September 27, 2025

Veteran Washington Post reporter Tom Jackman on covering the police and lessons for police leaders

PERF members,

Tom Jackman recently left the Washington Post after covering crime, courts, and policing at the paper for 27 years. While with the Post, he covered major national news stories such as the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, the 2002 D.C.-area sniper attacks, and debates about the police use of force. The Post’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting won a Pulitzer Prize.

Prior to joining the Post, Tom covered crime and criminal justice for the Kansas City Times and Kansas City Star from 1985 to 1998.

I have known Tom for decades and have always found him to be relentless, driven, and compassionate. He has been assigned to some very controversial incidents. While some reporters on the police beat move on to new assignments, Tom has developed an expertise in police and crime reporting that is matched by few other reporters nationally.  He started the Post’s “True Crime” blog. I often invited him to PERF’s meetings because he reported thoroughly, objectively, and quickly! Tom is respected by many police chiefs because they knew he can be trusted, and that trust has always helped him get to the bottom of stories without burning bridges. Young reporters learned a lot from Tom. He is one of the best reporters I have ever known, and I look forward to seeing what he does next!

I spoke with Tom earlier this week about his career, some of the high-profile incidents he’s covered, and his advice for journalists and police officials.

Chuck Wexler: Where did you grow up?

Tom Jackman: In the Washington, D.C. area, first in Bethesda, Maryland, and then in Reston, Virginia.

Wexler: Then you went to Notre Dame. What was that like? Did you already want to be a reporter?

Jackman: That was great, but there was no journalism school there. I had two uncles who were sportswriters, one who covered the [Baltimore] Orioles and one who covered the [Pittsburgh] Pirates. I thought there couldn’t be a better job in the world than to be a sportswriter and go to a baseball game every day, hang out with the players, write the story, hang out with the players some more, and do it again the next day. For many years, all I thought about was being a sportswriter.

I had a revelation toward the end of my high school years that sports was not the only thing that mattered in the world. Up until my 17th year, all I cared about was sports. So I went off to Notre Dame determined not to be a sportswriter, to instead cover politics, be a serious guy, and cover what mattered, not sports, much to my uncles’ chagrin.

Wexler: Your first job was with the New York Times. What did you do there?

Jackman: I was a clerk and trying to get hired as a reporter. There are all these clerks there in this historic system where you try to write stories in your off-time to get hired as a reporter. I wrote a lot of stories, but they said, “You need more seasoning. You need to go to another paper and then you can come back here.”

So I went to another paper. I went to Kansas City. I didn’t know where Kansas City was. I didn’t know anything about it. And I wound up enjoying the hell out of it and having much more of a learning experience than I could have ever imagined.

Tom Jackman meeting with future journalists as part of George Mason University’s 2025 Washington Journalism and Media Conference. Source: Twitter/X

Wexler: And you started as a police reporter. What was that experience like?

Jackman: I went in as a 23-year-old blank slate. I had no experience with anything related to policing. They were patient and explained things to me. I had access to the homicide, robbery, and sex crimes units. I could sit down and talk to the detectives, who knew that I wasn’t going to go and slam their words into the newspaper. They were just helping me understand.

I had the same sort of experience when I moved to the federal courthouse. The judges were willing to take the time to explain it to a green reporter because they knew I had access to what, at the time, was the biggest megaphone in Kansas City, the print newspaper.

I learned a tremendous amount about how the police do their jobs. I did a lot of ride-alongs with patrol and got a true sense of real policing and what a noble profession it is. People in my profession would ridicule me for being so positive or respectful of policing, but I got to watch it from the ground up for a number of years. I wrote a book with a homicide sergeant. I came to really appreciate what police do at all levels, from the grunt guy to the chief, and everybody in between. I got to understand what they do, and it’s truly an honorable profession.

Wexler: In 1998 you came to the Washington Post. What was that like?

Jackman: It was my dream come true. I grew up here, so I had been applying to this paper every couple of years since I got out of college. I think I had five or six rejections from them, but I kept trying. It was really my dream accomplished to make it to the metro desk of the Washington Post.

The quality of the editors was so much better, and the way they handled our stories was so much smarter and clearer than I had ever experienced. So I got a much better editing experience and much more engaged readership.

I was in a large suburban bureau. There were 12 or 13 reporters covering Fairfax County, a county of 1 million people, and there was plenty of news going on out there.

Wexler: You covered the John Geer case, in which a Fairfax County, Virginia, police officer shot and killed an unarmed man in 2013. Why was that significant?

Jackman: The Geer case was significant because after the police shot and killed this unarmed man as he stood behind the screen door of his home, they would not release any information about it at all. They would not say who did it, why it was done, whether there were any changes, or whether there was an internal affairs investigation. There was just a complete blackout for a year, and Mr. Geer’s family initially trusted the police and wouldn’t talk to me.

Eventually the family spoke to me, some documents were released to them, it miraculously wound up on the front page of the Washington Post, and the officer wound up getting charged with murder and ultimately pleading guilty to manslaughter.

Wexler: Another difficult case you covered was the Bijan Ghaisar case, in which U.S. Park Police officers shot and killed a 25-year-old in Fairfax County, Virginia, as he drove away.

Jackman: Again, it was a case where the involved agency, the [U.S.] Park Police, was not saying anything about their officers shooting an unarmed man as he drove away from them.

The same [Fairfax County] police chief who had maintained silence on the John Geer case was involved, and he was determined not to follow that path again. So he released the dashcam footage from his officer’s car over the objections of the feds, the Park Police, and the U.S. attorney. He released it, showing how Bijan Ghaisar was shot dead as he drove away from these officers. This caused something of an uproar.

