Why Did A Newspaper Use Mugshot Photos Of Black Criminals And Yearbook Photos Of White Ones? An Iowa newspaper recently got rightfully blasted for running stories on a group of white and black burglars with vastly different pictures. A group of black men were recently arrested for burglary and put into the paper with their mugshots. By contrast however three white men were also arrested for the same crime and their pictures were yearbook photos. Mind you searching for mugshots required extra work for the writer, so why the push to find mugshots for the black criminals and not the white ones? Via SoLetsTalkAbout: Why did this story get run with these criminals’ school photos, where on the same day, same situation, the article of another group of burglars featured their mug shots? Same day. Same channel. Same crime. Same author. So why weren’t mugshots good enough for the white guys who got arrested? Who already looks guilty before their trial? Which story plants the seed into a potential jury pool that this is a group of good kids versus this is a group of criminals? The Gazette’s weak explanation is that they can’t get mugshots without a formal request, so why didn’t anyone formally request them since they obviously requested the mugshots of the Black men? Because nobody wanted to. It didn’t even cross their minds to use a mugshot for these nice white boys accused of THE SAME CRIME, being written up by THE SAME REPORTER. I would have more respect for these people if they would just admit it. “Ooops. We made a mistake. Racism is so ingrained in our society we didn’t even realize we did it. We’ll make every effort to correct this behavior in the future.” Blah blah blah. But I haven’t seen a retraction or any acknowledgement of wrongdoing and that’s half the problem. Nobody wants to be called a racist even when they get caught being racist, whether intentionally or not. The worst part is, I’m almost positive the author didn’t consciously say “I’ll use mugshots for the Black men but not the others.” It was just an instinctual reaction, implicit bias, the result of being conditioned from birth to view Black men one way and white men another way. That’s what we have to overcome in our everyday lives. It’s not about you saying, “I’m not a racist because I try to treat everyone equally.” It’s the knowledge that YOU could have done this and not even realized it because no one pointed it out to you. This is clearly racial bias, if you’re going to write a story on criminals whether white or black then be fair.
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Mugshots V.S. Yearbook Photos: Newspaper Shows Racial Bias Towards White Criminals
