In what appears to be another woke-minded move to ignore the realities of crime, faculty at Cornell University approved a resolution to exclude ‘race’ from suspect descriptions in campus crime alerts. The faculty—in a completely unrealistic, after-the-fact argument—seems eager to ignore the obvious.
The Cornell faculty members stated that including a suspect’s race in crime alerts fosters suspicion of “Black people” as The New York Post reported. But just to point out the obvious, criminals are criminals and they are who they are. And concealing race-related characteristics will not change such facts, but only allow criminal behavior—and criminals—to carry on unnoticed.
Strangely, the faculty seemed to acknowledge this fact—but in a way that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and does nothing to actually promote public safety. For example, the Cornell Faculty Senate’s Resolution 158 states:
“… the knowledge that a crime may have been committed by a Black man does not make CRIME ALERT recipients any safer, but instead endangers Black people in the community, reinforcing the common phenomenon of violence against Black people on the grounds that they look like suspected criminals…”
According to the faculty’s confused attempt at crime fighting, protecting a “phenomenon” has now become more important than actually protecting students. And it should seem obvious and suspicious that the resolution was sponsored by a group representing Asian Studies, Romance, Comparative Literature—and not a single sponsor from the field of public safety or criminology.
Moreover, their argument completely ignores another well-known crime phenomenon: most violent crime is intra-racial. In other words, most “blacks” are victimized by “black” offenders; most “whites” are victimized by “white” offenders etc. Even the quickest glance at the most basic crime statistics proves this point, as the FBI stats below clearly evidence.
Ironically, the faculty’s resolution completely ignores another misperception about what cops actually care about. Hint: it’s not race.
Most cops typically care about one thing more than anything else: catching criminals. And even more ironically—and outright hypocritically—politicians, professors, sociologists, and many other non-sworn individuals are the ones who typically insisted upon “race” and race-related information in crime reports, so they could have “robust, description-rich data” to analyze.
However, mastering the nuances of racial demographics and crime statistics isn’t something most cops want to be involved with, just to continue stating the obvious. To put it bluntly, figuring out whether a suspect was “white” or “caucasian” or “Caucasian Non-Hispanic” isn’t something most cops even care about: they care about catching criminals, and the sooner the better.
Granted, the faculty’s resolution does evidence concern for stigmitization and perception. But if someone is committing a crime, they’re committing a crime. And ignoring obvious (race-related) characteristics that would aid in apprehension does not promote public safety: it endangers the entire public.
Indeed, the faculty’s resolution puts the entire community at risk of actual violence—for the sake of attempting to minimize phenomenological perceptions of “violence” and violent criminals.
There’s the reality of violent crime and criminals. And there’s the perception of violent crime and criminals. Unfortunately, the Cornell faculty have miguidingly proven which one matters more. Ignoring information to apprehend a suspect endangers everyone and does nothing to change the reality of violent crime.
We can only hope that the reality of public safety on campus is just as safe as the faculty’s (mis)perception of it…
