In a staff-bylined story in the Feb. 3 New York Times, the suspect in the slaying of five women in a mall in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, Ill., was described only “as wearing a waist-length winter coat, jeans and a knit cap.” Not altogether true. The Chicago Tribune reported the same day that police described the suspect who wore those clothes “as an African-American man.” The assailant could junk or change his coat, jeans and cap but do little or nothing to camouflage his race. While “African Americans” come in all shades, and the term does little to differentiate one from another, in the search for fugitives it’s reasonable to believe it does help somewhat in narrowing the field. At least police seemed to think so in the Tinley Park murders.

But the press doesn’t always see it that way. Perhaps in reaction to the days when the press thoughtlessly inflamed racism by routinely citing the race of criminal suspects even when they were in custody, the press nowadays often shuns racial identifiers. I know that my hometown paper, the Des Moines Register, will routinely report that a robbery suspect drove a maroon getaway car but seldom give the color of the person making the getaway.

Call it a form of air-brushing. It’s widely considered a journalistic no-no to delete relevant information from a photograph without notifying the reader but it’s considered acceptable to do the equivalent doctoring of information in print. Deleting the police description of the Tinley Park suspect as an “African American” seems to me on all fours with the kind of air-brushing of photos that arouse so much indignation.

Instead of banning references to race or ethnicity in crime stories, the press should demand more precision. The chief rationale for using racial identifiers in crime stories is that they can assist police and public in apprehending fugitives, but making all “African Americans” a suspect class partially undercuts that purpose. It’s no more defensible to ban all references to race in crime stories than to sweep so broadly that race as an identifier becomes almost meaningless.

The Register says that it will use race in crime stories when suspects have other distinguishing features that set them apart from others of the same race. That‘s a defensible policy. Still, when a maroon car comes careening around my street corner I’d appreciate knowing whatever it is police believe I ought to know about the driver.