essay on role of media in crime prevention

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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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Article contents

Police and the news media.

• Ted Gest Ted Gest President, Criminal Justice Journalists
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.501
• Published online: 30 September 2019

Police and the media have had a close relationship but it has become an increasingly uneasy one. For more than a century, the mainstream United States media—mainly newspapers, radio, television and magazines—have depended on the police for raw material for a steady diet of crime stories. For its part, law enforcement regards the media as something of an adversary. The relationship has changed because of the growth of investigative reporting and of the Internet. Both developments have increased the volume of material critical of the police. At the same time, law enforcement has used social media as a means to bypass the mainstream media to try getting its message directly to the public. However, the news media in all of its forms remains a powerful interpreter of how law enforcement does its job.

• penny press
• public information officer
• community policing
• social media
• investigative reporting
• COPS Office

The Fascination of News Consumers with Crime

Americans have long been fascinated with crime. The news media have helped satisfy this fascination by providing a heavy diet of crime coverage, and this requires working closely with law enforcement to obtain basic information.

David J. Krajicek in Scooped! , a review of the “burgeoning tabloid influence on the mainstream American media” that grew sharply in the 1980s, traces the prevalence of crime news in newspapers and on television to British pamphleteers, who as early as the 1600s “peddled their melodramatic accounts of crime and misdeeds to blushing bluenoses.” He describes the evolution of the tabloid press in New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries in satisfying the public obsession with crime. Crime news was “cheap and easy and almost anyone could produce it” (Krajicek, 1998 ). Such reporting was prevalent in the so-called penny press, newspapers available for one cent starting in the 1830s. No doubt much of the public interest in crime derived from a human desire to hear about unusual news.

Crime rates in the United States are not known with any precision before the 20th century , but the crime began to increase notably in the 1960s. Violent crime in 1960 was reported at a relatively low 160 per 100,000 population each year, but by 1980 , the figure had jumped to 600. It grew even more, until a modern-day peak in the early 1990s, dropping steadily since then. Even with the widely reported decline, by 2017 the violent crime number stood at 383 per 100,000, more than twice as high as 1960 (Disaster Center, n.d. ).

Crime and criminal justice generally became more of a political issue. News reports increasingly involved not only individual acts of lawbreaking but also issues of crime policy, prominently featuring what police departments were doing to combat crime. The result was even more attention to crime in both print and broadcast media.

By the late 20th century , news about crime and the courts filled an estimated one-third of the space allotted for news in a typical US daily newspaper and nearly half of the minutes available for news in local television broadcasts. Obtaining the raw material for these reports always involved the cooperation of police departments, which have served as a constant source of information.

The Tradition of “Police Blotter” News Coverage

By both tradition and law, the “police blotter” has been available to the public, recording an endless series of offenses seven days a week.

In addition to detailed coverage of major news such as mass murders and sex offenses, many small town and community newspapers and even some major ones have published regular listings of major and minor crime incidents. While the broadcast media have lacked the resources to follow suit in terms of volume, both local television and all-news radio stations have long aired a steady stream of crime stories. “Local TV news emphasizes the early stages of crimes because ‘breaking news’ from the scene of a crime is fresh, dramatic, and visual” (Lipschultz & Hilt, 2002 , 6)

It could be said that this phenomenon has been mutually beneficial to the media and to law enforcement. Historically, reporting on crime, particularly lawbreaking that involved violence, has brought newspapers high readership and broadcast media high ratings. The trend likely has extended to news websites, although research is needed to confirm this.

The media depends on police agencies to provide the “who, what, when, where” details that are central to basic news coverage. Of course, news reporters can and do expand on the material provided by police agencies by interviewing crime victims and witnesses. Frequently, however, little time is available to do this in the crush of daily news, and many victims are unavailable or unwilling to talk, so many crime stories consist solely of information provided by law enforcement.

Police departments are such a predominant source of crime news that it is almost a joke among journalists that they can repeat just about any fact mentioned in a law enforcement report, as long as it is followed by the phrase “police said.” The result of this long-standing practice is that most routine stories about crimes reflect only the observations of a police agency and so, as a result, much of what the public knows is solely or primarily information collected by law enforcement officials. Evidence that a suspect may have been wrongfully arrested, for example, may emerge only through court filings of a defense attorney or additional reporting by the news media.

