Police fail to keep name of West Texas gunman out of spotlight
Print Edition
When law enforcement authorities gathered to discuss details of a mass shooting in West Texas that left seven people dead, there was one bit of information they refused to provide on live television: the name of the gunman.
Instead, they decided to release it through a Facebook post.
Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke made it plain why he wouldn’t mention the name at the news conference: “I’m not going to give him any notoriety for what he did.”
Even with such restraint, it remained a challenge to curb the spread of the gunman’s name. The Odessa Police Department has fewer than 25,000 followers of its Facebook page but the social media platform easily reaches millions of Facebook’s members around the globe and the post was shared hundreds of times. Within minutes, Twitter lit up with posts mentioning his name.
Journalists and advocates on both sides of the gun debate also began spreading the word, spewing a firehose of information about the suspect.
In an era of social media saturation, it’s impossible to keep that information secret.
“Ultimately, the police department can only directly control what they do, and that name, that information can be reposted and retweeted and republished hundreds of thousands of time,” said Adam Lankford, a criminologist from the University of Alabama who has studied the influence of media coverage on future shooters.
‘No Notoriety’ movement
He and others appeal to the media to limit the volume of information about these perpetrators, saying it does little to understand the reasons for the violence or stop it in the future.
The “No Notoriety” movement first started to take hold after the 1999 Columbine school shooting outside Denver. The gunmen became household names and even in death appeared to motivate a whole new crop of mass shooters.
In recent years, it has gained momentum amid a seemingly steady stream of mass shootings. The idea is to urge news organizations to refrain from naming the shooters in mass slayings and to curb the volume of biographical information about them. In New Zealand, after a mass shooter there killed 51 people at two mosques, its Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern refused to mention the perpetrator’s name at all.
FBI leaders, leery of inspiring copycat killers and hesitant to give them what they see as undue attention, have occasionally been reluctant in recent years to refer to them by name.
Former FBI Director James Comey expressed that concern in a briefing with reporters the day after a 2016 rampage at an Orlando nightclub, repeatedly referring to the gunman not by his name but simply as “the killer.”
“You will notice that I am not using the killer’s name and I will try not to do that,” Comey said.
“Part of what motivates sick people to do this kind of thing is some twisted notion of fame or glory and I don’t want to be part of that for the sake of the victims and their families.”
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