Cornell Faculty Approves Resolution Removing Race From Crime Alerts

Faculty at Cornell University have approved a resolution that would remove a suspect’s race from crime alerts, arguing that its inclusion encourages suspicion of Black people.

Passed last week, the Faculty Senate resolution removed race as an identifier and called out an alleged effect on Black people.

“[T]he knowledge that a crime may have been committed by a Black man does not make CRIME ALERT recipients any safer, but instead endangers Black people in the community, reinforcing the common phenomenon of violence against Black people on the grounds that they look like suspected criminals,” the resolution reads.

A background document added that Black men made up 75% of suspects whose race was identified since January 2019. Previous alerts, it said, were too vague in their descriptions.

One alert involved “an unknown black male approximately 5’7″ with an average build, dark skin, wearing all black clothing and a black mask,” according to the backgrounder.

“Considering that height estimations are untrustworthy, this could be almost any Black man,” it read. “This information is useless to protect the community from the perpetrator — unless one believes it is protective to mistrust or avoid all average black men, which would precisely constitute a racist prejudice.”

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“They feel jarringly ignorant of the drumbeat of anti-Black violence that we see every day,” the document said.

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Bill Jacobson, a Cornell law professor who runs the site Legal Insurrection, told Fox News that the proposal would have the opposite effect of encouraging stereotyping based on other factors.

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Last fall, dozens of Cornell University faculty, staff, students and alumni signed onto a letter attacking “colorblind” practices, insisting that the university institute racial quotas and recruit “clusters” of non-White individuals.