Race and Crime in the News: Whites' Identification and Misidentification of Violent and Nonviolent Criminal Suspects

Abstract

White participants read a series of newspaper crime briefs (short news stories) that included both violent and nonviolent crime stories and that f e a t u red photographs of both White and Black criminal suspects. Subsequently, participants identified a series of photographs in terms of whether or not they had been featured in each of the crime stories. Misidentification of individuals as criminal suspects was higher when the individual and the actual suspect were the same race than when they were not. In addition, misidentification of Blacks was higher than of Whites for the violent stories, but not for the nonviolent stories. These patterns in misidentification did not vary as a function of participants' self-reported racial attitudes.