VCU news

By Corey Byers

For years, students, faculty and staff members representing minority groups at Virginia Commonwealth University asked VCU Police Chief John Venuti why racial descriptions of criminal suspects were needed in crime alert emails.

And for years, Venuti sought answers about how to reconcile the need for timely warning information with the concern that alert emails promoted negative stereotypes of minorities – specifically the stereotype that young African-American men are the only people committing crimes near VCU.

Venuti believed there was a way to balance public safety information with the community’s concerns. In 2015, he contracted William Pelfrey Jr. of VCU’s Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs to conduct research on the issue.

Pelfrey is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, which he chairs. He studies policing, homeland security and the psychology of the offender. 

By conducting VCU-specific research, Pelfrey found the answer the chief sought.

In short, VCU’s police and public affairs staffers no longer include racial descriptors of suspects in timely warnings (crime alerts) delivered via email. Rather, full suspect descriptions will be posted on VCU’s public safety page, alert.vcu.edu. In lieu of a description, emails will have a hyperlink with the following notation: For a full description of the suspect/s visit alert.vcu.edu.

Looking at crime alerts

In a May 2014 study, VCU criminal justice graduate student Mark L. Johnson benchmarked VCU with 30 other institutions of higher education that included race in timely warnings (crime alerts). 

Johnson found VCU’s practice of including racial descriptors was not only justified, but an accepted practice nationwide that met Clery Act requirements. All of the examples of timely warnings in a Department of Education handbook include race as a descriptor.

However, Venuti still wanted to look at the issue of racial descriptors. He had the idea to study the use of skin color descriptors in lieu of traditional racial descriptors, but Pelfrey determined that those could be highly subjective in witness reports. 

Pelfrey launched a mixed-method project to gain insight into what VCU was doing and to gather suggestions from the community. He used two types of data in his research: a review of email crime alerts issued during a four-and-a-half-year period and feedback from focus groups.

Focus groups included students in the Black Graduate Student Association, the VCU NAACP, the VCU Criminal Justice Association, faculty and staff at VCU and a class of VCU criminal justice graduate students. Subject matter experts who study race and criminal justice also participated.

“I wanted to know if crime alerts were perpetuating negative stereotypes at VCU,” Venuti said. “Having reliable research and data to refer to was really important in the decision-making process. People openly shared their personal experiences and opinions on the topic with me and getting the research was the logical next step.”

Pelfrey’s research found participants in the focus groups recognized that the need for public safety was critical, but there was still a serious concern that alerts were perpetuating negative stereotypes.

“Perpetrators are overwhelmingly male and largely black,” Pelfrey’s research found. “It is reasonable to question whether repeated descriptions of crime acts committed by black males could raise, foster or enhance a negative stereotype.”

Participants suggested that race be left out of crime alerts – particularly those that were several hours old – since an immediate threat to the public had passed.

Developing a solution

As officers arrive on the scene of a crime, such as a robbery, they speak with witnesses to gather information on the suspects involved.

Aside from race, what a suspect is wearing is key, as is the suspect’s vehicle, including the make, model and plate number on the car. Details about clothing and vehicles help police quickly narrow down a visual description to share with the VCU community. Detectives use the information to scan security camera systems for relevant footage of the crime.

Typically, VCU Police will issue text alerts for crimes such as robberies, aggravated assaults and shots fired due to the threat of harm to individuals nearby. Texts are used to communicate immediate dangers. Follow-up information is posted on alert.vcu.edu and crime alert emails (timely warnings) are sent out for Clery crimes.

Texts are immediate, followed by postings to alert.vcu.edu. Emails are subject to a delay, between 15 minutes and an hour, as VCU’s email system sends out 50,000 emails.

Sometimes police receive delayed reports from victims, hours or days after the crime took place. In these cases only a web alert and email will be issued because the threat to safety is gone.

Keeping all this in mind, Venuti wanted to find a way to meet the public’s need for information without perpetuating negative stereotypes.

“An evidence-based solution was what we sought in the research,” Venuti said.

When Pelfrey’s research was complete, with a suggestion to remove descriptors from emails, Venuti took the fix to university officials, the Black Education Association and VCU’s public affairs office. Since police and public affairs staff already use pre-written templates for email alerts, inserting a hyperlink to alert.vcu.edu was a simple update to include in the message.

“My goal was to find the intersection at which public information and inclusivity meet,” Venuti said. “It’s a difficult task to find balance, but having Dr. Pelfrey’s research in place shined light on the issue and yielded actionable results.”

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