The sirens we stopped hearing

The sun was shining, the sirens had stopped wailing, and people were losing their minds. When you open fire in one of Europe’s safest cities, the response is instantaneous. In Krakow, the police reacted in minutes; the people in even less time. Dozens of missed calls, hundreds of messages flooding group chats, and videos going viral within minutes. As I reached my student dorms after returning from a walk by Rynek Główny, I experienced in real time the worry, shock and absolute chaos that people experience when violence erupts. 

I come from Mexico, and this was not my first shooting, but for many Europeans, it was. It reminded me that violence is not supposed to be taken for granted. Heartbeats are supposed to race when we see videos of a car speeding down the street, bullets flying. Mine did not. These videos are common where I come from. People are supposed to call their loved ones, their acquaintances, the random people they know in a city that is becoming international news after an hour of violence left six dead and 16 injured. Receiving these calls throughout Saturday afternoon was what actually tolled me mentally and emotionally. Every time you are forced to explain you are safe, you are reminded of how close you were to the danger unfolding in the streets. Every call is a reminder that this was an extraordinary event. This was not supposed to happen. And it is not only your loved ones. It is the international news outlets that immediately comment, the thousands of official communications released into the ether, the black-and-white filter that haunts social media feeds as authorities declare mourning. 

This is not the procedure in Mexico. In Mexico, coverage of violence is common, to the point in which it feels practised. There is a pattern to these articles, which read as the latest instalment of a never-ending piece. After detailing the newest victims of an attack, they call back to the larger death tolls of the month or year, linking all together in a chain that has lost meaning. When AP News covered the attack on Irapuato´s streets on June 26th, 2025, they wrote it almost as a summation formula, adding the 12 new deaths to the 1435 homicides they mentioned had taken place in the state of Guanajuato in the first five months of the year. 

And this applies to the news that gets quick coverage. Many are usually reduced to feature articles and long-form analysis. For example, when the New York Times covered violence in Mexico in December of 2023, it did so beat by beat, dedicating two lines to each instance of violence. With its extremely narrative style, it linked multiple tragedies into a cohesive story that somehow never landed with the shock it was intended to. 

This offers the world insight into the major developments of Latin American countries, but it also turns them into interesting points of conversation, into something people read once in the news and are curious to ask about when they meet a national of the country, often very clinically. The cynicism with which violence in Latin America is discussed is not trained in conversation, even less in the moments of danger. It is trained every time we read a detached article about violence in the region. These articles do not have urgency. They may use the language of horror, but they still lack the element that turns news reporting into sirens. They are written days after the event, and are often framed as overarching narrative stories instead of urgent coverage. This tells readers two things: First, what to expect. Every feature article on violence in Mexico tells audiences that violence is a feature of Mexico. It tells audiences to take it as a given, and simply read the latest story of its development. And while yes, this is an ongoing issue and not a one-time shocker, this treatment makes people gradually learn to normalise it. News coverage stops acting as a siren for an issue that should never stop shocking us. Second, news coverage tells people how to react. Newspapers are authorities of their own, and when authorities react a certain way, audiences mimic. Live, individual coverage and constant updates can do as much to signal the importance of an issue as government authorities issuing comments. Both tell audiences that this event should not be overlooked, that a shrug-and-move-on is not the acceptable reaction.

Kraków´s tragedy, on the other hand, proved the power of proper coverage. Not only were updates widely available, but empathetic information on every detail of the attack was given. The police were rightfully labelled as heroes, the event was described as an “act of terror”, and the people reacted accordingly, filling Rynek Główny on Monday night to honour the victims. Saturday's shooting was a rare instance. This might explain the difference in the volume of coverage compared to Mexican more-than-common shootings, but not the tone. The tone lit up the sirens in my mind as Saturday afternoon went by, overriding almost two decades of desensitisation. I heard them again for the first time in years, even after having lived in one of Mexico´s most dangerous cities. This does not mean that newspapers must cover every shooting in the world. What it means is that they need to return the urgency to violence in regions of it that they seem to have given up on. 

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Krzysztof Zgłobicki

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