crime and media essay

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Media Representations of Crime and Criminal Justice

Christopher Birkbeck, University of Salford

• Published: 02 September 2014
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To date, criminologists have approached the media from a communications perspective that, directly or indirectly, treats them as a powerful social force. However, systematic research (conducted mainly outside but also within criminology) has failed to substantiate this image: the media may be an ubiquitous ingredient in daily life, but their influence is crucially mediated by social and psychological variables. Further progress in critically assessing the power of the media will depend on developments in media and communications theory rather than criminology. Meanwhile, criminologists could open up alternative lines of inquiry relating to the media’s quality of publicness and its location at the interface between revelation and concealment—an interface of considerable significance for crime and criminal justice. To do so would be to explore the media as a discourse, and materialization, of conventionality.

Introduction

Criminologists often criticize the media for a variety of sins, notably the emotiveness, distortion, and oversimplification that they bring to matters of crime and justice. This academic frustration is driven by the media’s social and technical accomplishments: their perceived capacity to create, reproduce, and deliver content in mind-boggling abundance and near instantaneity and their putative impacts on many aspects of social and cultural life. From this perspective, these apparently potent forms of communication subvert the work of criminology by purveying unrealistic images of crime and criminal justice and eschewing rational reflection about them.

Central to this critique are a conception of the media as a process of communication and an underlying imaginary drawn from physics. Messages are seen as profuse, ephemeral, but highly charged particles circulating in the social universe, with a potential to render some sort of change (in behavior, emotions, beliefs, or attitudes) in any individual or organization that they collide with. The predominant analytical framework is one of causal relations ( Greer and Reiner, 2012 ), within which media representations of crime and criminal justice are posited as both the outcome of societal and organizational processes and an influence on those who intersect with them. The communications perspective is shared with many other academic disciplines, most obviously media and communication studies. It was prefigured by social critics and the general public at least a century ago and—significantly—is still widely held today ( J. Anderson, 2008 ).

Notable for its absence has been any extended reflection on the merits and problems of adopting a communications perspective within criminology. For although this perspective has underpinned a burgeoning literature within the discipline ( Carrabine, 2008 ; Greer and Reiner, 2012 ; Jewkes, 2004 ; Mason, 2003 ; Surette, 2011 ), it appears to demand a vision of causality as a one-way process in which messages are merely an intermediate link between producers and consumers. From this viewpoint, a focus on the messages themselves will supposedly reveal important aspects of the production and consumption processes; or a focus on production will naturally look to its consequences for consumption. The problem, however, is that the messages produced are not necessarily the messages consumed, because the mere fact of production does not guarantee exposure or attention to content, and attention, if garnered, does not imply a singular reading. Criminologists have not been unaware of this, particularly those focusing on questions of meaning in media content (e.g., Carrabine, 2008 ; Rafter, 2007 ; Sparks, 1992 ), who have pointed out that texts are polysemic and may be interpreted in different ways by different consumers. Nevertheless, both the discipline in general and even these scholars in particular have not followed through on the implications of this claim, the former preferring to proceed as if the question of meaning can be ignored, and the latter opting to provide a presumed common reading of the texts that they consider. Both of these tactics create crucial weaknesses for their analyses. A better solution to the problem would be to treat messages as jointly determined by producers and consumers, but this would be to look much more closely at the process of communication and less at the particular images of crime and justice, at least for the time being. In other words, it would lead away from criminology into a more explicit engagement with communications theories and methods.

Some may see in this a welcome enrichment of approach through transdisciplinarity. But for those who are interested in remaining more firmly within the discipline there is an alternative perspective already hinted at by some of the studies on the production of media content. This perspective focuses on the media not as a process of communication but as a form of publicness and a key constituent of the contemporary public domain. Along with a host of other topics, matters of crime and criminal justice are made collectively visible by the media ( Thompson, 1995 , 2011 ), a process of some significance given that most instances of crime and many actions of criminal justice agencies seek some sort of secrecy. Interesting questions relate to the processes of revelation and concealment and to the media as the interface between them, questions partly touched on in existing studies but relegated to a relatively minor supporting role within the dominant communications perspective. Somewhat paradoxically, when looked at as a form of publicness, media representations of crime and justice offer a study in the production of conventionality.

The Challenges for a Communications Perspective

Difficulties in characterizing media representations of crime and justice.

Although scholarly interest in the media, crime, and justice has existed since at least the 1920s, researchers with a specialist focus on criminology did not begin to look at this topic until after the Second World War. The first task that they set for themselves, one that continues to serve as a staple ingredient in many contemporary projects, was to delineate the idiosyncratic renderings of crime and justice in the media. This could be done by comparing media content with the images of crime and justice furnished by systematic study (i.e., by criminology). For example, in perhaps the earliest study of this type, Davis (1952) compared changes in the amount of column inches devoted to crime in Colorado newspapers with changes in the volume of crimes recorded by the police. He found that the two were not associated.

Much recent work has used content analysis to compare the proportional representation of different crime types, offenders, and criminal justice outcomes in the media with that found in official statistics. For example, in a study of items about crime published in British newspapers between 1945 and 1991, Reiner, Livingstone and Allen (2003 : 18) found that about two-thirds referred to violent or sex offenses, a picture that was “almost the obverse of [that given by] official statistics.” Similarly, Cheatwood (2010) found that fictional crime programs broadcast by radio in the United States between 1929 and 1962 dealt almost exclusively with murders, whereas murders never accounted for more than 0.5 percent of offenses known to the police. Both studies reported that the offenders featured in these media samples were older and of higher social status than the typical offender caught by the police. However, Pollak and Kubrin (2007) summarized more recent research that indicated that young violent offenders and offenders from ethnic minorities were overrepresented in news items compared to official statistics. Finally, Reiner, Livingstone, and Allen (2003) found that the clear-up rate for offenses reported in the news was above the general clear-up rate achieved by the police during the same period. These authors noted that media attention to the criminal justice system was largely confined to the police, as did Cheatwood. Surette (2011) has referred to the “Law of Opposites” and “Front End Loading” to designate the respective patterns of reporting.

Beyond simple comparisons like this, representational processes begin to look more complex. For example, Galeste, Fradella, and Vogel (2012 : 4) identified four “myths” about sex offenders—that they are “compulsive, homogenous, specialists and incapable of benefiting from treatment”—which, they claimed, are perpetuated by the media. Nevertheless, only 38 percent of the articles they examined contained at least one of these myths. Researchers have noted the penchant for certain news items to use strong condemnatory terms for offenders, such as “fiend” or “beast” for sex offenders ( Greer, 2003 ); yet this is to highlight the well-known difference between “tabloid” and “quality” news, which may be blurring ( Esser, 1999 ) but has not disappeared ( Peelo et al., 2004 ). An influential perspective for examining the “construction” of crime and justice has been that of “framing,” which studies particular configurations of problem definitions, causal interpretations, moral evaluations, and treatment recommendations ( Entman, 1993 : 52). However, frames are seen to originate in ideology, politics, culture, and science, rather than the media. The latter mainly serve as a means for communicating frames—for there are usually several frames in existence at any given time—and as a source of information for researchers interested in studying them. For example, Sasson (1995) identified five frames that characterize political, policy, media, and private “talk” about crime. This kind of variety in the media’s depictions of crime and criminal justice makes it very difficult to posit straightforward effects of the resulting content.

A particular problem is posed by the matter of interpretation: what does media content mean to the person who intersects with it? The construction of meaning may be partly set by the producer of the message or text, but it will also be shaped by the characteristics of those who attend to it: their cultural background, personal history, level of comprehension, and the context of reception ( McQuail, 2013 ). Nellis (2009 : 131), for example, observed that although The Shawshank Redemption may look like a “prison movie,” film critic Mark Kermode “plausibly argues … [that] … its overall appeal and popularity has had little to do with its specifically penal content.” Nevertheless, despite some sort of routine caveat of this nature, rather than explore different meanings criminologists have proceeded to provide their own extended reading of the text or content, implying that this is how it will be interpreted by others. For example, Rafter (2006 : 3) asserted that “crime films offer contradictory sorts of satisfaction: pride in our ability to think critically and root for the character who challenges authority …; and pride in our maturity for backing the restoration of moral order.” Whether these sorts of satisfaction arise among viewers has not been explored.

Criminologists link what is often claimed to be the media’s idiosyncratic renderings of crime and justice with two additional claims that would be significant if they were well supported. The first is that crime and criminal justice are prominent topics in the media (e.g., Beale, 2006 ). However, general inventories of media content show that these are merely two among many subjects in the news, such as the economy, civil rights, sport, and international affairs ( Quandt, 2008 ) and not the most frequent. In the realm of fiction, where classificatory tasks seem much more complicated ( Altman, 2003 ), films or shows about “crime” or “justice” sit alongside many others about “romance,” “comedy,” “science fiction,” and so on.

The second claim is that most people get their information about crime and justice from the media; at least, that is what they say when asked about it ( Marsh and Melville, 2009 ). This claim would seem unproblematic given that most criminological events cannot be witnessed directly, but it fails to give due consideration to other sources of information, such as that relayed by friends and acquaintances, or that which can be gained through personal experience as a protagonist or victim of crimes or, perhaps more important, lesser delicts of equal moral consequence to the individual (cf. Katz, 1987 ). More significantly, attention needs to be paid to the priority accorded to different sources of information and to the notion of “information” itself. What, exactly, is captured from the media? Perhaps people believe that the media are an important source of information, when something other than a single survey question used as a method of measurement might reveal different processes at work. Some of the limitations to survey research for measuring respondents’ contact with the media have been explored by Prior (2009) who found that many people overstate their viewing of TV news—sometimes quite considerably.

Related to this is a tendency among criminologists to assume that the samples of items compiled to demonstrate the “distorted” image of crime and justice will also have been seen, heard, or read by the public, but this is not necessarily the case ( Graber, 2004 ). Indeed, the only people likely to view and—more important—analyze these particular samples are the researchers themselves. Media and communications studies have long recognized that audiences are not passive recipients of messages (Livingstone and Das, 2103). Some people may never watch “slasher films,” and never want to; others may do everything possible to view them.

Seeking the Effects of Media Images of Crime and Justice

Research that directly seeks evidence of media effects represents a vast field of inquiry that has mainly been conducted outside of criminology, much of it in relation to topics that are of little or no interest to the discipline. However, matters relating to crime or criminal justice have often featured as questions of specific concern, or as case studies for broader conceptual and theoretical explorations. One prominent line of inquiry has involved the search for the effects of media content on violent and aggressive behavior ( J. Anderson, 2008 ). Another has looked at the effects of media on perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes relating to crime and justice (e.g., Holbrook and Hill, 2005 ). Some studies have used experimental methods, in which subjects were asked to read short texts or view video clips and were then canvassed for reactions or observed in their immediate behavior (e.g., Slater, Rouner, and Long, 2006 ). Other studies have asked samples of respondents about their recent engagement with the media, perceptions of crime, attitudes toward punishment, and associated matters (e.g., Goidel, Freeman, and Procopio, 2006 ). The focus of attention has been the individual, as reflected in the numerous theories of media effects—social learning, cognitive, reception, cultivation, agenda setting, and so on—proposed by psychologists, communications theorists, and others ( Bryant and Oliver, 2008 ). Criminologists undertaking empirical projects to detect effects have mainly focused their attention on fear of crime (e.g., Ditton et al., 2004 ) or punitiveness (e.g., Callanan, 2005 ), both of which link to the considerable interest within the discipline in the evolution of crime policy over the past 50 years and the well-documented shift from penal welfarism to populist punitiveness. In so doing, they have cited antecedent work from outside criminology, used similar research techniques, and obtained similar sorts of findings.

The cumulative results of this “individual effects” research, reported in literature reviews and meta-analyses, can be summarized as follows: variables measuring exposure or attention to the media are not always statistically significant; significance, when established, usually indicates association rather than causality; and the associations are comparatively weak. For example, J. Anderson (2008) reported that 70 years of research had shown correlations between media exposure and aggression ranging from .01 to .10. Similarly, C. Anderson and colleagues (2010) reported only small effects of violent video gaming on different dimensions of aggression. Morgan and Shanahan (2010 : 340) reported that a prior meta-analysis of more than two decades of cultivation research showed that television makes “a small but consistent contribution to viewers’ beliefs and perspectives.” Research has confirmed the ability of the media to influence people’s estimation of the most salient issues at any time—the so-called agenda-setting effect—including the issues of crime and criminal justice ( Uscinski, 2009 ). However, agenda setting can be weakened or eliminated by factors relating to personal experience or beliefs ( Graber, 2004 ). Translating these results into situated processes leads to what J. Anderson (2008 : 1272) called the “some/some/some” conditionals, as in “For some children under some conditions some television is harmful.”

For some commentators, these generally modest results are indicators that the search for effects is not a very fruitful enterprise ( Ferguson and Kilburn, 2010 ). For others, however, even small effects are worth documenting ( C. Anderson et al., 2010 ; Grabe and Drew, 2007 ). Given the multiple options for refining and varying the research strategy—changing samples, time frames, and measurement techniques; studying different variables relating to audiences, media types, genres, contents, and outcomes; testing different concepts and theories—there are endless possibilities for doing more of this kind of work in the search for more significant results.

