Let’s call a spade a spade
An opinion piece by Paul Sheehan in the Sydney Morning Herald this week got me thinking why is it that police and much of our media shies away from providing meaningful descriptions of suspects who have allegedly committed crimes. Witness the Andrew Farrugia killing recently …notice how there was no mention of the boys arrested being aboriginal, except for an oblique reference to their ties in the aboriginal community used as an excuse for them to attempt to get bail - and even this didn’t get a mention at all in some media.
Sheehan refers to the description issued by police in the murder of Sione Matevesi last weekend in Sydney:
“Police are looking for a group of men described as wearing dark clothing.”
And then we have all the crimes committed by the notorious “men of middle eastern appearance” often muddied as “men of middle eastern/mediterranean appearance”.
What is more important, protecting the racial sensitivities of some groups, or giving the community meaningful information to enable identification of crime suspects? Why not use ethnicity as a descriptor - it is generally reasonably meaningful. People have a fair idea of what someone who is Aboriginal, or Asian, or Arab, or Southern European, or black African looks like. Use all the available information to fully describe suspects. Stuff any concern over sensitivities of any racial group about being identified as criminals!
All this namby-pamby tip-toeing around calling a spade a spade, and mincing words to avoid giving offence causes more problems than it solves. If there is a problem with Lebanese youths being over-represented in the ranks of criminal thugs, deal with the problem, not deny they exist, or are part of some other generic broader based problem. If aboriginal youths roaming drunk around country towns are a problem, deal with it, not deny it and hope it goes away - likewise things like domestic violence and sexual abuse in aboriginal communities …admit the problems exist and deal with them. In all these situations, dealing with them is inevitably going to involve a mix of punitive and encouragement strategies. For example in juvenile crimes, I think it would be more beneficial for the community, criminal and their family to come down tough on them right from the first instances of petty crime, teach them a lesson before they graduate from petty criminal to serious one, but use their jail time for a real attempt at rehabilitation, with intensive case work on both the prisoner and their family environment outside jail. The reluctance to jail young criminals stems from jails being very disfunctional places, where the main thing learnt is often how to be a better criminal. This needs to be changed - not sure how, but I’m sure it can be done with sufficient effort and resources applied, and new ideas.
Technorati Tags: Andrew Farrugia, aboriginals, middle eastern appearance, political correctness, juvenile crime, corrections system
January 9th, 2007 at 7:58 am
I suppose you may find 5% of the population don’t agree with you. I am not among that five. Until yesterday I did not know, although I had guessed. It makes us all very distrustful of those in authority and the media when it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, but it could be a swan and the media aren’t going to tell us.
Hope you don’t mind a couple of links. Mine first and someone elses.
http://highriser.blogspot.com/2007/01/very-hot-babe.html
http://pommygranate.blogspot.com/2007/01/who-needs-msm.html
January 9th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
I was confused when I’d heard on the news that police were worried there’d be a race-related retaliation or something similar, when I’d heard no mention of ‘race’ in the stories about the actual incident.
I guess I understand a bit more now.
January 11th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Agree with some of what you are saying but you know in this world of namby-pamby-tip-toeing, it’s not going to happen the way you want it to and the way it should happen. Why not? Cos it’s plain old common sense, and that doesn’t go down well with people in charge.
Rant over!
January 13th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
I’m inclined to agree with the general thrust of your argument. But witnesses draw conclusions from what they see and sometimes get mixed up.
Example: a witness sees someone with olive skin commit an offence and reports that the person was of Middle Eastern appearance. The police give that description to the media. A member of the public hears the report and is on the lookout for somebody who looks Middle Eastern. Although he passes the offender on the way to work, he ignores the offender as (to this particular member of the public)the offender seems Greek.
The alternative is a highly specific physical description: “Caucasian features but dark skin with a dusky greyish hue” (Pakistani) or “yellowish brown skin with slanted eyes” (Chinese) or “yellowish brown skin with almond-shaped eyes” (Mongolian).