Most people send any crime news they encounter through an internal racial filter that varies according to their own skin color, environment, upbringing, personality, education and religion.
I’ve heard from enough racists — and people who don’t believe they are racists — over the years to convince me that this is an irresistible fact. Perhaps as a result, many of my black friends have told me that nearly every time they read or hear about a crime, they always have the same, instinctive thought: “Please, God, don’t let the perpetrator be black.”
So I know that readers will react to the crime stories we publish according to where they happen to be along the racial spectrum. And sometimes they are suspicious, questioning our fairness, context and motive.
The Plain Dealer’s coverage of the recent shooting at Cleveland’s SuccessTech Academy, in which 14-year-old Asa Coon wounded four people before killing himself, raised several race-related questions that need to be addressed.
First, the issue of the photo.
Coon was white, as you know by now. But in the hours after the shooting, and in the newspaper the following day, his race was not obvious — nor did it seem relevant.
We are long past the days when newspapers identified suspects by skin color — but it is obviously a part of a person’s overall physical makeup, and any reader curiosity is usually satisfied by a photo.
Unfortunately, in this case we didn’t have a photo at first. One of the sadder aspects of Coon’s sad, short life is that he lacked the photographic history that most of us take for granted. Our reporters found not a school photo, a friend’s snapshot, a yearbook candid — nothing.
After the next day’s paper was published with no photo and no racial identification, I heard from several suspicious readers who wondered why.
If he had been a black kid, the inference was, we would have identified him as such. One of our editors even got a call from a newspaper in another city, wondering why we had “withheld” the photo.
The truth is we didn’t have it, and neither did anyone else. Plain Dealer reporters made dozens of phone calls trying to track down a photograph, and the fuzzy picture we finally published the next day came from a caller who contacted us about a separate aspect of the story. Minutes after the photo was posted on our cleveland.com Web site, editors got calls from news organizations all over the country, asking permission to use it. It remains the only photo of Asa Coon we or any other media outlet has.
But the suspicions were troubling to those of us who believe that The Plain Dealer plays racial issues down the middle.
Even more troubling were some comments that the newspaper had treated the white Asa Coon with more sensitivity than black youths who have been involved with similarly high-profile crimes. The four boys who were involved in the car chase that ended in the death of a Brecksville woman on her way to the theater in Cleveland got no such sensitive treatment, one e-mailer wrote. Phillip Morris addressed the topic in a thoughtful Metro column Thursday, opining that the stories about Coon were softer — probing and nuanced — while stories about black suspects have been less forgiving.
That’s a serious indictment if true.
Is it true? As we noted above, in stories like this, everyone’s truth is filtered through his or her own background and experience. I’ve got a lot of respect for Phillip Morris, and his remarks gave me pause. But let’s take a second look at three recent stories of youthful mayhem:
Asa Coon, white: Our reporters had 5,000 pages of official documents from an attempted suicide and a wide variety of family legal problems, plus no shortage of people who were willing to talk about him.
Dontez Hairston, Davonta McIntyre, Davonte Johnson and Durraymus Gillis, black: These were the four boys age 13 and 14 who were charged in the August hit-skip tragedy in the theater district. Our stories had nowhere near the context of the stories about Asa, but there was nowhere near the official record or background information, and family members declined to talk to reporters. “We heard right away that the kids in the back seat weren’t troublemakers and hadn’t been in trouble before, but we called 20 or 30 teachers before we found somebody who was willing to say even that on the record,” said reporter Rachel Dissell.
The newspaper did make a bad mistake when the four boys appeared in court. “Boys showed absolutely no remorse’ ” read the Page One headline. That was the way prosecutors portrayed them, but the story told a different tale, describing the boys with slumped shoulders and one with “tears streaming down his face.” The headline was terribly misleading.
There is more work to do on that story.
A.C. Buford, black: He was the 15-year-old who was killed while trying to rob a man last April: Reporters Diane Suchetka and Dissell spent many days in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, gathering information for Suchetka’s story that was sensitive enough to produce complaints from people who said the story painted a picture that was too understanding of the young man.
Every story is different, and each depends on how much information reporters can get and how much people are willing to talk.
But in the end, that’s not the most important thing. What really matters is the final product that hits your doorstep. And Phillip was right to remind us all that our words and tone don’t hit everyone the same way.
