CRIMINAL JUSTICE NEWS COVERAGE IN 2023

Annual discussion conducted by Criminal Justice Journalists

Participants:

Ted Gest, Criminal Justice Journalists, moderator

James Alan Fox, criminologist, Northeastern University

William Freivogel, Gateway Journalism Review and Southern Illinois University
    School of Journalism

Marea Mannion, Pennsylvania State University

Dan Shelley, Radio Television Digital News Association

Brandt Williams, Minnesota Public Radio

Published April 29, 2024

TED GEST: Let’s start with crime rates. The FBI says crime reports were down slightly last year, but the National Crime Victimization Survey says violent incidents, including unreported crime, were up.

JAMES ALAN FOX: The national homicide total is down quite a bit. I had thought that was going to happen after the big spike we had in 2020 – the rise and then the fall. What comes up must come down. The news media attention to crime increases is far more substantial than the attention given to crime declines. Bad news is big news. There’s a sense out there that crime is out of control, when it’s not.

There are indications that the crime rate Is going in the right direction, but that doesn’t get a lot of coverage.

MAREA MANNION: As you say, there’s a rise in media coverage creating more fear of perceived crime, even though some types of crime are relatively low. That includes major cities starting with New York. Interestingly, Gallup surveys for the past 20 or more years indicate fewer Americans believe crime is up where they live, but at the national level, their perceptions of rising crime is pretty common based on those surveys.

FOX: Some of the fear is correlated with immigration, even though the data show that the amount of crime committed by immigrants is not great. It happens – there are incidents – but immigrants’ involvement with criminal activity is relatively low.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: We are able to frame the issue as we have candidates making statements and promises. Some overstate the way crime impacts people. In Minneapolis, where I work, the city has been under the microscope for the last few years after the killing of George Floyd. We had a crime spike in 2020 as did other cities.

Crime is now going down although the rate still is high. There are still forces behind a narrative that Minneapolis is some kind of hellhole, although our crime rate is on a downward trend.

FOX: One of the presidential candidates is campaigning on the theme that crime is out of control, which was a winning formula for him in 2016. He’s clearly playing that tune again. That doesn’t match the facts, and I hope the media will point that out.

DAN SHELLEY: Donald Trump is attempting in a kind of twisted way to identify with people of color, because he has a mugshot, and the implication is that they have lots of mugshots, and maybe that’s going to appeal to voters of color. I think that is sick and twisted, and the media coverage has pretty much called it the way it is. In an environment where it is hard to be surprised any more, that would surprise me.

GEST: Back to the topic of immigration, is it fair to talk about an arrestee’s immigration status, just like you’d mention his age and address?

SHELLEY: My view is that it is fair, if it is placed, like all coverage of crime, in the proper context. I’m thinking of the viral video of the immigrants beating up two New York police officers in Times Square. If you’re going to beat up officers in Times Square, you’re going to get attention regardless of your immigration status.

The fact that they were immigrants fed into the narratives of a lot of our political leaders and policymakers. That coverage may have been overblown.

FOX: Perhaps you can just say they were Hispanic.

WILLIAM FREIVOGEL: The suspect in the murder of a young woman in Georgia seemed like an illegal immigrant. I think that had to be reported, or it would look like you were covering up something that people might have been asking themselves in their heads. Even though I think it’s abhorrent what Trump does in terms of painting immigrants as murderers and rapists, I think it was appropriate for news stories in the Georgia case to use that label.

MANNION. The Georgia case has certainly fueled even more debate and media coverage of immigration policies, on the heels of the two New York police officers beaten up in Times Square. The story became even bigger with video of those arrested being released the next day. However, their immigration status continues to be described differently by various media outlets, ranging from ”immigrants”, to “undocumented” to “illegal,” causing confusion for media consumers in the same way as mass shootings or other crimes described in generalized categories without context.

