Simone Weichselbaum
Simone Weichselbaum is a writer who primarily focuses on national policing issues. She is The Marshall Project’s National Law Enforcement Reporter and has spent more than 15 years reporting on a variety of urban criminal justice systems, previously working as a staff writer for the New York Daily News and the Philadelphia Daily News. You can find her on Twitter right here.
Tell us about how you first got into writing. What was your first paid writing gig, and how did you land it?
I am proud of alum of the Chips Quinn Scholars program, which guides college students who are from a diverse background into their first paid summer internship at a news outlet. When I was 19, I spent the summer on the crime beat at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, NY. The big story of the season? A baby bear on the loose in a residential neighborhood.
If I had to give one tip to writers looking to break into journalism, it'd be intern, intern, intern.
What's one thing you learned quickly once you started working in journalism that the average person may not know or understand?
The needed muscle of getting to the bottom of a situation as quickly as possible. To me, it's second nature to meet someone for the first time and to Google their name. My non-reporter friends don't do this. It's so easy to do a small amount of research when we encounter new people, new places or an idea that we just learned about.
The day-to-day of journalism is really different today, too. Back when I was a cub reporter, there was no Twitter or smartphones with computer-like web browsing powers. I still had to use *gasp* paper maps to navigate around a new city.
Tell us about The Marshall Project and the work you're doing there right now.
We are a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on the U.S. criminal justice system, and we co-publish a lot of our work with national and local outlets. This isn't crime reporting, per se. Rather, it's digging into what's broken, what's working and the stories behind the faces in this sphere. I mainly focus on national policing issues, and I am also co-chair of our diversity and inclusion committee.
What story are you most proud to have written?
My colleague Beth Schwartzapfel and I spent nearly a year examining, what we called, the "vet-to-cop" pipeline. I frequently meet young police officers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and are working patrol beats in urban communities.
We found that about one-fifth of police officers say they have military experience, but there is little research on what impact being deployed has on a cop's psyche. In a package co-published with USA TODAY, we learned that in some cities, officers with a military background had a higher rate of use-of-force complaints. Also, there's an entire drug rehab industry catered towards first responders, many with military experience, who suffer from addiction because of untreated PTSD.
We found that the police unions, not the police departments, are helping this population of cops find treatment. It's still taboo for police officers, especially men, to openly discuss the mental damage that stems from being exposed to trauma from their jobs and their military experience.