From their point of view, police generally have regarded the news media as essential to their mission, informing the public not only about individual crimes but also of trends affecting the community generally. “The news media have traditionally been the primary method police have used to communicate important messages to the public,” declares Strategic Communication Practices: A Toolkit for Police Executives , published by the US Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) (Stephens, Hill, & Greenberg, 2011 ).

An Element of Police–Media Distrust

Despite this mutual dependence, there always has been some element of distrust between the two sides. Susan Braunstein, formerly a member of the communications faculty at Miami’s Barry University, summarized the relationship in a volume published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police: “Historically, police officers have often viewed journalists as adversaries or obstacles to their law enforcement efforts. Departments released only the information they were required to by law” (Braunstein & Cheek, 2006 , v).

Michael Sale, a former public information officer for the Toronto Police Department, put it more bluntly in the same volume, saying that, “In many departments, the historical culture is one of antagonism toward the media.” He contended, however, that “change is both possible and necessary.”

The ups and downs of the police–media relationship cannot be measured precisely, but Braunstein contended that it improved somewhat from the 1980s with the growth of community policing. Under that practice, law enforcement leaders began requiring their officers to engage more with local residents—after years of concentrating their work mostly on responding to calls for service and surveilling communities from their seats in patrol cars. “As community policing changed the philosophy and practices of departments, police executives began to alter their view of the media from obstacle to conduit to the community” (Braunstein & Cheek, 2006 ).

With respect to individual crimes, police departments frequently request the media to ask their readers, listeners and viewers to provide more information about crime incidents to help them find suspects and evidence that would be instrumental in obtaining convictions. In the age of social media, those requests now are often made directly to the public through services like Twitter and YouTube.

Members of few other professions can count on their daily activities being recognized in the news media. In the latter half of the 20th century , just about every daily newspaper, local television station, and talk radio station has at least one reporter, and sometimes several, assigned to cover crime. By 2016 , there were fewer than 1,300 daily newspapers in the United States and about 700 television stations originating local news. The daily newspaper total has declined in recent decades but a large number of news websites such as Yahoo! News, Google News and Huffington Post on a national level, and many more local-oriented sites have helped make up for the decline in print journalism.

There are no reliable data on the number of journalists covering crime news, but between 2008 and 2017 , newsroom employment in the United States dropped by 23% (Grieco, 2018 ). Necessarily, this has meant somewhat fewer reporters following crime and criminal justice, and fewer investigative stories by local newspapers.

There were 1,670 radio stations in the “news/talk” category as of 2017 (Nielsen, 2018 ), a slight increase from 1600 recorded in 2009 . It is not clear exactly how much of these stations’ broadcast content relates to crime.

Dawn of the Police Public Information Officer

In response to the constant request for information by news organizations, the last half of the 20th century saw the growth of public information units in major police departments. This development received the imprimatur of experts in 1973 , when the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommended that, “A police agency should designate an officer or unit to maintain regular liaison with the media.” The commission cited the Kansas City, MO, Police Department for establishing the first “teletype hot line” in the mid-1970s to report crimes to the media, a precursor to the constant reports conveyed via the Internet in the 21st century .

As the Justice Department’s COPS Office “toolkit” puts it, “Police agencies are well acquainted with the demands of the ever-hungry ‘media beast.’ Stories about crime and the justice system are a staple of the media ‘diet.’ As such, police are a dependable source of stories and for many [police] departments, ‘feeding the beast’ requires full-time staff devoted to the job” (Stephens et al., 2011 ).

While public information offices are well entrenched in large departments, almost half of police agencies in the United States had ten or fewer officers as of 2013 (Reaves, 2015 ), making it impossible to assign staff members to maintain full-time connection with the news media.

Technology in the 21st century has allowed police departments to make one major change that news reporters say has hampered their access. Journalists have long been able to pick up tips on new and ongoing crimes by listening to police scanners that broadcast communications among officers. Some police departments have blocked public access to those communications, which has made journalists in the areas affected totally reliant on learning about incidents from telephone contacts or whatever an agency decides to circulate on social media. The result can be long delays in initial reports on incidents. (For further information on this, see “ Police–Media Conflicts .”)

While most police–media interactions take place without incident, it also is true that the media–police relationship always has been fraught with conflicts. The police want to control what information about cases is made public, concerned that their chances of finding a perpetrator may decline if too many key details are disclosed. Further, typically, police officers also want to protect crime victims from what they may perceive as unduly intrusive coverage by journalists, so they may withhold information about victims’ names and the exact locations of crime incidents that might inadvertently disclose their identities. News reporters may thwart these concerns, albeit not deliberately, if they publish information that may tip off criminals to what evidence law enforcement has or lacks about a case.