The Georgia student murder has fueled more political debate and media focus, including coverage of the President’s State of the Union. On a recent PBS News Hour broadcast, a noted criminology professor discussed a flurry of recent research based on public perception and interest showing opposite results from public perception of illegal immigrants and crime. Across all research, it shows recent immigrants don’t engage in more crime than native-born counterparts and immigration can cause crime to actually go down depending on circumstances,

GEST: The director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives fears that the public is becoming numb to mass shootings. What do you think about media coverage?

FOX: After any incident in which many people are killed, media outlets including the New York Times and CNN say there have been hundreds of mass shootings, based on the Gun Violence Archive definition of four or more victims shot in an incident. People come away thinking that incidents in which many people die happen all the time.

The mass shooting in Maine was one of 10 public massacres last year, more than we have had in previous years, but still 10. The average has been around seven. So it’s still rare.

Last year, we said that mass shootings were up in 2023 compared with 2022, based on data from the Gun Violence Archive. They were up by only two or three additional incidents.

This year, the numbers are way down. As of late February last year, there had been 85.  This year, there were 57. It would be a nice idea for the media to report downturns.

GEST: Are you saying that when news media report on one mass shooting, they should be telling their audience what the trend is?

FOX: If you’re reporting on incidents where people are killed you shouldn’t be comparing that with incidents in which no one was killed.

MANNION: Do many people think that “shootings” must mean “killings”? It seems that some of the general public remains very confused over breaking news that reports there’s been another mass shooting somewhere. It often seems the public assumption is that many have been shot, meaning they were killed, and that it’s random, versus cases, for example, where its clearly domestic.

FREIVOGEL: There was a good story in the Missouri Independent, an online news organization that does about the best statehouse reporting, about the shooting at the Super Bowl parade, in which one person was killed.

They did a good job of saying how that affected politics in the state capital of Jefferson City. Before the shooting, Republicans were pushing a bill to lower the age to 18 at which teenagers could have guns. Suddenly, that didn’t look like such a great idea when juveniles were arrested in Kansas City for the shooting.

FOX: On the subject of school shootings, there have been stories about a huge rise in school shootings, over 300 cases a year in K-12 schools. I took a look at those data, and 90% of the incidents had nothing to do with students in school. They happened after hours, on weekends, or cases not involving students.

When people hear about hundreds of school shootings, they think about kids being gunned down in their classrooms. In fact, they may be things like a gang killing on a basketball court on school grounds. There is a big difference between students being killed in school and a killing on school property.

MANNION: Do many people think that “shootings” must mean “killings”?

FOX: Yes, and while guns are obviously more lethal than other weapons like knives, most people survive gunshot wounds.

WILLIAMS: There is less reporting on people who are wounded in mass shootings. Often they are paralyzed or lost limbs or organs. Those people get less attention. We can do a better job of highlighting those costs of mass shootings, that some of these people are not able to work anymore, they are on permanent medical disability.

We should also report on the presence of firearms and how they impact people in law enforcement. We had an incident in a Minnesota suburb in which three first responders were shot by a man who was holding his family hostage.

It’s unfortunately only after an incident like this do we report on possible measures that might prevent these kids of incidents from happening again.

The most common kinds of shootings are not mass shootings but incidents involving people who know each other and shouldn’t have guns in the first place, but use guns to solve their problems.

You have trained first responders who are trying to help someone and end up getting shot and killed. That’s a context that those of us in the media should do a better job of describing. That’s a consequence of having so many firearms – first responders must recognize that someone might be pulling a gun on them.

FOX: Half of mass shootings involve family members, not strangers. Serious incidents not involving guns get less attention. In Ferguson, Mo., near St. Louis, a woman set fire to her house, killing herself and her children. Had she used a gun, it would have been far more newsworthy.

FREIVOGEL: Of course she got a ton of attention in St. Louis.

GEST: The Biden administration is making millions of dollars available for community anti-violence initiatives. Has anyone seen any notable coverage of that?

