Here’s the AP showing more evidence of that, with emphases added by me:
Antioch Church suspect Emanuel Samson had a note referencing Dylann Roof caseIn Paragraphs One through Three, you are reminded that Dylann Roof was white and that his victims were black. You are not told what color Samson is, or what color his victims are. You will find out his color in Paragraph Seven.by The Associated Press, Fox17Nashville, September 29, 2017
A note found in the car of a man charged with spraying deadly gunfire at a Tennessee church made reference to revenge for a white supremacist's massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, two years earlier, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press.
The note could offer a glimpse into Emanuel Kidega Samson's mindset at the time of Sunday's shooting and a possible motive for the rampage, which killed a woman and wounded six other people. The Associated Press has not viewed the note, but it was summarized in an investigative report circulating among law enforcement. Two officials read to AP from the note.
The report said that "in sum and in no way verbatim," the note referenced revenge or retaliation for Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine black worshippers at a South Carolina church in 2015 and has since been sentenced to death. It wasn't clear what precisely Samson is alleged to have written about the Roof shooting, or whether his note contained other important details that might also speak to a motivation or state of mind. [More]
Here’s Paragraph Six:
Police have said Samson, masked and wearing a tactical vest, fatally shot a woman who was walking to her vehicle and then entered the rear of Burnette Chapel Church of Christ and shot six other people, walking silently down the aisles with a .40-caliber handgun. The case immediately called to mind the killings at Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston, South Carolina. But unlike that church, which is mostly black, Burnette Chapel in the Nashville neighborhood of Antioch has a diverse congregation with people of various ethnicities, a detail noted in the report. And church members told investigators that Samson had attended services a year or two ago.Trigger Warning! Here’s Paragraph Seven—you’re about to learn that the killer is black:
Samson, who is black, came to the United States from Sudan as a child in 1996 and is a U.S. citizen. Police records say he had expressed suicidal thoughts in June and had a volatile relationship with a woman that twice involved police this year. He made bizarre Facebook posts in the hours before the shooting, including one that read: "Everything you've ever doubted or made to be believe as false, is real. & vice versa, B."Maybe he'd been reading the Associated Press. A reminder that, as I've been reporting here since at least 2004, the AP has an official policy, which they will defend, of not telling you the race of a criminal. Here's something I wrote 13 years ago:
You may know that the Associated Press Style Guide is used by almost all papers in the United States.As we've seen recently in police shootings and the Dylann Roof case, race seems to always be relevant when it makes a white person look bad, never when the person who looks bad is black.Race: Identification by race is pertinent:
In some stories that involve a conflict, it is equally important to specify that an issue cuts across racial lines. If, for example, a demonstration by supporters of bussing to achieve racial balance in schools includes a substantial number of whites, that fact should be noted.
- In biographical and announcement stories, particularly when they involve a feat or appointment that has not routinely been associated with members of a particular race. [I. E. the “first black” to do something good is relevant. The thousandth black to commit an armed robbery is not.]
- When it provides the reader with a substantial insight into conflicting emotions known or likely to be involved in a demonstration or similar event.
This is the excuse the Associated Press invokes when it gets caught, as it regularly does, failing to report the race of a criminal who is still on the loose, when lives might be saved by knowing what the suspect looks like.