Dive Brief:
- After a building-takeover protest and months of discussion, the University of Minnesota has announced that it will not always identify criminal suspects by race in public alerts.
- The criminal racial description issue has also prompted a rally at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge and controversy at Yale University after a campus police officer detained the son of a New York Times columnist at gunpoint because he was black and matched a vague description of a suspect.
- Critics of racial descriptions of criminal suspects say they’re too vague to be useful and they endanger a large group of innocent civilians when nearly everyone in a racial group becomes a potential suspect.
Dive Insight:
Inside Higher Ed makes the point that college students may be more aware than the general population of police suspect alerts because colleges are required to send the notifications to students, typically via text message or emails. Minnesota’s new policy is that race will be used in suspect alerts only “when there is sufficient detail that would help identify a specific individual or group.” Whose Diversity, the group protesting the issue at Minnesota, called the policy "bread crumbs meant to pacify dissent and halt further actions toward justice."