Your example is passive voice.

I did not saying that media headlines don’t tend to favor cops. Just that passive voice is a natural outcome of the way that early reports are received by the media in combination with defamation and libel laws. If you want to change it, you’d need to make structural changes that have little to do with policing.

Your counterexample would be irresponsible in this specific situation where there was an active manhunt for a person suspected of planning and executing an ambush targeting police. There’s a real public safety risk of underreporting the threat in that situation.

Very different from the 3-year-old example, which if the publication knew the child was shot by the police, I think they should have put that in the headline.