SHELLEY: Unfortunately, some law enforcement agencies are using some federal money to encrypt their radio dispatch traffic. That has hampered journalists’ ability to cover the news in real time. In a couple of exceptions, law enforcement has provided newsrooms with encryption keys or codes so that journalists can monitor what they are doing. This issue has been making the news in New York City, the Bay Area, and a few communities in between. I call it a pandemic of the lack of transparency on the part of law enforcement agencies. The subject should get more media coverage. It’s having a big impact on the ability of journalists to cover crime in real time in their communities.

WILLIAMS: Back to the issue of violence prevention, we’ve devoted a lot of attention to what Minneapolis is doing. The police department is under a state consent decree and the city is expected to enter into a consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department about discriminatory policing.

Minneapolis has put a lot of money into violence interrupters but that’s about as far as we can get now about how effective these programs are.

FREIVOGEL: For some historical perspective, when Ted and I were reporters in St. Louis in the 1970s, we went to meetings about a large amount of federal money going into crime prevention programs. Federal aid to these efforts was getting a lot more attention, and that was during the Nixon administration.

GEST: Yes, that was a time in which high rates of street crime was a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S., which is why a lot more media attention was paid to it.

GEST: Changing the subject to mass incarceration, close to 2 million people remain behind bars at some level in the U.S. Louisiana elected a conservative governor who wants to increase it. The number incarcerated nationally has gone down somewhat but despite activity by advocacy groups trying to reduce it, I don’t see much media coverage.

FOX: Massachusetts is shutting down prisons. The number of inmates is about half of what it was previously. The Boston Globe has produced a lot coverage of that.

SHELLEY: I think it’s a red state-blue state issue. Generally speaking – and the coverage follows this trend – in blue states, you see incarceration leveling off or decreasing. In red states, you see it rising. You mentioned Louisiana. In Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants to add 600 prison beds, and the agency that oversees state prisons is pushing back, saying we don’t need those extra beds. Sanders is hell bent on making sure that Arkansas gets them.

The coverage follows the trends, but this is a red state-blue state or conservative-progressive issue.

GEST: Back to policing, there has been a lot of news coverage of wrongdoing by police. The Washington Post consistently reports about 1,000 police killings of civilians annually, many of which may be justified. It is good that the newspaper is tracking that. What about news media coverage of other aspects of policing?

SHELLEY: At the risk of getting back on my soapbox, post-George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and similar incidents there has been a general trend among law enforcement agencies to become less transparent to the public in terms of what they are doing.

I’m talking about their activity on a daily level and their general activities. I mentioned the encryption of radio dispatch channels. That’s just part of it. If you want to get into the law enforcement public information officer business, now is the time. They’re hiring.

And a lot of these PIOs are not advocates for the public but rather for the police departments they work for. What they release to the public may be either inaccurate or almost exclusively paint their department in a good light, and conversely, try to hide problems within agencies.

We saw this the day after the George Floyd murder. The Minneapolis Police Department’s initial news release said that a suspect died of a medical issue and there were no weapons involved. That was pretty much all they said.

Were it not for a 17-year-old girl with her cell phone, the world would not have seen what really happened.

The coverage of police is getting harder and harder by the day just at a time when it’s in police departments’ interest to become more transparent, not less, to rebuild public trust.

There’s a real trust problem in many communities, in part because police are becoming less transparent about what they’re doing.

FOX: I agree with you, but there is one area in which there is too much transparency, oddly enough: release of body-cam videos of shootings and 911 calls when people are dying. I don’t see the value of showing the public people being shot. It reinforces the public view that it’s dangerous out there.

The release of the Allen, Texas, video of people being killed at a mall had no purpose. That’s a case of transparency being a bad thing.

FREIVOGEL: There are instances in which release of video can help determine if officers acted properly. There was a recent example in St. Louis in which two rookie police officers drove their cruiser into a bar. Not only will the police department not release the names of officers involved in misconduct incidents but in this case will not release the video that might show why they drove into a bar. (They arrested the bar owner for resisting arrest.)