Effects, however, have not only been researched and theorized in relation to the individual; they have also been discussed at the organizational level. Thus, and in relation to criminology’s subject matter, media content may affect the decisions made by the judiciary, bureaucrats, politicians, other media organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and so on. This has been one of the premises underlying studies of moral panics and scandals. For example, Cohen’s ([1972] 2003) initial work on a moral panic over youth violence in English seaside towns included extensive consideration, on the one hand, of the media treatment of the topic and, on the other, of official reactions to the “problem” (greater police control, harsher judicial treatment, and so on). Similarly, Greer and McLaughlin (2011 , 2012 ) described a “politics of outrage” that emerged in relation to the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service and that they linked to the resignation of one its commissioners and to complications in public order policing. The notion that the media have this kind of influence is also underwritten by the organizations themselves, most of which have a media strategy if not a media liaison office ( Mawby, 2010 ) and whose members sometimes cite the media as a factor that influences their decisions.

The methodological preference in this work is for case studies, but the latter have been limited by their reliance on the media as almost the sole data source. As colleagues working on individual effects would attest, any impact of the media on organizations cannot be demonstrated by focusing entirely on the media; additional determinants of decisions need to be examined. Researchers would need to observe for themselves what happens within organizations and assess the role of media alongside that of organizational resources, objectives, normative frameworks, the existence of institutional competitors, and the like. There is general agreement, both within criminology ( Surette, 2011 ) and outside of it ( Voltmer and Koch-Baumgartner, 2010 ), that this is a complex task and that, so far, the results have been equivocal: there are some processes or policy outcomes where significant media influence has been detected but many that seem completely impervious.

Despite these difficulties, criminologists doing empirical research on individual or organizational effects tend to be faithful to the communications canon. They argue that it would be premature to give up this line of inquiry ( Ditton et al., 2004 : 598) and often overstate the analytical significance of their findings (e.g., Callanan, 2005 ). What these media-centric studies reveal, however, is that the principal determinants of the phenomena under study lie elsewhere. For example, in their study of media usage and fear of crime Weitzer and Kubrin (2004) focused on four theories of media effects but hardly commented on the fact that in their results age, gender, race, and the local violent crime rate emerged as stronger predictors of fear. Another way of envisaging the peripheral role of the media in thinking about the causes of crime is to peruse any text on theories of criminal behavior, where discussion of the media is likely to make only a brief appearance and only in relation to social learning and anomie perspectives.

Several authors have correctly observed that the notion of effects needs to be critically assessed: people should not be seen as passive recipients of media messages but rather as individuals who intersect with these messages in different ways—purposefully, accidentally, attentively, distractedly, passionately, apathetically, and so on (e.g., Carrabine, 2008 ; Chiricos, Eschholz and Gertz, 1997 ; Sparks, 1992 ). And they have noted the importance of understanding how people make meaning out of the content they intersect with. For example, Rafter (2007) has suggested that the media provide individuals with a “tool kit” ( Swidler, 1986 ) of images and ideas about crime and justice that they use to develop their own discourse about these topics, a conception that grants much agency to the individual in the interpretation and subsequent use of media content. In making this kind of argument, these criminologists have drawn—explicitly or implicitly—on theories of audience and reception that have an established trajectory in media studies ( Livingstone and Das, 2013 ). But they have not studied audiences or reception, or provided inventories of interpretations, or typologies of media users (for a very limited exception see Chiricos, Eschholz, and Gertz, 1997 ). Instead, they have preferred to develop their own reading of media content and offer this as the likely reading among the audience. As suggestive as these readings might be, they can only be speculative: criminology as exegesis. To go beyond this demands sustained engagement with the concepts, theories, and methods of media and communications studies, for which matters of crime and justice simply become case material. There is no prima facie reason for thinking that the processes operating in the reception, interpretation, and use of media content on these topics are radically different to those operating in relation to, for example, the environment, politics, the economy, or fashion.

The Production of Media Representations of Crime and Justice

One of the stronger antidotes to the notion of passive media recipients lies in the concept of the market, a mechanism through which consumers express their preferences and cumulatively construct something like collective attention. From this perspective, it is the task of media organizations—which sit at the interface between demand and supply—to read market forces accurately and do their best to develop content that will attract sufficient attention. They may not always be successful in this: some content surprises because it garners so much attention; other content surprises because it garners so little. The most thorough examination of market forces in relation to crime and justice content was Hamilton’s (1998) , who argued that the presence or absence of violence in television programs is strongly determined by strategic attempts to attract particular audiences. Because the most frequent consumers of violence are viewers ages 18 to 34, channels and advertisers seek to target this group through programming schedules. More generally, crime and violence are thought to attract public attention and to have been used increasingly to maintain ratings ( Beale, 2006 ). In relation to news and reality TV shows, matters of crime and justice also have the added attraction of comparatively low production costs. Several criminologists and communications scholars have examined the journalistic practices which underlie the production of crime and justice news, including journalists’ routine reliance on specific sources for items of interest and the efforts of criminal justice agencies or stakeholders to influence and control what is reported ( Chermak and Weiss, 2005 ; Ericson, Baranek and Chan, 1987 , 1989 ; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994 ; Silverman, 2012 ). They have demonstrated quite convincingly that the agendas of media organizations and sources frequently overlap and are consciously made to do so but that there are also inherent tensions between media objectives on one side and public relations on the other (see also Doyle, 2003 ). While media professionals and sources can usually maintain cooperative relationships in the generation of newsworthy items about crime—focusing on the immediate, the dramatic, the novel, the celebrity offender, and so on ( Jewkes, 2004 )—that relationship will rapidly become conflictive if the media turn a critical eye on agencies’ shortcomings.

Of course, newsworthiness can only be an explanation, and a superficial one at that, of the demand for factual content on crime and justice. Deeper explanations, which would also cover the demand for fictional content, require a different approach. Thus criminologists and others have gestured at individual and collective social processes that translate into the “demand” for certain kinds of media content on crime and justice. For example, Sparks (1992 : 120) speculated that crime fiction “presupposes an inherent tension between anxiety and reassurance and that this constitutes a significant source of its appeal to the viewer.” Echoing the earlier influential work of Hall and colleagues (1978) , he posited a “displacement” process by which widespread social anxieties about economic and social change (notably unemployment and immigration) were partly addressed and partly resolved through narratives depicting the overturn of disorder (see also Welsh, Fleming, and Dowler, 2011 ). Moving more toward the terrain of psychoanalysis, other researchers have written of voyeurism and the fascination with mediated crime and violence ( Carrabine, 2008 ; Jewkes, 2004 ), or of offenders as scapegoats “onto which society projects ‘its darkest fears and desires’ (Schober, 2007:135)” ( Kohm and Greenhill, 2011 : 196). Intriguing as these claims are, they have yet to be substantiated by systematic empirical research. More problematically, they seek to hold media portrayals of crime and justice in the largely contradictory position of simultaneously being a result of consumers’ demands and a determinant of their perceptions—a difficulty that might be resolved by arguing for a positive feedback spiral between the two but that has not so far been recognized or addressed. This sort of problem derives from the adherence to a communications perspective that ultimately privileges a focus on media representations as determinants of individuals’ images of crime and justice.

The Media as a Materialization of Publicness

Studies on the production of media content relating to crime and justice offer a useful starting point for developing an additional framework to the communications perspective. For example, Ericson, Baranek, and Chan (1989) looked at media-source relations in terms of openness and closure in the genesis of news. While criminal justice agencies “patrol the facts” ( Ericson, 1989 ) by attempting to establish particular dividing lines between what is revealed and what is concealed, journalists and others are often trying to move those divides. For Ericson and colleagues, unable to free themselves entirely from the framework of communication, the significance of this process lay mainly in its consequences for the inventory of news items that would be offered to consumers ( Ericson, Baranek, and Chan, 1991 ). But it is also significant for what it indicates about the tensions between social visibility and invisibility in relation to crime and justice. One set of tensions relates to that which is withheld from public view and another to that which is brought into the public domain. Both are founded on a widely held lay theory of media functioning. Both work to maintain a notional boundary to the public domain; both connect significantly with the dynamics of crime and criminal justice; and both support the production of conventionality in public life.

When legal or moral censures of behavior are powerful, those who think they will attract such censure usually work to keep the offense clandestine and its authorship anonymous. Few seek to publicize their own wrongdoing, except politically motivated actors, who often accompany their actions with discursive challenges to the prevailing normative climate—positioning themselves, for example, as “freedom fighters,” not terrorists. Video surveillance, now so widespread and an easy source of material for the news and entertainment media, is mainly ignored and sometimes avoided by those committing crimes in public places ( Phillips, 1999 ). For a long time some individuals—fascinated with deviance—have kept photos, home movies, or sound recordings of their crimes, and these have been joined more recently by “happy slappers” ( Chan et al., 2012 ) and others who record their clips on mobile phones ( Kenyon and Rookwood, 2010 ). But they have rarely sought to make these materials public, even if some of them have subsequently entered the public domain. The result, quite obviously, is that those who think that they are, or might be, engaged in wrongdoing will try to avoid public disclosure.

For media organizations, the undermining of secrecy can be a powerful source of news or infotainment. In its more confrontational mode, this process takes the form of revelations and seeks its justification in the idea of accountability. It is typically used against other organizations (in the criminal justice sector, particularly the police or prisons) or against white-collar or higher status offenders, and it often produces scandals. Information or allegations arising from these revelations may then be examined by police or prosecutors to determine whether legal action should be taken. While investigative reporting is obviously a prominent topic in journalism studies ( de Burgh, 2008 ), criminology has so far paid scant attention to it. Which sorts of crimes and delicts are investigated and why, how journalists gather and make sense of information, the roles played by whistle-blowers, and freedom-of-information requests are just some of the topics that are ripe for investigation.

In its lighter mode, designed for infotainment rather than accountability, the undermining of secrecy is much shallower, sometimes bordering on illusion. Here the media seek to get close to offending behavior but are hampered by the evasive tactics of their protagonists or by legal and ethical constraints on what can be revealed. It is not so difficult, of course, to find convicted offenders who will talk about what they have done rather than simply use the media to proclaim their innocence. However, their media performance is likely to center on justifications ( Sykes and Matza, 1957 ), excuses ( Scott and Lyman, 1968 ), or apologies ( Birkbeck, 2013 ) for their behavior, all of which represent discursive strategies for moral alignment with the public domain. When it comes to individuals who are supposedly involved in ongoing criminal activity as part of a gang or organized crime group, anonymity may be a condition of collaboration, and generalities the order of the day in what they say. Media organizations cannot learn about, witness, or generate criminal behavior in the course of their activities without an obligation to report it (even if they may not always do so), and consequently their domain of inquiry is quite limited. Thus the police and other spokespersons for criminal justice, bureaucrats in other branches of government, politicians, journalists, occasionally researchers, and victims and witnesses are the sources for news items ( Frost and Phillips, 2011 ; Thompson, Young, and Burns, 2000 ). Rarely included are those labeled as offenders ( Pollak and Kubrin, 2007 ). The interesting questions relate to presentational strategy: that which is revealed and that which is not by people who publicly acknowledge their engagement in crime. Those questions cannot be answered by focusing on the media appearance itself but only by comparing media revelations with revelations made to researchers who interact with these individuals under different conditions (although with similar ethical and legal obligations) and often for much longer periods of time (e.g., Miranda, 2003 ).

Thus where wrongdoers do not entirely evade public attention there seem to be many moral incentives that support the construction of accounts or apologies for their crimes. But even for the small group of rebels, terrorists, or others who would seek to defend their crimes or encourage others to join them there are legal and institutional barriers to getting a hearing. Media space is well policed, in order to exclude content that is considered undesirable. Schmid and De Graaf (1982 : 165), for example, cited rules within the CBS News organization that sought to avoid providing “an excessive platform for the terrorist/kidnapper”; while Miller (1984) reported a similar approach by the BBC to television coverage of the Provisional IRA in the United Kingdom. The object is to avoid incitement to crime—a crime itself—by publicizing nothing in the way of encouragement. In the United States, the First Amendment right to free speech has been curtailed by the courts when incitement to crime is argued to be in play ( Montz, 2002 ); in the United Kingdom, the Broadcasting Act of 1990 prohibited the dissemination of anything that “is likely to encourage or incite to crime or lead to disorder” ( Ofcom, 2013 ). Of course, this type of legislative control is based on a theory of noxious media effects, and its purview extends beyond the news to fictional portrayals of crime ( Montz, 2002 ). Criminology could do much by developing a critical perspective on the notion of incitement to crime and setting out the limitations to any simplistic view of media effects in this regard.

The right to free speech is also debated in relation to the media’s coverage of police investigations and criminal trials. In interviews with media representatives, witnesses may subtly change their accounts of events in order to comply with the interests of the news organization. Reports with information gathered by journalists about crimes, victims, or offenders may affect the perceptions and judgments of those involved in processing the case, particularly jurors (e.g., Spano, Groscup, and Penrod, 2011 ). Closure of proceedings, jury sequestering, and contempt of court are the measures typically used to control publicity in criminal cases, often aimed at limiting the perceived undesirable effects of the media (e.g., Conboy and Scott, 1996 ). Once again, there is scope for criminology to review the trends in, and characteristics of, this kind of control but from a theoretical rather than a normative perspective.