Conflicts over what details can and should be reported have flared forever but they have not stopped the large volume of crime coverage around the nation. However, the media–police relationship has become frayed in recent decades for a variety of reasons.

Investigative Reporters Target the Police

A key cause of the degeneration of the media–police relationship is the growth of investigative reporting. The modern trend often is tied to the Washington Post’s relentless coverage of the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s that helped doom President Richard Nixon.

Now, investigative reporting has become a staple of US journalism, not only in newspapers but also magazines, broadcast outlets and purely Internet operations. A national organization, Investigative Reporters & Editors, is dedicated to improving journalists’ investigative skills, and its activities include providing advice on how best to monitor problems in police departments.

It is not, of course, surprising that much investigative reporting has dealt with law enforcement, given the prominent role of crime and police in public life. Among prominent subjects of critical stories about police that have appeared in recent years are these:

The Associated Press chronicled police officers who have been involved in sexual harassment of motorists and crime suspects (Sedensky, 2015 ).

Many media organizations have reported on cases of officers who have lost their jobs in one or more departments for misconduct and have been rehired by others. See, for example, Schaefer and Kaufman, 2018 .

The Boston Globe ( n.d. ) reported on a wide range of misdeeds by members of the Massachusetts State Police, including false claims of overtime.

These stories are typical of many in which news organizations have reported on wrongdoing or poor management by law enforcement agencies that might not have come to light without dedicated journalistic effort.

One of the most persistent subjects of investigative reporting on police since 2014 has involved police shootings of civilians. Such incidents have occurred frequently over the years—there is no count that is considered very reliable—but the subject exploded into one of national concern after unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson in August in 2014 . That incident provoked major civil disturbances and widespread criticism of the police by civil rights advocates.

A low point in police–media relations in the aftermath of the Brown shooting occurred when police arrested two national reporters who were covering the protests. Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post were charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer at a McDonald’s restaurant. Post editor Martin Baron said there was “absolutely no justification” for his reporter’s arrest. (The charges were dropped in 2016 in exchange for a promise by the reporters not to sue St. Louis County.)

Because government agencies fail to track shootings by police very consistently, the furor prompted two major newspapers, the Washington Post and The Guardian , to start publicly available databases listing key details of police shootings. (The Post ’s project was continuing in 2018 but The Guardian ended its effort after 2016 .) The Post has followed up with a series of notable articles drawing on its police shooting database to show, for example, that African Americans were disproportionately the victims of officers’ bullets.

Public Trust in the Police Declines

Extensive reporting by various media on police shootings no doubt contributed to a drop in public respect for the police. In 2015 , overall confidence in the police fell to 52% in a Gallup survey, tying a low mark that had been recorded in 1993 . Gallup attributed much of the decline to a series of incidents, not only the Ferguson case of Michael Brown but also the deaths of black men at the hands of police in Staten Island, NY and North Charleston, SC

A Gallup survey reported in 2017 that overall confidence in the police had risen slightly in the previous two years, with 57% of Americans saying they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in law enforcement (Norman, 2017 ).

Police were not the only profession to suffer a loss in trust by the public. It also is notable that Americans’ confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” dropped to its lowest level in the history of Gallup polling in 2016 . A survey that year reported that only 32% of respondents said they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media, down eight points from the previous year (Swift, 2016 ).

Of course, media reporting was not the only cause of the decline in public trust in the police. What does seem clear is that there were many more news reports on police shootings—not only the initial event but also civil disturbances and the response by public officials — during a time that there was no evidence that the overall problem of abuse of citizens by police officers was becoming any worse.

Because most Americans do not have direct interactions with the police in a given year, it seems fair to conclude that much of what the public knows about law enforcement comes from media, both news reports and entertainment media.

The Internet: Double-Edged Sword for Police and Media

The other major change in the basic police–media relationship involves the growth of the Internet, which has evolved into something of a double-edged sword when it comes to police–media relations.

The Internet has changed the face of journalism in the United States: in the pre-Internet age, for many decades in the 20th century , the national news media were dominated by a few large newspapers that offered national coverage, three television networks (later four, with the addition of Fox), and three national news magazines. Locally, one or two newspapers and a handful of television stations typically dictated the scope of a region’s coverage. Television coverage was considerably expanded with the launch of Cable News Network in 1980 . By the turn of the 21st century , the Internet had spawned a seemingly unlimited number of news websites, many of them boasting of investigative reporting both on the national and local levels.

