Always Under Suspicion

Recently, in Oneonta, N.Y., a 77 year-old woman was attacked, but she could provide few clues to the police. Her only vague description was that her assailant was young and Black.

On the basis of this sketchy information, a manhunt was launched. The bus station was staked out. Young Black men coming and going were stopped and ordered to roll up their sleeves where police thought they might find scratches the woman left.

Police then visited the State University of New York, some 70 miles away and obtained the confidential records of its Black male students on the Oneonta campus.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got involved, announcing its outrage, and debates were launched over the role skin color plays in criminal investigations.

Rather than outrage or even surprise, I had a profound sense of deja vu. While an undergraduate student at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in the 60s, a white coed from the Boston area was raped about six blocks away from campus.

Like the woman in New York, the coed's description of her attacker was vague. He was young, and he was Black. Investigators from the Washington police department came to the university and asked for the confidential files of every Black male student or employee.

The files, protected then, and now, by a federal educational privacy law, were turned over without so much as a telephone call to those involved.

Black students only began to learn of this when police started showing up, asking questions based on those files. In the ensuing controversy, the university did ask the police to return all copies of the files, but refused to apologize to the students. Representatives of the ACLU refused to answer our letters for help.

A short time after the Catholic University episode, community activists and Black reporters got the Washington daily newspapers to clarify their policies on racial identification in crime stories. It was agreed that these identifications would be made only when they were part of a description that might reasonably be expected to identify a suspect. Similar pacts occurred in other cities throughout the nation. But, so far as I can tell, just about all the news media have reverted back to the gratuitous use of racial identifications in crime stories.

Thus, the news media become deeply implicated in discriminatory law enforcement practices. In this way, news organizations encourage police departments to stage dragnets in African American communities during highly sensational crimes.

The infamous Carol Stuart case in Boston is a good example. Police swarmed through the city three years ago stopping and searching Black men on sight after a white man reported that his pregnant wife had been shot in the head and that he was shot in the stomach by a Black man. Race--the color of a person's skin--became probable cause in that case, as well as in the one in Oneonta, N.Y. And those are only two cases that made headlines.

In fact, something like the Stuart and Oneonta cases serve as an operating principle in most police departments in this country.

The news media's disproportionate portrayal of African Americans as criminals, in addition to their cavalier use of racial identifications in crime stories, makes the press a willing accomplice to this activity.

Kenneth R. Walker, an independent television producer and columnist, is a fellow at the Institute of Politics.