Sorry, hard to condense this question into a workable title.

This is a local Bay Area issue, but could apply to other places as well. What happened is this: there has been a rise in crime on the BART train system. There have been a couple recent incidents where a mob of teenagers, mostly black, swarmed a train car and stole iPhones and other electronics out of passenger’s hands.

Recently, BART has come under fire for underreporting crime and withholding information from the public. This is not just an accusation, a BART representative admitted thus, claiming that releasing information about these crimes might cause people to become “racially insensitive” (due to the fact that the criminals have been overwhelmingly black—most of the crime occurs in Oakland).

http://www.thesfnews.com/bart-faces-accusations-withholding-crimes/39209

Does the public have a right to know what kind of crimes occur and who commits them? How much detail should be released? Will honesty about crime inevitably lead to racial profiling?

Topics: San Francisco, crime, trains, race, BART