The line-of-duty death of a police officer challenges the public’s shared views of social order and morality. Local news media help audiences make sense of these tragedies. This study examines how attributions of responsibility are framed in local print news stories, guided by the question, “How do news stories frame the cause of death when police officers are killed in the line of duty?” We conducted an ethnographic content analysis of stories about line-of-duty deaths published in Indianapolis, Indiana newspapers between 1872 and 2019. Six frames promoting causal explanations for police officer deaths emerged from our analysis: moral depravity, gun availability and lethality, the nature of the job, unaddressed mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse, and officer failings. While line-of-duty deaths have been consistently framed as a result of individual and societal moral depravity over time, we also find that officer deaths have more recently been framed as simply being part of the job. We discuss our findings within the broader framing of social problems literature, recognizing how frames shift over time and conflate social issues to maintain their salience.

中文翻译：

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警务人员因公殉职时的责任归属：本地印刷新闻媒体框架的民族志内容分析

一名警官因公殉职，挑战了公众对社会秩序和道德的共同看法。当地新闻媒体帮助观众理解这些悲剧。本研究以“当警察因公殉职时，新闻报道如何界定死因？”这一问题为指导，研究了当地印刷新闻报道中如​​何界定责任归属？我们对 1872 年至 2019 年在印第安纳州印第安纳波利斯市报纸上发表的有关因公死亡的故事进行了人种学内容分析。我们的分析中出现了六个促进对警察死亡的因果解释的框架：道德堕落、枪支可用性和杀伤力、性质工作，未解决的精神疾病，酗酒和吸毒，以及官员的失误。虽然随着时间的推移，公务人员死亡一直被认为是个人和社会道德败坏的结果，但我们还发现，军官的死亡最近被认为只是工作的一部分。我们在更广泛的社会问题文献框架内讨论我们的发现，认识到框架如何随时间变化并将社会问题混为一谈以保持其显着性。