At the same time, the Internet has provided law enforcement the opportunity to put out its “official” version of news on their own websites, Twitter and other social media. Some agencies see this as a way of bypassing the news media, sometimes declaring that they will not offer comments or factual material beyond what they have posted.

As one example, Tanya Eiserer, a reporter for WFAA television in Dallas, says, “Our largest local police department—the Dallas Police Department—absolutely has attempted to use social media to bypass the media. In fact, I recall a former chief specifically stating that they were starting the department’s blog so that they could get their version of the “story” out. Over the last six years, the department has become less and less responsive.”

The COPS Office’s “toolkit” put it this way: On the Internet, “when done well, a police agency has much more control over the content, messaging, and context than when they leave the job of informing citizens only to third parties, whether the third parties are journalists, community activists, or talk radio jocks” (Stephens et al., 2011 ). In sum, at one time, police agencies were literally dependent on the news media to get out the word about crime incidents but with the evolution of social media, it is now easy for the police to issue direct reports on crimes to any subscribing member of the public.

Full, official police reports may be obtainable some time after a crime is initially investigated via requests under freedom of information laws, but when an investigation into a crime is in its early stages, or particularly active, a police agency may decline to answer questions from the media or the general public, declaring that supplementary information on the report will be available only on the same social media on which it was published.

It is important to note that law enforcement agencies on the federal, state and local level in the United States total about 18,000—no one knows the precise number—and media policies differ greatly among agencies. Generalizations expressed here about police policies on public information are broadly accurate, but local practices may change frequently. Readers should check with specific agencies for information about their current policies.

While police often bypass the mainstream media through the use of social media, it also is true that accusations of misconduct by law enforcement, whether founded or unfounded, may be posted by anyone on social media absent any scrutiny by the news media.

Smartphone Videos and the Police

Another major technological change that has rocked police–media circles is the prevalence of smartphones capable of making video.

For many decades, it was possible to take still photographs or some forms of video of criminal acts and police involvement in reacting to them. This happened so infrequently, however, that it was unlikely that a major incident such as an officer shooting a civilian, or even that the more common though less prominent police–citizen interactions, would be captured on video. By the second decade of the 21st century , however, the situation had had changed radically. Not only did many average citizens carry smartphones, but higher-quality video equipment was so relatively inexpensive that cameras could easily be installed in police vehicles and worn by officers. This led to a revolution in the recording of events.

Whereas before the revolution an incident like a police shooting or a disturbance that resulted in police being called to the scene could only be described by participants after the fact, by the early decades of the 21st century it was common for such events not only to be recorded instantly but for videos to be promptly posted online. This meant that videos of controversial incidents typically “went viral” on platforms such as YouTube and Twitter, with news accounts often reporting that a video had been viewed many millions of times.

In one sense, this bypassed the news media because it meant that many members of the general public had some knowledge of an event simply by being able to view at least one person’s recording of it. Many such episodes that previously would never have been mentioned on national and local nightly television news programs ended up being reported there, if only briefly, simply because video was available.

Of course, videos usually cannot capture the full details of an event, such as what led up to it and what happened afterwards. The news media still play a big role in providing such details.

Police–Media Conflicts

The increasing ease of photographing public events has led to many skirmishes in which officers arrest or threaten both news media representatives and the general public for recording police activities. In 2018 , for example, a Colorado prosecutor declined to pursue charges against a police officer who handcuffed a Denver journalist who had taken photographs of several officers who were standing around a naked, handcuffed man seated on a sidewalk. During the same summer, Milwaukee police arrested a journalist who was taking photographs of squad cars in a police parking lot. The reporter was issued a $181 ticket for trespassing after being handcuffed, fingerprinted and questioned at a police station.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which represents journalists in conflicts with police, says that, “case law makes clear that police can limit media access when they believe such restrictions are needed for public safety or to prevent interference with an investigation.” The organization recommends that news organizations “have a ‘battle plan’ for dealing with situations before they develop.” The important need, says the committee, is to “develop a good working relationship with police officials.”

In 2017 , the Reporters Committee noted that “the most dangerous place in the U.S. for a journalist was at a protest” (Fraser & Matthews, 2018 ). Citing the US Press Freedom Tracker, the committee said that nearly half of “press freedom incidents—such as arrests of and attacks on journalists, as well as searches and seizures of newsgathering equipment—occurred at protests” in that year.

