We Found Matt Patricia’s Sexual Assault Indictment In 30 Seconds. Why Didn’t The Detroit Lions?

The Detroit News reported Wednesday night that recently hired Detroit Lions head coach Matt Patricia was indicted on a sexual assault charge in 1996, when he was in college. The case never went to trial after, according to authorities, the victim decided not to testify due to feeling she could not “face the pressures or stress of a trial.”

The News contacted Lions team president Rod Wood, and he told the paper that the team was unaware of the indictment when they hired Patricia because their background check only covered criminal convictions. But that statement doesn’t address just how easy it would have been for the Lions to find the indictment.

Deadspin found it in 30 seconds. Just plug Patricia’s name into the criminal record search function in Nexis, a ubiquitous public records database and the first step for most large organizations’ background research into any individual about whom information is sought. There’s no reason anyone working on background checks on behalf of the Lions wouldn’t have Nexis, if not something much more powerful. The results of the search can be seen above.

While the language of the charge is different—and Nexis can occasionally get details wrong—much of it lines up: the name, the birthdate, and the case number is the same as those cited in the News article. At the very least, it’s a flag to go pull this case file and see what happened, which the News did. The Detroit Lions, which Forbes estimates to be worth $1.7 billion? It sure seems like they didn’t.

Deadspin staff writer Lauren Theisen contributed to this report.

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Yale Police Called on Black Student Taking a Nap

A white Yale University student called the campus police this week upon finding a black graduate student taking  a nap in the student’s dormitory common room. The police came and the black student needed to get her identification card to show that she belonged in the building.

Napping in common areas of dormitories (not to mention libraries and elsewhere on campus) is hardly unusual at Yale or most colleges, especially at the end of a semester, when many students are feeling pressure to finish assignments. So the incident has become the latest in which minority individuals are subjected to the police for behavior that goes unnoticed when white people do it.

Some of these incidents — such as the treatment of black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks — do not take place on campus. But because of the view that colleges should be particularly inclusive, these incidents anger many students and others who are frustrated that minority individuals on campus are treated as they have been. Recently, the mother of a participant on a campus tour at Colorado State University called the campus police there on two Native American students who the mother thought were behaving oddly. Though they had done nothing wrong, they were pulled from the tour by campus officers to be asked questions and have their pockets checked.

At Yale, the black graduate student who was questioned by campus police, Lolade Siyonbola, recorded the incident and posted it to Facebook.

She noted that she showed her key to the police officers, as well as her identification card, but that it took some time for the police officers to agree that she did indeed live in the dormitory and had a right to be there. Yale officials noted that they regularly do ID checks in such situations. This one took a little longer, they told The New York Times, because the student’s preferred name was on her ID, but differs from the name the university had on record.

The Times also reported that Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s vice president for student life, sent an email to graduate students Wednesday night saying that she was “deeply troubled” by what had happened. “This incident and others recently reported to me underscore that we have work to do to make Yale not only excellent but also inclusive,” Goff-Crews said.

Shaun King, the writer and civil rights leader, was among the many who took to social media Wednesday night to write of their frustrations:

 

Glad this incident is getting national coverage.

Add “napping in the dorm room common area” to the list of things white people will call the police on Black folk for.

Black people have no true safety or security in this country of white fragility.https://t.co/ofrzIFntr9

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) May 9, 2018

This isn’t the first time that Yale has received scrutiny for police encounters with black students. In 2015, Yale police briefly detained a black male student who had not been doing anything wrong. The student happened to be the son of a New York Times columnist who wrote about what happened, renewing the debate about racial profiling.

Concerns on these issues also extend to black faculty members, who have described local or campus police in college towns who seem to doubt that these professors could in fact be teaching at the institutions that employ them.

 

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