Seeking Community Voices on News Coverage of Police Violence

This article is authored by Emily Blyth, who was part of the 2023 cohort of CERi's Graduate Fellowship Program. She is a PhD student with the Faculty of Health Sciences and uses arts-based and interdisciplinary approaches to study the differential health impacts related to media exposures to police violence. This article details her journey with the CERi Graduate Fellowship Program and how she learned to incorporate community-engagement in her work. 

When I arrived at SFU in August 2021, I was determined to become a fabulous community-engaged researcher who would amplify voices that are silenced in discussions of police violence in Canada. There was just one problem: the day I arrived on campus was also the day I arrived in B.C.; I knew no one and had no community connections. 

My SSHRC-CGS funded research seeks to understand how people who have experienced police violence interact with news coverage on police violence. I describe news on of police violence as a multi-faceted harm because of the many ways that reporting can cause damage. When police do harm, reporting that does not hold them accountable or honour the person who was harmed can trigger community members who have been hurt by police in the past – either because they read this news, or because they hear the stories repeated by others who are not aware of discriminatory policing. Thus, news can perpetuate one moment of police violence across impacted communities. Uncritical reporting can also shield police and prevent scrutiny, consciousness raising, and calls for accountability. Thus, reporting can contribute to the acceptance and persistence of violent policing.  

These potentials for harm beg the question: which reporting styles feel harmful – and which feel validating in community and generative for wider change? I intended to turn to community to address this question. However, as you now know, I did not have a specific community to turn to, and I was unsure where to start.  

In the first weeks of my program, I shared my anxieties with my supervisor, Dr. Lyana Patrick. She understood the importance of community voice in this project, and she was quick to connect me with community and researchers at the intersection of justice and health. Still, those connections took time to grow. While those relationships were growing beneath the soil and beyond my understanding, my relationship with my research became strained. Through research methods classes and passing conversations in the first two years of my program, I was urged to “be community-embedded”, without roadmaps or space to explore what that could look like in my work. As time passed and still struggled to see where my work fit within community, I wondered if I was the right person to do this work.  

CERi enabled me to focus on what matters most to me in my research: relationships. The seeds of those relationships have since tangled into a vibrant garden as roles layer, deepen, and grow. These layers of connection are what makes my research feel robust, and seeing this garden grow has been instrumental in shaping my research identity and increasing the relevance and impact potential of my work.