“Before you brand me as some racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic bigot, let me be clear. I am not suggesting that people of color should be handled any differently than whites…I’m simply suggesting that we are not benefiting anyone by warping reality on a consistent basis.”
As someone involved in the press, I’m pretty familiar with stock photography. According to Webopedia, stock photography is an industry providing “professional photographs of common places, landmarks, nature, events or people that are bought and sold on a royalty-free basis and can be used and reused for commercial design purposes.” Essentially, stock photos are what you see attached to social media posts or beneath the headlines on all kinds of electronic news. You can search different types of stock photos that can be used for free right now by typing “google image advanced search” in your web browser to see what I am describing for yourself. But be warned—what you will find is that stock photos appear to follow the strict tenets of political correctness pervasive in every other aspect of our lives in 2017 America.
Before you read on, picture yourself as a news editor or writer for a media outlet. Let’s say you cover the crime beat for your local paper. Your next story is about an attempted robbery in the community, and you’ve got a couple things you need to do here. First, you research the crime itself. Next, you write up the story. Finally, you find a stock photo to accompany your headline that will give your piece the pop it needs to rack up those “clicks” for your paper’s website. You were limited in your selection, but the photo you found is licensed for commercial use and it fits the subject matter. You tie it up with a bow and your finished product looks something like this.
Next, you write about a rash of burglaries and find another stock photo. Your finished product looks something like this. Then, it’s entering autos—also known as car break-ins—and it looks something like this. Are you noticing a pattern in the photos here? Let’s keep going, and you can stop me when you see it. Your next report covers a crime wave involving more burglaries and entering autos. It gets published with this stock photo. More stuff gets stolen from peoples’ cars. Here’s your story. Even more entering autos and you find another stock photo to use. Finally, there’s a truck theft. The police arrest Amir Cowley, Maliq Boston, and Chareion Appling for the crime. Yet you use this stock photo for your finished product. Is the pattern in these photos clear yet? Is it not abundantly obvious? Congratulations. Your eyes work. The criminals depicted in these stock photos are all white guys.
It’s so important to note that I didn’t cherry pick these stories to fit my own agenda. I literally went down the list of stories in the “crime” section of a local Metro-Atlanta newspaper called The Citizen from the most current incident back to December of 2016. Research it yourself over several pages of news reports here if you don’t believe me. You won’t find a single stock photo of a person of color committing a crime to go along with a story. Even when the names of the arrested suspects are clearly not those of Caucasian males, we get the stock “white male in the ski mask” photo. I don’t know about you, but he doesn’t look like your average Amir, Maliq, or Chareion, does he? Was there not a mug shot available of the actual offender or perhaps a stock photo depicting a ski mask-clad criminal of the appropriate racial makeup?
It’s also important to note that I only included pages one through five of the crime beat to prove my point that 100% of the stock photos used to depict criminal activity featured white male suspects—but it goes on and on in the same fashion no matter how far back into the archives you go. Before you brand me as some racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic bigot, let me be clear. I am not suggesting that people of color should be handled any differently than whites. As a police officer, I’ve arrested people of all races for all different types of crimes. I’m simply suggesting that we are not benefiting anyone by warping reality on a consistent basis.
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau, the black arrest rate for robbery was 8.55 times higher than whites, and blacks were 16 times more likely to be incarcerated for robbery than non-Hispanic whites. In 2013, black Americans accounted for 4,379 (52.2%) of all homicide arrests despite being only 12.2% of the population. In the same year, 3,799 or 45.3% of all homicides involved a white American being arrested despite whites accounting for 63.7% of the population per US Census data from 2010. Again, don’t take my word for it. It’s all laid out right here.
The gross overrepresentation of white males as criminals in commercial marketing extends far beyond the particular newspaper I have used to demonstrate my point. I was driving up I-85 in Atlanta the other day and saw a billboard for Atlanta Crime Stoppers. It was here that I saw an orange jumpsuit-clad white male in handcuffs emblazoned across the massive sign. That’s right. Despite the fact that Atlanta is a majority black city with the vast majority of crimes being committed by young black males, a white male is the poster boy for who Atlanta Crime Stoppers is looking to toss in jail.
Read the Atlanta Police Uniform Crime Report for December of 2016 here and you’ll see that 26 black males were arrested for robbery as opposed to three white males. 53 black males were arrested for aggravated assault as opposed to one white male. 140 black males were arrested for larceny as opposed to 20 white males. 12 burglary perps were arrested this particular month as opposed to zero white males. This is just one month, but in this one month the numbers are not unique. This is your average month in Atlanta.
My mind is wide open to discussions as to why the crimes committed in my city so overwhelmingly involve young black male perpetrators. There are socio-economic factors at play here for sure. For the sake of our society’s future, we need to find a way to deal with the disparity—but that’s a topic for another day. The reality is that you’d have to completely take me out of context to mount accusations of racism against me for juxtaposing crime stats to how the crime gets reported, yet some will try. Not surprisingly, those folks are the very reason we are only seeing white males depicted as criminals in stock photography in the first place. The stock photographers taking the photos and the media providers selecting them realize that it’s better to just make the perp a white guy than to be tarred and feathered by Black Lives Matter, Al Sharpton, or the ACLU for doing otherwise.
Maintaining runaway political correctness relies on spreading incorrect information. In the same way that it is considered “Islamophobic” to acknowledge radical Islamic terrorism when it occurs, the PC police program us to believe it is racist to acknowledge that people other than white males are committing the lion’s share of crimes. Under PC indoctrination, you can brand the Fort Hood Shooting “workplace violence” when an Islamic killer mows down 13 US service members while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and you can present criminal activity in a fantastical way that indicts white males as public enemy number one despite the reality that the facts directly contradict the picture being painted.
Again, bringing these facts and figures to light is not done to show that one racial group is better or worse than another, but rather for the sake of intellectual honesty. I live in a tremendously diverse community where black households are more affluent than their white counterparts and the demographics are evenly split. People of all races are represented as role models in my community, and I’m happy to call it my home. If the rest of the country looks like the county I live in 50 years from now, I can die a happy man knowing my children and grandkids are in the good hands of a prosperous nation.
With that being said, I want to ask The Citizen, Atlanta Crime Stoppers, and any other influential organizations this applies to a favor. Can we stop pretending white men are the gun-toting, ski mask-wearing robbers and car thieves 100% of the time? When you guys tell us that Santa Claus is real, it’s pretty insulting to our intelligence. If we’re not going to use the actual crime stats as a guide for how we racially depict the offender in pop culture, lets at least split the burden of who plays the villain equally across the board.
T.B. Lefever is an OpsLens Contributor and active police officer in the Metro-Atlanta area. Throughout his career, Lefever has served as a SWAT Hostage Negotiator, a member of the Crime Suppression Unit, a School Resource Officer, and a Uniformed Patrol Officer. T.B. is also a certified Field Training Officer. He has a BA in Criminal Justice and Sociology from Rutgers University. Follow T.B. on Twitter @tblefever.
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