Any Black Guy Will Do
As stated earlier, I am a student at a public mid-western university. This school has been the center of negative public attention for the last few years due to a death that occurred on campus. The suspect an African American male, former student and the victim a European American female, current student. Not to get into particulars, the autopsy was inconclusive but since he was with her that night he is going to be in prison for a very long time.
This crime sparked an outrage amongst the university and neighboring community, so much so that the school’s police department setup email and cellphone text alerts to inform students about crimes committed on campus and in the adjacent area. This sounded like a good idea to keep the community informed and people safe, at least at first.
In email after email we received word of some robbery, burglary or assault that happened within the last 24 hours. We soon started receiving alerts a couple times a week sometimes and they all seemed strangely similar. The similarity was the suspect description. This is an actual suspect description that I received in my email today “African American male , early 20′s, unknown height/weight, medium build, last seen wearing a red shirt, red baseball style hat, and blue jeans.” This being on a college campus nearly describes every Black man in the area. How can you not know if the person who robbed you was taller or shorter than you? Or if they were light skinned, dark skinned, had facial hair or not or what about any tattoos?
This general description is like an open invitation for a number of unfavorable conditions. One, the police is given free reign because of probable cause so that is limitless violations to the right to privacy of African American men and that is to say the least. Two, it instills fear in the community which leads to an unwarranted alienation of all African American men, convicted or not. Three, it creates a situation were it is okay to just say that a crime was committed by an African American in hopes of police pinning the crime on some poor man that they picked up during a routine traffic stop. At my university in the pass year there has been at least 3 crimes reported were the “victim” later admitted that they falsely told the police that an African American committed the crime, and these were just the one’s that we heard about. Or things like this happen White Guy Robs Banks in Black Guy Mask. If you were to read these crime alerts you wouldn’t believe that anybody else ever committed a crime in the area.
There should be an investigation to be sure that these alerts are sent out when all victim crimes occur and not just select ones to push an agenda. Their should be attempted sketching of the suspect done and release so everyone can be on the look out for the real criminal instead of focusing of racial profiling and checking people for warrants…
