Good Question

(WCCO) When Lucia Whalen called 911 about two men possibly breaking into a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was asked if the men were "white, black or Hispanic." Her answer turned out to be wrong. How reliable are eyewitnesses and why do police agencies use race in descriptions?

We took photos of WCCO newsroom staff members on to the streets of downtown Minneapolis to see if people could accurately identify their races.

Shown Bob, a Hispanic photographer, one woman said, "He's a white guy from Minnesota."

Most people couldn't accurately identify news anchor Amelia Santaniello as Japanese, rather guessing that she was "Mexican" or "Latino."

Lucia Whalen was describing her neighbor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his driver. She told a dispatcher that Louis Gates, Jr., "one looked kinda Hispanic, the other one entered the house and I didn't see what he looked like." Both men turned out to be African-American.

The 2012 United States Census form has 14 different boxes for race/ethnicity, plus one for "other." But suspect descriptions often focus on major race categories, based on descriptions from witnesses. However, if witnesses can't correctly identify the race of people when they're looking at the photo, how can they be expected to correctly identify race in a fleeting moment?

Our experiment provoked one woman to remark, "It makes us wonder why are we using race" in descriptions.

The U.S. Department of Justice has guidelines on using race in federal investigations. It requires that race in descriptions be used "only to the extent that there is trustworthy information."

But researchers have identified a serious problem with people identifying faces of other races.

Roy Malpass, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso has published widely on the cross-race effect. He's suggested that people tend to make about 50 percent more errors when they're asked to remember faces of people from other races.

The problem is so pervasive, that Bela August Walker, a researcher at the Columbia Law School, suggested abolishing race as a part of descriptions.

"Employing race as an identifying characteristic allows law enforcement officers broad discretionary powers that can be used in a discriminatory manner, while ultimately proving counterproductive to the aims of effective law enforcement," wrote Walker in an article called "The Color of Race: The Case against Race-Based Suspect Descriptions."

Instead, Walker proposed a Universal Complexion Chart, where suspects would be identified as a 5 or a 12, instead of a Hispanic, which may have the counter-effect of sending criminals flocking to tanning salons.

Other researchers have suggested that dispatchers and investigators stop asking witnesses to check a box and put a witness into a certain racial category, because most people feel pressured to make a choice, rather than just saying, "I'm not sure."

Police have long maintained that using race as part of a description is a critical component of narrowing down the field. Many people are eliminated when race is used as a descriptor. But in general, eyewitness descriptions are notoriously unreliable. A review of hundreds of people exonerated after being wrongly convicted of murder or sex crimes found that 75 percent were identified by an eyewitness as being guilty.

Several local Police Chiefs and agencies declined to comment on this story when contacted by WCCO.

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