A concern for noxious effects also crystallizes in the controls on materials considered to be offensive to “good taste” and “decency” ( Shaw, 1999 ). Here the worry is less about the posterior effects of media content than about the reactions provoked at the moment of its reception: readers, listeners, or viewers may be shocked, offended, or repulsed ( Taylor, 1998 ). An associated concern is with the dignified treatment of those in the frame: too close an examination of grief, harm, or vulnerability may be felt to invade their privacy ( Fullerton and Patterson, 2006 ). Advocates, commentators, social critics, journalists, and legal scholars have examined the history, merits, and problems of this type of control (e.g., Couvares, 2006 ; Tait, 2009 ), but criminologists have not looked at censorship or control—whether external or self-imposed—of media content. Doing so would be less the addition of one more voice in the normative or historical debate about the appropriateness of particular media contents than an extended exploration of the contours of control: what material relating to crime or justice is felt to be inappropriate and why? Scholars in other disciplines (e.g., Campbell, 2004 ; Tait, 2008 ) have assembled some important observations relating to graphic portrayals of violence and death and have reflected on their uses, meanings, and moral significance, but these would need to be reexamined to understand the dynamics of revelation and concealment around crime. Campbell, for example, discussed the racist murder of James Byrd in Texas by three men who dragged him behind their truck for three miles. He noted the effects of this ordeal on the body of the victim—flesh worn down to the bone, ribs broken, head torn off, and so on—and the unsparing detail in the photographs of the deceased. These pictures were not carried by the news media, and the jurors found them “horrendous, and had to force themselves to look” (58). Criminologists could doubtless join other scholars here in considering whether these images should have been made public or what emotions they provoked in those who saw them, but a central criminological question—probably overlooked by other disciplines—concerns the understanding of concealment. Why are such graphic accounts of violence not made public? How does the boundary between revelation and concealment affect the meanings and censure brought to bear on these events? Within criminology, some purchase on this type of question can be gained through historical studies of the concealment of executions (e.g., Foucault, 1979 ; Lofland, 1975 ; Sarat and Schuster, 1995 ), but explanations—while very suggestive—are still quite speculative and topically focused. Their relevance would also have to be explored in relation to nonstate violence and to crimes that do not involve force but fraud or stealth.

Sociologist William Gamson (1988 : 162) once remarked that “There is some residue of [a lay theory of media effects] in all of us.” This lay theory accords great influence to the media because it equates publicness with collective attention and suggestibility. Systematic research, however, has failed to confirm the equation: in point of fact, media effects are mediated by social and psychological variables. Criminologists know this (through their reading of the extant literature) and have confirmed it for themselves (through their own studies of the media); nevertheless, they have largely continued to work within a communications perspective that is insinuated by the lay theory of media effects. They have thus been inattentive to an alternative conceptualization of the media as the construction of publicness and to the questions about the revelation and concealment of crime and criminal justice that thereby arise. Those questions lead in a number of different directions, offering additional lines of inquiry that look to be at least as productive as those currently pursued. They also imply a decentering of the media within the analytical frame, for revelation and concealment are inherent in every type of public domain, from street life to mass meetings. It is the visibility and accessibility of the media that makes them a convenient object for study.

Normative debates about “appropriate” media content on crime and justice reflect the importance accorded to the character of the public domain. In fact, the tensions relating to revelation and concealment spring from a desire to ensure that publicness is an exercise in conventionality, not deviance. This is reflected at the level of discourse, where the identities talked into being in the news are those of respectability; the community created in words and images is that of civil society; and the experience narrated is that of a melodramatic conflict between good and bad ( Birkbeck, 2013 ). Even fictional renderings of crime could be seen as rhetorics of conventionality: “Given the primacy of the hero, villains and their villainies may be relatively incidental” ( Sparks, 1992 : 147). And although the outcome of conflicts between good and bad may sometimes be ambiguous, the situation does not become more ambivalent; it simply becomes bleaker: “evil is ubiquitous, crime intractable, the criminal justice system impotent and moral redemption impossible” ( Rafter, 2007 : 409). Yet even a cursory glance at the media hints at the narrowness and superficiality of current convention. Surely there are better, more satisfying ways of discoursing on crime and justice.

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• Published: 02 April 2020

Crime and its fear in social media

• Rafael Prieto Curiel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0738-2633 1 ,
• Stefano Cresci   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0170-2445 2 ,
• Cristina Ioana Muntean 3 &
• Steven Richard Bishop 4  

Palgrave Communications volume  6 , Article number:  57 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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• Complex networks
• Criminology
• Cultural and media studies

Social media posts incorporate real-time information that has, elsewhere, been exploited to predict social trends. This paper considers whether such information can be useful in relation to crime and fear of crime. A large number of tweets were collected from the 18 largest Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, over a period of 70 days. These tweets are then classified as being crime-related or not and additional information is extracted, including the type of crime and where possible, any geo-location at a city level. From the analysis of collected data, it is established that around 15 out of every 1000 tweets have text related to a crime, or fear of crime. The frequency of tweets related to crime is then compared against the number of murders, the murder rate, or the level of fear of crime as recorded in surveys. Results show that, like mass media, such as newspapers, social media suffer from a strong bias towards violent or sexual crimes. Furthermore, social media messages are not highly correlated with crime. Thus, social media is shown not to be highly useful for detecting trends in crime itself, but what they do demonstrate is rather a reflection of the level of the fear of crime.

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Introduction

The social media revolution.

The use of social media completely revolutionised the way in which information is now shared and consumed, and is now a relevant part of government agencies and companies (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010 ). Social media has given its users the ability to share content and opinions without having to depend on traditional and centralised news media outlets, potentially obtaining a more democratic distribution of opinions, offering users the ability to reach a large proportion of the population (Kwak et al., 2010 ).

Data collected from social media is a valuable input to analyse the flow of information, opinions and sentiments, and by detecting who shares what and how frequently. Millions (or perhaps even billions) of posts or tweets have been used to detect social media activism (Xu et al., 2014 ), to assist emergency responders (Avvenuti et al., 2016 , 2018 ), to analyse the spread of a disease (Lampos and Cristianini, 2012 ), to detect the role of different users in the network (Martinez Teutle, 2010 ) and their behaviour (Cresci et al., 2020 ; Mazza et al., 2019 ), to quantify media coverage (Prieto Curiel et al., 2019 ), to provide indications for tourists (Barchiesi et al., 2015a , b ; Cresci, 2014 ; Muntean et al., 2015 ), to detect road traffic (D’Andrea et al., 2015 ), exposure to cross-ideological contents (Himelboim et al., 2013 ), access to political information (Himelboim et al., 2013 ) and political participation (Ausserhofer and Maireder, 2013 ), perception on social phenomena such as migration flows (Coletto, 2017 ), and even to detect the popularity of different types of food (Amato, 2017 ) and to construct a real-time measure of happiness or hedonometer (Dodds et al., 2011 ). Although most of what is shared in social media are not news, nor posts related to public issues, it has nonetheless become, for some, one of the main sources of political information and news (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2012 ).

However, is the information from social media a fairly good representation of reality? Does the fact that “everyone can post something” on Twitter or Facebook translates into a more accurate description of reality than the traditional media? How to measure the bias that exists in social media?

Arguably, there is no other type of social event, which is both regularly and rigorously measured and, at the same time, promotes traditional media and users to post comments on social media as crime is. Here, we use crime as the object to quantify social media and to link it with traditional media and with the observed reality. Crime itself is a complex phenomenon with many unexpected social behaviours, which are difficult to understand, control and, sometimes, even to quantify (Helbing, 2015 ). For example, enforcing longer prison sentences or harsher punishments might not decrease crime rates (Becker, 1968 ); allocating more police might not reduce crime via deterrence (Kleck and Barnes, 2014 ), and a city with higher levels of crime might be perceived as being more secure (Prieto Curiel and Bishop, 2016 ). Crime and fear of crime have many non-linear elements (D’Orsogna and Perc, 2015 ; Gordon, 2010 ); and so here, we collect millions of tweets and detect whether crime is expressed in social media, we analyse which types of account publish crime-related posts and quantify whether more crime or more fear of crime at a city and country level are correlated with more expressions of crime in social media, and we compare the amount of crime that is expressed in social media with mass media.

Our results show that crime rarely appears on social media and it is usually mentioned by only a few users. Tweets about crime come mainly from news agencies and reporters, and exhibit the same reporting biases as the mass media towards violence, sexual crime and murders, and this almost mimics what was observed on mass media, such as printed newspapers.

We then compare the quantity of social media expressions of crime with observed trends of crime and fear of crime. Although there is a significant time discrepancy between the crime data and the collected social media posts, assuming that high-crime areas remain with a similar insecurity problem for some time, and that regions perceived as being insecure also remain with the same problem, results show that there is little correlation between crime and social media posts, but social media posts are related to the fear of crime of a region.

Traditional media miss-represents criminal reality

To be newsworthy, social events must capture the attention of the viewer/reader and so they have to be rare, or timely, or unexpected, or alternatively have some special significance (Chermak and Gruenewald, 2006 ). However, the majority of crimes do not have these attributes with many being merely attempted crime or do not have serious consequences (Skogan, 1987 ). Traditional media gives a distorted version of the crimes within a city with a significant bias towards violence (Hollis and Downey, 2017 ).

As a result, less than 1 out of 400 crimes is featured in the traditional news (Chadee and Ditton, 2005 ), and these are usually crimes with violence or with a sexual component, outweighing non-violent crimes, even though non-violent crimes are much more frequent (Ditton and Duffy, 1983 ). For instance, considering the ten most popular printed daily newspapers published in the UK for a period of 4 weeks in 1989, it was found that nearly 65% of the space that was devoted to crime was related to personal violence, whereas official statistics reported that only 6% of crimes involved violence (Dickinson, 1993 ). Similarly, taking 25 editions of newspapers in cities of the USA, it was found that nearly 30% of crime stories were murders, where in fact only 0.02% of the crimes are murders (Liska and Baccaglini, 1990 ).

Is crime also miss-represented in social media?

There are significant differences between what is published in traditional media, and what is posted on social media. For instance, traditional media typically covers major disasters in more depth than social media (Olteanu et al., 2015 ). In terms of crime, social media could provide a more accurate description of the crime suffered in a country or a city than traditional media does. Victims, indirect victims, and witnesses might be inclined to share their thoughts after experiencing a crime (Cresci et al., 2018 ), regardless of whether that crime was minor or not, so that social media might be able to provide a more accurate version of the criminal reality of a city. Leaving aside the potential readability issues (Temnikova et al., 2015 ) and fake news (Del Vicario, 2016 ; Mendoza et al., 2010 ), social media could potentially provide a powerful tool for detecting crime trends and patterns.

Social media could also provide a useful source of information for detecting and measuring fear of crime. Although a clear relationship between crime and its fear is perhaps expected, there is often a mismatch between fear of crime and the actual crime suffered in a city (Prieto Curiel and Bishop, 2016 ; Skogan, 1987 ), so that people often fear crime even if they are immune to suffering any (Prieto Curiel and Bishop, 2017 ). Traditional ways of measuring fear of crime frequently depend on costly victimisation surveys (Carro et al., 2010 ; Ferraro and Grange, 1987 ; Hale, 1996 ), which have a considerable time delay between the date when the study is conducted and when the data is available for analysis. However, with social media, we could obtain an almost immediate reflection of the fear of crime in a city. Users of social media might express their concerns and fears of crime more frequently in a more dangerous city, enabling us to understand how we arrive at our perception of security (Kounadi et al., 2015 ).

Therefore, social media could be a powerful tool for measuring crime trends and patterns but only if it is, in fact, related to crime, or social media could help us understand the fear of crime and perceptions of security but only if it is, in fact, related to actual fear of crime. Also, social media could be used at a city level, both in terms of crime and fear of crime, if there are enough tweets related to crime and if they are meaningfully associated with the local problems of insecurity.

Other experiences using big data in crime analysis

There are successful attempts to unleash the “wisdom of crowds” expressed in social media in the context of crime analysis (Bendler et al., 2014 ), mainly with the idea of obtaining information about crime and fear of crime from new sources of information (Solymosi and Bowers, 2018 ). Some platforms have been developed exclusively to crowdsource information about crime, for instance, Postacrime.com , CityWatch (Cvijikj et al., 2015 ) or a fear of crime application (Solymosi et al., 2015 ).

However, most of the data from social media is produced as a digital byproduct of a platform, such as Facebook or Twitter (Hilbert, 2016 ), and so applications of social media to crime analysis face some serious challenges. Firstly, not everything posted on social media is true (Mendoza et al., 2010 ); secondly, posts might be difficult to understand due to the use of abbreviations, hashtags, typos, or the lack of connecting words and more (Temnikova et al., 2015 ). Also, although social media posts offer a rapid distribution of information, it was found that there is frequently a delay, of possibly several months, in the case of crime-related posts in social media (Kounadi et al., 2015 ), so that, in fact, the most up-to-date posts are not necessarily a reflection of the current crime and security situation of a city.

What information has been extracted from big data in the context of crime

Firstly, the location of published content in social media. Without analysing the text contained, the density of tweets per unit of area has been used to identify the correlation between Twitter users and crime rates (Bendler et al., 2014 ), and for detecting risky areas on a city, showing that indeed hotspots move when the density of tweets is considered (Malleson and Andresen, 2015 ). Social media is used as a proxy for a mobile population density.

