At a dinner with some of my colleagues last week someone mentioned the fact that many of the crime alerts on campus – our university police are particularly aggressive about sending out alerts/updates to counter the perception, and frankly reality, that we are in a high crime area – turn out to be fabricated. These are property crimes, not violent or sexual in nature.
It struck several of us as odd that students would lie about being relieved of an iPhone by a nighttime mugger.
The problem is that students – particularly the ex-suburban private school type – are more afraid of their parents than they are the law. Or just about anything else for that matter. Despite the fact that these college students are all legally adults, their primary concern is to avoid getting In Trouble with mom and dad. So when Dakota loses her $500 smartphone because she got too wasted on Saturday night to keep track of her limbs let alone her electronics, she has two choices. One is to tell Dad that she lost it. The other is to call the police and say that a black guy took it. They choose the latter and generally I don't imagine that police have a hard time finding inconsistencies in the mugging story (or in the security camera footage that covers more of the area than most people realize).
This is not something that happens daily, mind you, but there have been multiple incidents in the past year.
It's a good anecdote to pull out when someone tries to argue that race isn't a thing. Because the "suspect" is always the same. If you want to claim that something was stolen or a crime was committed, what else would you invent but a Black Male, 18-30, tall and slender and wearing a hoodie and baggy pants?
It makes sense that college kids are sheltered and do stupid things and in a moment of panic they might make up a story. That's not the alarming part. The alarming part is that well-off and mostly white college kids instinctively know that if you're going to invent a crime, the best faux-perpetrator is the person everyone already thinks is a criminal anyway.
Tom says:
Not exactly on point, but the reason that the police are aggressive about sending out the alerts is the Clery Act which puts campuses at risk of losing federal funding if they fail to "issue timely warnings" of serious/ongoing threats to safety. There was some talk that Va. Tech would lose its Clery compliance after the shooting there.
Xynzee says:
Two ideas both as unlikely as the other, but here goes:
1) That the students are subjected to the full weight of the law and prosecuted for making a false statement to the police.
As a follow up to above or at the very least:
2) The maker of said false claim is put front and centre on the school paper and paper's website having to make a formal retraction of said false claim.
A few examples subjected to public humiliation every year and you won't here boo for the rest of the year.
Perhaps now's a good time to give up chroming ;)
Dookie says:
I wonder if the police went and grabbed some random black guy that fit the description and decided to hang the fabricated crime on him (they wouldn't do that, right?), would the fabricator let the innocent black guy go to jail or fess up? I hope I'm wrong about which way I think that would go.
c u n d gulag says:
A lost phone is one thing, but accusing black males of rape and murder – which is all too common – are another.
In those cases, the cops really DO go out looking for someone who fits the bill. And the first one who looks like he fits the bill, ends up in jail.
There was Susan Smith, down South, who killed her own kids, and tried to blame it on a black male.
Fortunately, she was such an inept liar, that the cops knew she was lying, and investigated the case with her as the prime suspect, and not some mythical black guy.
It seems like every few weeks we read about some black inmate released from Death Row, or a life sentence, because DNA evidence exonerated them.
What I want to know, is why the DA's who willfully pursue putting and innocent person in jail to pad their anti-crime bona fides, aren't themselves put in jail?
Oh yeah, that's right – most of them are white…
Emerson Dameron says:
@Dookie:
Don't worry – he was probably doing something bad anyway, right?
Whatver says:
Dakota? The Ruling Class gives their children stripper names?
Emerson Dameron says:
@Whatver:
Any Mountain West city or state will do. Denver. Billings. Wyoming. Taos. It's fun!
bjk says:
I've this from other people, that the kids today are basically best friends with their parents and keep in almost constant contact and the parents even select their college courses. I don't have any great theories for this, but one might be the almost complete financial dependence of many middle class kids on their parents. The solution is more jobs at an earlier age, but that's another topic.
J.D. says:
bjk: College kids are almost completely financially dependent on their parents, but that's not due to a character flaw – they basically have to be due to the insane costs of college. You can imagine that this breaks both ways: some kids focus on buttering up their parents in order to get more financial support, and some parents condition their support on having input into their kids' lives.
bjk says:
Yeah, but I was totally dependent on parents for college and I pretty much didn't talk to them between Christmas and Thanksgiving. It's not a new thing. There's more to it, but not having much contact with that set of people, I really don't know.
Andrew says:
When the only way to stay in touch with your parents was to stand in line for a dirty pay phone where everyone could hear your conversation and a five-minute call cost as much as a six pack of cheap beer, people did it a lot less. Now that everyone carrier a Star Trek Communicator in their trousers, and calls all over the US and Canada are included in the monthly bill, it stands to reason that communication would be more frequent, right?
human says:
A few years ago at the University of Minnesota, they had a text alert system that I guess was relatively new. One day they texted out an alert that a black guy had stolen something and was last seen in a certain building. I got the text and I remember the description being minimal, along the lines of this post — tall black male, or whatever.
The campus police were surprised when people started texting replies to the text alert saying they had seen a black guy in such-and-such nearby building. They got a number of these. Soon after the campus cops arrested a black guy.
