“To the Moon, Alice, to the Moon!” 0
The Seattle Times’s Danny Westneat remembers his time as a beat reported doing a weekly “police blotter” column. Despite the publicity, he suspects that, aside from the cover-up, pearl-clutching over the NFL’s abusive husbands and boyfriends may be obscuring a larger problem. A nugget:
. . . I came to call this my weekly domestic-violence tour.
Family fights, usually with a man attacking a woman, are the top reason people call police. They make up anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of what police do. Sifting through the weekly reports of South King County was a bruising tour of family dysfunction: shouting matches in the streets to fist fights to battering of children with canes to assaults with knives to, every so often, homicide.
Family violence was so routine it became background noise. I rarely put it in the crime blotter. Maybe this was a mistake, but there was too much. I could have filled the entire blotter every week solely with horrific accounts of men abusing women. I didn’t. I looked away.
(snip)
But the obsession with the NFL scandal is obscuring the real story: We are the ones who really have an epidemic of domestic-violence problems.