The media will always use race classification in an article and so will law enforcement. Race classification is just what a lot of the public do. If someone from the Middle East makes news thru a crime, they will be identified as "Middle Eastern". I know that a lot of folks really wish that the race of a person wouldn't be used anywhere, but that just doesn't happen...…..in most cases anyway. And, when it does happen, the people who do it aren't racist, to me anyway. It just seems to be common to use race, and other things, like multiple tattoos, to describe someone, like law enforcement does quite often.
I have seen the opposite in the past decade. An illegal immigrant sleeping in a park in Los Angeles would be described as a "Los Angeles resident," and photos are not used as often when the criminals are black. Even in cases where the immigrant status or race of the individual is substantive to the story, as in the case of racially motivated attacks, it is often necessary to make that determination from the name of those who are arrested. In Maine, we have a problem with recent immigrants and immigrant families from Somalia in Lewiston-Auburn, Portland, and the surrounding southern Maine area, but particularly in Lewiston, where the Somalian community is concentrated. There have been a spate of attacks against white residents and police, as well as harassment lawsuits, such as suing a restaurant that has been in business for more than fifty years for serving bacon, now offensive to the new Muslim community. Yet you wouldn't know very much about any of this from the Maine media because when they do feel the need to mention that an assault was racially motivated, they pretend that both sides were equally responsible, and the only way you'd know that the people being arrested were Muslim is from the names, or from people who live there. Even in regular crimes, photos of white people who are arrested are published in the newspaper while photos of black arrestees are more often omitted. This is a low-populated state. Photos of people arrested for shoplifting will often be published in the newspaper. If a black person is arrested because he commits a crime, that's only racist if white people are not arrested who commit the same crimes. Where crimes are racially motivated, the race of the people involved are pertinent to the story. Where a large percentage of people of one race are are arrested, this might also be pertinent to the story. Our governor was lambasted a few years back because he mentioned, not to a reporter but in a meeting intended to discuss the crime problem in Maine, that the majority of people who are arrested for drug trafficking in Maine are black and from Massachusetts. That was a fact but, of course, some Democrat leaked it to the media, who reported it as a racial attack. Since then, while the newspapers will often post photos of people arrested for very minor crimes, they will most often omit photos of black people who are arrested for drug trafficking. Of course, if a newspaper were to make a point of mentioning the race or depicting only the black people who are arrested, there might be cause for a cry of racism, but I think it's fair to say that this isn't being done.
When I look at my news app for Jacksonville, Florida here, seems like the mug shots of arrested blacks, that have committed a crime, are placed on the app. I've also seen security camera shots (photos) of blacks caught doing thefts, on the local news app. Most people here know just how much black-on-black crime is done in Jacksonville...…..a lot. Just the way it is and has been for a number of years.
Back to the thread topic...... This whole story does not make much sense to me, and I think that there is a lot more involved than what is on the news videos. According to the news reports, the two guys rented the van about 3 weeks before they stole the guns, and they rented it in Chicago. Then, on the day of the robbery, they broke into the UPS facility in Memphis at about 4AM. I wondered why the security camera shows both men wearing bright lime green safety vests, but in one of the pictures, it shows actual UPS employees wearing the same green vests. There had to be a lot of intelligence information for this theft to be carried out, and someone had to know when and where that shipment would be coming through, as well as how to look like UPS workers, and be able to get into the facility with their U-Haul van . This is not an example of the neighborhood druggies out stealing stuff to finance their habit, someone put some hard work into setting this whole robbery up. One interesting outcome is that now that the guns have been recovered, they have been taken as evidence by the BATF, so those guns will probably now end up belonging to that branch of the government. This gives a person something to speculate about what actually happened here.
Actually, now that I've read Yvonne's reply above, there HAS to be more to this story than is being told. But, then, again, on many news stories, just how much are we told and not told? Interesting. Anyway, really all I care about is that the weapons were recovered by law enforcement.