Jargon - Framing the Issue

Adam Johnson has written an article listing seven ways police jargon is used by journalists to color public perception. Here are some excerpts:

Probably the most popular and most frequently criticized example of copspeak, “officer-involved shooting” is a textbook example of what Robert Jay Lifton called a “thought-terminating cliche.” It describes an act of violence without assigning blame and is almost never used for when a police officer is the victim, only when the police have shot someone — justified or not.

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“Such phraseology,” Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” “is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

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Those who’ve been arrested, shot or had any interaction with the police are routinely referred to as “suspects” or “subjects”—terms that prejudice the reader by conveying a sense of criminality before the details of the case are known.

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Note that the police officers [in the Fredddie Gray case] — who would eventually be indicted after Gray died from his injuries — are not referred to as “suspects,” despite that fact that someone was killed in their custody. “Suspect” is a subjective description of prejudice, told entirely from the police department’s perspective.

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Like “clashes,” “altercation” is a popular catch-all to describe any violent exchange between police and civilians.

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One of the starkest examples of this euphemism’s use came from the shooting of Walter Scott by a South Carolina police officer in 2015, as FAIR reported at the time (4/7/15). Before a video surfaced showing Scott being gunned down in the back as he ran away from Officer Michael Slager, local media were describing the killing as having taken place as a result of an “altercation” — a term that implies parity of violence.

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Using the vague phrase “altercation,” local reporters perpetuate the misleading idea of a struggle between two evenly matched parties.

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“Discharged weapon” is another pseudo-official way of passively saying a police officer shot at someone.

  Adam Johnson @ FAIR

"The officer discharged his weapon" sounds so non-violent and almost like the opposite of what the officer actually did. During an "altercation."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.