We have previously noted that the Lexington Herald-Leader apparently does not post photos of criminal suspects, — though an exception was recently made for a white suspect — even though the other city media do, and that McClatchy Company, which owns the Herald-Leader, apparently does not either.

Well, it seems that the Lexington city government is just as eaten up with political correctness as its newspaper. The unreadably small chart to the right, which you can expand by clicking on the image, is a screen capture from the city government’s Shooting investigations page, taken at 4:02 PM EDT on Monday, May 10^th. If you expand it, you will see that it lists the victims’ sex, race and age, along with the suspect, if known. Of 31 shooting investigations, 24 of the victims are listed as black, 3 as Hispanic, and 4 as white.

But when you come to the city’s Homicide investigations page, on a different page of the same website — the two pages are linked — shown on the left, you’ll notice, if you click on the screen capture and expand it, the victims’ sex and race are not included. The Shootings investigation page excludes homicide victims.

I wonder why that is.

Now, you can get that information on the website original, in some cases, by clicking on the crime scene location. Nevertheless, I find it an odd omission, considering that the information is posted on the shootings investigations page; why exclude information that the police clearly have?^[1]Note that the investigation of the shooting on January 31, 2021, on the 100 block of West Vine Street, has both a surviving shooting victim and the murder of Lonnie Oxendine. Are we to somehow think … Continue reading Why do the Lexington Police and city government censor information they clearly have? Why, if they are going to make the information posted for plain public view in the first place, do they deliberately withhold statistical information?

Well, I think that I can tell you. Lexington is, according to 2019 Census Department guesstimates, 74.9% white, 14.6% black and 7.2% Hispanic (of any race). If the city puts out too much information, then an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me might look at the numbers and ask something like, ‘If the city is only 14.6% black, why are 77.4% of the shooting victims black? If the Lexington Police Department told us the race of the homicide victims, would we find a similar racial disparity?^[2]According to the Homicide investigations page, all 15 of the listed victims — the page had not been updated with the most recent homicide — were killed by gunfire.

Lexington isn’t Chicago or Philadelphia yet, though sometimes it seems as though the criminal element there is taking that as a personal challenge. But if the city’s violence problems are ever going to be solved, they have to be solved by addressing the problem properly, by recognizing what and where the problem lays, and that’s something the city, and its newspaper, just won’t do.