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The events of June 10 that ended in the homicide of rural Freeborn County resident Brenda Kay Krause, 66, and the officer-involved shooting and killing of her son Nathaniel Dewitt Bailey, 44, are both heartbreaking and unfortunate in equal measure.

The night’s culmination resulted in five law enforcement officers discharging their firearms after a chase that wound into Mower County, returning back to the scene of origin.

Those officers included one each from the Albert Lea Police Department, Freeborn County Sheriff’s Office, Steele County Sheriff’s Office, Mower County Sheriff’s Office and Faribault County Sheriff’s Office.

As with all incidents like this, there are questions, some of which we won’t fully know the answer to until the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension finishes its investigation. However, one of those questions we faced, and that has circulated among newsrooms across the state and nation, is why the Austin Daily Herald and Albert Lea Tribune, papers that belong to the same company, jointly opted to run the three videos we did from the Albert Lea Police Department, Mower County Sheriff’s Office and Steele County Sheriff’s Office?

It’s a fair question.

Undoubtedly, the viewpoints of those reading our story will fall on either side of the decision, but ultimately the decision comes down to a single idea: balancing privacy and public interest and weighing the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort caused by reporting personal details.

Again, not an easy question to answer because the obvious question people might ask in return is “why show something like this in the first place? What can be gained from it?

First, it must be recognized that under state law, law enforcement in Minnesota are required to release video taken from body cameras publicly within 14 days of the incident if available. Once public, then the media can make the choice to run or determine how much of a video to run.

In our case, we made the decision to show the entirety of the three videos we had been given access to — two of them over eight minutes long and the other under two minutes.

The reason was to provide an accounting of the incident from the moment the shots were fired to when medical attention was being delivered.

By doing this, clarity is given as to the processes of the officers involved. In the two longer videos we see how law enforcement took careful steps in approaching Bailey and in doing so revealed that Bailey, who has had weapons and fleeing charges in the past, did indeed have a weapon.

In the video provided by the Mower County Sheriff’s Office, we hear the deputy give the command to put the gun down before opening fire.

At this point, the process of our own decision works into an overall theme of accountability. Over recent years, law enforcement has faced more and more requirements of transparency and accountability in how they carry out their duties.

We believed that running these videos provides understanding to the situation and insight as to the decision officers made to use lethal force.

It’s also generally accepted that these videos should be made public at some point during the investigation. According to a story by The Conversation, a world-wide non-profit website that brings editors and academics together, among 4,000 people surveyed by The Conversation, 9 in 10 respondents thought that footage should be made public. Of that number, 1,000 police chiefs were surveyed and in that case 9 in 10 agreed that video should be made public.

The only differences were when the videos should be released. In this case, the videos were released well into the investigation of the incident.

Our staff recognizes that not everybody will agree with our decisions, and some have even displayed anger over it, which is understandable. It was a tragic outcome for everybody involved.

But the hope is that the publishing of the videos will also encourage public conversation that might well lead positive steps forward in how situations such as these are approached as well as how the incident unfolded on June 10.

We also recognize that there are questions of sensationalism and the graphic nature of the scene, but the videos we obtained blocked out and obscured anything that might have been overtly graphic. We would not have run them or would have edited them had that step not been taken.

Difficult decisions were made that night and in choosing to run videos as we did, we hope that through the story we were able to provide context to a developing situation that is still, in some ways, unfolding.

However you feel we should have approached this, what we hold unequivocally true is that we made this decision with thoughtful consideration and that at no time was it made lightly.