By Michael Miner
The desperate passengers all decided to stay put.
Plattner is 25 years old, and this was her first newspaper story. She’d approached it in the spirit of the aspiring film writer she is, taking creative liberties that punched up her material. Plattner assured Curwen that she did fly from Kariba to Hwange last October, though everything else she said happened to her was not, in a literal sense, true.
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“I realize now that I was stupid and naive to put the story in the first person, but I thought it would heighten the dramatic effect.”
She went on. “I have learned one thing. I will never write anything without a pseudonym.”
That’s not to say the race of the officers makes no difference. If to be black is to be presumed armed and dangerous by black cops as well as white, that wretched truth must be confronted. If the police department is accepting minority recruits who aren’t up to the job, then the media better say so and let the chips fall where they may. (In addition to being black, the officer who killed Haggerty was a tiny woman with just a couple of years on the force.) If the detail that the cops were also black muddles the racial narrative–well, that might inconvenience the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and newspaper-circulation directors, but it shouldn’t make journalists hesitate.
