Not reporting the race just makes it all the more difficult to find the suspect. Too many people fit the description of 5’9", 180lbs, brown eyes, brown hair. Add race in there (along with sex), and it greatly narrows it down.
Just to stir the pot a little, suppose the newspaper stopped mentioning race only when reporting on suspects already in custody.
The arguments that it makes it more difficult to catch the guy (or warn the public) then don’t apply.
Would you support this idea, or still consider it too PC?
I will withhold my own opinion for now.
If the suspect is only in custody, or is on trial, then I’d only support the use of “black” in the description if the newspaper in question also described suspects as “white” - e.g. “a 53-year-old white male”.
Wait a minute! I pay when I buy the newspaper to get information! If the editor decides I don’t need the information maybe I’ll decide he doesn’t need my quarter!
What’s this “need to know” business? You don’t “need to know” most of what’s reported. And I would like to decide for myself what I “need to know”, thank you very much.
And hiding facts is a good way for people to be better? gimme a break! This is censorship to me.
Information is about reporting facts, all the facts and nothing but the facts. I, as the reader, will decide what I make of them.
(This PC stuff really gets to me)
I can see the point of not reporting race. When the Toronto Star made the decision not to report race they justified it by not reporting any details of the criminal unless they had a detailed enough description to allow capture. Anything else is just fear-mongering if the suspect is black or (especially in Toronto) Asian.
In that case, they won’t even report the “brown hair, brown eyes medium-build male” facts either, because so many people fit that description that it can’t possibly be meaningful.
They will report the “white, medium-build, long brown hair” when it’s combined with “large scar over right eyebrow and prominent Celtic knot tatoo on left wrist”. That information is then meaningful, and could lead to identification. They will also report those details if they have a sketch or photo to accompany them.
I agree with this policy.
Bear in mind that this is the city where the police didn’t let the general public know that women were being raped by men entering through their apartment balconies, even if they were four stories off the ground. I think two or three women were raped after the police knew, but before the media got wind of it.
I agree with Revtim (and others)… there’s no point in reporting race when the suspect is already in custody, except maybe in special cases (like a hate crime or something).
A newspaper should report EVERYTHING that’s important to an article. If someone’s race is important to an announcement about that person, it should be in there. If it’s not important (as in the case of the little boy who shot the little girl in Michigan), then there’s no point in including the info, unless the newspaper just wants to stir up controversy to get more sales (which wouldn’t surprise me in the least). However, announcing that the newspaper WOULDN’T report race at all could also be considered as a sales gimmick.
uummmmm. This is what editors are paid to do. “Edit” the newspaper. Take out information. Not everything that happens or every detail of a news item is printed in the paper. They are constanly making decisions on what is news worthy and what isn’t.
i.e.
The Gorilla that has a cold at the zoo is newsworthy.
2 million deaths in the congo due to war isn’t.
**
Nothing wrong with what you say here. The problem with papers is that they constantly “selectivly” report the facts. Sensationalism sells. I have to agree that what Boogarrheal Catastrophe said was right on. Sadly, many newspapers do fall into that trap.
Of course most of the censorship comes from news-media protecting the government. not from PC concerns. But, you are right in many ways. The way that our news is censored is disgusting.
Revtim asked:
I don’t know that I usually see much in the way of descriptions of suspects already in custody. Usually, they just accompany the story with a photo or mug shot, and it’d be hard to make that so you couldn’t tell the race…
It depends. I used to have a B&W 13" Zenith. When my husband forced me to get a color set, I was surprised by the race of a few ppl.
In math and in psychology class there was a problem related to misreporting of race and percentage of population statistics. I wish i could remember what is was.
Actually, I never stated my opinion either way.
But since I’m already making a reply, my opinion is that if you are describing a suspect in any way, in custody or not, it would be ridiculous to avoid mentioning obvious characteristics, whether it is race or whatever.
You are incorrect. The Toronto Star routinely issues descriptions along the lines of: “The suspect is described as a male, 30 to 40 years old, about 5’ 8”, 180 lb, with short dark hair". In fact, contrary to what you said, they report all details of the criminal except race. You claim they don’t report “any” details. Not so.
To give a description that omits the most obvious characteristic is pretty dumb IMHO. The whole thing is just a politically correct way of not pointing fingers at certain racial groups, but if you don’t want fingers pointed at you, the best thing is to respect the law. And why is it OK to report the sex or the age? Isn’t that unfairly pointing at a group for no reason?
The Washington Post does not report race either.
I just cannot see any reason not to do it as this is objective information. We are bombarded daily with statistics (or as we say in Indiana, “satistics” 
)of how much black people need this or that etc. What’s wrong with knowing who commits the crimes? Lack of information is good? If Orwell were alive… he’d turn over in his grave.
