The Taboo On Reporting The Race Of Criminal Suspects
/When you read something, you generally notice the things that the writer explicitly mentions, while you rarely take note of what the writer omits. So at first it’s easy to skip over the omission, in nearly all reporting about violent crime in the United States, of the information about the race of the perpetrator or suspect. Still, if you read enough about this subject of violent crime, at some point you just can’t help noticing this universal omission. Indeed, should you once start to look for information on the race of criminals or suspected criminals, you will quickly realize that something weird is going on.
Is it appropriate that this subject of race of perpetrators almost never gets mentioned? Perhaps there is some legitimate concern about not wanting to potentially tar all members of a race with the suspected bad conduct of a relative few. But that concern would not explain the extremes to which the suppression of this information gets carried. Even when the race of the perpetrator is known and could be helpful to the public in potentially assisting the police in identifying a suspect, you won’t find the information in a media report of the crime. Clearly there is a powerful taboo at work. Maybe it’s a rule officially prescribed and enforced by media higher-ups; or perhaps it’s one of those unspoken orthodoxies that reporters must follow in order to avoid being “canceled” by their erstwhile friends and colleagues.
This subject turns out to be important. The reason it is important is that the general suppression of information about the race of suspects enables narratives to arise that run directly contrary to facts, but the facts have been so effectively suppressed that no one knows them. The obvious narrative at issue here is the narrative that police across America unfairly target young black males in enforcement of the criminal laws.
This subject occurred to me as I was reading yesterday’s New York Post, which is filled with even more reports than usual of violent crimes and shootings:
On page 4, it’s “Wild video shows moment shots are fired into NYC car dealership with kids inside.” On the video, you can see the shooter charge into the dealership and open fire. But the shooter is wearing a mask, and you can’t tell his race, nor does the accompanying article mention it, even though the article says that the police have identified three suspects. The neighborhood where the shooting occurred — Eastchester, in the northeast Bronx — is heavily black.
Next up on page 5 is “I halted fiend’s attack — then city bailed him out.” There does not appear to be an online link for this piece without paid subscription. The story concerns a man who walked up to a mom and two young kids on a park bench and pulled down his pants and started masturbating. A good Samaratan chased the guy down and cornered him until the police arrived. The race of the perpetrator is not mentioned in the article; however, there is a picture that shows him to be black. The neighborhood where this occurred is my own West Village in Manhattan.
Also on page 5, it’s “7 more shot in gunplay plague.” Again, I can’t find an online link. The report concerns shootings in New York City on Monday and Tuesday, September 21 and 22. Locations are given for five of the shootings: 117th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. in Harlem; Carlton Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn; East 51st St. and Tilden Ave. in East Flatbush, Brooklyn; 191st St. and Jamaica Ave. in Hollis, Queens; and East New York (no specific street address) in Brooklyn. The Post does not mention the race of a suspect in any instance. However, all of the neighborhoods mentioned are majority-black neighborhoods.
Moving on to page 7, we have “Street assault on senior.” “A brute barked, ‘That’s what I do’ as he randomly delivered the blow that left a 77-year-old in Manhattan in need of brain surgery.” The man’s wife was present and witnessed the event; however, the article does not mention race of the perpetrator. Once again, I cannot find an online link.
Finally, on page 21, it’s “Tessa ‘Confess.” The piece relates to the December 2019 murder of Columbia student Tessa Majors. Apparently the prime suspect, already under arrest, has made the mistake of confessing to the crime in a wiretapped conversation on a prison telephone. Nothing in the text of the article mentions the race of the suspect. However, an accompanying photograph shows him to be black.
Note that the New York Post is by no means a left-wing publication. Yet clearly its reporters and editors are enforcing a rule, whether written or unwritten, that the race of suspects or perpetrators is not to be mentioned in the text of any article about a crime. And meanwhile, over at the New York Times, it’s even worse. That rag did not cover any of these stories on Monday or Tuesday at all. Indeed, the Times has almost entirely discontinued covering any local news. Some years ago they had an entire section of the paper every day titled the “Metropolitan” Section. Then that became a couple of pages toward the end of Section A of the paper with the heading “New York.” Now, even that does not appear at all most days.
At American Mind on September 21, Heather Mac Donald has a piece titled “Blue Truth Matters.” The piece addresses not just the failure of media to report race of suspects or perpetrators, but also that police departments around the country generally do not collect or release such data. Excerpts:
Most police departments make it difficult, if not impossible, to get racial data on criminal offending. . . . No data collection mandate has ever required the publication of crime or traffic law violation rates by race. . . . It is time to draw back the curtain on the carnage going on in the inner city. Americans deserve the truth about crime and racial statistics from the governments their tax dollars pay for.
As a result of the failure to collect and report such data, Mac Donald concludes that Americans simply have no idea of the extent of disproportionate crime levels between and among races:
The American public is clueless about how disproportionate violent street crime is. Even hearing the numbers makes many well-meaning whites uncomfortable, though no one seems to cringe when law enforcement is accused of a reign of racist terror.
So how disproportionate are crime commission rates between and among races? Since there is no universal reporting on this subject, the data are fragmentary; but data do exist for some years and some cities.
Mac Donald provides several links that are quite eye-opening. For example, she provides this link to data from the City of Chicago for the year 2011. Of offenders convicted of murder for that year, 71.3% were black, 24.6% Hispanic, 3.5% white, and 0.6% other. The overall population of Chicago is about 50% white and 30% black. That would mean that a black is about 30 times more likely to commit a murder than a white. That is not a small difference.
Another link provided by Mac Donald goes to 2020 data from the Police Department of St. Louis. Through September 24 (today), of murder suspects whose race is identified, 62 are black and 5 are white. Since blacks and whites each constitute about 46% of population in St. Louis, that would make a black about 12.5 times more likely to be suspected of a murder than a white.
Not surprisingly, crime victimization rates are very close to rates of crime commission. Thus, the chances for a black to be a victim of a crime are comparably disproportionate to share of population.
With widespread accusations abroad today that police are conducting an unjustified war against young black men, you would think that Americans would have readily available statistics on racial breakdown of known and suspected criminals. But in fact the data are difficult to find, if they can be found at all, and Americans are generally unaware of what the data would show. And thus, false narratives flourish.