The Outstater
A Murder Most ‘Random’
IT WAS MY FAULT. Even after a gracious interview with a Capital Chronicle columnist, Stacey Compton, I didn’t get my point across, the ideological gap being just too wide. I wanted to object to the reflexive description in recent murder stories of black-on-white violence as “random.” It is anything but that.
In its statistical context, the word means “being governed by or involving equal chances for each item.” That would not describe the National FBI Supplementary Homicide report that shows whites killed by blacks outnumber the reverse by two-to-one. And the National Crime Victimization Survey shows that blacks account for a disproportionate share of crime against whites relative to population share. Tragic, yes, but not random.
And granted, there is a wide range of theories about why that is so, some scientific and others specious. But the point, again, is that even though these crimes may be indeterminate, few think they are random. Nonetheless, we get the headline, “How Indy Newsrooms Covered a Random and Fatal Shooting Downtown.”
Let’s break down the coverage of this case in particular, that of Brett Scrogham, a 23-year-old recent Indiana University graduate shot in the head in a downtown Indy parking garage on his way to meet family at a baseball game.
In their use of “random,” had the editors, without seeing a whit of evidence or having heard a word of testimony, somehow ruled out robbery or, heaven forbid, racial animosity bred into a generation of adolescents? Or finally, did they think the dead man was merely unlucky, at the wrong place at the wrong time?
None of that. They were clinging to a narrative, trying to hide a pattern of behavior that does not fit comfortably into a world view of innate equality and interchangeable cultures. It is why even at-large suspects considered a threat are not identified racially — bad optics, it is thought. As I told Ms.Compton, the coverage is not so much biased as it is curated orthodoxy, a member of one race or group not being allowed to be seen as different (either more harmless or more dangerous) than another.
Wikipedia tells me that the intellectual arguments in support of this orthodoxy are familiar, simplistic even. The over-representation of certain races in the criminal justice system is routinely blamed on socioeconomic factors such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, inferior housing, poor access to early education, harmful chemicals, pollution and of course discrimination. More complex are the formal academic theories attempting to explain inordinate black-on-white violence: conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social-control theory, subcultural theory and so forth and so on.
Jim Briggs of the Indianapolis Star, always a bellwether for the corporate media flock, tells his readers that the Scrogham murder was even less than random, it was incidental. “Yes, homicides happen,” Briggs lectures us. “They sometimes happen downtown. They sometimes happen to people who were just going to a game.”
All of this camouflaging of the most serious of crimes does nothing to preserve public order, one of government’s primary responsibilities. An honest editor worried about his or her community would want to address the numbers head-on and assess crime strategies with a gimlet eye — every strategy, including the prosecution regardless of socioeconomic assumptions or identity politics.
It won’t happen. Evaluating policy remedies rather than just blaming inanimate objects (guns) would require hard work, including historical and comparative research, plus it would challenge the preconceived notions of powerful people. Lazy journalism, you see, is merely another bad choice. —tcl
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