Baltimore County police earlier this week gave descriptions of the suspects in the kidnapping and sexual assault that began in Cockeysville last Friday night and ended in the Cherry Hill section of Baltimore.
Two teens, one guy, one gal, were carjacked in the lot of the Deerco Park and Ride. The reprobates raped the girl and dumped the couple out in Cherry Hill.
“A black male,” the Oct. 13 press release describes one of the suspects, “20 years old, approximately 6 feet tall, with a heavy build.” The other is “a black male, 20 years old, approximately 6 feet, 3 inches tall, with a slim build.”
I gave those descriptions in this column to counter critics of the press who claim we put on the sissy pants when it comes to identifying crime suspects by race. And I’m doing it for another reason: This crime and race business is a bit more complex than you think.
There was a time when newspapers routinely identified black suspects. If editors and reporters are reluctant to do so today, it’s because they’re aware of the nasty history such identifications often led to. I won’t bother to gross you out with the gory and grisly details, but I doubt any of the people who constantly harp on the media’s reluctance to identify suspects by race really want headlines like the one that read: “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”
That headline did appear in a Tulsa, Okla., newspaper of the 1920s, on the same day a rampaging white mob destroyed much of that city’s black community in a race riot that made those of the 1960s look like prayer meetings by comparison.
That is the reason editors ratcheted down the practice of identifying suspects by race. And it’s probably the reason Baltimore County police refuse to give the race of the victims of the rape and carjacking. Cpl. Michael Hill, when I asked him, said the department doesn’t identify victims by race.
Now you can dismiss the print media as a bunch of liberal wusses, but no one’s going to accuse Baltimore County cops of random acts of reckless political correctness. They realize such information only serves to inflame, and doesn’t do a darned thing to help them solve the case.
The race of the suspects was given, I suspect, to inform the public so that maybe some of us can help catch these miscreants. For those purposes, I have to admit that the description Baltimore County police gave is downright inadequate, but I assume they had nothing else to go on, and they have to start somewhere.
When I started working at The Baltimore Sun as a police reporter in Anne Arundel County in 1993, I would only give the race of a suspect if there were a lot more to go with the description. In the Baltimore area, there must be hundreds of young black men 6 feet tall with a heavy build and 6 feet, 3 inches tall with a slim build.
It would be nice to know the complexion of these suspects: light-skinned, dark-skinned, medium? (We REALLY don’t all look alike.) What kind of clothes were they wearing? Any tattoos? What about facial hair? Were they clean-shaven? Mustache? Goatee? Full beard? What about hairstyles? Afro? Close cut? Braids? Dreadlocks? Bald? Any visible scars? Was either of the suspects wearing those horrible “grillz” in his teeth?
Only with such details do racial identifications become relevant. Those looking for the press to give routine details of a suspect’s race might have an agenda of linking young black men to a disproportionate amount of crime.
That disproportion exists, especially in the statistics for felony murder. (Death penalty opponents who talk about racial disparities in capital punishment should ponder THAT particular racial disparity.)
But the disproportion may not exist for the reasons the people who constantly make the clarion call for racial identification of suspects might like. Show me a group of young men who have been historically marginalized and who have a history of bad relations with the police, and I’ll show you a group of men who disproportionately commit crime.
And I don’t care what their race is. History has a way of catching up with you, especially if it’s bad history.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