Secondly, by analysing the contents of the published messages. For instance, by looking at topics on tweets, the prediction of the locations of certain types of crimes is claimed to be improved (Gerber, 2014 ) with even further improvements, if the weather conditions are included in the model (Chen et al., 2015 ). By detecting whether a tweet contains indicators of disorder or decay (with words such as “dumping”), Twitter data increases the variance explained in crime estimation models (Williams et al., 2017 ). Reports to fix street disorders, such as graffiti, were successfully used as signals correlated with fear of crime (Solymosi et al., 2018 ). Also, by detecting tweets which contain at least one violence-related word, the attitudes of the audience around stadiums were analysed (Ristea et al., 2017 ). In a similar manner, the tweets from a news agency were analysed to “predict” hit-and-run crimes in a city in the USA (Wang et al., 2012 ).

Thirdly, the structure of the network, who follows who, who retweets who, or who was nearby, has revealed structures of organised crime, the role they might play and which actors play a central role a corruption network (Requião da Cunha, 2018 ).

Finally, social media has also been used to analyse the reaction of the audience to a specific incident. For instance, in the case of the Paris attacks in 2015 and after several major earthquakes, it was detected that event-related tweets triggered more retweets than those expressing support, possibly due to a higher information content (Avvenuti et al., 2017 ; Cvetojevic and Hochmair, 2018 ), and also tweets with images received higher retweets.

Other relevant uses of big data and social media in crime analysis and prevention have been implemented, for instance, using data from Foursquare (Kadar and Pletikosa, 2018 ), and for fraud detection (Bello-Orgaz et al., 2016 ) or to detect the marketing and distribution of illicit drugs (Watters and Phair, 2012 ) or for crowdsourcing information related to specific incidents, such as the Boston Marathon bombing (Markowsky, 2013 ). Also, by looking at tweets related to 98 homicides in London, it was detected that nearly half of the users are within a few kilometres of the location of the incident, but also <10% of those tweets are published on the actual day of the murder, and so there is a considerable time delay, often, months, between a specific crime and tweets related to it (Kounadi et al., 2015 ).

Although there are many more applications of big data and social media in crime science (Chan and Bennett Moses, 2016 ), and more of them will appear as new platforms are developed, there are certain challenges about establishing the usefulness of social media in a crime setting.

Social media is not a fair representation of the whole population

Twitter is incredibly useful for spreading information or personal views but it is not perfectly representative as it does not provide a random sample of the population since not everyone uses the service (for example, <10% of the population in the case of Mexico) plus, even of those that do use it, there is likely to be an age bias towards the 25- to 45-year-old age group. What is more, among those who do use Twitter, just gleaning the number of tweets on a particular topic does not provide a random sample of opinions from its users since some accounts post dozens of tweets per day, while others post with a much lower frequency. Moreover, users with the highest fear of crime, or involved users who are promoting a particular view, are more likely to post tweets about crime.

Also, it is important to note that some tweets might reach a larger audience than others since accounts run by organisations have greater numbers of followers (Mendoza et al., 2010 ). Hence it is likely that merely measuring the number of tweets that include an expression of crime or fear, alone and weighted equally (an approach, which has been useful elsewhere), is not representative of actual crime taking place. Bearing in mind that some information promulgated by tweets might not even be true (Del Vicario, 2016 ), this again reinforces the fact that the collection of tweets is not necessarily a reflection of reality and do not express the “true picture”.

Data and methods

The objective here is to detect expressions of crime and fear of crime in social media, measure them and compare them with the actual crime suffered. Three sources of information are used for such comparisons: Twitter data, crime data and fear of crime data.

Data from Twitter

Data from Twitter users in 18 Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America Footnote 1 were collected with this choice of target group selected for several reasons. Firstly, there are roughly 400 million people who have a shared Spanish language among which there is a high level of internet users Footnote 2 . Secondly, the data spans a number of countries allowing sufficient breadth so that we can compare one country with another, where there might be different social norms and crime rates, and additionally ensure that the data will not be dominated by local trends. And finally, crime is one of the most relevant problems suffered by the whole region, with 42 of the world’s 50 most violent cities located in Latin America Footnote 3 .

Twitter posts

The data used in this study were collected using Twitter’s Streaming API Footnote 4 between May 22 and July 30 2017 (70 days). During this time, all geo-located tweets shared from within the 18 Spanish-speaking countries from Latin America were initially retained, while retweets were not considered. This resulted in a dataset of 32,513,684 distinct tweets, which will be later classified, 27% of them shared from Mexico, 23% from Argentina, 12% from Colombia, and the rest from smaller countries.

Whenever possible, the city from which the tweet was published was also recorded so that 64 of the larger cities could be considered separately. As a result, we obtained 2,678,783 tweets (8.2% of the total) with a city level geographic resolution.

Identifying and classifying crime-related tweets

To identify that a tweet was crime-related, an extensive list of 392 words and hashtags consisting of terms related to crime, organised crime, or fear of crime was constructed, in an incremental way, by reading tweets and news related to crime. The list includes gender and singular-plural variations, such as “murder”, or “stolen” and other words, which have a crime connotation. In the list (see the Supplementary Information ), 274 are in Spanish and the rest are in English (Prieto Curiel et al., 2018a ).

Each word in the list was then assigned to different crime categories, defined as “violence-related”, “property-crime-related”, “organised-crime-related”, “sexual-crime-related”, “murder-related” and “gun-related”, where some words can be assigned to more than one category.

If a tweet contains any of the 392 words related to crime, the post is considered to be crime-related . In addition, if the tweet contains a word from a specific category, then the tweet is also considered to be part of that category. Notice that categories might have a considerable overlap or might even be fully contained, for instance, murder-related tweets are fully contained in the category of violence-related tweets.

A similar technique, detecting the use of words such as “food” or “wedding” allowed the construction of a real-time measure of happiness (Dodds et al., 2011 ), which showed weekly and daily cycles of happiness. In terms of crime, detecting whether a tweet includes words such as “violence”, was used to classify tweets as “crime-tweets” (Ristea et al., 2017 ).

Not all “crime-related” tweets are related to crime

The list of words and the methodology was designed thinking of ways in which it could be used in real-time, for instance, by the Police Department. There are two types of error that could emerge by classifying tweets based on whether or not they contain a word from the list: identifying a tweet to be related to crime when it is not, and not classifying a tweet to be related to crime when it was.

The second type of error, which are tweets meant to be related to crime but that did not include words on the list, is relevant (and perhaps worse than the other type of mismatch), as the emergency would not be dispatched. This type of error represents all expressions of fear of crime, call for emergencies and crime reports, which the Police would ignore with our method. However, by constructing an extensive list of crime-related words, this type of error is considered to be kept to a minimum. Also, in case of a real-time application, adding some words to the list (for example, the name of a newly organised crime group) would keep this type of error in a minimum level.

The first type of error (classifying a tweet as crime-related when it has no relationship with crime) has little impact in terms of a real-time application, as the Police Department would simply not dispatch units, not follow up on the tweet and manually read that it might be related to football or anything else (similar to a fake emergency call to the 911). We use this type of error to measure the precision of our method.

Some tweets might contain a phrase such as “I would kill for a holiday right now” or similar expressions that are not actually related to crime or to fear of crime. To measure the frequency of this type of mismatch, 3000 crime-related tweets from different countries were individually read and manually analysed to determine if the post was actually related to crime or not. The manual classification of the 3000 tweets also required website visits if the post included a link or a visual inspection of the media included (such as photos or videos). The 3000 annotated tweets were randomly picked across different dates, places, and for different categories of crime and the false-positive rate was analysed.

Roughly 66% of the 3000 crime-related tweets were manually found to be related to crime, or an expression of fear of crime, or a demand for justice or security. While this could be tested for different cities or countries or, for instance, times of the day or days of the week, it is a very time-consuming test, which would help us identify some words that could be dropped from the list, since they are more frequently used in a non-criminal context. Although a learning technique could be used, or a more sophisticated text-analysis technique, including n grams, for instance, for some tweets it is still not easy to determine whether or not the post was related to crime, even if it was manually read. Similar methods of validation have used a smaller number of annotations to check and quantify their results (Pak and Paroubek, 2010 , 2011 ; Ritter et al., 2011 ) and here, instead of refining the technique to determine whether a person is expressing crime or fear of crime, we assume that this potential mismatch is observed for all tweets. With a 95% confidence interval, the error is 1.8%, meaning that roughly between 64 and 68% of all tweets identified automatically as crime-related tweets are actually associated with crime.

It is assumed that two-thirds of the crime-related tweets are actually associated with crime (and the other third is just an expression of something else), and this is assumed to be uniform across all tweets considered to be crime-related (Pak and Paroubek, 2010 , 2011 ; Ritter et al., 2011 ).

Crime data at a national level

Unfortunately, the majority of crimes are not reported to the police and any cross-national comparison strongly depends on the definitions used for different types of crime. Therefore, murders (intentional homicides) are used for comparing between different countries since they are, perhaps, the most reliable way to compare the levels of crime. The most up-to-date data per country for the number of murders, as well as the number per 100,000 inhabitants, is published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Footnote 5 . The number of murders for the year 2015 is available for most of the countries analysed although, in some cases, it reflects data from previous years.

Fear of crime is also analysed, using the Latin American Public Opinion Project LAPOP Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) ( 2017 ), which includes a question Thinking of your daily life, how much fear do you have being a direct victim of homicide? Do you feel a lot of fear, some fear, little fear or not fear at all? , and answers are combined to produce a fear of crime index (Tseloni, 2007 ). More details about the LAPOP survey are available in the Supplementary information .

Crime data at city level

Comparing the actual crimes suffered in each metropolitan area to events expressed in social media at a city level is complicated with respect to both variables. Unfortunately, a comparison between cities from different countries is not possible due to the varying definitions of crime, ways of measuring crime, and significant, but varying, issues with unreported crime.

At a national level, there are some resources, such as victimisation surveys, but unfortunately, not all countries have them and it is often difficult to compare between two different surveys with different types of questions. At a regional level, the LAPOP survey is very useful, but it is not representative at a metropolitan level and therefore, it cannot be used either. For the social media posts, a more local dimension, such as cities, is complicated since only a small number of users publish their location. Also, it was found that the accounts that post their location might be local newspapers, which tweet about crime much more frequently than a general user would, and creates a strong bias in some cities.

Despite the aforementioned issues, here, a focus on Mexico is useful since good data is available to compare between the 23 metropolitan areas with at least 750,000 inhabitants. A victimisation survey from Mexico Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción sobre Seguridad Pública, ENVIPE (Encuesta, 2016 ) provides estimates for the crime rates suffered by the population of each city, divided into different types of crime, and provides a metric for the population who have fear of crime in their city and therefore, it allows us to quantify the level of crime and fear of crime in each of the 23 cities using the same definitions. The victimisation survey in Mexico is for 2016 so that again, the time intervals between the two data sources do not match. More details about ENVIPE are available in the Supplementary information .

Temporal miss-alignment of the data

Ideally, spatial and temporal alignments of the crime data and the social media data should be observed, but this is not the case.

One of the most difficult parts of the analysis is that there is a time delay between the moment in which tweets are posted, the moment in which crimes were suffered and the time in which the crime data (such as reports and surveys) is available. However, this should always be the case. For example, tweets were collected in London to detect how people reacted to a murder on social media (Kounadi et al., 2015 ) and it was detected that tweets were often published months after the crime happened while less than 10% of the tweets related to a homicide are published on the actual day of the murder, and so there is a considerable time delay, often, of months, from the social media data.

Also, from the crime data, victimisation surveys, which allow a full analysis of the suffered crime, have a delay of several months between the person suffered any crime and the time in which the data is available to conduct research. Thus, there is a delay in the tweets but also a different delay with respect to the crime data and this is a natural part of social media studies. The time delay is an unavoidable part of any analysis to compare and measure the attention that society puts on different topics and events.

However, although there is a significant and unavoidable temporal miss-alignment between the crime data and the Twitter data, overall trends for the level of crime in a country do not have drastic changes from one year to the next one (Prieto Curiel and Bishop, 2016 ), and a similar thing happens with the perception of insecurity, in which a region perceived as insecure, remains with the same problem even if the crime rates drop (Prieto Curiel and Bishop, 2017 ), so even with the temporal miss-alignment, crime and fear of crime data might still be considered as a proxy to determine a general level of crime and insecurity observed in a region.

Crime portrayed on social media

Collecting 32 million tweets and then classifying them as being related to crime gives a quantification of crime-related topics in social media. This quantity is considered per city and per country, and it is analysed by the proportion of tweets for comparability purposes.

The amount of crime-related tweets and other categories (violence-related, murder-related, property crime-related, etc) is compared to crime data and fear of crime data from each region (city and country). Although we do not link a tweet with a specific crime, here the analysis is conducted with respect to the frequency of crime-related tweets, so that we analyse why a city has more posts related to crime than others.

Roughly 1.5% of the tweets are crime-related

Based on the approach outlined, from the 32 million tweets collected, 501,057 were deemed to be crime-related. Thus, 15.41 tweets out of 1000 tweets posted in the major Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America are considered to be related to crime. The aggregated number of crime-related tweets per city and per country is available in a public repository (Prieto Curiel et al., 2018b ).

