The Ups and Downs of Crime Reporting
Murder rate at historic lows, not a lot of coverage celebrating it
Hello!
We hope you have all found some respite from the sweltering heat, maybe gone on a little vacation or two, read some books, eaten some cold things, etc...
This month, we’re going to kick off the newsletter with an essay from The Center for Just Journalism’s Director, Laura Bennett. Laura is going to get into what’s going on with the current historic decline in murder in the U.S., which you are probably aware of — but if you’re not, it’s because it certainly hasn’t been covered with the same urgency as corresponding rises in violence. We’ll hand things over to Laura and then close out with a few more things we’ve been reading and thinking about.
The Ups and Downs of Crime Reporting
Laura Bennett
In a year full of “first”s and “never before”s, the United States is making history in at least one positive way: a record-setting national decline in murder. After a sharp increase that began in mid-2020, homicide deaths began falling in 2023. They dropped even faster in 2024, and, if trends hold, 2025 could have the lowest murder rate ever recorded in the U.S. Other categories of crime tracked by police—rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and car theft—are also declining, according to the best available data. These numbers represent thousands of people alive or unharmed today because of this remarkable decline in violence.
While crime trends have changed dramatically in the past few years, much of the news media’s approach to crime coverage has not. Reporting on the 2020-21 increase in gun homicide relied on many of the same tropes that characterized the crime coverage of the late ’80s and ’90s: round-the-clock coverage of lurid crimes, cherry-picked data, unfounded scapegoating of criminal legal policies, etc. The most obvious failures of this type of crime coverage are inaccuracy and bias. After all, the news media played a role in the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five, elevated the disproven “superpredator” theory, and helped turn “Willie Horton” into shorthand for racist dogwhistling. But there were subtler issues with this style of media coverage too.
First, this brand of crime reporting is anecdotal and sensationalistic. This isn’t an argument that murder shouldn’t be covered by the news media. On the contrary, serious crime warrants serious coverage, but a large share of these stories do not meet that standard. They rarely paint a full picture of the people impacted by the violence or a sober analysis of relevant trends, focusing instead on gruesome details. The goal of journalism is (or should be) to inform, not to inflame. In order to do more of the former and less of the latter, stories about crime should include information that can help people place the event in context. This doesn’t require a deep investigatory approach; just a few sentences can help readers understand if a crime is more or less common than it was in the past, whether it’s unusually prevalent in their community, and how many people it impacts relative to other types of crime and harm.
Second, traditional crime stories tend to focus on individual pathologies or the most proximal causes of a given incident, rather than taking systemic factors into account. In the 1980s and ‘90s, this manifested as a blatantly racist focus on the purported deviance, savagery, and moral poverty of Black, teenage boys. Media coverage was also quick to assign blame to criminal legal policies that grant freedom to people who go on to commit harm. For example, news outlets published hundreds of stories about Massachusetts’ furlough system after Willie Horton’s escape and subsequent attack of a woman and her fianceé, despite the narratively inconvenient fact that more than 99% of people released through that system returned to prison without incident that year.
Again, this isn’t an argument that the news media shouldn’t have covered the crimes Willie Horton committed, or that they shouldn’t have discussed the fact that he was on furlough at the time. But just as there is a responsibility to cover serious harm like that committed by Willie Horton, there is also a responsibility to prominently mention the overwhelming success rate of the program and to find creative ways to cover the documented benefits of policies like furlough and parole outside of the context of tragic but vanishingly rare failures.
Despite widespread acknowledgement of these problems and promises to change from major news outlets across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, the news media largely fell back into old patterns when gun violence rates began to rise just months later. Replace “superpredator” with “teen carjacker” and “furlough” with “bail reform,” and it would be hard to distinguish between the news stories of 1991 and 2021. Just as it did forty years ago, this style of media coverage drove fear and, in turn, punitive policymaking that has a terrible track record of improving public safety and carries enormous social and financial costs.
As this alarming rise in gun violence began to slow, flatten, and then sharply reverse, I once again felt a sense of deja vu scrolling through the news. Stories about the crime decline often quote police sources crediting their own tactics (the “Compstat” of yesterday is the “real-time crime center” of today) without noting that homicide is dropping nearly everywhere in the U.S. in ways no single local policing practice could explain. By excluding the national context, these news stories lend credulity to the self-interested explanations of local police that don’t bear scrutiny.
