Justice & Law Quote by Catherine Crier

There is a quiet flex in Crier's phrasing, and it lands because it refuses the swagger we often attach to true-crime work. "It doesn't harden you" rejects the cliché of the jaded reporter; she won't perform numbness as professionalism. Instead she offers a more unsettling truth: repetition doesn't erase feeling, it reorganizes it. You become "capable" - a word that sounds neutral, even bureaucratic - but the capability she describes is intimate exposure to the full inventory of human behavior, including the parts society would rather outsource to police reports and courtroom transcripts.

The subtext is an argument about the price of bearing witness. Journalists are trained to translate chaos into narrative and fact, to turn pain into something legible. Crier is naming that acquired skill without romanticizing it. The line "anything human beings can do" widens crime into anthropology; she's talking about cruelty as a recurring social fact, not a freak exception. That framing matters because it positions reporting as a civic function: someone has to look directly at what the rest of us avert our eyes from.

Then she draws a hard boundary: the murder of a child. Not because it's rarer, but because it collapses the moral defenses that let professionals keep working - the idea that victims made choices, lived risky lives, wandered into danger. A child punctures those narratives. Crier's intent isn't confession so much as credibility: she asserts competence while insisting on a remaining human limit, the one case that should never become routine.