During the 70 days over which data was collected, there are 317.5 tweets posted every minute from the 18 countries considered and from these tweets, five are crime-related.

Violence is most common crime-related tweet

Turning now to the issue of which crime category of the tweets is more prevalent, the most frequent category is the one designated as violence-related tweets with 6.51 out of 1000 tweets (Fig. 1 ).

The most frequent crime-related tweet is violence-related forming more than 40% of the collected tweets.

We found that violent-related tweets were 3.7 times more frequent than property-crime tweets. Also, murder-related tweets are 2.3 times more frequent than property-crime tweets.

Every minute, there are five crime-related tweets posted within the 18 countries in Latin America and every minute, there are two violence-related tweets.

Different countries have different expressions of crime in social media (Fig. 2 ). In Venezuela, nearly 40 out of 1000 tweets are related to crime, whereas Nicaragua, Panama, Bolivia and Costa Rica have less than 10 out of 1000.

For each country, different categories of crime-related tweets are considered, including violence-related tweets, murder-related tweets and others. In Venezuela, 38.1 crime-related tweets per 1,000 are published, but the number is much smaller for other countries in the region.

Social media is just as biased as traditional media with respect to crime

In the tweets collected, 28.3% of the crime-related tweets are related to murder although murder accounts for only 0.072% of the crimes suffered in Mexico. Similarly, taking 25 editions of newspapers in the USA, it was found that nearly 30% of the crime stories were murder, but it represents only 0.02% of crimes (Liska and Baccaglini, 1990 ). Violent deaths, such as homicide, suicide or deaths by terrorism, are overrepresented in the news Footnote 6 and they also overrepresented in social media.

Only a few accounts publish crime-related tweets

Most of the accounts do not post anything related to crime. In Latin America, 90% of the active users Footnote 7 detected during 70 days did not publish anything related to crime or violence, so that only 10% of the accounts post tweets related to crime, varying from 2% in Cuba, 7% in Mexico and up to 20% in Venezuela.

There are just a few accounts that publish the majority of the crime-related tweets. A similar situation was encountered before with other types of social media, in which a few super-contributors publish the majority of the posts (Solymosi et al., 2018 ). The top 1% of the users post 61% of the crime-related tweets; the corresponding top 1% of the users post 62% of the violence-related tweets but the top 1% of the users (meaning, those who publish more frequently) only post 35% of the tweets. Thus, crime-related tweets have a much higher concentration than regular tweets. A way in which the over-influence (or the concentration) can be formally measured is with the Gini coefficient of the number of tweets, the Gini coefficient of the crime-related and the Gini coefficient of the violence-related tweets, which goes from 0.838 for all tweets in Latin America to 0.965 for crime-related tweets (Fig. 3 ). This means that indeed, crime is, in general, only mentioned by some accounts with a very low frequency and by very few accounts (news agencies, institutions, and involved users) with a very high frequency.

The Gini coefficient is a metric frequently used to measure income inequality and it is obtained by comparing the observed distribution of wealth against the hypothetical case in which all individuals have the same wealth. Here, the Gini coefficient is computed by comparing the number of tweets per account against the case in which all accounts publish the same number of tweets. The lowest Gini coefficient means that more users engage with crime issues in their country.

Mass media has a strong influence on social media

Taking a sample of 100 crime-related tweets and manually labelling the types of accounts which post them, it is possible to classify and detect which users publish most of the crime-related tweets. Results show that 33% of the crime-related tweets are posted either by the Twitter account of a newspaper or by a journalist.

Also by looking at the accounts which publish crime-related tweets, accounts who engage, promote or complain about security-related issues in Latin America were detected and labelled as being “involved users”. They are not the individuals who suffer first or second-hand victimisation (so, not the victims or direct witnesses), but are individuals who protest against the levels of insecurity or a specific crime. Although there is no clear distinction between involved users and ordinary accounts, when the Twitter profiles were manually sorted by their type of engagement, an account was considered to be an involved users if: they follow government and institutional accounts, they follow newspapers and other sources of information and more importantly, if they engage frequently with different crimes or if they engage with different issues (including security, but also, gender equality, corruption issues, air pollution and climate change, among many others). For most of the users that were manually classified, their “involvement” was clear and constantly observed on their tweets and their engagement with other social media users. Involved users publish 22% of the crime-related tweets.

In most of the cases, when a specific crime is mentioned by an “involved user”, the tweet also contains a link to the information source and the majority referred to a traditional media website. Similar to what has been encountered in the political debate (Himelboim et al., 2013 ), traditional media has a strong impact on social media in terms of what is posted related to crime, either directly (33% of the crime-related tweets) or though involved users (22% of the crime-related tweets).

Besides 33% of the crime-related tweets being published by journalists and accounts, which belong to mass media outlets and 22% of the crime-related tweets published by accounts labelled as “involved users”, also 7% of the crime-related tweets are published by government accounts (either an account which belongs to the Police, the Mayor of a city or similar types of accounts). Therefore, only 38% of the crime-related tweets are posted by “regular” users (or not by involved users).

Social media against reality in terms of crime

Comparing the number of crime-related tweets with the observed levels of crime and fear of crime at country level, let us detect if there is any correlation between crime and what is portrayed on social media. Although there is a temporal misalignment of the data, there are some stable patterns in terms of crime and fear of crime. For instance, according to the World Bank, the intentional homicide rate (per 100,000 people) between 2007 and 2016 of Chile ranges between 2.5 and 3.7, the rate of Uruguay ranges between 5.8 and 8.5, the rate of Brazil ranges between 21.9 and 29.5 and the rate of Honduras ranges between 46.5 and 80.1 Footnote 8 with no overlap between these four countries during a period of 10 years.

At a national level more murders means more crime-related tweets

The correlation between the number of crime-related tweets, violence-related tweets and murder-related tweets out of 1000 tweets posted, against the number of murders, considering the 18 countries shows a positive relationship between them so that countries with a higher number of murders are also expected to have more crime-related tweets (expressed as a linear model in Fig. 4 ). Results show that, in general, countries with a higher number of murders, murder rate and fear of crime are more likely to have crime-related, violence-related, and murder-related tweets.

Crime-related, violence-related, murder-related and property-crime-related tweets per 1000 in the 18 countries in Latin America against the yearly number of murders, the number of murders per 100,000 (murder rate), the fear of crime index and the percentage of people with strong fear.

Broadly speaking, one murder in Latin America is associated with 8.4 murder-related tweets, 13.7 violence-related tweets, and 32.4 crime-related tweets. This is, perhaps, as expected, since it is likely that murders are covered by national news media outlets who then post the event on their own social media, which then might be reproduced by involved users, so that countries with more murders are also expected to have more tweets related to crime.

Note that the population size of countries varies considerably and, therefore, we also compare the number of murders per 100,000 people to take into account the impact of the size of the country (Fig. 4 ). The correlation between the number of crime-related tweets, violence-related tweets, and murder-related tweets per 1000 tweets posted against the number of murders per 100,000 people shows that countries with a higher murder rate are also more likely to observe more tweets related to crime, violence, and murder.

Venezuela is the country with the highest fear of crime (although not the highest number of murders or murder rate) and it is also the country with the highest number of crime-related tweets per 1000 and violence-related tweets per 1000 (Fig. 4 ). Also, Venezuela is the country with the highest percentage of users with crime-related tweets and the country in which crime and violence-related tweets are less concentrated (Fig. 3 ).

Social media against reality in Mexico

Considering only the tweets from Mexico, it is possible to compare the number of posts related to different types of crime with what is actually suffered in the country.

According to the Mexican victimisation survey ENVIPE (Encuesta, 2016 ), for every murder there are roughly 34 crimes with a sexual component (including rape, rape attempts, harassment, exhibitionism); 917 property crimes (including violent and non-violent crimes in which property is stolen from the victim, such as car theft, robbery of a person, burglary and others), and 1391 crimes including all types of crime, but this is far from what is portrayed on social media. Although there is a temporal misalignment between the posts on social media and the victimisation survey, assuming that the number of crimes remains roughly constant, results show that in Mexico:

there are 1.44 crime-related tweets for every 100 crimes suffered, regardless of whether or not the crimes were violent or with a sexual component;

there are 0.21 property-crime-related tweets for every 100 property crimes suffered in the country;

there are 1.41 sexual-crime-related tweets for every 100 sexual crimes suffered in the country; and

there are 567.5 murder-related tweets for every 100 murders suffered in the country.

Although the number of crimes has fluctuations, which also makes the above quantifications difficult to make, it does show the emphasis observed in terms of crime on social media.

Assuming that tweets are a direct response to a specific type of crime, results show that a crime with a sexual component is tweeted 6.6 times more frequently than property crimes are posted. Murders are tweeted 401 times more frequently than sexual crimes (Fig. 5 ).

Comparing different types of crime suffered in Mexico against the frequency at which they are tweeted shows that social media has a strong bias to sexual and murder-related crimes.

At city level, there are even fewer crime-related tweets

From the 32 million tweets collected, only 2.68 million are assigned to a city (8.3%), and from them, only 19,912 tweets are crime-related tweets, which represent 7.4 from every 1000 tweets collected at a city level. Talking about crime on social media drops from the 15.4 crime-related tweets per 1000 to less than half when users actually share their location on social media. In Mexico, for instance, there are 10.68 tweets related to crime per 1000 at a national level, but it drops to 5.98 tweets per 1000 when the user shares their location. In Colombia, the number of crime-related tweets per 1000 drops from 24.64 at a national level to 5.13 crime-related tweets per 1000 at a city level and in Venezuela, this drop is from 38.14 drops to 21.85. In every country, there is a considerable decrease of tweets related to crime per 1000 when posts are analysed at a city level, which means that users who share their location are less likely to post crime-related tweets.

There is a triple filter when the analysis is at a city level: only 1.5% of tweets are crime-related, then only 8.3% of the users share their location and then, the combined effect is even stronger (as observed in Colombia). Thus, at the city level, almost no tweets related to crime are collected. In 31 cities, less than one crime-related tweet is published each day. There are some cities, for instance, Cochabamba in Bolivia and Arequipa in Peru, where the number of crime-related tweets detected for a period of 70 days is only 2 and 5, respectively.

Crime-related tweets at a city level are very scarce, and in addition, there might be even more sources of bias. For the specific case of La Laguna, a metropolitan area in the Northern part of Mexico, with 1.2 million inhabitants, a media consortium was detected (including three different newspapers), which frequently shared crime-related tweets on their accounts (amounting to >95% of the total crime-related tweets from that city), and which also shared the location of their offices. Thus, a city could have a high number of crime-related tweets but mostly due to a few accounts, which publish their location. Since a similar situation does not happen in any other city and newspapers do not often share their location on every tweet, La Laguna was dropped from the statistical analysis to avoid having strong outliers (Fig. 6 ).

The number of crime-related, violence, murder, property-crime, organised-crime and gun-related tweets per 1000.

Crime at a city level

The correlation between the expressions of crime in social media, based on either the actual crime suffered or the fear of crime, shows that there is practically no relationship between the number of crime-related tweets per 1000 to either the suffered crime, property crime, perceived fear at a local level, at county level or at province level (Fig. 7 ).

Observed correlations between the collected crime-related tweets and the crime and fear of crime at a city level in Mexico.

There might be some apparent correlation between the victims of hard crime per 100,000 and the number of property-crime tweets per 1000 (Fig. 7 ); however, it is not the same type of crime. The number of murders and the number of murders per 100,000 has a small correlation with the number of murder-related tweets per 1000; also, the number of violence-related tweets per 1000 has a small correlation with murders or hard crimes per 100,000; the number of property-crime-related tweets has little correlation with the number of robberies of a person.

Although it would be possible to conduct a different statistical analysis, the scarcity of the number of crime-related tweets at city level is critical. The city of Puebla, Mexico, for example, has 2.7 million inhabitants and more than 3000 daily crimes according to the Victimisation Survey Encuesta ( 2016 ). Although their Police Department and local government might try to use Twitter for security-related topics, there are roughly 2.2 crime-related tweets posted every day in Puebla (less than one tweet per million inhabitants) and so even in the best-case scenario, less than 1 in 1000 crimes could be matched with a different tweet.

The number of property-crime-related tweets per 1000 is only loosely related to the hard crime rate observed in each city (where “hard crime” includes murder, kidnap and missing person). In 15 cities in Mexico, less than 5 property-crime-related tweets were detected during the 70 days of the data collection. Thus, at a city level, we are no longer looking at large amounts of data but we depend only on a few users posting even fewer tweets.

Unfortunately, at a city level, social media posts offer little information about the crime suffered or the fear of crime. Hence, forecasting crime, detecting hotspot patterns for policing, measuring fear of crime, activism or public opinions seems almost impossible at a city level using tweets.

Conclusions and discussion

This work addresses aspects of quantitative social science by analysing crime and fear of crime to highlight specific behaviour. The study was carried out via a comparison between reality and events and expressions posted on social media. An accurate description of the situation with respect to crime in a country, or a city, is provided by official data and victimisation surveys, the latter of which also gives quantitative measurements regarding the fear of crime.

