I received several complaints about some police briefs that we had in Wednesday’s paper. There were four briefs about various robberies and shootings. The second one carried this headline: Police look for tall, thin white man in robbery. The other briefs made no mention of the suspect’s race, which led callers to assert that we were going out of our way to avoid using race when black suspects were involved.
I’ll agree that the juxtaposition is problematic, and the headline is jarring, and if we had to do it again, we’d rewrite, but there’s a larger question about when we use race as a descriptor in police stories.
My good friend, mentor and predecessor as managing editor, Jim Laughrun, assembled a crime coverage manual that guides many of our decisions in this area. Like all guides, it’s not meant to be carved in stone. The first line in our section about racial IDs says, “Do not mention a person’s race or ethnic background unless it is relevant to the story.”
The section goes on to say it’s OK to use race if a suspect is at large and police have a good description. In other words, we wouldn’t just write that police are looking for a black man or a white man or a Hispanic man in his 20s. There’s thousands of people in our community who fit that description. It doesn’t really help anything. In the brief in Wednesday’s paper, here’s the description of the suspect we used: “white, in his 30s, 6 feet tall and weighing 150 pounds, with brown hair, a black baseball cap worn backward, a camouflage jacket and blue jeans.” That’s useful.
I checked our electronic archives, and here are some recent descriptions we used:
—The robber was described as a black man between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet tall, 140 pounds, with a large afro that police said was probably a wig.
He wore a purple windbreaker, a dark bandanna covering his face and a dark backpack with white writing on it.
— The robber was described as white, about 6 feet tall, 215 pounds, wearing a camouflage mask, blue sweatshirt and light-blue jeans.
—The robber was described as a black man of medium complexion in his late 20s, about 6 feet 2 and more than 200 pounds. He was wearing a white T-shirt, a white baseball cap, long, faded blue-jean shorts and white shoes. Hints said that the man had a thin beard.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
I guess the alternative is to always mention race. You know, “President Bush, a white male, just over 6’ tall and weighing approximately 180 pounds, was accused of verbal assault when he referred to the “nucular” problem in Iran.
It could also be quite useful in local interest stories. “Daisy, a 40% german shepherd, 30% doberman and 30% dachsund who measured 14 inches at the shoulder, sprang from her kennel and fled into the woods where she was promptly eaten by a 100% black bear that Daisy’s owner said appeared to be the size of a Toyota Camry. When asked to better estimate the bear’s weight Daisy’s owner, a woman who is normally 5’5”, white and approximately 130 pounds but at the time of the interview was 5’5”, ashen and about 128 pounds after losing her lunch and entering a state of shock, could not further elaborate.”
Really it’s all about accuracy isn’t it?
The Journal did the right thing. Most likely that was all the information released to them at the time.
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