CRIME COVERAGE SHOULDN'T BE A BLACK-AND-WHITE ISSUE

By: Nat Hentoff Nat Hentoff Bemoans Media's Focus On Race



Some 20 years ago, a friend of mine, one of the very few African-

American reporters then at the New York Post, told me of a call
he had received the day before at the paper. It was a tip on a murder
on Park Avenue. The reporter told his editor, 'I'm going right up.'



'Wait a minute,' said the editor. 'What's the address?'



It was uptown. Harlem.



'No,' the editor said, 'we're not covering that.'



Not much has changed since then. In the April 13 New York Daily
News, Stanley Crouch, a columnist who is black, noted that 'for all
the reduction in homicide' under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, '50% of
those murdered in this city' are African Americans and Latinos. Crouch
added that these so-called 'minorities' - though half the
population in the city - 'suffer 75% of the violent crime.'



Nationally - as Rod Dreher reported in the April 9 New York
Daily News - 'according to most recent [U.S.] Justice
Department statistics, in 1998, blacks were seven times more likely to
commit homicide, and six times more likely to be ... murder victim[s]'
than whites.



There is some coverage of black-on-black crime, particularly when a
given act is stunningly vicious and gruesome. But, in terms of the
less-than-startling run of common muggings, rapes, and murders, white
readers know very little of individual black victims of crime.



One of the few who consistently reports on these victims in the
nation's capital is Colbert I. King, whose column appears every
Saturday morning at the top of the Op-Ed page of The Washington
Post. I've always seen stories on African-American victims of crime
in the black press, but King's continued prominence in a white
newspaper is very rare.



On April 1, King wrote, not for the first time, about the murder of 16-

year-old Tia Mitchell, shot in the head and neck as she rode her
bicycle in her own neighborhood, within sight of the Capitol dome. The
gang member charged with her killing, David Reginald Johnson (a k a
'Stinka'), allegedly shot her because he believed she was associated
with a member of another gang. Johnson was 15 at the time.



How did King first come to focus on this murder that happened four
years ago? 'It earned a place in my mind,' he wrote this April, 'by the
insignificance ... it was assigned' at the time in The Washington
Post: 'a two-inch item on Page D5 simply headlined, 'Girl, 16,
Slain While Cycling in NW Alley.' No name, no motive, nothing.'



Only King kept digging into the story, as he has with other ignored
crimes against blacks - those human beings, he said in one column,
'with whom we don't identify or think much about.' At the end of
another column, he noted that Tia Mitchell's mother had called him to
see if he could help her find out what was happening to her daughter's
alleged killer.



'She said,' King wrote, 'no one downtown would return her calls.'



Because too many newspapers treat such crimes as so 'routine' as to be
not worth the space to report on them - except occasionally for
stories based on generalized crime statistics - readers have no
sense of who the victims were or who their families are.



Making diversity in newsrooms a priority in more substantive ways than
in speeches at conferences should not result in assigning African-

American reporters solely - or even primarily - to black
news. As many nonminority journalists have shown again and again, no
beat should have a color line. But it is reasonable to expect that many
journalists of color would be as aware as King of the stories of black
crime victims that are routinely downplayed, if reported at all. And as
more nonmajority readers find there are reporters who want to know
about these cases, they will call - just as King keeps getting
calls from people who live in neighborhoods where white reporters
easily get lost, as I have in Washington.



In November 1996, King wrote of 'a world of people who are treated by
the rest of us as so worthless that a Southeast Washington man could be
shot at a gas station last Sunday night, pursued by his attacker to the
hospital, and then be shot once again outside the emergency room -
this time fatally - by the same gunman, and then have his name
mentioned only briefly on Page B8 of the Post. Hell, if he'd
been a Capitol Hill staffer or a downtown lobbyist, he would at least
have made [the] 'Style' [section].'



King also wrote in that column about another call from Tia Mitchell's
mother, who said of her daughter's alleged killer - at the time
still on the loose - 'I don't want him dead. Dying is too easy.
That's been proven to me.'



She wanted - and still wants - 'just a little bit of justice
and peace,' King wrote. 'In that part of the world, they need that,
too: So I keep coming back to the pain.'



Nothing should stop white reporters and editors from coming back to the
pain, but the presence of more black colleagues might awaken them to
that pain.



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Nat Hentoff writes a syndicated column for United Media, as well as
a column for The Village Voice in New York.





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