Some people seem to think that the idea that Travellers of one sort or another are liable to be treated badly by the authorities, and persecuted and discriminated against in one way another, is absurd. Or they find it athreatening idea, and deny it.

"They aren't even black, so how would,it be possible for people seeing them to even know they are Travellers in order to discriminate against them". That seems to be an idea that keeps on cropping up here.

Well, it's never stopped people persecuting Travellers of various kinds any more that it's stopped people persecuting Jews. And it's worth remembering that, alongside the better known Holocaust of European Jews, Hitler carried out a similar genocide against Europe's Travelling People, murdering hundreds of thousands in the death camps. AS with the Jews, the genocide grew out of a tradition of prejudice. And though the death camps stopped in 1945, the prejudice, and the persecution, in a more low-key style, never has stopped. In fact in some places it's getting worse.

With that kind of background, is it surprising that people are worried about "cooperating with the authorities" when one of theirs get into trouble? And suspicious of what lies behind the kind of media panic that appears to have blown up over this in America?

Nor is it surprising if a lot of them have decided that the best thing is to keep their heads down, and not be too noticeable. And that means that it is quite possible for decent people who are in no way prejudiced to go through their lives unaware of their very existence. But the people with the prejudices know. Once again, it's not unlike the situation of Jews in many places and times.

Over here this case has hardly made the papers, what with the trailers for the Iraq War and so forth. But prejudice against travelling people is common enough in England and so it is in every country in Europe. And from some of the stuff in this thread it seems pretty clear that it crossed the Atlantic and took root in the USA.

How far all this affected what's happened in this case, you'd need to know a lot more about than I do to say. But whether or not prejudice lies at the root of it, it seems to have brought quite a lot of it to the surface as it's developed.