Some students of color at Loyola have criticized Campus Safety for how crime alerts have detailed the race of offenders.
At a meeting hosted by Loyola’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People College Chapter to discuss racial profiling on campus, critics pointed to an alert sent out Oct. 19, 2009 to warn students and faculty about strong-armed robberies in the area.
For the first incident, two of the offenders were described as African-American males between the ages of 18 and 25. One was last seen wearing a black hooded-sweatshirt that possibly had red stripes, and the other was wearing a white hooded sweatshirt with black markings, acording to the e-mail. A description of the third offender was unavailable.
For the second incident, the two offenders were described as African-American males between the ages of 23 and 25. According to the e-mail, the first offender was about 5’10” and 165 pounds, wearing a dark jacket or hooded sweatshirt with red stripes or writing.
The other offender was about 6’1” and 185 pounds, wearing a dark jacket.
Sophomore Russell Gonzalez was just one of many students at the event who was concerned that vague descriptions — like the one provided for the first incident, he said — do more harm than good.
“If [the description] doesn’t distinguish a person apart from a crowd, it just raises suspicion against people in the neighborhood or African-American students,” said Gonzalez, who is the chair of the Justice Committee for USGA.
“We need to regroup and focus on how harmful this letter is to students because I do know a young white girl who saw a black man walking towards his door, and she called Campus
Safety on him when he was just trying to get into his house,” said senior Shayla King, president of the LUC National Association for the Advancement of Colored People College Chapter.
However, Campus Safety defended the vague description because of the similarities between the incidents regarding clothing descriptions and the fact that electronics were taken in both robberies.
“People latched on the first description without realizing we were trying to draw a correlation between the two incidents,” said Tim Cunningham, student community liaison officer for Campus Safety, in an interview this week.
Cunningham also pointed out that five alerts were sent out last semester, and the two that included the race of offenders also included other details like height and clothing description.
“We are going to be very sensitive to including race in [the alerts],” Cunningham said. “But we’ve also been sensitive to it in the past.”
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