After George Floyd’s murder, there were a number of police accountability incidents, and states like California, Massachusetts and New York passed police-licensing legislation they hadn’t passed before But Missouri passed a law enforcement bill of rights and has covered up the names of officers accused of wrongdoing.

Ted and I worked on a story about a recent Missouri law that redacts the names of witnesses and victims from court decisions, which can make cases very hard to follow and masks misconduct by people who may have engaged in it.

SHELLEY: The Florida Supreme Court issued the right ruling in the case of two Pensacola police officers who were involved in separate fatal use of force incidents during calls

They sued to keep the police department from releasing their names under a statute called Marsy’s Law, which has been enacted in several states, which keeps the names of crime victims confidential.

The officers argued that because they were forced to use force in the course of doing their duties, they were victims of a crime.

The case went to the state supreme court, which ruled late last year that no, that is ridiculous, that police officers doing their duty cannot be crime victims, and therefore their names must be released.

GEST: Are there any solutions to the transparency problem, such as police governing bodies like legislators, city councils or mayors acting? Another issue is that there are fewer journalists covering police issues.

MANNION: Going back a few years, journalists and educators often took part in the public information and media section of national police and criminal justice conferences such as those put on each year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and a few others.

It was often a series of very productive discussions, exchanges of issues, ideas and positive interactions in what used to be called the Media and PIO section of those conferences, However, all that seems to have changed.

I do not know exactly when it started, but these days it appears the IACP is not allowing journalists or media educators as one example, into most sessions at its annual national conventions.

The exception might be some major announcement where media are invited to cover a public official’s statement. There also seems little or no public access to a published news media policy handbook that was available in the past. Are we now going backward in media and law enforcement relationships and mutual interest in the process of Informing the public?

GEST: There are some smaller police organizations, such as the Police Executive Research Forum, that permit journalists to cover their sessions, but the IACP’s policy, which is new in the last decade, reflects a bad trend.

WILLIAMS: I agree that police are more opaque these days. They are circling the wagons. They feel that the media are antagonistic towards them when we ask for information about why they do what they do.

One possibly brighter side is that as we’ve been covering cities like Minneapolis in responding to police calls that can result in their using deadly force against people who are experiencing mental health crises and exhibiting dangerous behaviors. Counseling might avoid the use of deadly force. Law enforcement groups have been in favor of that.

As we report that, it’s been a way for us to get more access to law enforcement. They’re more willing to talk about this area of their job that they’re woefully unprepared to do, and they support these kinds of intervention models. They don’t have to spend an hour trying to talk someone out of a house because someone who is concerned about them has called police. The police would rather have a team of behavioral specialists come out. There are areas where reporters must report stories about police use of force, but we can do a better job of building relationships with police departments so they’ll talk to us when something has gone wrong.

GEST: We haven’t discussed social media. Are more police departments saying that they will only speak to the public by making statements on social media?

SHELLEY: It’s a tool that can be used either way. Unfortunately, too often it’s being used by law enforcement either to delay the release of information or relay only information that paints them in a positive light. It cuts both ways, and in too many jurisdictions it goes the other way.

FREIVOGEL: To the point about other media outlets filling in for traditional outlets, in St. Louis, the news organization ProPublica has a reporter, Jeremy Kohler, who has done good reporting. For example, he wrote about how the police chief, Robert Tracy, is getting $100,000 of his $275,000 salary from the business community, which is an unusual setup that raises questions about whether business areas are getting more coverage by police.

Tony Messenger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, did a Sunshine Law request for documents on the use of force investigative unit of the St. Louis Police Department that had all sorts of holes and had done shoddy work. This all came to light because of his Sunshine Law request.

SHELLEY: On the topic of independent journalists, they are emerging in the journalism landscape, and some are being met with the same or more resistance than are traditional reporters.

