Suspect Terminology
The term suspect properly denotes a known person (as opposed to "person or persons unknown") who is thought to be implicated in a crime. He may or may not be in custody; if the latter, his whereabouts may or may not be known.
But his identity is. The only uncertainty is his guilt, though that uncertainty can be merely technical—he was witnessed and identified, though no court of law has yet returned a conviction.
Indeed, it is the protection of a criminal’s right to be considered innocent until proven guilty that accounts for use of the term. Even if he is apprehended in the very act of robbing, raping, stealing, or killing, our law regards him only as a suspect. He remains free of the stigma of the label robber, rapist, thief, or murderer until a jury has handed down its "guilty" verdict. And this is reasonable.
Not reasonable, however, is the change that has come over the word. Journalists and TV reporters routinely use the term suspect as a synonym for criminal or one of the latter’s more-specific subsets. Such use vitiates the original intent of the term. Consider a few examples, all quoted from published accounts:
Police are looking for a man who allegedly walked into a home armed with a handgun and
demanded money from a female resident. . . . The woman said the suspect was holding a
small handgun. She told police she pushed the suspect, who then ran out of the house.
The man whom the woman pushed was not a suspect. He was an intruder, and perhaps a would-be robber or rapist, or both. He was not captured. Had someone been apprehended who was thought possibly to be said intruder, he would have become a suspect. But none was. There was no suspect in this break-in, and the reporter should have used some other term.
A pizza take-out business was robbed of an undisclosed amount of cash . . . police said. A gunman entered [the establishment] shortly before 7:30 p.m. and pointed a chrome handgun
at a cashier. . . . The suspect took an unknown amount of cash.
No, the robber took the cash. The thief made off with the loot. The felon split with the bread (or would that be "dough"?). There is no suspect in this case either. For contrast, consider this:
A Wal-Mart security guard attempted to detain two men and one woman shortly after midnight. The three fled the store and drove out of the parking lot. Police stopped the car. . . . and found several wallets and a number of identification cards inside the car. The suspects were arrested for burglary. . . .
Three people are apprehended and arrested in connection with a burglary; they become, ipso facto, suspects.
As an aside, note the use of the term allegedly in the first example. Invoked widely by the press, this is another term whose function is to protect the innocent from false accusation. But the person here is the very individual who did in fact enter a home with a gun. It’s gratuitous to protect with mitigating terms like allegedly a player in the drama who is by definition a criminal, the more so since he remains unidentified. (Of course the reporter who wrote this story might have intended to cast doubt on the veracity of the woman who reported the incident . . .)
When you know who the perpetrator of a crime might be—even in the absence of knowing his name—you have a suspect, whether or not that person is at large or in custody. But if you don’t know who the person is who did the deed and have no one in custody, you cannot suspect him. Right? If the crime was committed by "a person or persons unknown," as such reports used to say when reporters had a better grasp of the tool we call language, then there is by definition no suspect.
And yet we have seen in print the ultimate absurdity to one who is verbalert: a statement that the crime was committed by "unknown suspects." This oxymoronic expression proves that the term has perhaps irretrievably lost its intended sense—and that journalists, in general, aren’t especially wordwise.
--PP#1