Project advisers
Kent Collins
chair of the radio and television journalism faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Mary Beck
professor of law and head of the Domestic Violence Clinic at the law school at the University of Missouri.
Niels Beck
professor of psychiatry, interim chair of psychiatry, and professor of psychology at the University of Missouri
"As a journalist, I smelled blood..."
“As a journalist, I smelled blood,” says Kent Collins, chair of the radio and television journalism faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism, describing the phone call he received six years ago from Missouri Law Professor Mary Beck. “I smelled a ‘bad guy.’”
Kent Collins tells how journalism and law students unexpectedly forged a collaboration that helps prosecute abusers and protect innocent victims of domestic violence.
RJI: The Battered Justice project has accomplished dramatic results, but you didn’t start out with a grand plan. In 2002, when it all began, you and Mary Beck knew each other socially but not professionally?
KENT COLLINS: Yes, our kids were friends. And Professor Beck called me one day quite upset. She’d been with a woman in court who had been abused in the most brutal way. And the prosecutor chose not to prosecute the abuser. He had some serious technical concerns, but Professor Beck thought he had failed to follow the law. Failed to show compassion, and failed to be aggressive within the law in trying to protect this woman.
She was quite upset for a woman who doesn’t get upset that much.
RJI: Mary Beck is not only a professor at the University of Missouri, she’s an attorney?
KC: Professor Beck is the head of the Domestic Violence Clinic at the law school. Students take course work under her and in the process they represent victims of domestic abuse. They interview the victims, they go to court with the victims, then they write pleas and legal papers for the court on behalf of these victims. Professor Beck, a member of the Bar, then takes the student work and the victims into court to try to get some redress, or protection, or whatever.
RJI: With that one phone call your instincts as a journalist kicked in?
KC: She said, “I don’t know what I can do anymore. I’ve gone through all the legal efforts and there is something wrong over there. And I don’t know how to deal with it.”
At that point, as a journalist, I smelled blood. I smelled a bad guy. That’s what journalists do, they look for bad -- not always -- but part of the job is to look for bad guys. She seemed to have described a bad guy to me, someone who is not following the law, but was in a responsible position within the legal community. So I began to look at it and asked a couple of top journalism students to look at it.
RJI: Professor Beck’s hope, from the beginning, was to tap into the power of the press?
KC: Yes, she was looking for an experienced journalist to see if there was a way that journalism could help to impact social change.
Could journalism not only report information to the public, as it does every hour of every day, but could journalism put the focus on a social issue -- an issue that needed attention -- an issue that the citizenry is sympathetic to, and interested in?
RJI: You proceeded to attack from both sides, journalism and law?
KC: She asked a couple of her top students to do some statistical checks: how many prosecutions for domestic violence? How many successful convictions? How many restraining orders in that county to protect victims from further abuse?
Meanwhile we were checking out the anecdotal information on the journalism side. And all of a sudden we had a collaborative.
I’m not sure we thought about collaborating until after the students had done their work on the law school side and the journalism school side. But what we found in this one case was that the prosecutor was in his rights under the law, but that there were things he could have done, we felt, to protect the victim and maybe to interrupt or prevent further abuse.
So we did a story on that. And the law students gathered more statistical information. We expanded it to three other counties in mid-Missouri and we found similar issues. Some counties were aggressive at prosecuting abusers and protecting victims, and some were not.
So that was our first project. I think we did three stories for KOMU-TV(the Journalism School’s NBC-affiliated station that serves as a teaching laboratory) and the law students wrote an article that was published in the Missouri Bar Journal.
RJI: Journalists have always been society’s watchdogs, but this project opens up new possibilities. Technology let you take a shapeless pile of statistics and turn it into important and compelling stories.
KC: Yes, some tools were old -- tried and true traditional journalism practices -- and some were new. The first year we investigated four counties and did a half a dozen news stories. In fact, we won a grant from the Missouri Department of Safety, which is the Highway Patrol’s umbrella organization. This $50,000.00 grant was renewed two more years for a total of $150,000.00, which allowed us to do some statistical work in every county in Missouri. We hired researchers to find out which counties did a particularly good job – for instance in issuing restraining orders -- which tend to keep abusers away from their victims -- and which counties did not do such a good job. We found outliers all over the State, some good, some bad, and then we focused on another series of stories.
RJI: Statistics supplied the horsepower?
KC: Our humanized stories had real strength. There was no speculation. There would be no exaggeration. We couldn’t be fooled, because we had the hard numbers. And we could go to judges and prosecutors and police officers, and say, “Here are the numbers, what’s happening? Why are you doing a good job?” Or, “Why do you seem to be doing a bad job?”
RJI: Where do you go from here?
KC: This has allowed us to build models -- a national model. At the local county courthouse, we can now tell journalists what to look for.
RJI: Give a scenario of how this might play out...
KC: A journalist hears of a brutal case, a troubling case of domestic abuse, and is told from his routine sources at City Hall, or the county courthouse, or a PTA meeting, or wherever the journalist goes -- there’s this terrible case of domestic violence.
We can build the template for a reporter in a small town in any state in America to go look at specific statistics in his county, or his two counties. This allows a journalist to ask a few questions, and find out if something is amiss in the local county courthouse.
As a reporter for the newspaper, radio or TV station, he or she can look at those statistics and get into some excellent stories. Stories that are investigative in nature -- they’re acting as watchdogs on the police, prosecutors, and judges -- and also have a social impact for the citizens of the country.
We’re not focusing on pictures of bruised and battered women. What we’re are talking about is, do the lawyers, the police officers, the sheriff’s deputies, the prosecutors, and do the judges follow the law? Do they do all they can to protect the innocent victims and to prosecute abusers in court?
Interview conducted by Carole Christie, Director of Communications at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.