The San Francisco Police Department announced Wednesday that it will no longer be releasing criminals’ mugshots to the public, ostensibly in order to combat “racial bias,” as reported by CNN.
Police Chief Bill Scott made the announcement in a letter to the entire police department, where he said that releasing such mugshots could “contribute to implicit and explicit bias in policing and by community members,” thus essentially implying that most criminals in the city, and therefore mugshots, are people of color.
Scott further claimed, without evidence, that “the widespread publication of police booking photos…creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior.”
Jack Glaser, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, similarly tried explaining the justification in a manner that made no sense, saying “when two rare things occur simultaneously, our minds tend to overestimate the relationship between those two things. Crime is a rare event for most of us, and minority status is by definition a rare event.”
The rolling-back of such a common and useful police practice is the latest instance of police departments all across the country being effectively neutered in the wake of far-left riots and protests demanding the abolition of the police. In New York, the 600-member plainclothes anti-crime unit was disbanded, nearly 300 officers have filed for retirement early, and the city council voted to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget. Similarly, the Los Angeles PD saw its budget cut by over $150 million, and the city council voted to begin the process of replacing LAPD officers with unarmed “community responders.”