Truth vs Perception: "Armed police targeted young blacks"

I was looking at a website called Ananova today, which culls newspaper articles from England and presents them on one page. It's pretty much a useless site in one instance, as the newspapers that these articles are from aren't mentioned!

Nevertheless, here's one of hte headlines from today:

Armed police targeted young blacks
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3623666.html

And I'm going to assume that that's the same headline that appeared in the original newspaper article, and on on-line newsfeeds. Now, what do most people do? They get their news from headlines, not from the actual article - that would take too much time to read, eh? So they read the headline, which says "Armed policetargeted young blacks," and that just reinforces what they've already been trained to believe, that white cops (obviously the cops are white and racist, that's a given) are going around shooting at any young black man who moves.

But if you read the article, that's not the case.

Internal Scotland Yard documents revealed senior officers suspected a small number of gang members and drug dealers were carrying weapons.

They decided to send in specialist CO19 armed officers alongside neighbourhood officers to patrol troubled London housing estates last year.

A series of forms completed ahead of the operations named key suspects and criminal gangs known to hold guns.

They show officers realised the move could fuel racial tensions as almost all the suspects were black.

So - the cops go into troubled housing estates, looking for specific suspects - who are black. That's a far cry from going in and shooting every black person they see, which is what the headline implied.

It's as funny, and as sad, as that poor woman who called in someone whom she thought was a prowler trying to get into that black Harvard professor's home in Cambridge. She had the utter gall to tell 911 that the person she thought was trying to break in was black - therefore she must have been a racist! Obviously what she was supposed to do was say, "Someone's trying to break into a man's house. I can't tell you his race, because that would be racist, so just hurry to the house and stop everyone on the street, regardless of their race, and ask them if they're the ones who tried to break into the house."

Political correctness is going to kill us all. (And by us, I mean all Americans, all Brits, all "every civilized country in the world that is caught up in political correctness".)