A consistent feature of contemporary crime and public safety reporting is its tendency to link safety with policing, prosecution, and punishment. This happens at every stage of the journalistic process when it comes to public safety reporting, from story selection and sourcing to substance and stylistic choices. Sometimes the connection is obvious (for example, a story suggesting without evidence that bail reform is causing an increase in gun violence), but often it’s far more subtle. For example:

  • The small number of crimes that police track–index crimes–are far more likely to be covered by reporters than other violations of civil or criminal law that impact as many or far more people each year, like wage theft, housing discrimination, price fixing, building code violations, tax evasion, illegal chemical emissions, and crimes committed by prison guards, prosecutors, and police.
  • Articles about index crime trends routinely mention changes to criminal legal policies, like a new police task force or a shift in a local prosecutor’s charging practices, absent any evidence that those policies significantly impact public safety.
  • Quotes from police officers, prosecutors, and corrections officials dominate crime coverage, and those individuals’ claims are not always fact-checked or contextualized, even if they have made inaccurate statements in the past. Experts on the macro-level causes of crime and the people successfully implementing other approaches to addressing violence and other kinds of harm are quoted less frequently and less prominently.
  • Language choices, like the “officer involved shooting” euphemism, send the signal that violence committed by government officials happens passively or is not crime.

These and many other practices, documented below, leave readers and viewers with a distorted understanding of what most significantly impacts their overall safety. They also give the inaccurate impression that public safety is inextricably linked with a small range of policy interventions found in the narrow world of police, prosecutors, and prisons, despite the wealth of evidence that those systems do not address the underlying causes of crime, are relatively ineffective at reducing violence and other types of harm, and have enormous social and financial costs.

Read the full article about improving public safety reporting at The Center for Just Journalism.