is Mary Couey the toll it took for her to constantly search for answers and come up with nothing. There's one day in particular,
Del Walters:
I remember where we were sitting. We were on the campus of Walter Reed army Medical Center. It was a beautiful day. And, um, we just met for lunch and she, I don't know if she knew that she was, was dying then, because it certainly did not appear that way, but she just said, take care of Keith for me. And I never will forget her making, making me promise that I would not let go. She was preparing to go to her grave, not having the answers that she wanted with regards to what happened to my son. And that's a terrible legacy to leave behind if you're a parent, how do you write that wrong? And I think that's the question that all of us should be asking right now. How do we write that wrong in 1986?
Alicia Garza:
What if Keith's case had been covered at the time? What might that have looked like? Well,
Dr. Nancy Yuen:
What research shows is that, for example, in news media, the way that they cover black victims of homicide is different from the way that they cover white victims.
Alicia Garza:
Dr. Yuen is a sociologist who studies race and racism in film, television, and news media. She says that typically in the news,
Dr. Nancy Yuen:
White victims are complex human beings with family, with backstory, whereas black homicide victims are much less complex.
Alicia Garza:
According to research from the prison policy initiative, black victims are less likely to be acknowledged in the media at all. And Dr. Yuen says that when they are oftentimes the media coverage works against them.
Dr. Nancy Yuen:
That's really problematic because those stories, especially when we're watching the news, we think that that is what reality is when it's not, it is one perception and the perception is unfortunately colored by racism.
Alicia Garza:
You'll remember how the news covered the murder of Trayvon Martin constantly comparing him to a thug because of the hoodie he wore
Speaker 5:
You dressed like a thug. People are gonna treat you like a thug.
Speaker 6:
Let's, let's be honest. Some people look at someone in a hoodie and they think maybe they don't belong in the neighborhood.
Speaker 7:
But I do wish that there was something, anything I could've done that wouldn't have put me in the position where I had to take his life.
Speaker 8:
I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimerman was.
Alicia Garza:
Dr. Yuen says that's because newsrooms are predominantly white, the racial biases of the people making the news bleeds into the stories they shape.
Dr. Nancy Yuen:
The loss of white lives is framed as tragic. Whereas the loss of black and brown lives are treated as normal, acceptable, even inevitable. And, and yes, even black victims are treated as, as essentially criminals, right? And, and the kind of digging up of backgrounds of black victims, uh, in ways that they do not do with white victims.
Alicia Garza:
We see a lot of these stories involving crime and the police get twisted within the news media. But Dr. Yuen says that this is a broader issue in all media coverage. She cites a study from the organization Color of Change.
Dr. Nancy Yuen:
There was one study that showed in the 2017, 2018 season, that out of all, the crime shows that they showed that police are overwhelmingly shown as heroes and that the system it works, it shows that everything is fair. And just
Alicia Garza:
Dr. Yuen remembers one example of a director and a producer who had filmed more than a dozen network cop shows.
Dr. Nancy Yuen:
He says that there were two basic categories of crime shows that he was able to tell and do, they were the, the kind of cops as infallible and heroic, or the three dimensional complex detectives, right, who are flawed, but then they deal with their biases. And this particular director said that they never got to make shows in which cops are actually acting in a criminal way.
Alicia Garza:
It's a reminder that the way media represents the police is very similar to the way the police would have themselves be represented.
Dr. Nancy Yuen:
And so this is a bias that actually creates, I think, a general societal perception that our criminal justice system works. And that we shouldn't question it.
Alicia Garza:
In episode two of uprooted, we heard from Carlean Ponder the co-chair of the Silver Spring Justice Coalition. She says media coverage, including the police is overwhelmingly positive because these stories usually originate from within the police department.
Carlean Ponder:
I mean, without community groups like the silver spring justice coalition, where we challenge the narrative, that generally comes from police. And we would continue to have media coverage of police misconduct in a, in a manner that basically accepts whatever press release was written by the police department itself, usually making themselves out to be heroes.
Alicia Garza:
In Keith's case, the limited coverage that did surface initially came from a police blog. Carlean says this dynamic plays out within the criminal justice system as a whole where the perspectives of police and other officials are elevated above the perspective of victims, especially black ones.