An argument that could be mustered by the Washington Post or Toronto Star is that perhaps it is desirable to omit potentially helpful descriptors of criminal suspects if doing so improves “race relations”. Phrased differently, including a suspect’s race in their description runs the risk of pandering to peoples bigotry (“Oh, look at that. Another black guy robbed a store”).
Mentioning the race allows the public to track crimes according to the race of perpetrator (inaccurately, I’m sure). That is possibly not a good thing. And, there is the risk of some sort of self-perpetuating aspect, i.e. if you read about a guy from a certain ethnic background as being a suspect in a crime, then maybe (unconsciously) you come to believe he actually committed the crime. Ergo, you may come to think that people of his background commit such crimes.
It is also possible that potential witnesses of future crimes may have their judgement impaired a priori. So, if someone has been reading about a black guy being sought in connection with a series of crimes, and then witnesses a similar crime, he may be predisposed to recall the supsect he witnessed as being black (as opposed to being honest and admitting that it was too dark to tell. Actually, he may be unaware that he couldn’t honestly tell - he was influenced a priori).
Personally, I don’t buy these arguments. But I always like to present what I believe are the counterarguments to mine.
There are times when the newspaper reports the race of a suspect or a victim when it is irrelevent to the story(not to describe a suspect on the loose, for example). And then there are times when people go out of their way to avoid mentioning a person’s race, and that seems almost as absurd. When, for example, my son is the only black kid on the soccer field and another parent asks, “is your son the medium-height kid out there?”
One unspoken assumption (except for Mattk) is that the issue of reporting/not reporting race is important when the suspect is a minority. This is part of the cultural bias we have to only describe someone’s race when they are not white. Wouldn’t a useful solution be to report the race of the suspect, regardless of whether he/she is white/black/whathaveyou?
If you provide racial information all of the time, I think you can avoid the stigmatizing effect that occurs when you only mention race when the suspect is a member of a minority. Hell, it might have the beneficial effect of educating people that the majority of suspects/criminals are in fact whites.
V.
>> including a suspect’s race in their description runs the risk of pandering to peoples bigotry
yes, facts can be used in many ways but they are facts. If I get the facts I can decide what to do with them, if I don’t then I am in the dark.
I repeat, IMHO the media should report the facts, all the facts and nothing but the facts. Let’s face it, they only withhold information when it reflects negatively on the minority and that is not objective information.
Suppose they do provide racial information. I go and gather some statistics and say, “hmmmm,… 85% of robberies in this town are done by blacks”. Now, if that is a true statement, a fact, why should it be silenced? If blacks as a group feel so insulted by a factual statistic, rather than kill the messenger, why don’t they try to get those people to stop committing the robberies? That would improve the statistics!
Like a lawyer friend of mine says: “It’s 90% of lawyers that give the rest of us a bad name!”
To interject a note from Real Life:
Sunday afternoon in NYC’s Central Park, a group of up to 25 young men ran around spraying young women with water, then tearing off their clothes and sexually fondling them. Several women were herded by police into ambulances, completely naked. So far, seven women have come forward, including four European tourists.
The Monday morning edition of the DAILY NEWS (a tabloid) reported on the incident. The NY TIMES said nothing. The Tuesday morning DAILY NEWS ran a headline story, with two inside pages devoted to the incident. The TIMES ran a small piece, below the fold, which continued on an inside page in the Metro Section.
The NYPD have confiscated video footage from citizens, and are currently looking for perps…two men are now under arrest as suspects.
It wasn’t until the Tuesday papers that either newspaper mentioned that these crimes may have been connected with the Sunday afternoon Puerto Rican Day parade on Fifth Avenue. Even though the cops are looking for suspects, no descriptions have been printed.
Oh, yeah…in addition, there were a number of stabbings in the general Uptown area where the parade took place…these did not get the same level of coverage, lacking the bawdy aspects of the above rampage.
I heard on the radio this morning that the Puerto Rican parade has been like this for years, but that people are so afraid of offending a minority group that details are rarely mentioned. WTF? This is something that happens repeatedly, and the newspaper would rather keep details under wraps (details that could let women know to stay away from this parade), than appear to be saying something bad against a minority-group?
How is reporting the facts in this case offensive? To me, what’s offensive is that thugs would get more consideration than citizens in the proximity of the festival.
Now, I’m not from NY, so maybe my take is incorrect; but given Ukelele Ike’s post above, it doesn’t seem like it.
Today there was a rather detailed article about the whole incident. Of course it was in the New York section, but still, it took up most of the page.
Also comments like Divemaster’s are exactly why we are having this debate. For all you know the suspects were white. No where was it mentioned what the ethnicity of the suspects were. You seem to be assuming that they were puerto rican. Is this a good argument for including race in all descriptions? Maybe.
As there was no description of any suspects at all, it is more likely that the police didn’t give any out.
And to restate my point–how many people just assumed that the first grader who shot the other first grader in Michigan was white?