Friday, January 27, 2023

Is "Cop" Disrespectful?

Headline writers use shortened versions of words all the time. So when they don't, it's noticeable. 

We had an example of this yesterday in our local news, in coverage of a shooting in a northeast metro suburb. The Saint Paul Pioneer Press's headline used the word "officer":

While the Minneapolis Star Tribune used "cop":

I saw the Pioneer Press headline first and this question is the first thing I thought of. Officer? It sounded odd to me. Note that it even refers to him as "Veteran cop" in the secondary headline. 

And this headline has other problems: "Officer shot" could be misread initially until the reader gets to the word "by," since usually it's the police who are the ones doing the shooting. "Offers shot 3 times." Sounds like the officer shot his gun 3 times, right? Why wasn't it "Suspect shoots cop 3 times"? Wouldn't that have been a better headline, since it's both more active and clearer?

The Star Tribune's headline is even better: It gets the standoff into the headline and tells the reader the cop is wounded, not dead, without having to read the deck. The fact that there's a suspect is not that important, so it's relegated to the deck.

But my biggest question, from comparing these two headlines, was whether it has become disrespectful to use the word "cop" to refer to individual police officers in usages like headlines. Referring to a cop as an officer, when it's not being used as a title for a specific person, doesn't sound like a newspaper to me. It sounds like a press release from the police department, or from media that exists in a police state. 

I'm not totally sure why. "Police officer" would not bother me in the same way, because that seems synonymous with cop to me. It's something about shortening it to "officer," as if there is only one kind of officer and we're all supposed to know that's police? And also that the use of officer implies "cop" is bad or they would have used it. 

I'm not sure, but this rankles me.


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