Carlean Ponder:
So when you take with the criminal justice system, you're talking about courts, you're talking about judges, you're talking about prosecutors, large parts of the community held them in high esteem, right? For many, many years in this country, I mean, they were trusted. That's why you have police officers give testimony in court because they could often sway the jurors. And so the likelihood of a black person being able to get up and counter the police officer's testimony by saying, you know, this officer beat me senseless. I was just walking down the street, minding my own business when this officer called me the n word and then began to beat me with his flashlight or baton, I didn't do anything or it wasn't me. I didn't Rob the store, whatever it is, you know, they're, they're being accused of the likelihood of that person's testimony being given credibility and weight was very slim, very slim.
Alicia Garza:
Which is later reinforced by the media coverage of the case.
Carlean Ponder:
And in a lot of cases, I don't think the media even covered, right. The counter testimony from the individual who was perhaps being charged with a crime or whatever it is.
Alicia Garza:
Although it may be too late for Keith Warren Carlene does see some hope when it comes to media coverage for victims like Keith in the future, especially when it comes to police misconduct. With the advent of social media and cell phones, victims, and bystanders now have a means to bring their side of the story to the table.
Carlean Ponder:
It is only very recently because black people in particular now have agency to speak up for ourselves that the media has taken more interest in giving more balanced coverage to the criminal justice system and consideration to how misconduct may be part of that system and, and has been part of that system for a very long time.
Alicia Garza:
Carlean says the change we're seeing is that tools that were once only in the hands of the professionals are much more accessible now.
Carlean Ponder:
More and more people have access to media outlets that didn't exist before. You know, that includes bloggers, right? I know activists who've done great work by going out and actually covering protest, being on the scene, having, you know, moment by moment accounts of what's happening on the ground from an activist perspective. And, you know, they're sharing their work as an activist, but also as really as a media professional in that sense.
Alicia Garza:
In the past media typically referred to print media, broadcast, advertising, but now regular citizen journalists with their cell phone videos, blogs, Facebook lives, they've become another pillar of the entire media system offering another point of view that's too often been ignored.
Carlean Ponder:
So I, I mean, I think that all those are changes in the media that are good because they're helping to give a counter narrative to what has been standard in American media coverage of the criminal justice system, which is we trust our officers. We trust our judges. We trust our prosecutors. We hold them in high esteem and whatever they have said is just the truth.
Alicia Garza:
And because this new type of media has become so popular, it's begun to affect and change the others.
Carlean Ponder:
I mean, I do think that we are seeing much better coverage of misconduct and, and bias in the criminal justice system, policing system from mainstream media as a whole, for a long time, you might have seen a publication like Ebony, right?
Alicia Garza:
So far in this episode, we've heard from reporter Del Walters about the media coverage or lack of it regarding the Keith Warren case. And we've heard from Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen and Carlean Ponder about how media coverage treats black victims and how the power of social media is slowly turning the tide up next. We'll hear from Kendrick Sampson, the actor to talk about police presence in Hollywood and what he is doing to change the system.
Alicia Garza:
You know, Kendrick, I love seeing you all over the television, even though. Insecure is one of my favorite shows. I think my favorite experience of you on TV was with how to get away with murder
Kendrick Sampson:
Oh, yeah.
New Speaker:
Alicia Garza:
And, um, and speaking of getting away with murder, a lot of people know you from the characters that you play on television, but you are a three dimensional human being that is quite active in your community. And I'm wondering if you can tell our listeners, how did you get introduced to activism?
Kendrick Sampson:
You know, you and I have talked about this before and just like discovering new things that informed our activism, whether it's experience of our parents growing up and, you know, for, for example, I, you know, my, my dad was black. My mom is of European descent, right? Mm-hmm
Alicia Garza:
Kendrick Sampson:
I think a lot of that informed my activism as well as I had an uncle that was dying of AIDS when I was young. And there was so many, um, circumstances that, that informed, I, I always think about what came first, the chicken or the egg, but right. There's not a whole lot to indicate if, you know, if it was in me first or as opposed to all of the situations growing up that I believe informed my activism, even moving out to LA like the first scene I did in class was Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz out of the Spike Lee's, Malcolm X. And we didn't do a great job
Alicia Garza:
Kendrick Sampson:
This is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And we worked on it for about two months and discovered so much, but I didn't realize, you know, as I was learning and studying this for acting, it was also informing my politics, same thing with Robey Theater Company around the same time I joined Robey Theater Company based off of Paul Robeson, right. Honoring Paul Robeson. And I had to learn about Paul Robeson.