Another issue of police–media disagreement in the second decade of the 21st century involved police attempts to block news media access to scanners that for many years had enabled journalists and the general public to listen to police audio communications. In a 2019 article based on events in Colorado, the Columbia Journalism Review ( CJR ) reported that more than two dozen law enforcement agencies in the state had encrypted all of their radio communications, meaning that journalists and others were unable to use a scanner or a smartphone app to learn about routine police calls (Peters, 2019 ).

Police departments in other states are beginning to impose similar restrictions. The CJR reported that “press advocates worry that such encryption efforts will leave journalists at the mercy of law enforcement agencies that might not always be motivated to alert the press to incidents (e.g., any questionable officer-involved shooting).”

No National Standards on Police–Media Relations

There are no recognized national standards for how the news media and police should deal with each other and with the public generally in reporting on crime. Dealings between the police and the media most often are a function of local practice, frequently depending on personal relationships between police officials and journalists.

On a national level, the Society of Professional Journalists has adopted a set of ethics guidelines (Society of Professional Journalists, 2014 ). Among them are provisions that say journalists should:

Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.

Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent.

Balance a suspect’s right to a fair trial with the public’s right to know. Consider the implications of identifying criminal suspects before they face legal charges.

There are a number of other unofficial guidelines for journalists. For example, Andrew Seaman, who served in 2018 as the chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists ethics committee, offered guidance on covering mass shootings (Seaman, 2018 ). One of his suggestions is that “journalists should not interfere with active shooter or hostage situations.” Because journalists in the United States are not licensed or generally regulated, such rules usually fall into the category of advice that is not mandatory. Most journalists do not belong to the Society of Professional Journalists, and even if they do, there is no enforcement mechanism for ensuring compliance. However, many news organizations maintain their own set of procedures and ethical guidelines that employees are expected to obey.

From the law enforcement side, there also are no official nationally recognized rules on dealing with the news media, although there is plenty of unofficial advice. In 2003 , the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) produced a “model policy” consisting of “guidelines regarding media relations and the release of information to the public through the news media.” The document was produced with funding from the US Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance.

The policy advises that law enforcement agencies “may” release basic information about a crime or incident, information about victims, suspects, weapons and vehicles used, stolen items, injuries and condition of victims, the name, age, address, and other basic information about arrestees and the charges against, information contained in arrest affidavits and other applicable crime or incident reports, and booking photographs.

As of 2018 , the model policy was not publicly available on the IACP’s website and was accessible only by the organization’s members. The group was in the process of producing guidelines for the use of social media by law enforcement agencies. In addition, the IACP in 2006 published a volume titled, Best Practices in Law Enforcement Public Information (Braunstein & Cheek, 2006 ), consisting of 21 chapters by various authors discussing a wide variety of subjects, including “The Police Chief and Public Information,” “Harnessing the Power of Television News,” and “Public Information in Major Disasters.”

Another organization of police officials, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, has established a committee on public information practices that was in the process of writing its own guidance relating to social media in 2018 .

Law enforcement officers exchange tips on how to handle social media effectively at an annual “SMILE Conference” sponsored by a Massachusetts-based company called LAwS Communications, which bills it as “the leading conference devoted to Social Media, Internet, and Law Enforcement initiatives.”

Just like the guidelines issued by journalism groups, the policies and best practices compiled by law enforcement organizations are advisory, and none of the approximately 18,000 policing agencies around the United States is obligated to follow them.

In the IACP volume on best public information practices, Roy Wasden and Doug Ridenour of the Modesto, CA, Police Department urge law enforcement agencies to “organize a well thought-out, written media policy prepared with input from the executive staff, the department PIO(s) and interested media.” Wasden and Ridenour explain that, “If the media contribute to the formulation of the rules, they will have ownership of them and largely police themselves” (Braunstein & Cheek, 2006 ). Many police agencies still lack such a comprehensive media policy.

The fragmented nature of both the news media and police organizations in the United States means that the relationship will always be a bit uncertain. Journalism organizations depend on police to provide them timely and accurate information on crimes but also will try to hold police accountable for illegal or abusive activities. For their part, police will try to enlist media to help them publicize cases in which law enforcement hopes that the public can provide information needed to find and convict crime suspects. The Internet has provided more avenues for police to appeal directly to the public. Along the way there are bound to be disputes, but ultimately both sides need cooperation from the other to do their jobs well.

