Crime Blotter, Wednesday February 3: Girl Gang On 24th And Mission, Muni Stabbing

Though I might catch hell for this one, someone needs to explain to me again how reporting the gender of a suspect is different from reporting the race of a suspect. They are both facts and descriptions at their most basic level, no?

BTW, gangy is now added to my vernacular.

Here were my feelings about it in reply to someone on 1/25's blotter. Do you feel it's a valid point?

from: http://sfappeal.com/news/2010/01/crime-blotter-monday-jan-25-pacific-heights-hot-prowl-north-beach-gang-fight-serious-shooting-at-16t-comments.php

Wil: "/me waits for someone to complain that mentioning the gender of involved parties is sexist."

Modelenoir: "The argument to exclude race was less an issue of political correctness and more about overall relevancy. Eve included the race of an individual in Friday's blotter (http://sfappeal.com/news/2010/01/crime-blotter-friday-jan-22-north-beach-street-fight.php) because it was complemented with more information. From what I gather race will be excluded unless the writer feels it otherwise important to include.

In terms of sentence construction, using "man" or "woman" instead of "person" does nothing to the overall sentence. It doesn't add anything extra to the sentence. Race was being used as an adjective, and the debate was more about its inclusion being irrelevant unless complemented by other information. That's only the argument against "man" or "woman" being contextually fine to leave in.

The argument that adding "man" or "woman" could somehow be sexist has yet to be brought up by anyone that feels offended. The issue has been brought up in a slippery-slope context, but not as an issue in itself. I'd be interested to hear someone's opinion if they think that gender is not only unnecessary, but actually detrimental to the blotter, much in the same way the race issue was debated.

Peace."

Peace.

Tomorrow, as an experiment, I will not refer to folks by gender-based pronoun, but by a rotating gallery of ungendered slang terms for their race. Urban dictionary, here I come!

awesome.

@modelenoir: I do see your point from a literary POV; race doesn't add anything substantive to the story. I guess I'm of the opinion, for good or for ill, that the more (true) facts a news report lists in a story, the more confident I can be in its accuracy. All that race is to me is another fact. It is no different to me than this apt example: many reports describe what a suspect was wearing. This is arguably more superfluous because, by the time the story is published, the crook is sure to have changed his/her clothes (my favorite is "black hoodie"; everyone I know, myself included, owns one of those). I still like having the info though, useless or not.
At the end of the day though, I'm happy to merely be informed blotter style, regardless of the depth to which a perp is described.

@Eve Batey: That's awesome. You should try alliterative color/crime pairs, e.g. "a lily-white larcenist," "alabaster arsonist," or "milk chocolate mugger."

AHEM! "Milk chocolate ALLEGED mugger," please.

Interesting how a gat-toting woman stole a dude's ride. You'd think an hombre would be the thief.

Ms. Batey, these crime blotters are becoming less informative and by extension less useful without details such as the color of the car or the race of the suspects. I realize that often times we may not have complete information but if a journalist is to serve his/her primary function as disseminating objective news in serving the community then leaving out very much pertinent information just to avoid stereotypes is a disservice to all.

jujube, anyone who reads the Appeal regularly should know better than to think that lecturing me on what you think a journalists' "primary function" should be will get you anything besides an offer to refund the money you're spending to read this site.

But I promise you that whatever happens, if and when SFPD provides us with the color of a car, we will provide it to you! And, please, call me "Eve."

I didn't mean to start another "thing" with this. I'm just fascinated, sociologically if you will, with the fact that individuals disfavor classifying people by certain innate, genetic characteristics rather than others (much in the same way constitutional jurisprudence treats the immutable characteristics of race and gender differently for the purposes of analyzing laws that classify people on those bases).

It's your site Eve, report what you want, how you want.