By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, October 2011
In early October 2011, at a panel discussion featuring criminologist David M. Kennedy and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, Beck delivered a sharp critique of LA media’s coverage of gang violence. His thesis was direct: “The coverage here in Los Angeles is very shallow. No one spends very much time on these types of stories and the attention span is very small. These are complicated issues that don’t fit into a small news article or into a 30-second spot on Fox News.” The original FishbowlLA framing, by Matthew Fleischer, conceded that Beck was “pretty spot on.”
Then
Charlie Beck had been LAPD Chief since November 2009, succeeding William Bratton. The Beck-era LAPD was, in 2011, in the middle of the broader community-policing experiment that the department had been building since the post-Rodney King reform period. The David M. Kennedy collaboration — Kennedy, a CUNY-based criminologist, was a prominent advocate of focused-deterrence community-policing models — was structurally important: a frequent national-level police critic publicly endorsing a specific big-city police chief’s approach was unusual.
Father Greg Boyle (Homeboy Industries) and journalist Celeste Fremon (longtime LA gang-violence chronicler at WitnessLA) were on the panel. The community-and-coverage axis at the discussion was substantively populated with LA’s most-cited gang-policy voices.
Beck’s media critique was structurally a critique of news-organization resourcing rather than a critique of individual reporters. He was arguing that the complexity of gang-violence dynamics didn’t fit into the news-article and broadcast-segment formats that the contracted LA-media economy was still operating on. Matthew Fleischer’s FBLA framing accepted the critique: “The only beat in LA that gets robust coverage is the entertainment industry. Coverage of social justice, crime, and general civic affairs needs a serious upgrade.”
The original FishbowlLA piece read as a small documented moment of LA-press-and-LAPD substantive engagement on the coverage question — the kind of moment that periodically produced productive cross-institutional discussion in the early 2010s.
Now
Charlie Beck retired as LAPD Chief in June 2018 after eight and a half years. He briefly served as Chicago’s interim police superintendent in 2019 — a controversial appointment that ended after about ten months. He has continued in public-safety advisory roles since.
The broader question Beck raised in 2011 — that LA media’s gang-violence and civic-affairs coverage was structurally too shallow — has substantially aged into being more accurate, not less. The LA Times and other major LA outlets went through additional rounds of newsroom layoffs across the 2010s and 2020s; the LA Weekly was substantially gutted under post-2017 ownership; KPCC-LAist and the broader public-radio system have absorbed some of the civic-affairs reporting function but not at the staffing levels that the 2011 critique implicitly called for.
The community-policing model that Beck and Kennedy were endorsing in 2011 has had a more complicated trajectory. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the subsequent national reckoning with policing structurally reframed many of the early-2010s reform conversations; “community policing” as a 2011-era rhetorical device has substantially been replaced by more granular discussions about specific use-of-force policies, accountability infrastructure, and community-investment alternatives.
David Kennedy has continued in his criminology work at John Jay College’s Center for Crime Prevention and Control; his focused-deterrence framework has remained influential in academic policing-policy discussions across the years. Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries have continued operating; Celeste Fremon’s WitnessLA project has continued as one of the durable LA-criminal-justice reporting operations.
The 2011 piece reads now as one of the documented moments when an LA police chief was publicly making the case that the media’s coverage of his city’s most-complicated public-safety issues was structurally inadequate — a critique that has aged into broader applicability rather than narrower.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.
More from the FishbowlLA archive
- Anita Busch confronts Anthony Pellicano at his December 2008 sentencing — the wiretapping case in court
- California Watch’s April 2011 ‘On Shaky Ground’ investigation — seismic-safety failure in California public schools
- CPJ’s 2011 Impunity Index — Iraq, Mexico, and the documented unsolved-murders-of-journalists list