In Los Angeles, there’s an independent journalist named Ben Camacho, who made a freedom of information request to get the photos and names of every Los Angeles police officer. The city responded by sending this information, including the names of undercover officers. They realized their mistake and went to Camacho, who had already published this material, not knowing that some of these officers were undercover, and demanded that he take it down. The case went to court, the judge laughed the city out of court, and the undercover officers who were exposed are now suing the city for having their identities revealed.

The city’s response was to sue Camacho to try to get him to cover the cost of all those lawsuits.

In Louisiana, a young journalist named Kiran Chawla in Baton Rouge is trying to keep the police department accountable. The police department has banned her from news conferences and taken her off the news release distribution list in direct retribution for stories she has done that have exposed problems.

Independent journalists are filling some of the gaps but they’re not always met with open arms.

GEST: What about the issue of bail and pretrial release. Critics say some suspects are released and commit new crimes while poor defendants must stay locked up because they cannot afford to post bail.

FREIVOGEL: There have been incidents in St. Louis. A volleyball player at a tournament was struck by an out-of-control driver and had her legs amputated. It turned out that the driver had been released and was supposed to be confined to home but was out on the streets.

In another incident, two women were run over, and the person driving the car had been let out on bond. On the other hand, the system has poor people stuck in jail, losing their jobs and apartments. The bail system has been a source of corruption in the courts.

FOX: A prosecutor in Arizona has blocked the extradition of a murder suspect to New York City, claiming that too many people are released on no-cash bail there.

GEST: Dan Shelley’s group, with the National Press Foundation, has had three sessions for broadcast journalists, in San Diego last year and in Philadelphia and New Orleans this year, to discuss ways of improving crime coverage.

SHELLEY: The title of each session was “Going Beyond If It Bleeds, It Leads,” mostly for broadcast but some digital and print, encouraging journalists to put more context around stories, making the stories more meaningful and useful.

For instance, if you cover a crime at the beginning, you make a commitment to follow that case through the conviction or acquittal of the suspects.

We’re seeing many stations around the country seeing the value of creating more context, being more comprehensive with their coverage.

At these conferences, reporters talk to police officers. In Philadelphia, we had a panel of police experts and the district attorney. It was a great back and forth about how we can work better together, not doing each others’ bidding but make sure we are both community partners.

One of the outcomes we’re striving for is to make sure journalists and police know that they live in the same communities, they serve the same communities, they do it in vastly different ways, but they are both critical to the community’s ecosystem and their ability to identify problems in their community and solutions as they relate to crime.

We heard from mental health experts and about the disproportionate number of people of color caught up in the judicial system and news coverage.

We tried to approach it from all of those perspectives to come to a common understanding that crime coverage needs to be better, it needs to be more thorough and comprehensive. It needs to be more contextualized and more responsible. I think we’ve done some good in the three summits we’ve had so far, and we’re looking forward to doing more.

FREIVOGEL: A documentary being shown around the country called “Trustworthy” talks about how people have trust in local news. Some broadcasters on a panel discussing it commented that “if it bleeds, it leads” is not true anymore.

SHELLEY: I can’t say that it’s true everywhere. I can say there’s a trend of local broadcasters going beyond “if it bleeds, it leads.” Crime still is covered when it has a community impact, not merely a routine shooting. Sometimes if it bleeds, it has to lead, because there is nothing else going on. That kind of coverage is not dead, but it’s dying.

FOX: On the subject of following cases through the end, I help run a database of mass shootings. In many instances, there is no media coverage at all of the conclusion of the case, even in some high-profile cases.

SHELLEY: Many victims argue that the media should not glorify shooters, and many newsrooms now have that policy – that argument is resonating with them.

FOX: What many people remember about mass shooters is not their name, but what they did. In cases like the shooting at the El Paso Walmart or the Pittsburgh synagogue, people remember not the name of the shooter but the act, not the actor.