The Face of Crime

In this week’s discussion the big issue was what race we tend to indentify crime with and why. We focused on the reading Prime Suspects, which talked about how the public is affected by the crime it, sees on TV. In this article there were five different experiments to test what people could remember from the case they saw. The 1st group was shown a violent crime case which had a black perpetrator, the 2nd had a white perpetrator, in the next two there wasn’t a perpetrator and the last group wasn’t shown a violent crime at all. When asked what the groups remembered from their cases more than 70% reported seeing a black perpetrator even though only one group actually saw one. So what does this tell us about our society?
The local news tends to shift its focus more on the violent crimes that black individuals are involved with and as a result spurs an immediate stereotype of the black community amongst the television audience that not only associate the black person, but specifically the black man with the crime. In addition, I believe the problem stems back to our nation’s history and the old beliefs on what a black man was, his worth, his life, and how he should be treated. Our society has not fully evolved away from these beliefs and in association with the fact that individuals in society are not well informed, this is probably reason as to when one hears about a crime they immediately associate a black man with the crime. Due to this something needs to be done when it comes to the crime that the media exposes to its audience.
The news needs to censor the amount of crime it shows on the news and the amount of details it gives while showing a case. For example, the viewing public doesn’t need to see a surveillance tape on the crime and maybe it shouldn’t focus so much on the perpetrator’s race or it can focus on other races besides the black race. Since these stereotypes have been going on for so long they have also followed black people outside of crime issues because some may not be able to look past the “angry black man.”