Just a Moment of Your Time

To be clear, [Erika Marie] Rivers explains, it’s not about asking for more attention or being in “competition” with white people — it’s about other groups getting the same attention as white victims and having their lives honored in the same ways.

“I’m talking about getting investigations up to par with what is already going on,” she explains. “And I think when we bring that awareness, especially when it comes to Indigenous women and with Black women, and we’re like, hey, we exist as well. It’s not to say stop searching for that white woman. It’s like, search for our women as much as you do anybody else and make sure that whatever energy that you place into one case is the same energy that you place into others.”
Tens Of Thousands Of Black Women Vanish Each Year. This Website Honors Their Stories

According to the story, in 2020, 268,884 girls and women were reported missing in the United States. If each of these stories were to receive a full two minutes of media attention, there could be a channel, running night and day, with nothing but stories about missing girls and women. And I mean that literally. It would be 24 hours a day, every day, with story, after story, after story. So I’m unconvinced that there is a genuine ability for the public, or the police, to put the same resources into every investigation as some “fortunate” few manage to receive. (It’s difficult to describe a woman who had been murdered as fortunate simply because her death attracted attention.)

In this sense, I think that the focus on the inequality in attention and resources, and accusations that law enforcement and the media are “ignoring” the cases of Black and Native American women in favor of White women, is misplaced. Let’s grant that America’s old bogeyman, Racism, is, in fact, the culprit here. When the public and the police decide to dole out their limited resources of attention and investigative manpower, they deliberately pick the cases of White women first. That’s bad, but changing that simply means that the distribution of cases changes; it doesn’t create more resources to deal with hundreds of thousands of cases every year. Swapping Mariah Edwards in for Gabby Petito is simply rearranging the deck chairs. What’s needed here are far fewer suspicious missing persons cases on an annual basis. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, more than 540,000 people went missing, including more than 340,000 minors, over the course of 2020. Granted, that doesn’t seem like very many, in the grand scheme of things, being less than one in six hundred. But that’s more people than were reported to have died of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States last year. Of course, the two phenomena aren’t directly comparable, so it’s something of an apples to robots comparison. With the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I think that people understand a solution to be much easier to obtain.

A case can be (and has been) made that the United States is a stupidly violent place for an advanced, industrial and allegedly religious society. While the intentional homicide rate here (about 5 persons per 100,000) is roughly middle of the pack for the planet in general and fairly low over all (given that the rate tops out at just above 50 in El Salvador), it’s pretty much the highest in the developed world (even if it isn’t as high as many Americans seem to think that it is). There would be a much better chance of equity in news coverage and police resources if there weren’t as many cases vying for a share.

I wonder if the United States hasn’t come to a place where it simply resigned to what many places in Europe and Asia would regard as insanely unacceptable levels of violence and crime. I think that part of it is the fact that the United States is not a particularly unified place; there is a tendency to think of “those people” (members of groups other than the one an individual belongs to) as being the problem and beyond or not worth helping. A large part of the focus on gun control in the United States operates under the implication that incapacitation is the best way to curb violence; access to the tools of violence is what begets violence, and blocking that access will reduce the incidence. The logic is simple, but it misses the fact that Americas are still more likely to kill one another with knives than Britons are to kill one another via any means. At some point, we have to look beyond how people are being violent, to why.

And maybe that’s what’s really being ignored. The fact that violence has become simply background noise, and that the people who are calling for more attention to be paid to individual cases have a difficult time being heard over it. Perhaps this is for the better. I suspect that, given the state of things, many people would be disappointed with the equality they seek.