Community trauma & the press’ systemic failure to look beyond quick clicks and views: Observations from Chantel Moore’s memorial
Photo Credit: (Victoria News / Google Images)
Written by: Morgana Adby
On June 18, I attended the Chantel Moore memorial at the BC Legislature in Victoria. At 26, she was an Indigenous woman shot dead by police in Edmundston, New Brunswick, during a wellness check at the request of someone close to her. She was a member of the Tla-o-qui-aht, and lived most of her life on the northern part of Vancouver Island. Her family was at the memorial, as were the friends and community she grew up with.
It was a beautiful ceremony, complete with calls to action and unity. The sea of people was covered in yellow, Chantel’s favourite colour. Her mother spoke to us and cried; the community cried. Chantel’s life was celebrated for those that knew her.
But this memorial was not only about her. I'm sure the family and friends will continue to grieve wherever they may be, but they wanted this memorial to be a community event. It featured calls to action from Indigenous community leaders to fix the “broken policing system” in Canada.
At one point, a friend of the family spoke about how scared she was. As a young Indigenous woman that also has lived with mental health problems, she said that she wants to know that if she needed help, she would not be shot.
In those moments the entire crowd could collectively understand one statement as being true: nobody should have to worry that if they were to call upon the police to check on a loved one, that loved one will be killed.
Many called to defund the police, and instead invest in emergency services for mental health.
I noticed something strange at the ceremony, probably because I was there passively; not to interview anyone, but just because the island was coming together to support a grieving community. I could not help but watch as the teams of two unpacked their equipment, as they filmed the reporter explain the story in front of the yellow crowd.
However, as the MC introduced herself and opened the ceremony, I noticed the news team closest to me leave. At first, I thought they were just departing to get more information in other parts of the crowd. But soon, each of the TV news teams I could see packed up, and by the end of the second speaker, I could see none of these media teams.
From the perspective of a young reporter, this was very strange. All the little details I so far mentioned give flesh to a story. Surface level inaccuracies are bound to be corrected if one cultivates a more intimate understanding of a situation. However, these news crews just got the shot of the reporter recounting Chantel Moore’s tragic story and then left.
I do not mean to condemn any TV crews that covered the story: local journalists are overworked and have intense pressure to be in five places at once. To be clear, I am sure these reporters have done their due diligence conducting interviews with the family. But that said, this practice is lacking the attention to detail that is required in covering both systematic issues and in covering grief of racialized communities. How are reporters supposed to accurately communicate the recounting of events, if they do not stay to the end?
To hear from people in her outer circles, and those that never even met her, is a story in itself; it gives us a greater understanding of how these events affect the people who are least likely to be platformed.
Surely, if an unpredicted outcome arose there would be a follow-up, but that does not negate the fact that one cannot even decide which elements are important to communicate, if they do not have the entire picture.
Likewise, before I even attended the memorial, I noted a traffic warning earlier in the day. The local station casually informed the public that they may need to leave the house a little early, if they want to drive to downtown Victoria because there will be a protest. To be fair, the station could have covered the story on-air another time, but as a consumer, I was only privy to this limited information. There was no mention of her name, or that it was a memorial. It would not have taken more airtime to simply say the traffic is due to the Chantel Moore memorial happening downtown.
I know this because when a cop was tragically killed by a drunk driver in my local municipality, the radio was happy to mention the Sarah Beckett tributes. I never met Sarah Beckett, but I know her name. I know her contributions to my community, and I know that she died too soon, that it could have been prevented - and now I know Chantel in the same way. We use names to humanize people, to tie the stories of their life together.
At the very least, as the press, we need to prioritize saying the names of people killed during police encounters. We need to call memorials just that, as opposed to indiscriminately using the term protest before the event has even begun.
Particularly we need to say the names of Indigenous and Black community members killed by police. As humans, we tend to have trouble visualizing numbers. I can quote the BC First Nations Justice Council, and tell you that, “one-third of the people shot to death by RCMP officers over a 10-year period are Indigenous, despite indigenous people only making up 5 per cent of the population.”
However, that is simply a distressing number to media consumers. Whereas, if people with a platform consistently humanize the victims of police violence, then a more accurate picture will be communicated to the public.
If the problem is that there are too many names to keep track of, then it is time to start demanding that list stops growing.
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