Less than 1% of social media is related to crime or its fear

Considering tweets to be associated with crime simply because they include a crime-related word has both advantages and disadvantages. Firstly, since the list of words is long (so that almost every word that has any connotation or relation to crime is included), so the method should pick up almost all crime-related posts. However, not all of the crime-related tweets are, in fact, related to crime. Manually reading 3000 crime-related tweets established that nearly one-third of the so-called crime-related tweets are clearly not related to crime. Even with a manual inspection of the tweets, it is very complicated to determine in many cases whether a tweet is related to a crime or not.

Without performing a sentiment analysis on individual tweets (Pak and Paroubek, 2010 ; Vadicamo, 2017 ), and only considering them as “relevant” or related to a specific type of crime simply by the inclusion of specific words, meant that little more than 15 tweets per 1000 were considered to be crime-related. Most of the tweets collected (on average 984 per 1000) were not related to crime, but the crime-related tweets rate is different in each country: in Venezuela, 38 of their tweets per 1000 are crime-related, but in Bolivia, less than 8 tweets per 1000 are crime-related.

Crime-related tweets are (and will likely be) scarce

In Latin America, as little as 15 tweets per 1000 are crime-related. There are three possible reasons that might lead to more crime-related tweets in the future: either the network gains more users; or the current users tweet more frequently; or the same number of users, with a similar number of daily published posts, tweet crime-related words more frequently. However, no evidence currently suggests that any of these three facts could actually happen in the near future. The number of Twitter monthly active users has been almost constant for the past few years Footnote 9 . Similarly, the social platform has today nearly 500 million tweets per day, but this number has remained constant since 2014 Footnote 10 . Therefore, unless the current number of users, posting tweets with the same frequency as before, decide to post more crime-related tweets (and displace other topics as a result), the number of crime-related tweets is not expected to have any significant growth. This last point is, among the three previously outlined, the one that is more likely to happen. In fact, “hot” topics on social media tend to change over time, as we have recently seen with issues such as migration and opinion manipulation that gained huge momentum. As such, it could happen that the interest of online crowds towards crime-related issues arises, or that exogenous factors (e.g., a more social communication strategy by law enforcement agencies) could result in a significantly greater amount of crime-related tweets.

Violence in social media

Very similar to what occurs with the traditional media, violence is the most frequent crime-related tweet, although it is not the most frequent type of crime suffered in the region. Traditional media shows a strong bias towards violent crime and the evidence here is that social media displays a similar bias towards violent crime, possibly even more pronounced, with tweets not reflecting the overall crime levels. For instance, in Mexico, a murder is 2653 times more likely to be mentioned on Twitter than a property crime is.

Involved users across different countries

A large part of the observed crime-related tweets is from users who might be termed “involved users”, who are likely to tweet frequently about crime and fear of crime. Results show that more murders in a country and a higher murder rate is associated with a higher number of crime-related, violence-related and murder-related tweets per 1000 (Fig. 4 ). Comparing the ratio between the weekly number of crime-related tweets and the weekly murder rate, and although a causal mechanism of whether a crime encourages users to tweet about crime is not detected here, it was found that in Uruguay and Chile, each murder is associated with more than 60 murder-related tweets, but the number drops to less than 3 tweets in other countries. A higher involvement in social media, measured as the ratio between the number of murder-related tweets and the murder rate, was found in countries with a higher gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.

Perhaps as expected, there are more crime-related tweets in countries with a higher murder rate. However, comparing again the ratio between the weekly number of crime-related tweets and the weekly number of murders, countries with a higher number of murders (not the murder rate) also have more crime-related tweets, meaning that population size matters. Consider, for instance, a country with the population size of Mexico (approximately 130 million people) and a country with the size of Uruguay (approximately 3.3 million people), then even if both countries suffered the same murder rate, indicating the same risk for their population, the larger country would experience 40 times more murders simply due to the difference in population size and therefore, would have more crime-related tweets as a result.

In terms of crime, social media is more useful at national level than at city level

The number of crime-related tweets per 1000 was shown to be correlated with the number of murders of the country and the murder rate. At a national level, a positive finding of our study reveals that the most significant correlation occurs between the number of crime-related tweets and measurements of the fear of crime. Crime-related tweets posted in one city are not necessarily about a specific crime in their city, but could also be about crime from neighbouring cities or the rest of the country. For instance, users in Mexico City might tweet about a murder in Tijuana, even if it is 2300 kilometres away. The closer the person lives to a murder, the more likely it is that they will tweet about it (Kounadi et al., 2015 ), but at city level, we could observe tweets refer to things from their city, but from outside their city as well, meaning that at city level, tweets might be less usefull.

Unfortunately, regarding city level analyses, social media posts seem to offer little information about the crime suffered or the fear of crime. Hence, forecasting crime, using tweets to detect hotspot patterns and for policing, measuring fear of crime, involvement or public opinions seems difficult at a city level using tweets. In summary, our results suggest that, regarding crime and fear of crime, only national conclusions are significant.

This finding is consistent with recent studies that highlight the scarcity of fine-grained geospatial information in social media data (Middleton et al., 2013 ). However, the situation might change in the future, for instance, due to advances in tasks such as geoparsing , which allow extracting geographic information also from social media posts that were not originally geotagged (Avvenuti et al., 2018 ). Moreover, our findings do not imply that social media data is useless for city level analyses regarding other issues. In fact, it already proved valuable for improving a number of city level tasks (Avvenuti et al., 2018 ; Cranshaw et al., 2012 ; Middleton et al., 2013 ).

Expressions of fear in social media

From a crime science perspective, the content of the tweets, and not just the location, as has been used previously (Malleson and Andresen, 2015 ), might still provide a valuable source of information when the focus is on the fear of crime at a national level. Traditional ways of measuring fear of crime strongly rely on costly victimisation surveys, which often have a delay of months or even years between when the data is collected and when the results are published. In addition, surveys might not be comparable between different countries, since different questions may be asked. However, by systematically processing and classifying tweets, we envision the possibility to create a proxy for the fear of crime within the population of a country. Results of such an endeavour can be both timely (with almost no time delay between the time when they are posted on social media) and economically efficient (at a negligible cost compared to the costly surveys), as already demonstrated in other domains (e.g., estimation of the impact of disasters) ((Avvenuti et al., 2016 )). This social media expression of fear of crime could be valuable, for instance, to detect people’s reaction to a highly reported crime, or to detect the speed at which that highly reported crime is mentioned by the users.

However, care should be taken with regards to possible forms of manipulations of crime-related social media data. This is not a specific limitation of our study, but rather a limitation related to all analyses that are based on social media data. Among the most common forms of manipulation in social media, are those related to the activity of automated accounts—so-called social bots (Cresci, 2019 ; Mazza et al., 2019 )—and those related to the spread of false and misleading information—e.g., fake news (Docan-Morgan, 2019 ). Results related to the study of online manipulation and fake content, have however, demonstrated that the majority of malicious activities occur in discussions related to politics (Bessi and Ferrara, 2016 ) and finance (Cresci et al., 2018 , 2019 )—that is, in those scenarios characterised by the strongest political or economic interests. To date and to the best of our knowledge, no study has reported orchestrated manipulations of social media data related to crime or fear of crime.

Data availability

Crime-related words: the list of the 392 crime-related words is available https://figshare.com/s/39a497ab6c604d19ac37 on a public repository (Prieto Curiel et al., 2018a ). Collected tweets per city and country: the list of the number of crime-related tweets per city and country is available https://figshare.com/s/10589b7174f48567e37c on a public repository (Prieto Curiel et al., 2018b ). Note that data is aggregated per time and geographic units to keep the accounts that posted the tweets private.

Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Data available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS

From https://www.businessinsider.com/most-violent-cities-in-the-world-in-2018-2019-3

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/filter-realtime/api-reference/post-statuses-filter.html

Data downloaded on the 1st October 2017 from https://data.unodc.org/

See from Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from

Where active users are accounts that publish at least one tweet during the period of 70 days in which the Twitter data was collected.

Data from the World Bank, available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5

See the Monthly Active Users of Twitter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/

See the number of daily tweets: https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/ and https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and its major supporters (the United States Agency for International Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Vanderbilt University) for making the data available. RPC acknowledges the support of the PEAK Urban programme, funded by UKRI’s Global Challenge Research Fund, Grant Ref: ES/P011055/1. This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654024. RPC carried out part of this research at CNR, as part of the SoBigData Trans-national Access programme. SC and CIM acknowledge the support by the “SoBigData: Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem” project funded by the European Commission under the scheme “INFRAIA-1-2014-2015: Research Infrastructures”, H2020 Framework programme, Grant agreement number 654024. SRB acknowledges the support by the Cimplex project funded by the European Commission in the area “FET Proactive: Global Systems Science” (GSS), as a Research and Innovation Action, under the H2020 Framework programme, Grant agreement number 641191.

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Cristina Ioana Muntean

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The Relationship between Media and Crime & Media Portrayals of Criminals

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• We will go over the relationship between media and crime in sociology.
• Next, we will look at labelling theory and the social construction of crime.
• We will then consider the influence of mass media on crime and look at examples of how media can influence the audience.
• Lastly, we will evaluate the media as a cause of crime.

Relationship between media and crime in sociology

It is important to study the relationship between media and crime in sociology because the audience builds its perception of crime based on the media ’s representations. Let's start with the labelling theory.

Labelling theory: media process and the social construction of crime

How does do media processes show that crime is socially constructed? According to i nteractionists , people become criminals and crime emerges as an outcome of ‘ labelling ’ by authorities.

The key idea within labelling theory is that crime is a social construction, and the agents of social control - police, people in powerful positions, authorities, media, etc. - label the ‘powerless’ as criminals based on stereotypical assumptions.

Labelling theory is applicable to mainstream media’s representation of certain groups. Interactionists believe that the media’s portrayal of the deviance of youth subcultures is often exaggerated, which creates a ‘ moral panic ’ among the masses. This results in restraining or stopping the activities of these subcultures, and that triggers them to respond with more deviant behaviour.

Moral panics

Youth subcultures have been frequent targets of moral panics, which are exaggerated responses and concern for the public over the morality of a group within society.

Interactionists argue that mass media, such as newspapers, television, etc., plays a crucial role in creating moral panics by overstating the deviance of youth subcultures to the extent that certain groups appear as ‘ Folk Devils ’ – people who are a threat to public order.

The fact that the public responds by showing anxiety about ‘youth crime’ suggests that they subscribe to the media representation of young people as a threat to society/social order.

Media and the simplification of crime

There are a number of reasons why it can be argued that media oversimplifies and dramatises crime.

The media tends to highlight the psychological state of criminals in its coverage rather than the social context which causes the crime. For example, crime stories mostly quote the police, the victim(s), and their families, instead of quoting the experts in the field for 'newsworthiness'.

Media coverage generally lacks objectivity e.g. analysing actual risks associated with the crime. Instead, it makes the audience ‘emotional’ or ‘angry’ by overexposing the victims of the crime story featured. Consequently, unrealistic fear of crime gets spread through media coverage.

The media tends to focus on harsher punishments for criminals and negates discussion on alternative methods of punishment, even though evidence suggests that harsher punishments are not always necessarily the most effective means to control crime.

Mass media's influence on crime

There have been a number of studies on the intersection of media and crime. Let's look at a few.

Stan Cohen’s study of the Mods and Rockers (1972)

In relation to labelling theory, let’s go through Stan Cohen’s (1972) study of m ods and rockers , which looks at how moral panics created by mass media influence crime.

The two youth subcultures, namely, mods and rockers, were working-class groups. The mods rode scooters and wore suits, whereas the rockers rode larger motorbikes dressed in leather. The two groups were youth subcultures, in a consumer society, that existed peacefully and were mostly inclined towards music and style, primarily interested in having a good time.

Mods and rockers visited Clacton on a bank holiday weekend to party, during which they engaged in minor acts of violence and vandalism. This alerted the media, who turned up at the next big bank holiday weekend in Brighton.

Once again, there were acts of violence between mods and rockers, and since the media was present this time, Cohen argued that they produced exaggerated reports on the disturbance between the two groups. This created tension and panic among the masses.

In response, the police perceived this as a threat to social order, and started policing more aggressively to prevent similar events in the future. This meant they were more likely to convict youths from either group for deviant behaviour, thus increasing unrealistic public fear of crime.

Also, the inflated media reports turned the mods and rockers against each other, which wasn’t the case before the media got involved.

The Hypodermic Syringe Model's influence on audiences

The theory claims that media productions can use their content to influence audiences to think and act in certain ways.

• According to the hypodermic syringe model, media influences the audience directly. The model suggests that the audience consists of passive homogeneous masses who unquestioningly believe the content that the media presents.

The culture industry's influence on audiences

In Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s opinion, popular culture in the USA was more like a factory that produced stereotypical content used to influence or manipulate uncritical mass audiences.

They claimed that the utilisation of this ‘dumbed down’ culture made audiences passive and triggered false emotional needs that could only be met by the consumption of capitalist products .

Essentially, the objective of the culture industry was to manipulate the public to become ideal consumers and maintain the capitalist structure of society.

Studies on media and crime in sociology

Let's look at some studies that have explored the relationship between media and crime in sociology.

War of the Worlds : The Radio Adaptation

An example of how media influences the passive audience is the response of audiences to the radio adaptation of ‘War of the Worlds' by Orson Welles in 1938.

