In the third sentence of this article, CNN reports as fact that :”the officer told (the accusing student) that an employee reported a Black person ‘demonstrating suspicious behavior’ “ This appears to be cut and pasted from CNN’s original hatchet job of August 3, 2018:(Headline:”Smith college student who was racially profiled while eating says the incident left her so shaken she can’t sleep”) In any event, the original article made clear that the student attributed the above statement to the responding officer, CNN now presents that statement as fact.

CNN’s lead in that the officer in fact told the student that he was responding to a report of a “Black person” acting suspiciously borders on being intentionally false or misleading. The transcripts of the calls from the janitor to the campus police dispatch reflect that the janitor made no mention of the race of the person he saw reclining on a sofa in the (non- air conditioned) lounge of a dorm which was then empty for the summer. Per the comprehensive investigative report, the responding campus officer further said that he did not receive ANY physical description of the “suspicious male,” including the person’s race, before arriving on the scene. Under the total circumstances (empty dorm, closed cafeteria, kid’s camp nearby), calling campus police was an entirely reasonable judgment call.

In yet another nod to the alleged “implicit racial bias” allegedly in play here, CNN pulls a quote from a Health Psychology professor: “In implicit stereotyping, there is a belief of how we expect those students to behave and what they should or should not be doing,”

To the extent the professor’s comment relates to the “incident,” I’m not sure what the Professor’s point is, apart from obscuring the facts. Again, an unknown person was lying on a couch in an empty campus dorm in the summer time, with a kid’s camp in session nearby. Expectations of student behavior seem completely irrelevant here, unless I’m missing something. But on the subject of behavioral expectations, I would point out to the Professor that the student’s doxxing of the janitor and cafeteria worker caused substantial harm to innocent people (the entire subject matter of which this CNN reporter studiously ignores). “Implicit stereotypes” aside, this is not acceptable behavior.

The ACLU has also acquitted itself miserably here: “The problem with ‘see something/say something’ policies is that dispatchers too often are instructed to always dispatch the police — even when there was no suspicion of a crime or danger,” says Carol Rose of the ACLU.

There was plenty here to justify a call to campus police. The officer conducted himself flawlessly. The issue here wasn’t “see seeing, say something,” it was this student’s inability to respond appropriately to an exceeding brief, polite encounter with campus security in what should have been a non-incident. In any event, this student is not now and never was a victim here.

CNN should do a retraction story like the NYT has done, but I’m betting they won’t.