That's pretty common, in my experience. People read "suspect" and hear "guilty". Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese once said in an interview, "you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect".

As best I can tell, the average person interprets "innocent until proven guilty" to mean something like, well, you can't put him in jail until he's convicted, but once he's caught, that's just the court system.

It's a well-known fact that the US criminal justice system disproportionately arrests, prosecutes, and imprisons Black and Hispanic Americans, and has for a while. I'm surprised to find that my expectations of the HN community were too high.