I'm in full agreement, iff it's standardized across the board. But it's very much not. As much as I hate the namesake, Coulter's Law is silly yet sadly mostly correct.
It sounds like the reason was to not perpetuate stereotypes, and in general caucasian people don’t seem to have that stereotype as far as I can tell. Whether they would have posted it or not is unclear, but if their only reason for not posting was as to not perpetuate stereotypes and the offender wasn’t living under that stereotype…
Do other regular black people appreciate when newspapers do this? Anyone with half a brain knows what it means when the newspaper declines to describe a suspect. It seems like it will both not have the intended effect of "not perpetuating stereotypes" and signal to everyone else that black people need special treatment. It seems entirely worse in every respect.
My impression as a black person waiting for the shoe to drop in these delayed ID stories is that the perp turns out to be another black person somewhat less then half the time, and that it's often the case that the police are the ones withholding the identity, not the media.
So I think you're making a leap by assuming that such instances are incontrovertibly based on a supposed intention by the media to treat black suspects with kid gloves. Other than the NYT on a good day, I frankly don't see any evidence that the mainstream media have such charitable intentions toward blacks.
To answer your question directly, if the suspect is going to end up being publicly ID'd, no I don't appreciate coyness, just come out with it. But I agree with the AP that not all stories are worth divulging the name. I had a girlfriend in my teens whose dad was arrested on suspicion of being in a drug ring, and not only did the tabloid get many details wrong, but of course there was no retraction when he was eventually released without charges. That blurb might be on some old microfilm somewhere but in today's world he would be Googleable forever.
Mind you: the situation of the above article is related to minor crimes.
Not mass shootings (a major crime if I ever heard one!). The reason for not naming people in mass shootings is different. Mass shooters want fame, so you deny them fame by not naming them.
Minor criminals have the opposite problem: they can often be rehabilitated back into society after serving their debt to society, but the public shaming of news reports can hamstring them for their entire lives. Entire industries revolve around using SEO tricks to hide people's pasts.
It doesn't have to be that way. If someone is arrested for petty theft, maybe it's ok for the news article to just say "A suspect was arrested". I'm not sure naming them actually helps society at large.
Well, if we go by Twitter, it is a stereotype, though as stereotypes they can be wrong, such as when someone recently on Twitter tweeted before the Id of the perp was made public said, another white male (about a mass shooting). Unfortunately? for her and her retweeters, that ended up being wrong.
Also it's the stereotype for serial killers. So, what, now they can't mention if they guy was white because it's a negative stereotype?
In my opinion—Twitter is not a very accurate gauge on society at large. I'd assume that Twitter has a vocal 10% of users counting as 90% of the content on there. Many of which are quite opinionated...
I'm inclined to think that the way the stereotypes were started and then perpetuated to begin with was they reported the persons color in news stories for decades for everyone who basically wasn't white. Couldn't artificially focusing on any particular group or groups eventually lead to a stereotype if you aren't reporting on the others equally?
The stereotype of the "scary black man" predates cable news reporting. The "savage colored man" predates slavery, and goes back to racist colonists, racist explorers, if not even before that and before that.
It doesn't matter which came first. The point is that the stereotypes are not relevant to today's society no matter how they started.
Well, technically speaking, depending on the exact terms of reference for "mass shooting", white people (... men ... mass shootings by women are rare) are slightly under-represented as mass shooters vs. their proportion of the population.
Are you sure? I looked into this claim last year and it didn't seem to hold up. As far as I can tell, looking at both FBI and wider media stats, each year white individuals (and white males) seem to be the minority of mass shooters. My theory is that people making this claim are confusing the terms "mass shooter" with "school shooter" and the first category is more than 10 times larger than the second category.
As another poster pointed out, as a percentage of the population, white people are slightly underrepresented, but in absolute numbers, they're the clear majority.
Well, there’s this (which is clearly trying to push an agenda but is apparently accurate): http://mass-shootings.info/
But it depends on your definition. Certainly the big, intentional “I’m going to kill everyone and then kill myself,” style shootings largely seem to be done by white men.
I told my wife the other week someone should really start an organization that brings gang members to shooting ranges. If they could actually hit their targets a lot less innocent people would die. We recently had three children in a week or so get shot in Minneapolis, all just bystanders.
No, it doesn't. At least not in this case. Austin is 8% black. So 4% black male. Then you narrow it down by age range, appearance, etc and you now have a very narrow pool. The public deserves to know about a violent, armed murderer in their midst, political correctness be damned.
If it's a more detailed description, and the shooter was still at large, then I agree with you.