Alicia Garza:
He's one of my faves.
Kendrick Sampson:
Me too. I just bought a bunch of albums the other day. I went to the Reparations Club. I was like, y'all got Paul Robeson on the thing
Alicia Garza:
Mm-hmm
Kendrick Sampson:
I think the short answer is, is they keep on putting bandaids on a problem. And because a lot of, you know, the foundation of the systems, uh, that they built can't survive without groups of people to exploit, because that was a, a, a central function of these systems that they were based on our oppression, black people's oppression, indigenous folks, right. And black people in particular were targeted by these systems and fueled these systems. They were the labor, they were the, the IP, the product, you know what I'm saying? They, it was multi-layered that an interwoven that these systems cannot exist without someone to oppress mm-hmm
Alicia Garza:
I think a lot of people feel the way that you do right. Which is that, you know, black people have been oppressed for a long time and black people have fought back, like part of our culture, our traditions, right. Are that we resist unjust systems and processes that deny us our humanity. And at the same time, there can be a little bit of resignation too, right. Like, okay, we're just in cycles. It's this happens over and over again. And sometimes that leads people to make decisions that they're not gonna get involved either because they don't think things can change or because they don't think that they can be a part of change. Right. They don't think that they can be people who can, um, inspire change, but you have made a very different choice. And in that, you know, again, I've seen you organizing, I've seen you protesting talk to me a little bit about why you choose to be involved as opposed to being resigned, right. To the way that things are.
Kendrick Sampson:
If I'm thinking about my nephews and nieces, which makes me all little tingly, sometimes mm-hmm
Alicia Garza:
Kendrick Sampson:
I think that is central central to what motivates me to do that work, that I want them to not go through things that I went through. And I see a future that is absent of a lot of the things that I had to struggle through. And I know, and I've seen glimmers that that world is possible through folks like yourself, right? Painting that picture. A lot of organizers, a lot of people don't realize are artists and they can paint these beautiful visualizations of the world that we didn't really, we didn't have the tools to imagine. Right. The tools were taken away from us to imagine those types of futures and with our resilience folks like yourself, right come up, come up and say, actually I've broken through. And I've gotten that visualization back. I got these tools back. Let me provide them for you as well.
Kendrick Sampson:
And that's what really, really motivates me. And even more so seeing kids that were in high school that are currently in high school, like here in LA defund, the LA school police by 35 million, one third of the budget, you know, wow. Ending random searches and seizures. These are kids organizing, you know, and I was in high school. Wow. I was just doing, doing different things. You know what I'm saying? That was not a part of my agenda, you know? So, so it's super impressive. I'm like, if they can do it, I, you know, the, and even my most tired days, I'm like, this is who I'm doing it for. And they have the vigor and, um, the ambition and the hope that it takes to move forward and be innovative in, in some of these strategies. And it inspires me. Mm-hmm
Alicia Garza:
You were shot with rubber bullets at a black lives matter protest in downtown LA, if I'm not mistaken. And what got exposed right here is the tactics that police use to squash protest right? Um, under the guise of often, right. Protecting public property or protecting public safety, but the violence that was happening wasn't in the protests, it was coming from the police. So I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about this so that our listeners get a better sense of how policing is functioning even with people who have large platforms and celebrities, right?
Kendrick Sampson:
Yeah. I think last year 2020 uprisings police were backed into a corner and exposed because they couldn't operate in the shadows as they usually do because the spotlight, we were all at home and we decided what people get to focus on. Mm-hmm
Alicia Garza:
Well, given the work that you're doing with Build Power and Black Lives Matter, it seems like, uh, you're involved in a ton of efforts to make sure that the system, as it stands, does not get to continue to enact such violence on our communities either by the neglect and divestment from our communities or from the segregated practice of offering safety to some and refusing it for others. So talk to me a little bit about some of the work that you're doing in Los Angeles to address the crisis of policing and segregated safety and tell us how that ties into your vision for what the world and how this country should function as it relates to safety and justice.
