Stories about ‘Dickface’ racked up the pageviews – but reporting did nothing but further ruin the lives of people arrested for minor crimes, writes Hunter Pauli

On 17 April Dickface made another run for it, which was not unusual. Less than a week earlier a trigger-happy parole officer here in Montana had shot out the guy’s tires and, after a chase and a crash, police arrested him for multiple felony charges. A month before that Dickface had fled from police after failing to appear in court and he was arrested hiding in a car in a garage.

Police called him Dickface because of an unfortunately shaped facial tattoo from forehead to jawline meant to depict exposed machinery. They also called him a “runner” (though he’s not a good one) and a “frequent flier” for his regular arrests.

I call him Dickface now because it’s more ethical than smearing another poor person by publishing his legal name in the newspaper and contributing to the ruination of his life.

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Doing that day in and day out didn’t feel like journalism to me and actively prevented me from writing important stories to the point where I quit my job.

When Dickface ran again last April, he was arriving at the courthouse in an ambulance from a secure hospital where he had been administered a mental health evaluation after harming himself in jail. When the ambulance doors opened, police said Dickface bolted, eluding police for 20 minutes until an off-duty officer spotted him at the hospital and he was arrested again. He faces as much as 75 years in prison.

Journalists have seen the value of covering chases – those at high speed and on foot – since KCOP Channel 13 introduced a live chopper cam hovering over the Los Angeles freeway in 1992. Even though we all know how chases end, even a print story about one is more enticing to local readers than just about anything else in the paper. And with three chases under his belt in a little more than a month, Dickface racked up the pageviews.

Despite his outsized media presence, Dickface is hardly a criminal mastermind and far, far from the worst criminal I covered. He just seemed like another poor kid who stole something too expensive when he was young and stupid and who was doomed by a five-year sentence in prison into a cycle that would lead him back there. During his incarceration at Montana State Prison, a Department of Justice survey identified the facility as the worst prison for sexual assault in the country. I’d probably run, too.

As the sole crime reporter at a daily paper in Butte, Montana in charge of putting out the daily blotter, I found the process for deciding which poor residents of my city to shame completely arbitrary. There’s almost never enough real crime worth covering, but if a couple nasty assaults occurred there might not be room to include some poor guy getting caught with a gram of meth. If nothing happened the next day, maybe that user would go in. The blotter was often all minor drug arrests.

Over time I established a system: the more harm someone was doing to others, the greater the priority. Reporting about violent criminals such as guys hitting their girlfriends is pretty easy on the conscience, and so are DUIs and endangerment.

After a while I stopped including people arrested for shoplifting food from Walmart despite how frequently it happened and how much readers loved laughing about it.

When I stopped including simple drug arrests in the blotter nobody noticed, not even my editors, which begs the question of why we consider minor drug crimes worthy of attention in the first place.

Not all news outlets publish the names of arrestees, but even small cities have a daily, a weekly and TV stations so desperate for material by deadline that the names often get through. I know of no outlets in Montana that withhold the names of arrestees.

Names of arrestees are publicly available information that anyone can get from the police, but without journalists they’d sit unseen in databases unconnected to the outside world. The rise of online journalism means the role of the modern crime reporter is to bridge the air gap between the deep web databases of the criminal justice system and the publicly indexed repositories of online news archives.

Journalists play an unintended but integral role in the modern continuation of the poverty-prison cycle. If you do a Google search for Dickface’s name, the first results are stories about his alleged crimes. How is he supposed to get a legitimate job when a potential employer takes a cursory glance at his name? How is he expected to make an honest living and stay out of trouble?

Citizens in some countries can petition big data companies like Google to prevent certain URLs from appearing when their name is searched and say in the network age everyone has a right to be forgotten. But even that leaves a Streisand Effect-like paper trail when journalists fight back against what they see as censorship, such as the BBC’s index of links to stories removed from search engines by right-to-be-forgotten requests filed under EU law. (Almost every removed story is a crime story.)

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While the minor crime stories churned out by the thousands every day have an enormous, devastating long-term effect on their subjects, all but the most heinous of offenses are simply not worth reporting and are a waste of resources already stretched thin. No one becomes a more informed member of their community after 30 seconds spent reading a story about a homeless woman who shoplifted meat. They just laugh and move on.

Read the comments section of any crime story and you’ll see that readers and viewers love nothing more than judging those in their community. Poverty crime stories generate clicks because everyone thinks it’s hilarious when a naked man runs down the street screaming even if it’s because he can’t afford his medication.

In my newsroom we had a monitor that displayed live pageviews, and I was often pressured to finish police blotters as soon as possible to feed the lunch break crowd, regardless of whether there were more pressing stories towork on. I don’t blame my bosses: small newspapers need money. While the crime coverage in media hubs may be more nuanced, those outlets have far more resources and account for very little of the country. I was the only police reporter in a six-county area and was responsible for 15,000 square miles of crime.

Frequently, the demands of filling a daily crime section would prevent me from working on more important stories, such as an investigation of why the Environmental Protection Agency’s acceptable level of lead in children’s blood was set at a higher level in Butte than federal regulations allow. Lead turns children into barbarians, and the lead-crime hypothesis in Butte – known to Montanans as a rough and tumble city – has never been tested.

We should be thankful small places in America are safe enough to not always need a daily update on last night’s mistakes, but instead we blow small crimes out of proportion and ruin people’s lives for pennies, all while missing the big picture.

It’s not hard to see the big crime in Butte that people are getting away with. You can see it from orbit.