What next? Not mentioning height so as not to offend the vertically challenged?

Univ Drops Racial Descriptions From Crime Alerts; Sheriff Clarke Reacts!

The University of Minnesota has dropped racial descriptions from campus crime alerts, after students protested for weeks about campus diversity. 

Student groups pressured the university to stop sending campus-wide crime alerts using vague racial descriptions of suspects in serious crimes.  

Fox News reported: 

Pamela Wheelock, the school’s vice president, told The Star Tribune that the suspect’s description will only be provided in cases with “sufficient detail that would help identify a specific individual or group.”

“We need to have enough information about a suspect so that somebody can reasonably use that information to help keep themselves safe,” Wheelock said. “Unless we have a sufficiency of information, we’re not actually going to use any suspect information.”

It was unclear how much information would need to be collected in order to pass that threshold.

But Wheelock told the paper that black men in particular “have shared that suspects' descriptions negatively impact their sense of safety.”

In a letter to faculty, staff and students, President Eric Kaler said  the routine use of a person’s race in those descriptions “may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes of black men and other people of color, as criminals and threats.”

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke told Elisabeth Hasselbeck this morning on "Fox and Friends" that he strongly disagrees with the decision.  

"Political correctness that's all this is," Clarke said. "Look there's a reason why this guy is a university president, because he is unqualified to be a law enforcement officer. He has capitulated to political correctness in favor of campus safety and I think that sends the wrong message. If I were a parent looking for a university to send my child to, I would scratch the University of Minnesota off the list, because apparently campus safety is not a priority."

Clarke explained that there is reason why law enforcement officials provide as much information as possible when they are searching for a suspect involved in a crime. He said that they want "to narrow the pool of people that law enforcement might approach to question someone matching the description."

"So more information is always better than less information," he said. "We're already trying to find a needle in a haystack when we're looking for suspects. What a decision like this does adds more hay and makes it more difficult for us to get a perpetrator in custody and prevent another student from being victimized. This is a horrible decision." 

Watch the full interview above with Clarke on "Fox and Friends."