Written by Brandon Lee Romo
On March 28, the San Diego Union-Tribune put out a “Watchdog” article under the headline “The Color of Authority: San Diego police, sheriff’s deputies disproportionately target minorities, data show.”
The issue with the headline is that the charts provided in the same article oppose the narrative that it is trying to push. The charts prove that there is no unequal treatment of Black people. According to SANDAG, Black people commit murder and rape at a rate 6 times higher than other races, as well as committing robberies at a rate twelve times higher.
Given that Blacks commit far more crimes (violent and non-violent) per capita than the rest of the county population, there is the possibility that there aren’t enough traffic stops. Because of this current narrative, the San Diego Union-Tribune time and time again avoids reporting on the frequency of crimes committed by each race.
What was also shown in the chart was that all the other minorities have encountered less than the average police stops, which completely disproves the headline stating the police “target minorities.” To avoid people seeing what the data actually represents, the Union-Tribune often lumps blacks and Hispanics into the same category.
The headline emphasizes that minorities searched by police are caught with contraband more often than white people, but as we can see in the chart, the margin between the two is minuscule.
In terms of the county sheriff’s department car searches, there is only one group with a higher contraband rate than White people, and it isn’t Black people. On the other side of it, there are six groups with a lower contraband rate than Whites.
Just as many other news sources do today, the San Diego Union-Tribune purposefully misrepresents data in order to push a “woke” narrative with the assumption that the majority of people won’t take the time to correctly analyze the data themselves. San Diego Union-Tribune head editor, Jeff Light, along with other Union-Tribune reporters have still stood behind their claims of the article to be true.
Photo by Chris Jennewein/Times of San Diego
