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Robert Sam Anson, Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry (Random House, May 1987) Published by Vintage in paperback in 1988 When a rookie police officer shot and killed 17-year-old Edmund Perry in 1985, radio announcers, television reporters and newspapers across the country immediately picked up the story. The officer claimed he shot Perry in self-defense, while those closest to Perry maintained the teenager was a victim of racism and police brutality. This was where investigative journalist Robert Sam Anson stepped in. His goal was to retrace the events leading up to that night, and in Best Intentions, he does so while successfully profiling Perry's dynamic persona through detailed anecdotes from peers. More importantly, Anson fairly depicts the complicated racial conflict between black residents of Harlem (where Perry grew up until he was accepted to an elite private school) and the white residents of Lower Manhattan (where middle-class friends supported the police offer's testimony). The methodical process Anson employs during his quest for the truth set a precedence as an ideal model in investigative journalism. His technique includes, but is not limited to, thoroughly sorting through a hefty stack of police reports and interviewing well over 100 sources. Even within the introduction of Best Intentions, Anson writes, "In questionable cases, when independent confirmation was not possible, information was not used." Anson, a former reporter for Time magazine, was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's. Although he is now best known for contributing political articles to Life and Vanity Fair, the publication of Best Intentions set new standards for long-form investigative journalists. In an interview with the New York Times published shortly after Best Intentions was released, Anson acknowledged that writing the book demanded "a year and a half of self-examination about racial attitudes. I had wanted to do a book about race for a long time. I've thought there's an enormous problem in race relations that's getting larger, and everyone was really pretending that it didn't exist, and every publisher said it wasn't a commercial idea. So this story was a hook into it." MORE: Anson's controversial article about the killing of Daniel Pearl Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. |
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