The rapid changes in both journalism and technology should be the subjects of new research by experts in communications and law enforcement. Most citizens once obtained their news about crime and police mainly from a limited number of print and broadcast news media organizations. It is not known with any precision how much news they now get either from law enforcement directly through social media or from Internet sources that are not related to the mainstream media. Also unknown on a national basis is how many police departments are succeeding in telling their side of the story either on policy issues or on individual crime reports by bypassing the news media.

The key question is, are emerging law enforcement practices in this area serving the public interest? If a police agency insists on controlling its messages and not subjecting them to any news media scrutiny, and any of the content proves to be erroneous or misleading, will their efforts be counterproductive by contributing to diminished public trust in the police?

These and other important aspects of the evolving relationship between the nation’s news media and its law enforcers would benefit from up-to-date research in the electronic age.

Further Reading

• Carlson, C. S. , & Cuillier, D. (2017). Public information officers exert increasing controls . Newspaper Research Journal 38 (2) 198–214.
• Carlson, C. S. , & Kashani, P. (2016). Mediated access: Crime reporters’ perceptions of public information officers’ media control efforts, use of social media, handling of body camera footage and public records . Indianapolis, IN: Society of Professional Journalists.
• Gest, T. (2001). Crime and politics: Big government's erratic campaign for law and order. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Graber, D. A. (1980). Crime news and the public . Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
• Grabowicz, P. (2014). Tutorial: Police records . Berkeley, CA: UC Berkeley Advanced Media Institute.
• Kania, R. R. E. , & Walsh, W. F. (Eds.). (1993). Mass media and criminal justice [Special issue] . Justice Professional , 8 (1).
• Lotz, R. E. (1991). Crime and the American press . Westport, CT: Praeger.
• Marshall, J. (2011). Watergate’s legacy and the press: The investigative impulse . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• Robinson, M. B. (2018). Media coverage of crime and criminal justice (3rd ed.). Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
• Surette, R. (2015). Media, crime, and criminal justice: Images, realities, and policies (5th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage.
• Boston Globe . (n.d.). State police turmoil . Boston Globe .
• Braunstein, S. , & Cheek, W. (Eds.). (2006). Best practices in law enforcement public information . Alexandria, VA: International Association of Chiefs of Police.
• Disaster Center (n.d.). United States crime rates 1960–2017 . The Disaster Center.com.
• Fraser, K. , & Matthews, S. (2018). Police, protesters and the press . Washington, DC: Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
• Grieco, E. (2018, July 30). Newsroom employment dropped nearly a quarter in less than 10 years, with greatest decline at newspapers . Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• Krajicek, D. J. (1998). Scooped! Media miss real story on crime while chasing sex, sleaze and celebritie s. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
• Lipschultz, J. H. , & Hilt, M. L. (2002). Crime and local television news: Dramatic, breaking and live from the scene . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Nielsen . (2018). Audio today 2018 : How America listens . New York, NY: Nielsen.
• Norman, J. (2017, July 10). Confidence in police back at historical average . Gallup.
• Peters, J. (2019, January 22). Encryption efforts in Colorado challenge crime reporters, transparency . Columbia Journalism Review .
• Reaves, B. A. (2015). Local police departments, 2013: Personnel, policies, and practices . Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.
• Schaefer, J. , & Kaufman, G. (2018, September 13). How problem cops stay on Michigan's streets . Detroit Free Press .
• Seaman, A. (2018). “ Reporting on mass shootings .” Compiled for Excellence in Journalism, 2018, Baltimore, September 27–29, 2018.
• Sedensky, M. (2015, November 1). AP: Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct . Associated Press.
• Society of Professional Journalists . (2014). SPJ code of ethics . Indianapolis, IN: Society of Professional Journalists.
• Stephens, D. W. , Hill, J. , & Greenberg, S. (2011). Strategic communications practices: A toolkit for police executives . Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).
• Swift, A. (2016, September 14). Americans’ trust in mass media sinks to new low . Gallup.

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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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The effects of mass media on crime prevention awareness, attitudes, and behavior: The case of crime stoppers

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Research has been limited on the effects of mass media in increasing awareness of and participation in crime prevention programs. Mass media campaigns have been criticized as ineffective because they are neither informative nor motivating. Crime Stoppers is a program that appears responsive to these criticisms. The program involves dramatic reenactment of unsolved crimes and promises monetary rewards and anonymity for persons with information leading to the arrest or conviction of criminals. The present research examines the effects of Crime Stoppers on awareness, attitudes, and behaviors. Implications for theory and policy are discussed.

