Journalists must look beyond crime rates to clearance rates. And many newsrooms have started improving crime coverage by dropping police mugshots and coverage of petty crime
by Sonni Efron, National Press Foundation

Walter Katz, a 17-year public defender, and former police oversight official, spoke to journalists about crime trends in his role as vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures. He was followed by Carroll Bogert, who leads the Marshall Project, a nonprofit focused solely on criminal justice reporting.

Katz started by saying the reasons behind the homicide spike in 2020 remain unknown. “One thing I’ll not tell you is why there was a rapid increase in violent crime, but we do know that homicides increased from 2019 to 2020 by about 29%, the largest year-over-year increase that had ever occurred in the history of data collection on homicides,” Katz said. There are many competing, unproven hypotheses, and the explanations that are being offered are being chosen based on bias, Katz warned.

In 2019, violent crime continued a long-term trend of deep decrease. The pandemic brought a confluence of “black swan” events (things deemed so unlikely as to be impossible.) There was a decrease in property crime like burglary and car theft – presumably because people and their cars were home – and a record increase in violence and gun sales.

And while Americans were at home, they witnessed on television the “obvious moral failure” of George Floyd’s killing by police, Katz noted. Both the “defund the police” movement and the demoralization of police have been blamed for the rise in violence.

Crime trends are difficult even for experts to tease out. Katz recommended Pat Sharkey’s “Uneasy Peace” for journalists who want to understand the origins and realities of crime. He also praised the reporting on police budget increases by ABC-owned television stations and recommended that journalists scrutinize the links between explanations of crime trends and police advocacy for larger budgets. The reporting showed that with few exceptions, the defund the police movement has not succeeded in prompting cuts to police budgets.

“Only eight agencies cut police funds by more than 2% while 91 agencies increase law enforcement funding by at least 2%,” Katz noted. “That’s an example of that vitally important context that has to be provided when we as a society are having these conversations about what makes communities safe, and what are the factors that help drive unrest and help drive disorder and violent crime.”

But the urgency of television news coverage too often results in loss of context. “For news stations where you have competitors, you have commercial challenges, you have time pressure, you don’t have a lot of time to put out a story, and often you don’t have time to follow up in a story,” Katz said. “Unfortunately, the cost is that there’s a ton of context in criminal justice which is getting lost, in my opinion, as a result of that need for urgency.”

How media cover crime truly matters, historically and today. “Criminal justice advocates think and talk all the time about what local broadcasters are doing, and feel that there are few elements in American society that are more determinative of what happens in criminal justice policy, than what you all put on the air,” Bogert said. “And if you feel sometimes like your job doesn’t matter or it isn’t what it once was, just remember you really, really make a difference.”

The attribution “police said” reflects the dependency on police sources that is the crux of the coverage dilemma. “The criminal justice system starts before the police, with a school-to-prison pipeline, and it cycles through a court system and prisons and re-entry. There’s a lot to cover in criminal justice, but in covering crime, the institution of the police is so overwhelmingly important,” Bogert said. “How can you do your jobs without information from the police? And what do you do when the police aren’t telling you the truth?”

Public perceptions of crime do not match reality – and media coverage has played a large role in that. From 2019 to 2022, media mentions of shootings were not correlated with the actual number of shootings. Distorting factors include:

* the way police report crime to attract media coverage
* the media’s focus on the most heinous crimes – which are a tiny percentage of all crimes
* politicians’ use of crime to boost their electoral prospects and drive media coverage
* the politicization of media outlets

Speaker: Walter Katz, Vice President of Criminal Justice, Arnold Ventures
Speaker: Carroll Bogert, President, The Marshall Project

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Crime Coverage Summit 2023 was sponsored by Arnold Ventures and hosted by NPF and RTDNA. NPF is solely responsible for this content.

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