Kendrick Sampson:
Yeah. So we started an initiative called in, at Build Power, our nonprofit called Liberate Mental Health and Hollywood for Black Lives. Last year, Hollywood for Black Lives in particular, was to stand in solidarity with the movement with uprisings and saying, what can we do in Hollywood? What, what is our part that we can do within our sphere of influence that would make a big statement? And one thing was getting over 300 powerful creatives and professionals in Hollywood to sign this list of demands. The first one being divest from police, removing police from our ecosystem in Hollywood, forces them to reimagine what safety is. If you're removing the mechanisms that's supposed to keep us safe, right? Then you have to acknowledge that we now need a new safety system. What is that gonna be? So a lot of the work that we're doing is figuring out how to transform this industry that we work in and then replicate that in other industries. I think that it's important to do it here because Hollywood is the largest propaganda machine, right? It is utilized to perpetuate white supremacy, anti-blackness and all over the world. And it's got the largest reach, the biggest PR platform. So I think it's really important to start to start here. And that's, that's a lot of the work we're doing besides obviously getting out in the streets and supporting our grassroots partners with policy and protest.
Alicia Garza:
That's excellent. What do you say to people who might be listening, who would say, you know, I think you're being a little bit harsh about police. I think police are actually here to keep us safe.
Kendrick Sampson:
I think a lot of us have to really think about if we've ever had a conversation about what safety actually is, conceptually, what safety is and what it takes to be safe. What we define safety as what we feel when we are, would call ourselves safe in particular systems of safety. If we're breaking down the systems of safety and really understanding and deciding, determining if they work for us and the people that we love, most the people that we feel are most targeted in our lives. The people that are differently able, the people who are trans, darker skin, who, you know, black folks who have been formally incarcerated, whatever it is, the people that we feel are most vulnerable people struggling with mental health issues. If you look at the statistics, if you look at their personal stories and experiences overwhelmingly so, you will find that they are not safe, that they don't feel safe, that there are no systems of safety, that account for their experiences and center them so they can truly thrive.
Kendrick Sampson:
And if we have that real conversation, then we have to establish police. You know, if there's no system that we are like, you know what? That is the system we turn to that keeps my trans nephew safe, right? If we can't point to that, then the systems need to be built. Which means the systems we have are inadequate. And in particular, a lot of, as we study a lot of these systems, particularly police, we find that they make us less safe, that they actually introduce harm into the situation. If we're using the protest as an example, you know, we always talk about Miriame Kaba, right? Miriame Kaba's talk says, you know, that all harm is not considered crime and all crime is not considered harm. And so you have crimes that are out there. These police criminalizing us for protesting and saying, we're not gonna take this shit anymore.
Kendrick Sampson:
Y'all are not gonna kill us. Mm-hmm
Kendrick Sampson:
She always says, you know, everything has a home, right? Everything has a home. You have to make sure everything has a home. When you put that to take that toothbrush out, you put the toothbrush back, it has a home, right?
Alicia Garza:
Mm. That is an excellent place to wrap this conversation. Kendrick, thank you so much for joining us today. This was insightful and inspiring and hopefully gives our listeners something to think about as we are reimagining the world and the country that we wanna live in.
Kendrick Sampson:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I appreciate you as always.
Alicia Garza:
That's it for this week. Thanks so much for listening to Uprooted the companion podcast to the Discovery Plus series. I'm Alicia Garza on the next episode, citizen detectives in this episode, we'll see how, when victims are not labeled the perfect victim, their cases get ignored, leaving it to their loved ones to get any unsolved questions answered. We'll learn more about Keith's sister and mother and their respective approaches to finding the truth. We'll also talk to Lonita Baker Co-Counsel for Brianna Taylor and her family.
Lonita Baker:
I think that the only thing that's preventing Brianna family from getting justice is the benefit of the doubt that prosecutors give to police officers that they don't give to everyday citizens. If what happened, um, to Brianna had been done by anyone other than police officers, they would be in prison right now.
Alicia Garza:
That's next week on uprooted for more on Keith Warren's case, check out the miniseries on discovery plus, and if you love the show, be sure to rate, review and subscribe to uprooted on apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast. Uprooted is produced by Now This for Discovery plus in partnership with Pod People special, thanks to the production team at Pod People. Rachel King, Matt Sav, Ivana Tucker, Jazzi Johnson, Liz Mak, Brian Rivers, Vincent Cacchione, Aimee Machado