Eventually the local prosecutor charged the two officers with manslaughter, but then the case was taken to federal court and was tossed out by a federal judge.

Wexler: And you were the lead writer covering the Virginia Tech mass shooting in 2007, reporting that earned the Post a Pulitzer Prize. What was it like covering that case?

Jackman: It was horrific. That first day, we didn’t know how bad it was. In the morning, they were saying low numbers—three or four people dead. Then, in the early afternoon, they said 32 dead.

It was an unspeakable tragedy, and we had to call families and try to call anybody at Tech. There were a lot of students from up here in northern Virginia who we reached and spoke to.

That’s the most atrocious case I’ve ever covered in terms of numbers and no reason for it, just massive misery caused by this one idiot.

Wexler: More recently you covered many of the trials of those who participated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. What was it like to cover those cases?

Jackman: It was fascinating, because these people were all on video. They really didn’t have much of a defense. The feds had done a good job of tracking down surveillance video and showing the actions of these people. They were basically able to track them from the time they set foot in the Capitol to the time they left.

This caused a lot of people to plead guilty, knowing they were on video. But a number of people went to trial because they were looking at serious time and would try to claim that they were pushed into the building. Or one of them said, “I didn’t realize that Congress met in the Capitol.” They had no defenses.

To watch these cases on a daily basis was to become frustrated at the sentences that these people were getting, because they were almost always far less than what the government asked for and less than what the sentencing guidelines called for. The D.C. court, I’ve come to find, had a reputation for being a lenient sentencing court. It was kind of funny to us [reporters] that people were complaining about being prosecuted in D.C., the “liberal” courthouse, but the liberal judges were letting these people get lesser sentences than they might have faced elsewhere.

Wexler: Between 2016 and 2020, you covered the national discussion about use of force by police. How did you make sense of that whole period?

Jackman: It was educational for me to learn about how police are trained to do something new. PERF helped make this happen by letting me watch some of this stuff and talk to the commanders and chiefs putting it in place.

We focused on how your organization and police departments around the country were taking steps to reduce the amount of violence that they were involved in. It seems to me that in the departments that really took it on, it’s worked, but it probably hasn’t spread widely enough yet.

Wexler: What are some of the lessons you’ve learned about covering the police?

Jackman: Reporters have to understand what police do, and a lot of times they do not understand that. That’s a problem. They don’t take the time to get a sense of why police act the way they do. And a lot of reporters bring an attitude of “The police are up to no good and just institutionally bad.” It colors their reporting, and they don’t do the homework to understand why they do what they do.

So I think more reporters need to spend more time on the ground in the areas they cover, riding along with cops, sitting with police administrators, and going to meetings. You have to get a sense of why the police do what they do, what they’re supposed to do, what the ground rules are, and what ideally would happen.

It’s hard to do. It’s harder than when I started in the ‘80s. But it can be done. Police departments generally appreciate hearing from thoughtful reporters. If you go to a police department and say, “Hey, I’d like to do some ride-alongs,” “I’d like to learn about how the crime lab does its thing,” or “I’d like to find out how you solved the missing persons case,” police departments appreciate that kind of attention.

And I don’t think police departments do a good enough job of telling the public of the good things they do, the cases they’ve solved, and the people they’ve found. Some of them are pretty good at it, but a lot of the positive PR that comes out of police departments is for Toys for Kids or the Santa Run. I don’t think they do a good job of talking to the detectives who’ve solved cases and saying, “Hey, what have you done lately? What’s been going on in court?”

When bad things happen, I know there is a tendency to wait until everything is known, and that makes sense. But I think there’s a middle ground where you can say, “Here’s what we can tell you at this point. We don’t know or can’t say the rest.” I would urge police commanders and chiefs to provide some information and explain why they’re not releasing other information. A lot of times the media don’t understand why you’re not saying where the weapon was found or how many shots were fired. I think it goes a long way to improving relations with the media when you trust them enough to say why you’re not telling them this. They’ll feel like they’re being treated like adults, and the goodwill will pay off in the future.

So I urge police chiefs and commanders to try to be a little more transparent. I’m not saying you should give away the farm in the first three hours of breaking news, but try to provide some information. The public wants to know too; it’s not just a bunch of pesky reporters. That transparency goes a long way with the public.

Wexler: You’ve seen significant changes in the media environment over the course of your career. What should police leaders know about the pressures on journalists now that may not have existed when you started?

Jackman: There is demand for copy continuously now. The word “deadline” is almost never spoken anymore because the deadline is now. You’ve got information; put it up now.

I had a long stretch of my career where I had a deadline of 5:00 p.m. I had all day to figure things out, write a smart story, and file it by 5:00 p.m.

Now as soon as I have the slightest bit of information, they want it on the web now. Then when you get more information, put that in now. Then at the end of the day, we’ll do a whole write-through. So deadlines are a thing of the past.

I hated that. I really enjoyed the rhythms of a newspaper where we filed once a day, the story came out, and that was that. Now the story goes through umpteen revisions. I’ll write a first draft that might be posted at noon, then as more information comes in, we keep updating the story online.

So the demands from the media will be continuous.

Wexler: Police and media both have an interest in correcting misinformation. Do you see any room for collaboration between the two parties to address the spread of misinformation?

Jackman: The media would welcome that, because we want to be the source of correct information and are always trying to go at misinformation. So we would be willing conspirators in trying to counter misinformation whenever we can.

I know police departments have to be careful with what they put out, and generally when they encounter misinformation, they’re pretty good at rebutting it.

Thanks to Tom for taking the time to speak with me! I’ve greatly respected his work and valued his coverage of the Washington, D.C., area over the past three decades. He set the standard for reporting what we do, and his presence will be missed.

Best,

Chuck