A brief report at the neighborhood web site DNAinfo in New York City, which describes itself as "New York's leading neighborhood news source" with "award-winning journalists" on staff, exemplifies how weak and negligent reporting on urban crime can be.
A video capture of an assault in the City's West Greewich Village area shows a young black man first punching and knocking to the pavement a man who it turns out is in his 70s, and then running away. That video and most of how it was written up by reporter Natalie Musumeci follow the jump.
First, the video:
Now, most of the report (HT to a longtime emailer; bold is mine):
72-Year-Old Man Knocked to Ground in West Village Attack
A 72-year-old man was punched in the face in an apparently random attack in the West Village Monday afternoon, police said.
The victim was knocked to the ground with a single hit as he walked past a man waiting in front of 99 Jane St., a doorman building in a residential part of the village between Washington Street and West Street.
The male attacker immediately ran off as his victim, who was carrying a shopping bag, fell into a doorway at 5:29 p.m., surveillance video of the attack shows.
Police said another man, who was waiting across the street at the time of the incident, ran off with him.
... Police describe the suspects as in their early 20s.
Although the video is available on YouTube, Matt Drudge's link to the story was causing it not to play at DNAinfo's site when I visited it. Additionally, many computer users' hardware cannot acceptably play video content.
If this blog post relaying information from the NYPD about an unrelated crime in the East Villiage is any indication, the police themselves don't self-censor their descriptions of suspects when their ethnicity is known. This would seem to indicate that Ms. Musumeci deliberately chose to leave the suspect's race out of her story.
If you're actually interested in seeing them apprehended, Ms. Musumeci, exactly how is telling the public that "the suspects ... (are) in their early 20s" at all helpful?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