This was a fictional story where aliens from Mars invade Earth and kill numerous people in the process. The radio adaptation was narrated in the manner of a news report. A few listeners tuned in a little late and missed the introductory part of the narration, and some of them actually misinterpreted it to be a news report. Consequently, they believed they were under invasion.

Bobo Doll experiment: example of media violence

Another illustration of how media violence can actually ‘ cause ’ people to behave aggressively in real life is Bandura’s ‘Bobo doll’ experiment. The experiment is evidence that children influenced by violence in media act more aggressively when given the opportunity.

• As part of this experiment, there were three groups of children. One group was shown aggressive behaviour towards a bobo (inflatable). Another group was shown non-aggressive behaviour towards the bobo doll, and the third (control) group of children was not shown any behaviour towards the doll at all.
• Children from the first two groups were taken to a room full of toys but were told that the toys weren't for them. Later, they were taken to another room where there was a mallet and a bobo doll. It was observed that the children who were shown violence started attacking the bobo doll out of frustration for not being allowed to play with the toys in the previous room, whereas those who weren’t shown any violence did not attack the doll.

It was deduced that children copied or imitated the violent behaviour shown through media and started behaving aggressively in real life.

Desensitisation to media violence

There are real-life incidents of children committing violent crimes after being influenced by media violence.

Consider the case of Jamie Bulger, a 2-year-old boy in the UK who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by two young boys, both aged only 10. It was an apparent outcome of watching a film from the horror franchise Child's Play .

Newson (1994) suggested that the effects of media violence on children are more subtle and happen gradually. She argued that continued exposure to violent media - through films, series, etc. - for several years desensitises children to violence, so they don’t get shocked by it but rather see it as the norm, or as a way of solving problems.

Newson further believed that aggression shown through media encourages people to relate to and identify with the offenders or the perpetrators, and not with the victims. Her research led to an increase in censorship in the industry, for example, a pplying age certificates to shows featuring sexual or violent scenes.

Evaluating media as a cause of crime

• Although watching violence might influence some acts of brutality, it is evident that many people watch violent movies or series or even play video games that feature crime, but do not commit any crimes themselves. So, media violence is unlikely to be a direct cause of crime.
• Another perspective is that instead of being desensitised, people are sensitised by watching aggression onscreen. The horrifying outcome of violent acts actually influences people to not act in the same way.
• According to p luralists and postmodernists , audiences today are a lot more active than what the hypodermic syringe model portrays. For them, the audience decides what they want to watch, and to what extent they wish to engage with it.

Media and Crime - Key takeaways

• According to i nteractionists , people become criminals, or rather crime emerges, as an outcome of ‘ labelling ’ by authorities.
• Interactionists argue that mass media, such as newspapers, television, etc., plays a crucial role in creating moral panics by overstating the deviance of youth subcultures, to the extent that certain groups appear as ‘ Folk Devils ’ – people who are a threat to public order.
• The media simplifies crime by highlighting criminals' mental states rather than social context. Their reporting lacks objectivity and focuses on harsh punishments.
• Examples of how media can influence crime are seen in the reaction to the War of the Worlds radio adaptation, the Bobo Doll Experiment, and how children can become desensitised to violence.

Frequently Asked Questions about Media and Crime

--> what is the relationship between media and fear of crime.

Media coverage generally lacks objectivity e.g. analysing actual risks associated with the crime. Instead, it makes the audience ‘emotional’ or ‘angry’ by overexposing the victims of the crime story featured. Consequently, unrealistic fear of crime is spread through media coverage. 

--> What are the main distinctions with crime and media?

There is evidence to suggest that crime might be somewhat influenced by media portrayals.

--> Why should we study the relationship between crime and media?

It is important to study the relationship between media and crime because the audience builds its perception of crime on the basis of media’s representation of the act. 

Crime is a social construction, and the agents of social control - police, people in powerful positions, authorities, media, etc., label the ‘powerless’ as criminals on the basis of stereotypical assumptions.

--> How does the media portray young people and crime?

Interactionists argue that mass media, such as newspapers and television, plays a crucial role in creating moral panics by overstating the deviance of youth subcultures to the extent that certain groups appear as ‘folk devils’ – people who are a threat to public order. 

--> How does the media cause crime in sociology?

A classic example of how media violence can actually ‘cause’ people to behave violently in real life is Bandura’s ‘Bobo Doll’ experiment. The experiment is evidence that children influenced by media violence act more aggressively when given the opportunity.

What is the key idea of labelling theory?

The key idea of labelling theory is that crime is a social construction, and the agents of social control - police, people in powerful positions, authorities, media, etc., label the ‘powerless’ as a criminal based on stereotypical assumptions.

Why is it important to study the relationship between media and crime?

It is important to study the relationship between media and crime because the audience builds its perception of crime based on   the media ’s representations.  

What leads to restraining or stopping the activities of youth subcultures?

Interactionists believe that the deviance of youth subcultures in media’s portrayal is often exaggerated, which creates a ‘moral panic’ among the masses. This results in restraining or stopping the activities of these subcultures, and that triggers them to respond with more deviant behaviour. 

What is moral panic?

Youth subcultures have been frequent targets of   moral panics,   which are exaggerated responses and concern for the public over the morality of a group within society. 

What is the role of media in the construction of crime according to interactionists?

Interactionists argue that Media - mass media - newspapers, television, etc., plays a crucial role in creating moral panics by exaggerating the deviance of youth subcultures to the extent where certain groups appear as ‘Folk Devils’ – people who are a threat to public order. 

Provide an example of how media simplifies crime. 

Media coverage generally lacks objectivity e.g. analysing actual risks associated with the crime. Instead, it makes the audience ‘emotional’ or ‘angry’ by overexposing the victims of the crime story featured. Consequently, unrealistic fear of crime is spread through media coverage. 

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Media and Crime in the U.S.

• Yvonne Jewkes - University of Bath, UK
• Travis Linnemann - Kansas State University, USA
• Description

The rise of mobile and social media means that everyday crime news is now more immediate, more visual, and more democratically produced than ever. Offering new and innovative ways of understanding the relationship between media and crime, Media and Crime in the U.S . critically examines the influence of media coverage of crimes on culture and identity in the United States and across the globe. With comprehensive coverage of the theories, research, and key issues, acclaimed author Yvonne Jewkes and award-winning professor Travis Linnemann have come together to shed light on some of the most troubling questions surrounding media and crime today.

  The free open-access Student Study site at study.sagepub.com/jewkesus features web quizzes, web resources, and more.

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“The comparative component to this book is brilliant. The eloquent writing style coupled with the international comparisons make for an informative, eye-opening, and exciting read! I honestly wasn’t sure what I would think about the comparative nature of this book, but I simply love it!”

“The comparison between the UK and US helps further our mission of creating global thinkers.”

“Accessible and engaging introductions to a wide range of theories, concepts, and critiques.  Good use of illustrative examples (including a variety of great new US and contemporary examples).”

“This is the American version of the text I already use, and my students are primarily Americans. It is directly relatable to their experiences.  This text offers foundational knowledge that links criminological theories and media theories with an examination of relevant current and historical events.  Jewkes has made this material greatly relatable to an American audience while maintaining an international perspective.”

“The text is well written and articulates concepts in a clear manner. Chapters 2-4 present relevant real world examples that will allow students to draw connections between their own experiences/media exposure and course/text materials.”

“The chapter on crime news is unique to this text and spells out clear criteria for why some crimes get covered and not others. Chapter on Media Misogyny - always eye-opening for students. In Chapters 2 and 3, the social construction of the “other” is clearly illustrated.”

“The structure and topics covered are all encompassing. The additional features like the summary and key terms are very helpful. The writing is understandable and clear for the students.”

“Great examples. Goes beyond description to analysis. Applies more complex concepts ignored by other books.”

"Jewkes and Linnemann’s Media and Crime in the U.S. delivers even more than its title promises. It is certainly the go-to book for scholars and students seeking a critical, comprehensive, and theoretically rich analysis of the crime/media dynamics that percolate through everyday life in the United States. But more than this, the book invents a distinctive criminology for the 21st century – a criminology able to explore and understand the interconnections between popular culture, daily surveillance, digital identity, cyber-criminality, and other essential features of the contemporary."

"Jewkes and Linnemann have produced a definitive US companion to a classic in crime and media studies.   In accessible, eloquent language, the authors provide us with a text that takes a much needed critical approach, ultimately insisting that scholars, our students, and general readers (re)conceptualize the relationship between media and crime in a manner in keeping with its proliferating spectacle."

KEY FEATURES: 

• Critical issues in crime and media keep readers engaged with discussions about current topics such as the sexual exploitation of children, gendered responses to crime, the portrayal of use of force by police, and fake news.
• Unique chapters on Media Misogyny (Chapter 5) and Crime and the Surveillance Culture (Chapter 8) provide readers with more insight on gendered responses to crime and the kinds of surveillance facilitated by the internet and social media.
• Innovations in technology are explored and forms of reporting, including citizen journalism, are discussed.
• Media and crime in the U.S. is critically discussed within a global context to engage students with global debates about the power of global media, as well as to help students better [SA: understand] the United States’ responses to criminal behavior.
• The latest theories and research on crime and media are included throughout.
• Helpful pedagogical features such as discussion questions, further reading, and a glossary support student learning and engagement.

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Chapter 1: Theorizing Media and Crime

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Crime & The Media Essay

This essay focuses on the depiction of law and agents of law in the American films Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . These are films with legal concepts in representation of the law. These films depict drama within courtrooms during the delivery of justice. Law films may provide some fundamental insights on how the criminal justice system works.

The major concern is whether these depictions do portray facts or provide useful insights to viewers. However, we have to recognise that films tend to portray surprising and dramatic events instead of providing factual accounts of cases.

Films are parts of popular cultures, which influence law and justice systems. Friedman notes that popular culture is “a part of law and some of the most obvious aspects of laws are exceedingly prominent in popular cultures” (Friedman, 1989).

Concerns of whether such depictions are “influential, acceptable, or accurate” (Rafter, 2006) lead to many questions. Creations of courtroom films have resulted from the public’s fascination and the desire to understand the criminal justice system. Some of the notable trials include OJ Simpson in the US, and Louise Woodward trial in the UK (Rapping, 2003).

We have to note that films and other popular news channels do not convey the real courtroom drama. Given the role of popular media in shaping the public perception, the public will understand “lawyers and law processes through diverse channels” (Rafter, 2006).

We have to ask whether law films are extensions of the criminal justice system or whether they compromise the integrity and the delivery of justice. Law films may portray various social issues and the courtroom as a centre for the drama. In this sense, law films and television series show that the public can also debate legal issues and determine legal consequences.

We realise how the issue of depiction of agents of law and the criminal justice system is complex when we review contemporary films. Machura observes that law films usually have both justice and injustice figures. Injustice figure creates the discrepancy in the justice system.

On the other hand, the justice figure comes as a hero in order to resolve the situation (Machura, 2007). The main of aims of law films are to portray the idea of justice to viewers. The general belief is that the law provides justice in a dispute. In the film, Young Mr. Lincoln , we look at the idea of right and wrong in the delivery of justice.

We can also observe that the process of delivering justice is a major challenge. For instance, lawyers must go beyond the written law and find solutions in moral arguments. In the film, Henry Fonda (Lincoln) demonstrates that lawyers can deviate from the written law in order to achieve justice to suspects. They may bring a moral argument as Lincoln does, “ I may not know so much about the law, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong ”.

Young Mr. Lincoln is a manipulative film. Lincoln achieves a high status in a short time than expected. It shows a rookie lawyer, who delivers justice to accused brothers. This transformation represents unrealistic aspects of law films. Such a transformation enhances the delivery of justice.

At the same time, such changes influence the process of an actual delivery of justice. If we analyse Young Mr. Lincoln within its context, then we see a young lawyer, who experiences transformation in order to deliver justice.

Law films may also depict cooperation or hostility among agents of law. In some cases, lawyers may work together. Still, the presiding judge and lawyers may also cooperate in a case. This is what Young Mr. Lincoln portrays when the judge supports the lawyer during the trial (Machura, 2007). Such acts of cooperation may also extend to interrogation procedures in order to establish the legal truth to a case.

Young Mr. Lincoln raises concerns related to how a legal system works to deliver justice. In other words, it focuses on who should the justice system favours. Law films tend to create extraordinary lawyers. For instance, in Young Mr. Lincoln, the lawyer claims that he does not know much about law.

However, he tends to show that we should rely on natural law or use common sense during trials. In this context, lawyers should use the law to protect law-abiding citizens and not to protect powerful individuals. Therefore, the justice system should work in any given circumstance, irrespective of the experience of the lawyer.

The law film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance depicts challenges related to establishing an effective political order using the rule of law in a lawless state. Some critics have argued that the film shows that, “ American history and the democratic process itself are something of a sham, a confidence trick played on the public by slick politicians and compliant reporters ” (McBride, 2001).

This explains why the newspaper editor sees it as important to write about the legend instead of writing the truth about the man who killed the Liberty Valance. It shows that issues of law and order are not among priorities in the primitive areas of the US. However, the Old West had to pave a way for civilization. The young and naive lawyer introduced the concept of law in a town run by criminals.

