Karla DeLuca
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Marshall News Messenger

If you will organize the paper in your newsroom rather than let piles of it rise to the ceiling, it will go to work for you. That is what happened in the year 2000 at the Marshall News Messenger.

After losing an appeal to view a video tape of an alleged police beating, Managing Editor Karla DeLuca turned to her own paper's files of daily police arrest reports. They are to answer any challenges to the News Messenger's daily police report feature. At this writing, the files go back three years. DeLuca used them from 1999 to produce a landmark study of her city's most prevalent crimes.

"It wasn't a witch hunt, nor were we digging just to dig up dirt," DeLuca said. "We were determined to write whatever we found."

DeLuca and her staff converted into an Excel database the information on the primitive paper police reports. It reveals arrest trends that the city and police department did not know existed.

Her principal findings are that minorities in Marshall are far more likely than whites to be stopped and arrested for minor traffic violations. The most prevalent crimes? Driving without a license and driving without insurance. When she confronted them with her facts, city officials "essentially had no explanation except to say, 'We know we aren't profiling.' " DeLuca recalled.

Why add to her sizable workload a computer-assisted reporting project?

"I guess injustice is something that really pushes my button," DeLuca said. After graduating from the University of Texas at Arlington, she worked for the News Messenger; suburban newspapers in the Dallas area; and the Shreveport Journal. For a time she left journalism to raise a family, then returned to the News Messenger as ME in 1999.

It is helpful for a newsperson to experience firsthand the societal trends she writes about, and DeLuca did just that. After her story was published, it happened that she was stopped for speeding in her 2000 Jeep by the Texas Department of Public Safety. On that day she was without her proof of auto insurance. She mailed in her $103 fine.