The press is in trouble when they cover missing stories. Those are stories where someone turns up missing. In many cases, the ones that are intensely covered are those of white women or girls missing. CNN and FoxNews seem to have a script set up when missing people happen, because the coverage follows a pattern. We get the police news conference, the grieving family, the neighborhood search. At some point it’s an unspoken rule that the person is dead, but no one will admit it. What also happens in a lot of these cases is a blame game. Someone becomes the villain, even if there is little to support the supposition.

The script works when you’re dealing with, and forgive me for saying this but others have mentioned it, young white women. You get into a social and economic map that is easy to plug information into. When you deal with minorities the networks have a problem.

Three weeks ago there was a missing woman story. She was at a restaurant in Malibu and couldn’t pay for her dinner. She was said to have been mentally disturbed by the staff, but once she was picked up by police and taken to the Lost Hills station, the deputies thought she was fine. She was told she could stay at the station overnight if she wanted to but she decided to leave. She had no cell phone, no keys and it was the last time anyone saw her.

The woman, Mitrice Richardson, is black and some believe because she was black she was treated differently. Think about it; how many people, once picked up and processed by the police, are told they can leave if they want to after skipping out on a bill? How many, if this did happen, would be let go at 1am, as what happened to her?

There was little coverage in the national press and locally it was covered for a week. The last I heard there was a search done two weeks ago which was the same time her parents were on TV. Now, in these types of cases, where the victim is a minority, a vulture lawyer will show up and will be more concerned with blaming the police for its ‘racist behavior’ rather than focusing on finding the woman. What tends to happen is this will tune out much of the community that might be willing to help. Even for me, after the initial flurry, I forgot about her until I saw something in the LA Times website where a body that was found in the area was determined not to be Richardson.

Nothing has happened in between the two reports, from what I can determine from the article.

I’m not sure how I feel about this because there’s so little to go on. I’m dismayed by the coverage and it reminds me a lot of the Jahi Turner case in San Diego years ago. There was a marked contrast between the effort made in searching for him and for another child that went missing a month earlier, which was the Van Damme case. What gets me angry about cases like Richardson isn’t about the race coverage but the opportunist. They’re so concerned about making a point and showing bad examples they aren’t doing the organizing and getting out the word to try and find the missing person. It’s been three weeks and I’ve heard nothing of weekly organized searches for the woman or press conferences pleading for help. When the parents were on three weeks ago it was with the lawyer who was quick to blame the police for letting her go, not in investigating where the woman was.