"Unsolved Murders Prompt Outcry on Lack of Justice for the Poor," is the headline over a Times dispatch from Huntington Station, N.Y., reporting on four homicides: "Many who live here said the inertia in the cases proved that the authorities paid too little attention to solving crimes when the victims were poor or Hispanic or lived in the more economically hardscrabble parts of town."
That accusation may fit with the Times' preconceived ideas about racial and income inequality. But is there any truth to it? The Times article, alas, doesn't shed any useful light on the question.I can name at least three unsolved homicides in which the victims were neither poor nor Hispanic. There is the killing earlier this year, in Tallahassee, Florida, of a law professor, Dan Markel, who was a colleague of mine on the Harvard Crimson. There is the 2005 killing in Savannah, Georgia, of Frederick Brockway Gleason III, There was the 1991 fatal stabbing of another law professor, Mary Joe Frug, in Cambridge, Mass.
If murders of poor or Hispanic victims are getting less attention from the police or prosecutors than are murders of rich or non-Hispanic white victims, it's a worthy topic for Times coverage. It'd also be interesting to examine whether the news media, including the Times, also tend to pay less attention to those crimes. But to be convincing, such coverage would also probably have to bring some statistics to bear, or at least some evidence beyond the fact that many people believe it to be true.