This weekend, in my local paper, there was a story on a robbery of a grocery store. In back-to-back sentences they left out the color of the suspects’ skin yet reported that the getaway vehicle was a white Cadillac.
Kind of struck me as odd. Is there a standard for reporting the skin color of a suspect?
There is a standard, and it’s something like this: mention the race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. of a person only when it is relevant.
The getaway car wasn’t a person, so the standard was different.
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There is a standard, and it’s something like this: mention the race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. of a person only when it is relevant.
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Isn’t race relevant when we’re talking about an escaped suspect? I mean it would narrow it down to know, right?
The standard is that most newspapers won’t do it because of political correctness.
If the cops are still looking for him, yes. If they’ve already caught him, no. It’s not clear if the story the OP is talking about is about criminals still at large, or criminals who have already been apprehended.
If he was already apprehended, the color of the car is irrelevant as well. 
Well, the robber may have been apprehended at some later point, but the car (or the getaway driver, if there was one) might not have been.
I interpretted “getaway car” from the OP to mean that he was still at large. I could be wrong.
There is no standard that I know of, it’s an editors’ discretion thing. Some people will include it, because if the police know what a suspect looks like, why not include it? Others won’t because they don’t want to cast suspicion on innocent people.
Could be, but properly speaking, a getaway car is just a car a criminal plans to use to get away in. It doesn’t really have anything to do with wether or not he actually gets away.
There was an issue over this at the Washington Post last year where the paper left out details of suspects’ race and caught a lot of flak. I found this blog entry on it: Patterico's Pontifications
The blog is pretty biased but it gives the facts of the case.
When do they ever report the skin color? That sounds like too fruitful a level of specifitivity. Don’t they just say the race, along with other unremarkable markers, like age and height (naturally always well within the average range of height)?
Because that’s far less prone to speculation and error?
Unless the reporter had details about the suspect’s overall appearance (height, build, etc., unique marks), I fail to see how knowing skin color is particularly helpful.
It would be interesting to find out if broadcasting physical descriptions of suspects in the media helps the general public locate them. Is a suspect more likely to be caught if everyone knows that someone with his height and skin color is at large? Or does it make absolutely no difference? If it’s the latter, then I can see why a reporter would exclude skin color from their piece. It’s irrelevant information.
Slight hijack: when I was working for my university’s newspaper, there was a man who was roaming the campus sexually assaulting women (or something to that degree, the details are a bit hazy). One of the victims was able to form a police composite of the attacker, who happened to be a Black male. We published the composite with an article discussing the attacks and basically just warning females on campus to be aware of what was going on. The next day we got a large number of complaints from the Black community saying publishing the photo was somehow offensive to them and perpetuated negative Black stereotypes. rolls eyes
Yeah, just like most newspapers don’t mention the religion of most criminals for fear of a backlash from the religious right. :rolleyes:
As was the case in the Washington Post incident in the blog mentioned above, police provided a very detailed description of the subject with a variety of characteristics that could identify him. Of course, the Post didn’t think mentioning the suspect’s skin color or hair style (cornrows) was relevant.
I think that’s political correctness gone too far. Skin color is certainly relevant in terms of identifying a suspect. It’s like leaving out the hair color of someone. While that one characteristic may not be important by itself, it adds to the picture of the person.
Editors and writers should be more concerned about providing an accurate descripton of a criminal than with worrying whether they will offend people who happen to be the same race as the criminal.
Skin color rarely if ever is reported. Skin color is also different than race. In terms of providing description information, race gives very little so I don’t see what benefit there is to reporting it, especially if the intent of the article is to simply relay that an event occurred and is not intended to faciliate a manhunt.
A suspect’s religion is mostly irrelevant; it is unlikely to assist in identifying him/her. I don’t know anyone who can “spot a Catholic at 50 yards”. (except maybe the Pope).
But a suspect’s race is visual information, and like height and build, is useful in trying to find/identify a suspect.
The local Long Island newspaper “Newsday” is “famous” for leaving out race in any crime story, unless the suspect is white.
As I recall, the Post left out a lot of information present in the police report, not just race. The suspect’s build, height, color and type of clothes they were wearing, none of that was present in the article. People seized on the fact that race was ommitted, but seemed not to care that details which happen to be a lot more descriptive were also not mentioned.
If you’re going to attribute PCness to the Post’s failure to note race, to what should we attribute people’s fixation on race to the exclusion of other details?