Bloody hypocritical BBC

[DuesToTheDirt]

This story was the top news story on the app this morning, though it has dropped off the front page now.

I don't want to make my post about race, just to point out the hypocrisy of their call for accurate data to describe people, and the importance of statistics and spotting patterns of behaviour...

Incidentally, the Scarlet Blake nonsense, and now Justin Webb, are tipping me over the edge with the BBC.

Can anyone suggest an alternative? I looked at the Times, who are generally on the ball with women's rights, but £26 a month is more than I can justify. And I searched for recent articles on Scarlet Blake, to compare the reporting, but failed to find who which correctly identified him as a man.

The story is initially alarming but, frankly, when reporting someone as missing (which I have done) it's more important to describe how they look rather than their "ethnicity", which might not be an accurate indicator of their appearance.

I understand the need to collect the data for later number-crunching but for the initial purposes of trying to locate someone it's not always a primary concern.

Also, from a practical point of view, some police forces direct you to an online form to report the missing person - you don't actually speak to anyone. So people are probably either leaving the field blank or putting 'unknown'. It would be a waste of police time to later contact all those people to ask them for the person's ethnicity just for the purposes of record-keeping. When the person reappears, you just update the police online. And you're so relieved they've turned up you're not going to give two hoots as to whether you completed the ethnicity field correctly.