Another robbery, another suspect, another round of criticism of the Gazette for failure to report the race of the suspects. By way of explaining ourselves, below is most of a letter, updated somewhat, that I sent a reader years ago about how we handle the fact of race:

Here is our policy: We do not include the race or ethnicity of a person in a news story unless race is pertinent.

Notice I did not say “crime story.” I said “story.” We leave race/ethnicity out of every story unless race itself is the issue.

For example, we do not identify Colorado Springs Mayor Lionel Rivera as “Hispanic Mayor Lionel Rivera.” His ethnicity is irrelevant. The mayor also appears to be about 5-feet, 10-inches tall (although I’ve never measured him and am a lousy judge of height). We don’t identify him as “Five-feet-ten Mayor Lionel Rivera.” These very precise characteristics – the mayor is very precisely Hispanic and very precisely five-feet-ten – have absolutely no relevance to just about any story involving the mayor.

A number of years back, The Gazette published a profile of then Vice-Mayor Leon Young. He had been appointed interim mayor for a short time, and the story made his African-American race a prominent part of the story. Indeed, it was the reason for the story. Young was the first black person to become mayor of Colorado Springs. Race had played a significant role in shaping his politics and policies. So for that story, we paid attention to his race. It was relevant. In other stories, however, where we reported on Young acting in one way or another as mayor, such as presiding over the most recent City Council meeting, we did not identify him as “black Interim Mayor Leon Young.” He was simply “Interim Mayor Leon Young,” because his race had nothing to do with the reasons why he had voted one way or another on a motion before the council.

We apply essentially the same standard to our reporting on crime. Imagine a person who has been arrested, charged and is now standing before a judge entering a plea. The person’s name is, say, Jeff Thomas. Does it matter that Thomas is white? Black? Asian? No. What matters is that this specific person stands accused of a specific crime and must answer the charges. The law will be administered, presumably, without regard to the defendant’s race, so race is irrelevant.

Now we come to the different situation of police trying to find someone who has committed a crime. No longer is a person’s race necessarily irrelevant: it can be a crucial distinguishing characteristic that separates the potentially guilty from the innocent. Doesn’t it make sense to tell readers the race of the person(s) the police suspect of committing the crime?

Our position: In most cases, no – not unless there is other unique identifying information about the person.

Our reason: In most cases, race by itself is far too crude a characteristic to be of any value singling out any individual.

Consider that, as of the 2000 census, El Paso County was home to 516,929 people. Of those half-million souls, 81.2 percent were white. Keeping that fact in mind, imagine reading something like this in The Gazette:

“Police suspect the burglar is a white male.”

Well, that effectively narrows it down to about 40 percent of the population, or 210,000 people. It certainly doesn’t aid the police – or Gazette readers — in the business of finding the man they’re looking for. Information like that is so useless that a reasonable reader would wonder why a mention of race was included at all. A good number of readers, I’m certain, would rightly complain that the Gazette was simply trying to cast whites in a bad light.

African-Americans, meanwhile, make up 6.5 percent of the area’s population, so a Gazette story that said “Police suspect the burglar is a black male” would create a pool of about 11,300 suspects. That number is still far, far too large to serve the purpose of finding the one person responsible for the crime.

Even in smaller subsets of the city, race doesn’t really help single out a suspect. In and around Rockrimmon, for example, the 2000 census counted 655 blacks. If police were looking for an adult black male and suspected that person lived in Rockrimmon, the field of potential suspects would be roughly 2/5th of that number, or about 262 black adult men. That’s still way too many people to make the description of any value — unless you think the police would be justified hauling all 262 down to the station for questioning.

And if whites have good reason to be upset with The Gazette for tainting all whites by reporting the lone fact that a suspect is white, then blacks are entitled to be equally offended by a story that taints all blacks by reporting that a suspect happens to be black. To take the Rockrimmon example, it simply would be unfair to the 261 innocent black adult males of Rockrimmon to give their neighbors a reason to look upon them with unwarranted suspicion. More to the point of public safety, it would do almost nothing to help single out the true criminal from the much larger group of innocents.

Some will say: Well, 261 black men is such a large group that no single one of them would or should feel he is under suspicion. OK, fine, but that argument essentially concedes the point that racial information alone does not narrow down the field sufficiently to be of any benefit in tracking down the actual criminal.

Even the police regard race by itself as only part of the information they need to track down suspects. That’s why they collect not only the race of a suspect, but every other possible identifying feature they can obtain: height, weight, hair color and style, eyes, scars, tattoos, clothing, jewelry, limps, right- or left-handedness, speech accent, and on and on. It’s the combination of personal characteristics that create a unique individual, not any single characteristic alone.

Usually, the particulars contained in police reports – height, weight, hair color and so forth – are so average as to describe the vast majority of people. A description along the lines of “five-feet-10, 180 pounds, brown hair,” is not specific enough. To write a story that says police are looking for a “white male, five-feet-10, 180 pounds with brown hair” is to say that police are looking for about 20 percent of the men in Colorado Springs.

For example, the police blotter on the crime reported today identifies the suspects as “a black male wearing a black jacket and black jeans,” and “a black male wearing a red jacket over a black hoodie. both suspects had handguns and wore bandanas over their faces.”

Well, the bandanas are gone now, for sure, and just about every American male owns black jeans or a black jacket. And there’s no clue about whether the suspects are short or tall, big or small.

By contrast, here is the police-blotter description of the suspect of a robbery that occurred Tuesday afternoon:

The victims described the suspect further as a Hispanic male with dark hair, about 5’5” tall, weighing 130-140 pounds. He was wearing blue pants and a blue down jacket with a “Broncos” emblem on the back.

That’s more precise, but still too vague to be of much use. The height/weight information helps, though plenty of folks around here wear Broncos jackets.

In those cases when the police do provide The Gazette with uniquely identifying information, we do include it in our news stories. Here’s a sample of a story where we did just that. This story, published a few years ago, was about police investigating the potential of a link between an earlier sexual assault and a more recent kidnapping:

The man was described as white with a light to medium complexion. He is about 5 feet 6 inches tall, 180 to 200 pounds, with black hair, dark brown eyes and a protruding stomach. He had facial hair and pockmarks on the lower part of his face. His teeth were stained brown, and he smoked Doral menthol cigarettes, police said. He drove a tan, older-model small pickup.
 
In this case, race was a useful identifying characteristic because it was accompanied by a host of other, precise characteristics. If you happen to know two 5-foot-6, 200-pound people with black hair, brown eyes, pockmarks and a taste for Doral menthols, you can eliminate the African-American one and instead focus on the white one.

A final point about police information: Citizens grant police officers certain powers that are so potent that we don’t allow just anyone to use them. A police officer can arrest and incarcerate someone. Citizens expect anyone entrusted with such powers to use them judiciously. We hire those people carefully, send them to police academies and train them. And judicious exercise of their power to incarcerate relies, in part, in precise information. Surely we don’t want police officers rounding up every five-feet-10, 180-pound man with brown hair until they finally get the right one. And, indeed, they don’t, because so often, the descriptive information they have on their own incident reports is not very descriptive after all. They need more than a mere height-weight-hair description to find the one person they’re after.

Certainly, we as a newspaper have an obligation to behave just as judiciously with such information. Just as the power to arrest is potent and needs to be controlled, so too is the power of information (and more to the point here, misinformation) potent and needs to be employed carefully.