The First 48
Hey,
Legendary standup comedian Patrice O’Neal, who tragically passed away in 2011, is on record as saying “A white woman’s life is valuable”. In his 2011 comedy special “Elephant in the Room”, O’Neal is quoted as saying:
The value of a white woman is you look at her and think about how long they would look for her if she went missing.
After watching 15 hours of true crime television in 2022 I decided to delve a bit deeper into these bombshell allegations. O’Neal was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when making this assessment but the crux of his argument is that when a white woman goes missing, law enforcement spends weeks, months or years trying to solve the case. They follow-up on leads, use their gut instinct, do press conferences to update the family and the local news media, and leave no stone unturned in the search for justice. O’Neal asserts that the more attractive the white woman is, the longer that law enforcement is willing to look to solve the case. I find that this coincides with what I’ve witnessed on true crime shows.
I’ve seen episodes of “Dateline”, “20/20”, “Snapped”, “Killer Couples” and “Cold Justice” to name a few. In each of these shows, the show begins with some description of the town as a quaint, normal suburb where everyone knows each other’s name and crime usually doesn’t happen here, despite the fact that the show’s existence means that a crime has happened here. The host then describes some purportedly middle class family that has been ripped apart by a murder, and the lengths that the detectives have taken to get to the bottom of what happened and put the right person behind bars. I couldn’t help but compare this to what I see happen on another variant of the true crime genre: “The First 48”.
On “The First 48”, each show begins with the murder of a person living in a rough part of a medium or large sized city. The victims are sometimes Black or brown, but regardless of race it’s painstakingly clear that they are dealing with poverty or making below a living wage in whatever job they have. The most frequently showcased cities on the show are Atlanta, Minneapolis, Tulsa, New Orleans, Detroit and Miami. What these cities all have in common is that crime is accepted as a normal aspect of life there, so detectives treat these murders a bit differently than they do on the other true crime shows.
In these less than affluent areas, the first 48 hours after a murder is committed are vital to effectively solving the case. The show’s title sequence states:
For homicide detectives, the clock starts ticking the moment they are called. Their chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours.
Rather than spending weeks, months or years looking into these cases, if the detectives don’t have a lead or proverbial smoking gun after 48 hours of looking into a murder they essentially give up. It increases the tension regarding everything that happens the first two days after a murder, but it also shows a subconscious difference in the way that these lost lives are viewed compared to those of the middle class white women of other true crime shows. The inherent assumption is that it’s not worth looking too hard into these crimes as it’s accepted as a fact of life here. And besides, there will probably be another murder to investigate soon so why bother.
Regardless of your socioeconomic background, murder is a serious crime and it should be investigated to the furthest extent of the law. Unfortunately, life has shown me that this isn’t the case and that people from fortuitous backgrounds get preferential treatment. At least the shows seem to back this up and keep things consistent in terms of who gets full-blown investigations and who only gets a few days before they move on to the next case.
My only hope is that if anything happens to your loved ones, a detective feels that your family deserves more than 48 hours in the search for justice.
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