I am excited to share this guest blog post by my friend Frank Edwards.  Frank is a Chicago-based anti-prison organizer, information activist, researcher and writer.  He serves on the leadership team of the excellent publication called AREA Chicago. Frank just recently completed his masters degree at Depaul University where he focused on media coverage of youth “crime.”

Creating crime waves

By Frank Edwards

Those of you in Chicago probably saw this cover on the Red Eye last week, or this story in the Chicago Tribune.  If this news reporting is to be believed, Chicago is facing a growing problem of robbery on public transit.  John Hilkevitch of the Tribune claimed this increase is due to “young thugs stealing smartphones from passengers.”  When I saw this cover walking to the el, my immediate reaction was shock.  Shock that on a system that has millions of riders every month, a meager total of 59 robberies somehow has become a crisis that needs to be dealt with.  I was also haunted by the knowledge that this kind of exaggeration of the dangerousness of public spaces (such as recent unfounded panics in Boystown) often leads to increased policing, harassment, and incarceration of young people of color.

Crime and the media

Newspapers are incredibly good at constructing crime waves.  At the most basic level, crime coverage sells papers (in line with the adage “If it bleeds, it leads”), and media outlets want to do everything they can to sell their product.  Thus, anything that can be labeled as a new trend in crime is a hot commodity in the news room.  Plenty of research has shown that even despite decreases in the number of crimes that occur, the news continues to increase the amount of coverage dedicated to crime. For example, between 1990 and 1998, there was a 33% decrease in murders nationally, but news coverage of murder increased by 473%.  Just with this information, we know that newspapers have a direct incentive to publish heavy volumes of crime news regardless of whether what they are reporting is an accurate representation of what is really happening.

This isn’t the whole story though.  When newspapers do publish crime news, they almost always portray Black and Latino youth as violent and dangerous, reinforcing racist stereotypes that people of color are “naturally” criminal.  This overrepresentation, of course, is not justified even by official arrest statistics, which reflect racist patterns of policing and arrest.

Lastly, people who consume crime news regularly are often more afraid of crime than those who do not, and will rank crime as a more important political issue than those who don’t bother to read or watch crime news.  In her book Making Crime Pay, Kathy Beckett demonstrated that public opinion about the importance of crime jumps dramatically after spikes in news media coverage in crime, suggesting that the news has a very active role in shaping public opinion about how much crime there is and how important it is for politicians and law enforcement to deal with.

What does all of this have to do with the Red Eye, the Tribune and coverage of robbery on the CTA?  On the one hand, these stories fit the same pattern of misleading the public about how often crime occurs, while on the other, they use coded language to suggest that commuters should be afraid of young people of color, and police should be doing more to control them.  Over time, this kind of reporting directly contributes to the kinds of racial disproportionality we see in both the juvenile justice system and the adult criminal justice system.

So let’s break this story down a little bit.

Numbers sometimes lie

The Tribune reported this data as such:

There were 581 robberies reported on CTA property in Chicago in 2010, averaging 48 a month, and 294 robberies January through May this year, an average of 59 a month, a 23 percent increase, according to the most recent statistics the Chicago Police Department released under a Tribune Freedom of Information Act request.

However, they do very little to tell us how uncommon robbery on the CTA is.

In 2010, people took 516,891,783 rides on the CTA (both buses and trains)(pdf).  If there were 581 robberies on the CTA in 2010, than means that there was about one robbery for every 900,000 rides taken on the CTA.  Put another way, in 2010, you would have about a one in 900,000 (.00011%) chance of getting robbed each time you got on a bus or train.

For the first 5 months of 2011, people took 214,331,782 rides on CTA buses and trains (pdf).  With 294 robberies during these months, that means that there was about one robbery for every 730,000 rides taken on the CTA.  Your odds of getting robbed every time you got on the train or bus would be about one in 730,000 or .00013%.  Your odds of winning $100,000 in the Illinois Little Lotto (1 in 575,757) are better than the odds of you getting robbed each time you get on the CTA.

From the numbers, it’s clear that the Trib is grasping for straws, trying to make a story out of nothing.  While there is an increase, it’s far from massive, and certainly isn’t grounds for front page news.

What the story says to readers: be afraid!

In case you were wondering who the Trib thinks transit riders should be scared of, they make it obvious by calling them “young thugs”.  In Chicago, as in most places around the country, the term “thug” has clearly loaded racial and gender connotations.

Quoting a police officer, the Trib suggests that commuters must remain alert and afraid.  “I’m wearing my uniform and he said, ‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ Then he realizes I am a police officer,” the commander said. “I told him someone is going to punch you or take your phone. We see it all day long.”

They attribute this perhaps insignificant increase to “youths ages 11 to 19 stealing smartphones from CTA passengers. Most of the phones taken are Apple iPhones, said authorities, who urged CTA riders to keep their smartphones out of sight.”  They are suggesting that middle class transit riders sporting expensive electronics need to be especially afraid of young people of color (as indicated by the “thug” coded reference).

So the Trib and RedEye both are continuing the trend of pushing for the criminalization of black and brown youth by encouraging their middle class readership to be constantly afraid.  It’s a big picture problem, but it happens at small levels every day in the paper, and one reason that every time I see a crime story, I cringe.