Coverage of the violent crime decline has also failed to take a sober accounting of the political fearmongering that preceded it. If Larry Krasner and bail reform were to blame for the increase in gun violence, should they also get credit for the decline? After all, Krasner is still in office, and bail reform laws are still on the books in cities and states across the country. The answer, of course, is that changes to prosecutorial and bail practices in a few cities can’t explain thoroughly national trends. In places where reforms and reform-minded elected officials were able to survive the onslaught of blame they endured in the early years of this decade, journalists have an obligation to question those in power whose cynical scapegoating of criminal legal reforms have been disproven.
While recent crime coverage has certainly left a lot to be desired, there have also been bright spots. Many journalists have looked outside the realm of policing for explanations of the rise and decline in gun violence, including the shocking disruption of the pandemic, unprecedented federal funding for community-based violence intervention efforts, and the economist John Roman’s theory that local government spending and employment played a major role.
These journalists have proven that it is possible to cover crime declines with focus, rigor, and curiosity. It can be challenging to report on counterfactuals (you can’t put a face on a life that was spared in the same way that you can a life that was lost), but journalists have been finding creative ways to tell difficult stories for as long as the profession has existed. There are endless threads to follow when violence and other types of crime rise and fall, and the most valuable to the audience are those firmly rooted in fact, devoid of hyperbole, and focused on causes and solutions.
A little more from H&J:
Every summer, variations on the same headline reappear: “Heat fuels surge in crime.” Summer is often a backdrop for this kind of predictable episodic crime coverage (and there is a link between extreme heat and increased violence, to be clear) but it can also be an opportunity to highlight the ways that heat interacts with our fraying societal infrastructure. Extreme heat is now the deadliest weather event in the U.S., yet those most at risk — people in un-air-conditioned homes and institutions and people living on the streets — rarely make headlines unless they die, and deaths from heat are notoriously tricky to count. Utility shutoffs during triple-digit heat follow the same pattern: systemic failures treated as isolated tragedies. Outdoor and warehouse workers, especially temporary and undocumented laborers, face increasingly dangerous conditions with few legal protections.
These stories are harder to tell than a standard crime report, but they define summer in a lot of ways. The Columbia Journalism Review has a great piece on why heat is so difficult for journalists to cover. Despite it being one of the most urgent climate issues, it lacks the same visual impact of disasters like wildfires or floods. Those kinds of crises create real spectacle; heat tends to just push us inward, to private spaces where we can be more comfortable. There are also real physical and logistical hurdles (like the actual health risks for journalists, inaccessible locations, and reluctance from subjects) that make good on‑the‑ground reporting on the subject difficult.
All that said, this Reuters story on heat in prisons is really well done. From Adolfo Arranz’s beautiful illustrations to the excellent data visualizations and storytelling, it’s worth your time. AND, on that subject: next month, we’re really excited to share a series of essays from incarcerated writers on their experiences of the (often dangerous) heat in the prisons they live in.
Lastly, some more good stuff we’ve read recently:
ProPublica on how the EPA quietly withdrew a legal complaint filed last year against GEO Group, one of the largest private prison operators (and a major Trump donor). The complaint accused GEO of misusing the toxic disinfectant Halt over 1,000 times at its Adelanto ICE facility during 2022 and 2023, exposing workers to severe chemical hazards without proper protective gear. The case was dropped without explanation. In the words of a former EPA lawyer: “This is a complete surrender. If this is not due to political intervention on behalf of an early and large Trump donor who stands to gain from managing ICE detention facilities and private prisons, then surely it is at least partly due to the intimidation that career staff feel in an environment when federal employees are being fired and reassigned to undesirable tasks and locations.”
The AP on Trump’s Labor Department moving to roll back or repeal 60+ workplace safety and labor protections, affecting millions of home health care, farm, construction, and entertainment workers. Changes could strip minimum wage, overtime, and key safety rules, especially for vulnerable groups like migrant and low‑wage workers. They would also curtail the government’s ability to punish employers if workers are injured or killed. In sum, obviously, these changes would be very dangerous for workers.
The Minnesota Reformer covered the state’s first criminal prosecution for wage theft, after a Lakeville contractor reportedly stole over $37,000 from five workers on a public housing project. He received probation, community service, and must repay what he took. If you’ve read this newsletter for long enough, you know that we want crime reporters to cover wage theft as a public safety issue — it quietly drains far more from working families than “street crime”, yet it rarely makes headlines the way poverty‑driven offenses do.
See y’all next month,
Hannah and Josie