Such criminals have used existing law to protect themselves. For instance, based on the law of East Coast, Liberty Valance has immunity. The only way to punish Liberty Valance involves a duel with guns. The film shows how lawyers can shape political situations of nations through democratic processes.

As a political drama unfolds, we also observe some aspects about the freedom of the press. Powerful figures had to control the content of the press. In some case, media have defended criminal justice systems.

However, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , a part of lawlessness includes restricting the freedom of the press, which has gone against the position of cattlemen. It is the lawyer, who must defend the freedom of the press against the town gang. In fact, Liberty Valance has tried to silence both the media and Dutton Peabody.

Confrontation between Liberty Valance and Stoddard shows different views of the concept of law. Stoddard is a lawyer from a well-established society. On the other hand, Liberty Valance tears several law books of Stoddard. According to Liberty Valance, laws from the East do not stand a chance in the Old West. Therefore, Stoddard must notice the law of the Old West (Livingstone, 2007).

People of the Old West elect Stoddard because he is a good lawyer and can throw a good punch. These are the two outstanding characteristics, which make the lawyer get the delegate position. Shinbone needs both physical force and knowledge of law in order to create effective rule of law.

Lenz’s work focuses on the relationship between the criminal justice system and public opinion using law films (Lenz, 2003). This reflects positions the public about crime during a given period. Some law films depict the criminal justice system as a growing matter of concern. Others show that crime is not acceptable especially in lawless states and violence may be the necessary tool to end such crimes.

For instance, the only person who can eliminate Liberty Valance must use violence in order to restore law and order in Shinbone. It shows the continued struggle to establish effective political power in a town run by gangs, who also use their laws to justify their actions.

These films reflect a continuous struggle between crime and order. Law films depict uncertainty as no audience can predict the outcomes. However, agents of law depicted in such films usually emerge as heroes against criminals.

Both the Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance highlight social responsibilities of lawyers as they emerge as heroes in their societies. This is what Asimow and Mader point in their work (Asimow and Mader, 2004). The authors achieve such depiction by combining social and film history within the context of legal systems and issues.

Some studies show that whatever law films portray is not always true (Surette, 1998). Surette notes in every subject category like “ crimes, criminals, crime fighters, the investigation of crimes, arrests, the processing and disposition of cases, the entertainment media present a world of crime and justice that is not found in reality ” (Surette, 1998).

These scholars argue that such processes of criminal justice systems do not exist in reality. As a result, they believe that the films portray exaggerated events of the criminal justice system and now question whether media portrayal of crimes may increase the rate of crime (Rafter, 2006).

Such law films may appear fragmented. This reflects how films distort crime in society and provide distorted approach to the criminal justice system. In this sense, films construct their own reality and transmit to the audience. This only results into confusion.

Law films play significant roles in shaping public opinion in comprehending crime. They enable us to learn what is right or wrong. However, law films have raised contentious issues regarding the use of social power in society. Some scholars consider such films as means of providing opportunities for crimes, rebellion, and use of the justice system to restore order (Rafter, 2006).

Rafter sees crime films as the best reflection of social, political, and economic problems in society. Consequently, such films influence the audience’s thoughts about issues in society. Through analysis of film history, crime, the justice system, and other factors that can explain crimes, we can understand influences of media on viewers.

In fact, various forms of media tend to report crimes for sensational purposes. However, Carrabine expresses the reality behind such reports. In addition, we have to understand how such law films with bad endings influence the audience’s attitudes about crimes (Carrabine, 2008).

Such observations have renewed the debate about the relationships between films and crime. The concern relates to harmful effects or influences of media on viewers. Carrabine notes that crime offers great fascination to the media because of numerous programmes focusing on both real and imagined crimes.

The issue remains whether the media invoke feelings and tendencies of viewers to express their obsession with crimes. Given such effects on the audience, it is necessary that films should portray real events of crimes. This can eliminate unrealistic expectations of the audience in real-life situations.

We have to realise that watching law films like Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance can provide entertainment and provoke thoughts among viewers. We have to recognise that these law films portray agents of law who are rookies.

However, these lawyers perform exceptionally well. The films give these lawyers extraordinary power to turn impossible situations using both written and conventional laws. Most people do not have contact with criminal justice systems.

As a result, they rely on the media to learn about criminal justice systems. However, for diverse reasons, media presentations of criminal justice systems remain erroneous and do not focus on facts. Events in both law films are not realistic. As a result, they may lead viewers to form unrealistic expectations based on what they watch.

Both Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance portray lawyers as people with extraordinary qualities. The films demonstrate the effectiveness of lawyers in a form of a drama to the audience. The only challenge is that we cannot gauge influences of filmmakers and their acting agents of the law.

Under such confusion, filmmakers usually give general information about the purpose of the film as Machura observes (Machura, 2007). Some of the notable ways of misrepresentation include “the voting rule, the behaviour of lawyers in court and the decorum of the benches among others” (Machura, 2007).

Filmmakers know that some of the elements in the films originate from laws of various nations and do not conform to laws of the country at the time of production.

Reference List

Asimow, M, and Mader, S 2004, Law and Popular Culture, Lang, New York.

Carrabine, E 2008, Crime, Culture and the Media, Polity, Cambridge.

Friedman, L 1989, ‘Law, lawyers and popular culture’, Yale Law Journal, vol. 98, pp. 1579.

Lenz, T 2003, Changing Images of Law in Film and Television Crime Stories, Lang, New York.

Livingstone, D 2007, ‘Spiritedness, Reason, and the Rule of Law: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’, American Political Science Association , pp. 1-27.

Machura, S 2007, ‘An Analysis Scheme for Law Films’, Baltimore Law Review, vol. 36, pp. 329-345.

McBride, J 2001, Searching For John Ford, Martin’s Griffin, New York.

Rafter, N 2006, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, Oxford University Press, Cambridge.

Rapping, E 2003, Law and Justice as Seen on TV, NYU Press, New York.

Surette, R 1998, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images, Realities, and Policies, Wadsworth Publishing, Belmont, CA.

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Media And Crime Essay

The television has become one of the most important sources of information for people in today’s society. It is also one of the most powerful tools that criminals have at their disposal. The media has a lot of influence over how the public perceives crime, and this can have a significant impact on the justice system.

The way that the media covers crime can often be sensationalist and distorted. This can lead to a number of problems, such as making people more afraid of crime than they need to be, or giving criminals ideas about how to commit crimes.

It is important to remember that the media is not always accurate in its portrayal of crime. However, it is still influential, and it is important to be aware of its power.

Communications technology has brought the world into a single global village in less than a generation. TV and radio news reports are broadcast across the country and around the world in minutes. The same edition of newspapers may be printed simultaneously all over the country and on the street within hours, as we all know.

Yet, as the media has become more powerful and pervasive, its relationship to crime has come under increasing scrutiny. There are those who argue that the media is a powerful force in creating criminals by sensationalizing crimes and portraying criminals as larger-than-life figures. Others claim that the media is a public watchdog, exposing corruption and wrong-doing and serving as a critical source of information for the citizens. Still others maintain that the media has no effect whatsoever on crime rates.

What is clear is that the relationship between media and crime is complex and multi-dimensional. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of these dimensions. In particular, we will examine the impact of television on crime, the role of the mass media in shaping public opinion about crime and criminals, and the use of the media by law enforcement agencies.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of television on our society. For more than fifty years, television has been one of the most powerful forces shaping our culture and our values. And because television is such a powerful medium, its impact on crime is also significant.

There is no question that television can be used to educate people about crime and the criminal justice system. However, there is also a great deal of evidence that television can have a negative effect on viewers. Research has shown that television can desensitize people to violence, glamorize criminal behavior, and create fear in the general population.

The Internet is a worldwide network of interconnected computers. Anyone with a computer and a modem now has access to the whole world. These new technologies, as well as their influence on how we exchange information, will force us to examine fundamental concerns such as freedom of speech and related issues like crime prevention and cultural integrity. It’s the pervasiveness and immediacy of the entire operation that gives mass media such influence in molding public opinion.

With the advent of television, and then the Internet, mass media has become a pervasive force in our lives. It is hard to overestimate the impact that television has had on society. It is the most popular medium of communication, with over 90% of households in America having at least one television set. It is also the most influential, as it has the ability to reach a large audience very quickly. This power carries with it a great responsibility, as television can be used to inform, entertain, and educate, but it can also be used to manipulate and mislead.

As we move into the age of the Internet, we are seeing a new kind of mass media emerge. The Internet is a global network of computer networks that allows users to access information from anywhere in the world. It has given people around the world a voice, and has allowed them to share information in ways that were not possible before. This has led to a number of important issues being debated online, such as freedom of expression and the role of the media in society.

The Internet has also had a significant impact on crime and crime prevention. The anonymity of the Internet makes it a perfect place for criminals to commit crimes, and it has become a popular place for buying and selling drugs, weapons, and other illegal items. Law enforcement officials have had a difficult time keeping up with the rapidly changing landscape of the Internet, and they have been struggling to find ways to combat crime online.

At the same time, the Internet has also been used as a tool for crime prevention. A number of initiatives have been launched to try to use the power of the Internet to catch criminals and to prevent crime. For example, the website Crime Stoppers allows people to anonymously report crimes, and provides rewards for information that leads to arrests.

The impact of mass media on society is an important issue that deserves our attention. As we move into the age of the Internet, we need to be aware of the potential dangers and pitfalls associated with this new medium, but we also need to recognize the potential it has for making our world a better place.

For some, the ubiquity of contemporary and developing mass media has been regarded as a negative thing. After all, these communication technologies are pushing graphic images of crime and violence farther and wider.

For the most part, newer technologies decrease our control over the pictures that are disseminated, especially among young people. But there is another way to look at them. We may see them as providing new possibilities for connecting with other people. Rather than blaming or vilifying the media, we might consider it a partner rather than a culprit or opponent.

The television has been a particularly powerful force in the spread of information about crime. It is estimated that the average person in the United States watches more than four hours of television each day. This means that television reaches more people than any other form of communication. And, because television is a visual medium, it can have a very powerful impact on viewers.

Some research has shown that television does indeed have an impact on viewer’s perceptions of crime. Studies have found that people who watch a lot of television are more likely to believe that crime is a serious problem and that they are at risk of becoming victims of crime. Other research, however, has found no relationship between television viewing and perceptions of crime.

So, what do we make of all this research? It is clear that television plays a significant role in the way we think about crime. But it is also clear that we need to be careful not to overstate the impact of television. We must remember that television is just one source of information about crime. Other sources, such as personal experience and news reports, also play a role in shaping our perceptions.

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Facebook let Netflix peek into user DMs, explosive court docs claim

The court documents were unsealed last week and form part of a major anti-trust lawsuit.

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Facebook privacy lapses

The social media giant Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to access Facebook users' direct messages for nearly a decade, breaking anti-competitive activities and privacy rules, explosive court documents claim.

The court documents, which were unsealed last week, are part of a major anti-trust lawsuit filed by U.S. citizens Maximilian Klein and Sarah Grabert, who claim Netflix and Facebook "enjoyed a special relationship" so that Netflix could better tailor its ads with Facebook .

Facebook received millions of dollars in ad revenue from Netflix as part of these close ties, guaranteeing ad spending of $150 million in 2017, the lawsuit claims. 

Social media giant Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to peek into Facebook users' direct messages, court documents claim. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images | Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via / Getty Images)

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The lawsuit also claims Netflix's co-founder, Reed Hastings, joined Facebook’s board of directors and then was instrumental in the closure of Facebook Watch – a streaming service competitor to Netflix.

The lawsuit was filed in April 2023 and demands the court have Hastings respond to the plaintiff’s claims.

"For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship. Netflix bought hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook ads; entered into a series of agreements sharing data with Facebook; received bespoke access to private Facebook APIs; and agreed to custom partnerships and integrations that helped supercharge Facebook’s ad targeting and ranking models," the lawsuit states.

APIs (application programming interface) are pieces of software that allow two or more computer programs or components to communicate and share information with each other.

The API agreement allowed "Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s private messages inboxes, in exchange Netflix would ‘provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendations sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variation (e.g. Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation receipts).’"

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg established Meta in 2021. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

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Meta has said in the past that it does not disclose people’s private messages to partners without their knowledge and that the API access only gave partners an ability to reach inboxes, i.e. to send messages to users via API.

"Meta didn’t share people’s private messages with Netflix," a Meta spokesperson told Fox Business on Tuesday. "As the document says, the agreement allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app. Such agreements are commonplace in the industry. We are confident the facts will show this complaint is meritless."

FOX Business also reached out to Netflix for further comment but did not immediately receive a response. Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021 as its CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled metaverse, a virtual reality space.

In 2018, the New York Times published a report citing hundreds of pages of Facebook documents , alleging Facebook had authorized Spotify and Netflix to access users' DMs. 

The publication reported that the connections helped Facebook gain explosive growth and bolstered its ad revenue streams. 

Meta has already been fined for sharing users' information without permission. 

In 2022, Ireland fined Meta $284 million after data about more than half a billion users was leaked online. 

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Full names, phone numbers, locations and birthdays of users who used the platform between 2018 and 2019 were leaked online by a "bad actor" who Meta said exploited a security vulnerability, reports the Daily Mail.

That same year, Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a security breach case related to Cambridge Analytica, a British social media engineering company.

The firm had paid Facebook for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users, which was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign that culminated in Donald Trump's election win.