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Lurigio, A.J., Rosenbaum, D.P. The effects of mass media on crime prevention awareness, attitudes, and behavior: The case of crime stoppers. AJCJ 15 , 82–105 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02885621

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Social Media and Crime Prevention

Harnessing the power of technology.

Creative cybermedia tools unite law enforcement and the community in the fight against crime.

A September 2010 International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) survey revealed that 81 percent of law enforcement agencies interviewed now use social media. However, while 62 percent report using tools such as Facebook to aid in criminal investigations, fewer than half acknowledge using social media for crime prevention. Many experts believe the social media sphere holds enormous potential for law enforcement crime prevention units and groups such as Neighborhood Watch. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, “… [W]ith law enforcement personnel being strained by budget cuts and the struggling economy keeping us at home more often, embracing online networks as prevention tools may help us form a deeper connection with our neighbors and local law enforcement while helping to prevent crime.”

Social Media: All the News That’s Fit to... Upload!

Just what constitutes “social media”? Wikipedia defines the term as “Media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.” More simply, “Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings” (Creative Media Farm). A few—but by no means all—of the available formats include online videos, blogs, and social networking sites. Designed as a primer, this article introduces some of the most popular platforms and reviews current and potential uses in crime prevention.

Back in the good old days, when family time meant an evening spent together watching Happy Days or Dallas, we received emergency news alerts via the local and national television networks. Nowadays, portable electronic devices such as smart phones, DVD players, and laptops are fragmenting a formerly cohesive audience, requiring crime prevention organizations to adopt multi-targeted approaches in order to reach individual segments of the community. “Whenever a group holds a Neighborhood Watch meeting, we send an officer. People are on social media now, so we have to have a presence there,” explained Mark Economou, public information officer for the Boca Raton Police Services Department. “The bottom line is, when you’re on the computer late at night checking your Facebook page, you’re not going to visit the police department’s website. We put information in front of your face so that you don’t have to go looking for it.”

According to the aforementioned IACP media survey, social networking is the most popular social media platform used within the law enforcement community, with nearly 67 percent of responding agencies stating that they currently have a Facebook page. This networking Goliath (and, to a lesser extent, its cousin MySpace) is especially popular with crime prevention units, which can easily—and for no setup cost—create a page where “fans” can read the latest news, post comments, and participate in discussion forums. With 500 million active users, Facebook represents a supersized slice of the social media pie, but it is by no means alone. Following are some other major social media platforms that are gaining ground within the law enforcement and crime prevention community.

Weblogs , or “blogs,” such as the Google-owned Blogger/BlogSpot, allow users to publish and share text and multimedia files online. Indexing and key word search functions enable readers to retrieve information easily, making this an attractive medium for detailed and timely communications. Arranged chronologically, blogs are an ideal venue for posting upcoming event announcements and seasonal crime prevention and safety information. Last summer, for example, the Boston Police Department posted propane gas and charcoal grill barbecue safety tips on its blog.

Microblogs adhere to the “less is more” principle, allowing users to publish brief (typically up to 140 characters) status updates. The Internet is home to dozens of microblogging sites, including Nixle, Tumblr, and Google Buzz, but Twitter currently boasts the most subscribers—175 million as of September 14, 2010. Because Twitter posts, known as “tweets,” convey a sense of urgency, they are an effective way to rapidly disseminate time-sensitive crime prevention news and alerts, as the National Crime Prevention Council illustrates: “If we sign up to our watch group’s designated social media site, we can give our neighbors instant access to information that may make a difference between being victimized and escaping unscathed. One tweet to your neighbors about a strange person peering into a neighbor’s house in the area... about an attempted child abduction can instantly put hundreds of your neighbors on alert and get them all working together to help law enforcement apprehend the suspects.”

Multimedia sharing websites such as Flickr, PhotoBucket, and YouTube let users store, share, and create audiovisual files and photographs. A similar audiovisual tool, the podcast, is designed to be released in segments, which are stored chronologically on a website server. Users can download these segments directly or stream them online. It’s an old cliché, but for visual learners, a picture really does paint a thousand words. Audiovisual media let law enforcement agencies demonstrate crime prevention and safety techniques in a format that Neighborhood Watch members can easily replay and share with others in their community. For example, in Lathrup Village, Michigan, the police department produced the following 10-minute video to explain the steps for establishing a Neighborhood Watch ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHpDYiQq7z8 ). A segment featuring professional burglars helps illustrate how quickly and easily a home break-in can occur. The police department requires that groups wishing to start a Watch view the video before signage will be placed in their neighborhood. In Boca Raton, the Police Services Department has shot a series of seasonal videos on topics ranging from boating safety ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-w9YRZ55EU ) to tips for remaining safe while holiday shopping ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igt3TBB7ooc ).