No idea how it panned out, if he was the right guy or got convicted or what, but of course they were bragging about this as an unexpected success of the text alert system. There was an article in the campus paper about it. Neither the people interviewed for the article nor the reporter seemed to notice that it was maybe a little bit fucked up that a bunch of people's first instinct on receiving that text was to report a black guy they had seen recently in the general area. Because… oh god I just can't even finish.
Robert says:
Given that my older son is a tall, slender Black male who regularly dresses in baggy pants* and a hoodie, and who turns eighteen next year – well, my stomach is a little upset right now.
*Not sagging, just baggy. Not that Officer McFriendly would notice.
Khaled says:
I used to work in a pretty rough neighborhood, and it amazed me the "descriptions" we would get of would be bad guys "black male, slender, tall, 20s- 30s". Thanks, asshole. That was about 1/2 my customers.
The white trash, btw, were the ones we had to worry about. They were in the 'hood to buy heroin, and goddamn it, they were going to steal, what were we gonna do about it?
greenergood says:
I graduated college 35 years ago (gulp). We had a pay phone in the corridor, the only television was in the bar down the road, where we used to go and watch Saturday Night Live, and the only video game was Pong and maybe Pac Man later on. We didn't have expensive things to lose when we got drunk, so didn't have to phone Dad to say a black man did it.
We also spent lots of time talking because we didn't have iPhones to distract us. We drank and smoked weed and had sex, but most of all we talked. We didn't have Google, so we had to learn how to use the library to search for references, which meant we stumbled across other books and topics that we weren't even looking for. I am NOT being nostalgic – there are loads of things that were awful – the ingrained sexism, especially, in terms of what subjects women should study, and how acceptable it was to sleep with your professor and get a decent grade, etc.
But this facile use of an excuse that gets a black man in trouble is just so disturbing to me – rich or even middle-class white kids just used to be isolated from black people; now they're able to use Black people as excuses for when White Girl or Boy screws up and is scared to tell Dad. And law enforcement is just lazy/racist/low-budgeted enough to go along with it. Horrible.
Anonymouse says:
@greenergood: I'm a bit younger than you, but I went to school in a similar situation. Computers were certainly not something you owned–they were huge mainframes in the computer room. Cellphones? Nope. I went off to college with a $6 clock-radio thingy and a discount department store Timex watch. We had a landline in each dorm room, but it was controlled by the university and only made local calls. There was a television in the lobby, but cable hadn't come to our area yet and we needed a huge roof antenna to get any kind of crappy local reception, so nobody had tvs in their rooms.
The good news was that nobody had much of interest to steal (occasionally pocket change for vending machines and laundry went missing, or cans of beer–but it was always petty stuff).
As you pointed out, we did a lot of talking to each other, face-to-face, or when the weather was nice, we lay out towels on the hill out back and lay there catching rays while chatting.
Kaleberg says:
My favorite "this black guy did it" story involved Charles Stuart who murdered his pregnant wife, shot himself non-fatally, then called the cops on his car phone which was then a bit of a novelty. He told the police that some black guy did it. My first reaction was that it was the baby or the car phone and that he had murdered his wife because he didn't want to be a father and possibly have to sacrifice having expensive things like car phones.
The search for the murderer went on for weeks with lots of press coverage. Stuart was a salesman at one of the fanciest furriers in town, so there was that angle. Meanwhile inconsistencies started to appear in his story and the cops started getting suspicious. Stuart killed himself by jumping off the Tobin Bridge.
P.S. greenergood, don't overestimate the perspicacity of Google. I'm always stumbling over neat new facts and interesting stories when I'm searching for other things.
Pat says:
The alarming part is that well-off and mostly white college kids instinctively know that if you're going to invent a crime, the best faux-perpetrator is the person everyone already thinks is a criminal anyway.
"Officer, Dick Cheney stole my iPhone!"
Miller says:
We had the exact scenario mentioned happen here at UD last week. Alert goes out about a daylight robbery near campus, is rescinded the next day with no mention of what actually happened. University is predominantly white, community that is being forced further and further to the fringes of town by "luxury student apartments" is predominantly black.
The "all-clear" does nothing to tamp down the kneejerk racism that the initial alert stokes up. And I have to say "stokes," because it's Delaware, and the bros are easily stoked.
D. Faul Tagain says:
It's like you're psychic or something!
—
Notification of a Criminal Incident – [] Campus
[Month/date], 2014
Robbery
At approximately 9:00 p.m., [Month, date], [] Police were dispatched to contact a robbery victim, a University of [] student, who reported he was walking in the [] block of []th Ave., when a lone male suspect approached him and struck him on the back. The victim fell to the ground. The suspect grabbed the victim’s cell phone and fled northbound. The victim ran after the suspect chasing him through yards to []th Ave., where the suspect got into a white car that drove away northbound. The victim was not injured. [] Police checked the area for the suspect and vehicle but did not locate them.
The suspect is described as a male black adult, 22-29 years old, about 6’0”, medium build wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and dark jeans. The suspect was seen getting into a newer model white sedan.