High on almost every metro journalist’s New Year’s resolution list is a solemn vow not to focus quite so much on mindless crime news – despite the fact that such stories are easy and fun and eagerly gobbled up by readers and viewers.
The “problem” has been noted in approximately 865,000 academic papers over the years, which bemoan the appeal of flashing red lights to local television reporters; which urge newspaper reporters to cut down the quantity and focus on quality news about “root causes” of crime; and which note that the quantity of crime news journalism seems to have no relationship to the rise or fall of crime rates in the region being reported on.
While much of this intellectual whimpering has the makings of a dull sociology class lecture, the business professors will note that excessive reporting on local crime that does not reflect actual crime rates can adversely and unfairly influence real estate values and retail sales in “high-crime” areas.
In the end, of course, everyone shrugs and acknowledges the wisdom of the late, great academic and U.S. senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who noted that nobody knows a damn thing about crime.
Ponder the crime fighting strategy launched in Boston in late November – a marketing/publicity blitz urging criminal gangs to hold off on violence during the “holiday season.”
If the marketing team knows the target audience of thugs well enough to shower them with positive-message brochures, why not just arrest them in advance?
At the same time Boston was urging the gangs to participate in a big group hug, state, local and federal law enforcement folks unleashed a major raid and investigation and indictments against gang members in Fitchburg. No cease-fire treaty in Fitchburg.
Chicago tried an anti-loitering ordinance aimed at gangs – no hanging around, looking gang-like. That one got laughed out of court years ago. A curfew aimed at the young and foolish in Lowell suffered a similar fate. A study by the Justice Policy Institute in 2007 found that anti-gang initiatives were so awful that they actually led to a strengthening of the criminal enterprises.
Points Up, Points Down
The number of violent crimes in Boston has dropped, compared with last year, in an annual dance of the statistics. The variables that might be responsible for a crime-drop in general, and a drop in specific crime categories in particular, are subject to all manner of mediocre analysis – much of it probably wrong.
There were 15 fewer homicides in Boston this past year than the previous one – a 26 percent drop that might be attributed to factors ranging from crackerjack police work to murderers having found the Lord to a handful of criminals with bad aim who only wounded those they intended to kill. The most mundane explanation: statistics can be a bitch.
James Alan Fox, Lipman Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, in a USA Today essay early last year, warned against attaching too much significance to the short-term homicide rates. “A one-year drop in a city’s homicide rate often reflects a simple correction following an unusually elevated figure from the year before. Likewise, a sharp upturn can reflect a hangover effect following an unusually light year.”
The number of Boston rapes was up sharply year-to-year, but sex-crime numbers are a nightmare of self-reporting bias and fuzzy definitions and varying levels of enthusiasm to report such crimes at all.
Beyond the number-crunching, analytical clarity is often avoided in the face of squeamishness about the role of race in the criminal marketplace.
Murders committed by black teenagers were up sharply in the past 10 years, in contrast to flat rates for white teens. An embarrassing study from the late 1990s found that half the young black men in Washington, D.C., were under criminal supervision on any given day.
Efforts to curb crime run up against clashing special interests, ranging from cranky cops who want more bodies and better guns; to warm and sensitive cops who favor “community policing”; to social service agencies that want just one more grant to tame the teeming masses; to the inevitable church-sponsored rallies and marches asking the bad guys to behave.
Analyzing crime data? That may be a crime in and of itself.