Thanks to advances in technology, video production doesn’t require a Spielberg-size budget. Using only a camera, a laptop, and video editing software, the average crime prevention unit can create a polished and professional product. Furthermore, when it comes to selecting a narrator or spokesperson, subject area expertise and public speaking ability may substitute for extensive media experience. “You don’t need to have a big staff or a public information officer, explained Economou. “[Your spokesperson] could even be a civilian in records or a deputy in crime analysis.”

Innovation and Integration

As the social media market matures, organizations are beginning to focus less on simply establishing an online presence and more on developing comprehensive integration strategies. For instance, Facebook and MySpace users now can embed YouTube videos into their profile pages. A Twitter application lets account holders find Facebook friends who tweet as well as post tweets to their own Facebook fan or profile page. A useful social media tool, the RSS feed, works in conjunction with other social media platforms to facilitate integration. Rather than repeatedly visiting an agency’s blog, Facebook or Twitter page, or website, subscribers to a site’s RSS feed can elect to have new content automatically forwarded to them electronically.

Integration is a rapidly evolving, multifaceted science that can be uniquely tailored to meet the needs of the individuals and organizations that use social media. “We’re currently looking at ways to integrate our daily blotter into the newsfeed on our Facebook page,” Economou noted. “We’re also trying to set up a notification system for when someone asks a question on our Facebook page after hours and on weekends so that we can reply in a timely manner.”

Smart phones also play an increasingly important role in social media integration. By downloading special applications, iPhone users can be notified when they receive a Facebook message or tweet, and bloggers can create new entries on their Blackberry. The Boca Raton Police Crime Prevention Unit recently teamed up with retailers at a popular local mall to reach on-the-go holiday shoppers using smart phone technology. “We’re constantly trying to get safety messages out, especially in areas where there is a lot of petty theft,” Economou said. “At Christmas time, many mall shoppers are oblivious to their surroundings. We want to remind them to not leave packages inside their cars and to not talk on their phone while walking through the parking lot.” The police department designed and displayed throughout the local mall “Happy Holiday” posters (without identifying the source) that invited readers to scan a QR (quick response) barcode. “We decided to try out this new technology during the holiday season,” Economou explained. “Smart phone users who scan the posters receive a holiday shopping safety reminder, courtesy of the police department, plus a discount coupon from a participating retailer.” The Be Safe and Save campaign was recently featured on CBS News and can be viewed here ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHqWB3EGsyo&feature=related) .

IACP Launches New Social Media Resource

The comprehensive website ( www.iacpsocialmedia.org ) features a step-by-step guide that provides an overview of social media, information on strategy and policy development, as well as tips and tutorials for getting started. The Technologies section lists the major social media platforms with hyperlinks to detailed information and case studies from actual law enforcement agencies. A growing directory includes drop-down boxes from which users can search for agencies that use social media by country, state, agency type and size, and media platform.

The website’s blog, The Social Media Beat, features thought-provoking columns written by law enforcement communications experts. Past topics have ranged from tips for creating a Twitter bio to the importance of developing a consistent voice across social media platforms.

As social media use in the workplace increases, so does the need for established policy. The IACP has drafted a model policy to help law enforcement agencies develop procedures and guidelines for official departmental use ( www.iacpsocialmedia.org/portals/1/documents/social%20media%20policy.pdf ).

According to Nancy Kolb, IACP senior program manager, the project began in response to member inquiries and growing interest in the field of social media. “We’ve held several workshops on social media at recent conferences, and they’ve been standing room only.” Although the website launched only two months ago, feedback from the law enforcement community has been exceedingly positive.

In the News

Following is a sampling of media reports that focus on the use of social media in crime prevention.

• “Beyond Twitter and Facebook: Leveraging Other Social Media Tools at Your Department,” James Gunther, The CrimeMap, February 4, 2010
• “How Police Can Use Twitter,” DailySplice
• “Lawbreakers foiled by Facebook,” CNNMoney.com, April 8, 2010
• “Neighborhood Watch Goes High Tech,” abcNEWS, May 2, 2009
• “Social Networking for Law Enforcement,” TechBeat, National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, Winter 2010
• “Virtual Neighborhood Watch: How Social Media is Making Cities Safer,” Mashable, October 1, 2009

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