Injustice in LA hit and runs
This won’t surprise anyone, but it’s a story worth spreading anyway. On March 29th, two individuals were killed in independent hit-and-run incidents within hours of each other. One was a hot, 18-year-old coed at UCLA. The other was a hard working, 55-year-old Guatemalan construction worker. Guess which one wound up with twelve detectives, a $235K reward, and media attention and which one got a single detective the next morning. And guess whose city LA is.
It does seem like unfair treatment. There are a number of factors – some fair and some certainly not – to consider in determining why the treatment varied:
- Severity. These crimes were not actually quite the same. In one case, the car struck two people, not just one, and “The driver… had driven on with Bachan’s friend lying on the hood of the car. The car stopped suddenly and a passenger jumped out to pull the young man’s body to the ground. The car then sped off again.” It does not seem unreasonable to assume that 2 people should have been easier to see than 1 person. Dumping a body is also very different than just driving off (possibly without knowing at the time that it was a person that was hit).
- Location. Threats to pedestrians on the edge of a college campus may seem like a bigger problem than in other places where there may be fewer people out walking.
- Photogenic subject. As Cuz noted, attractive people get more attention.
- Age. A young person “cut down in the prime of her life” could be expected to draw more sympathy than the death of a middle-age person.
- Proactive approach of the family. The young lady’s family appears to have aggressively pursued media coverage. It sounds as if the other victim’s wife was found by a reporter, rather than beating down the door to the newsroom. Still, knowledge of how to gain access is likely influenced by education.
All this certainly suggests why there would be more media coverage, but it doesn’t explain why the police would bow to the media or whether they should have. The stimulus-response to media coverage is fairly obvious, but consider this. Why shouldn’t the police have said that the two incidents occurred and that it was necessary to split their efforts evenly between the two? Not only would this have been equitable, but it would have forced the media and the (presumably white) people concerned about the “young lady” to either support both efforts or publicly voice their discriminatory views.
Of course, the rapid response of the detectives and the follow up are probably more indicative of the university’s institutional power and need to protect its interests, i.e., students’ parents’ trust in the university to act in loco parentis. Splitting the effort evenly would then have driven the university to support or discriminate.
Great point!