San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has surveillance videos -- hours and hours of them -- showing crimes such as mugging being committed on its trains. But it won't release them, because, in a feat of PC self-censorship remarkable even for San Francisco, the snowflakes at BART are concerned that the videos might "perpetuate racial bias and stereotyping." Seriously...
KPIX-TV reports that in just three months, at least three robberies have been perpetrated at BART's San Francisco station by groups of teenagers who were, errr, non-white. One such "swarming", on April 22nd, was committed by some 40-60 teens. Debora Allen, a director of BART, admits in the video embedded below, "I think people are genuinely concerned. They are fearful about the stories that have come out about the recent attacks, the assaults, the thefts."
Why, then, don't they release the surveillance videos so people can see what's going on and judge for themselves whether it's safe to ride on the system? Ms Allen says that when she asked BART management that question, they told her that releasing the videos "would create a racial bias in the riders against minorities on the trains."
That would seem to suggest that the poor disadvantaged yoofs involved were black. Well, maybe Hispanic. Ummm, no... let's call a spade a spade. In a follow-up e-mail, Ms Allen said, "I don’t understand what role the color of one's skin plays in this issue. Can you explain?"
BART Assistant General Manager Kerry Hamill answered, "If we were to regularly feed the news media video of crimes on our system that involve minority suspects, particularly when they are minors, we would certainly face questions as to why we were sensationalizing relatively minor crimes and perpetuating false stereotypes in the process."
Walt has highlighted the weasel words in that response. "False stereotypes" indeed! Seems to me the stereotypes are based on fact. The criminal behaviour which we assume is shown in the videos goes on 24/7, not just in San Francisco but in every city in the USA fortunate (?) enough to have a BART-type mass transit system. Riding mass transit in the USA is like inviting 20 random hitchhikers into your car. Do so at your peril.
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