Czech Police again report fabricated attack by "dark-skinned" person as real

The Czech Police evidently still do not know how to go about publicizing information from their investigations. Many examples to back up this claim exist, but the most recent is, of course, the most typical:  The existence of fabricated reports of "muggings" which the police (and subsequently, several media outlets) present to the public as having actually occurred through their initially poorly-formulated press releases. 

Police spokesperson Jana Kroutilová has published two contradictory press releases in three days about one case recently. In the first press release (published on 2 June) she claims that "dark-skinned youths" mugged a student in Jihlava, one of whom used a knife to cut him, while in the second press release (published on 4 June), she claims the student invented the entire story. 

Her mistake is obviously her formulation of the entire first press release, starting with the headline given to it ("Student suffers cutting injury during robbery"), as well as its opening paragraph:  "Detectives in Jihlava are searching for a perpetrator who committed robbery there on Sunday. The victim was a 17-year-old student who was assaulted with a knife. The victim suffered a cutting injury during the attack and had to be treated in hospital." 

In this press release, the police spokesperson claims as fact that a 17-year-old student became a victim of assault, even though she only had his testimony available to her at that moment. This means Kroutilová is publishing the claims of one side of an alleged conflict as if they were the truth.

The spokesperson chose to do this despite the fact that rather a lot of fabricated stories of muggings and other similar inventions being reported to police have come to light in the past few years. For more information about such reports, see here.

The first press release about these latest allegations was picked up by several media outlets, specifically, the online news servers of Deník.cz, iDNES.cz, and the local "Jihlavské listy". Kroutilová’s complete press release was also published by the police publication "Policejní deník".   

All of these media outlets obediently parroted the police spokesperson’s press release, which reported an allegation by a student not has his claim, but as a fact which took place precisely according to the testimony he gave police. The police spokesperson did this despite the fact that she has previously had bad experiences with Czechs inventing tales of "violence committed by Roma" which turned out to be untrue. 

The most infamous such case was that of the Břeclav lie. Precisely due to a poorly formulated police press release of the kind described above and the subsequently biased reporting by the media, a strong wave of anti-Romani sentiment swelled in that town that was eventually expressed through large, strongly racist demonstrations. 

How should the media and police approach such topics? It’s not that complicated.

For example, the press release could have read as follows:  "A 17-year-old student claims he was mugged and suffered a cutting injury during the incident. Police have begun to investigate and can neither confirm nor deny his claims at this time."

The situation in the media today is a little better than it once was. For example, news server iDNES.cz promptly published the police spokesperson’s second press release about the student having invented the story of the mugging.

Moreover, in its first article on the subject, iDNES.cz cited the police spokesperson’s press release as such and did not publish its content as if its was the newspaper’s own findings. Now we must wait and see whether the Police of the Czech Republic can also manage to get rid of their own lack of professionalism and the unethical approach they take to reporting on their own work.