Whereas, the United States is host to a generations-long epidemic of anti-Black violence, provoking President Pollack to affirm that “Decent people and institutions cannot stand silent while such violence against our fellow citizens continues,”;
Whereas, one of the perceptions that contributes to and justifies the disproportionate and disproportionately violent policing of Black people is the false association of Blackness with criminality;
Whereas the university’s understanding of local crime is substantially affected by the CRIME ALERT emails that are sent to all Cornellians, with no exception, when the Clery Act requires timely notification of a crime or when the Chief of Police considers it appropriate;
Whereas, these emails consistently foreground the race of suspects, sometimes listing race and gender as the only distinguishing features of unidentified criminal suspects;
Whereas, the knowledge that a crime may have been committed by a Black man does not make CRIME ALERT recipients any safer, but instead endangers Black people in the community, reinforcing the common phenomenon of violence against Black people on the grounds that they look like suspected criminals;
Whereas, the Clery Act, which requires CRIME ALERT emails to be sent, does not require raced descriptions of suspects, as evidenced by the legally successful transition away from the practice at Brown University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Michigan;
Be it resolved that the Cornell University Police Department will cease to use racial descriptors in CRIME ALERT emails.
Vote results:
67 yes; 14 no; 8 abstain; 39 DNV
I support the resolution. But I am curious: Is there any data on usefulness of Clery Act notices (not necessarily at Cornell, but anywhere)? That is, do they ever lead to actionable leads for police? Or is it all “crime theater”?
It’s really difficult to measure this exact question, in part because campus crime wasn’t recorded in the same way before the Clery Act was passed in 1990, and there is no systemic way to report whether usable crime information comes from people who have read timely notifications. One (equally unmeasurable) thing to balance against that unknown, though, is the diversion of resources away from other activities that’s required by the reporting requirements of the act. For example, when IPD gets a crime reported to them in Collegetown, they need to connect with CUPD, identify the type of crime (which is a long stretch in the Clery handbook), and provide the requisite information. This is something officers have to do in the fairly important first hours after the crime was committed, and it trades off with investigation, victim care, etc. So from the perspective of some law enforcement agencies, even if the Clery Act were to provide leads, it prevents as much police work as it enables. This is essentially why the former Police Commisioner of Boston has come out in favor of reforming the law, and senator Claire McCaskill was pushing for its total repeal (you can find articles about both of them at insidehighered.com, just search for “Clery”). Neither of them seems to take into account the law’s effect on the Black community — they don’t even think the reporting is worth the paperwork.
Anecdotally, I haven’t heard of a specific case in which a Crime Alert email led to an arrest, but my experience is highly limited and such examples might exist, especially on very small campuses. For my part personally, I believe that the cultural focus on black-on-white crime that the email reporting rules contribute to is part of a bigger performance of denial about how people really do hurt each other. Even a quick look at the daily crime log is a reminder that most violence happens between white people who have relationships with each other (domestic partners, acquaintances, and the potential violence of the police-citizen relationship): the stigma attached to blackness has the effect of making whiteness feel safe and comfortable, which does feel like a staged fiction to me.
Thank you so much for supporting the resolution!
why stop at this? the gender should not be mentioned either… nor the age of the person to avoid ageism.
This is not racial profiling. To say that a person who commits a crime is probably black (or Asian etc) is racial profiling, but describing an individual (white, black, Asian etc) is not, it is simply providing factual, and possibly useful, particulars. Deleting information makes it more difficult to identify offenders and makes the community less safe. The statement that, “knowledge that a crime may have been committed by a Black man does not make CRIME ALERT recipients any safer” seems unlikely to be true since narrowing the field of suspects is bound to help in at least some situations. The statement that these “emails consistently foreground the race of suspects, sometimes listing race and gender as the only distinguishing features of unidentified criminal suspects,” is correct, but is not a logical argument against providing the information. Should identifying gender also be disallowed? That is profiling too. The fact that there has been a “legally successful transition away from the practice at Brown University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Michigan” is meaningless unless it is shown that their transition has had a positive, or at least not a negative effect. Otherwise, to adopt their policy means that we are simply blind followers.
Actually, this very resolution is equating Blackness with criminality. This is as racist as it gets, and you don’t even seem to realize it.