Facts :
Eric Olson: 'Black male' does not describe the suspect | Daily Chronicle
The Daily Chronicle will no longer include witness descriptions of crime suspects in news stories when the only physical description offered is a person’s race and gender. An undescribed white man or black man will be simply "a man."
Police should stop propagating such vague race-based information, too. While doing little to actually identify crime suspects, such vagaries can go a long way toward reinforcing negative stereotypes and encouraging racial profiling.
Often, it’s black men who are singled out.
Sometimes the crimes being described are made up, leaving black men scapegoated because somebody wants to explain away an embarrassing incident.
The most recent example of this came late last week, when a person who DeKalb police have not named made up a story about how they’d been robbed on a street near the Northern Illinois University campus in the early morning hours of Aug. 28.
NIU police, in a campus alert about the fabricated robbery, recounted the man’s story of being pushed down and robbed by three men. After noting that the alleged victim had scrapes on his arms and legs, and that the suspects ran off in “an unknown direction,” it offered this description of the perpetrators: “The victim described all three suspects as African-American males.”
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