On Aug. 1, a brief story in Metro’s Crime & Justice column reported that a University of Maryland student had been beaten and raped after being grabbed off a street while she was jogging. A reader in the area, who has a daughter at the university, called to ask why The Post did not include a description of the suspect, because TV news accounts she saw had one.
The Hyattsville city police put out a press release on the investigation of the case and reported: “The suspect is described only as a black male, under 30 years old, about 6 feet 1 to 2 inches tall, with a muscular build.” The Post did not include that in its account, although it did have the information.
Metro desk editors said the description was far too vague to be useful, that it fit thousands of men and that it did not meet the newspaper’s guidelines for racial identification.
Those guidelines, in the paper’s stylebook, say, “In general, race and ethnic background should not be mentioned unless they are clearly relevant.” That seems clear enough. But then it goes on to say that race and racial identification “are relevant and should be used in crime stories when we have enough specific identifying information to publish a police description of a suspect who is being sought.” That sentence seems poorly worded and confusing, leaving it unclear whether the police or The Post should determine whether the information is sufficiently specific.
In the Hyattsville case, the information wasn’t very specific, yet the police published a description. Should The Post have withheld information that the police made public in a press release and that some — not all — TV stations broadcast, showing film of police going door-to-door in the neighborhood? Even though vague, could the description have been useful in some way to readers in the area? Or does it just feed dangerous and unfair racial stereotyping that inflames racial prejudice without being legitimately useful in apprehending suspects?
These are difficult questions, not uncommon in newsrooms, that put a special burden on editors to think through each incident carefully. What is the level of detail that should push something into print? These are also internal decisions that unfold out of sight of readers and unexplained to them.
Although part of the style guide’s wording may be confusing, Metro chief Jo-Ann Armao makes it clear that The Post sets the journalistic standards. “In cases of crime stories, we use race when we have enough specific identifying information to publish a description of a suspect who is being sought. That means on a case by case basis we decide as to whether there is enough descriptive information about an individual that would be of real help to citizens.
“In this case,” Ms. Armao says, referring to the Hyattsville rape, “it was not even close. The description released by the police was so vague that it could include many, many individuals. Substitute ‘white’ for ‘black’ in the description released by police. Do you find that description helpful? I suspect not.
“The heart of the issue,” she says, is that “when a story singles out a person’s race for no reason, no relevance to the story, no service to the public, it reminds me of a time when newspapers pandered to the racism in society.”
There is indeed a shameful history to this issue that newspapers have moved beyond. Yet I can understand why some readers in Hyattsville might not agree with the notion that this case was “not even close.”
That newspaper editors feel different constraints than police departments about what should be made public regarding crime is an important issue needing steady scrutiny. Perhaps newspapers could also find a way to explain briefly to readers when and why information that did not meet their standards for relevance was being omitted.
