Complete Story
08/01/2018
Blade apologizes for police shooting story: 'Mistakes were made'
In the newsroom whenever you hear “officer-involved shooting” come across the police scanners, or these days see it on the Toledo Police Facebook page or Twitter account, everything stops for a second, waiting for what comes next — “officer down” or details about the shooting of a criminal.
At The Blade, as in newsrooms across the country, it’s our job — our most important job — to be accurate.
That didn’t happen Friday night. It didn’t happen again on Saturday night.
We messed up. Mistakes were made.
Inserting the race of the man shot and the police officer who shot him on Page 1 Sunday was wrong. We saw the error late and fixed it, but 25,000 papers were already en route.
As soon as we heard a man had been shot Friday and police officers were involved, a reporter and a photographer were sent to the scene. Reports came in quickly via Facebook and Twitter that police had shot and killed a person. A second reporter and photographer were sent out.
