Crime and Media Hysteria: Tone Down the Headlines

Hysteria in the media about crime has caused a moral panic and calls for extreme measures such as zero tolerance. But do the front pages reflect the true picture of crime in Ireland? And are vested interests turning a manageable problem into a crisis? By Dr. Mick O'Connell.
The Irish public is greatly troubled by the crime crisis. Opinion polls, for example, regularly demonstrate the high levels of fear and pessimism surrounding crime. An article resulting from an Irish Marketing Surveys poll for the Irish Independent in October 1993 argued that “public opinion... has swung firmly in favour of a tough crack-down on our criminals – despite official figures that portray merely a gradual increase in lawlessness.” An Irish Times/MRBI poll on February 3 last year reported that “most people fear crime is getting worse and are unhappy with what's being done.” In 1996, Irish sociologist Ciaran McCullagh argued that levels of concern about crime in Ireland are “as high as comparable figures for major American cities.”  In a 1996 survey of a sample of Dublin citizens, Anthony Whelan and I reported that people believed all crimes were on the increase but that more serious, violent and extreme offences were increasing especially quickly.

Given this level of concern, the natural assumption must be that Ireland is facing an unprecedented upsurge in crime. When the governor of Mountjoy prison recently criticised the Irish public for its lack of compassion towards offenders, he was possibly unaware of the severity of the problem. The full extent of the crisis was revealed in November 1996, when a referendum produced a majority in favour of a draconian change of the bail law.  As criminologist Paul O'Mahony [who writes on the following pages] noted in the Irish Times in November 1996, the change in the bail law “was part of a wider agenda to erode civil liberties, which has already seen the introduction of seven-day detention and a significant curtailment of the right to silence for the specified group of suspected drug dealers.  Such is the extent of the present hard-line consensus that these incursions on individual rights have been adopted with hardly a murmur of dissent.”  True, but perhaps dissent from a hard-line consensus is an unaffordable luxury in these times.

There are a number of anomalies that should be mentioned, however.  Oddly, Ireland appears to have a favourable crime record. It may surprise the reader, but every study comparing rates of recorded crime in EU countries has confirmed that the rate of crime in the Republic of Ireland is very low, relatively speaking.  In 1993, for example, Mr O'Mahony compared rates of crime in Ireland, England and Wales, Scotland and Denmark, where crimes are categorised similarly.  Ireland's recorded crime rate is less than half that found in the rest of these jurisdictions. Nor does it seem likely that the gardaí are more efficient at “cuffing” certain crimes from the official statistics than police forces in other countries in order to present a more flattering picture. The small number of studies comparing official rates with self-reported levels of crime victimisation confirm that, while there are discrepancies between official and self-reported rates of crime in Ireland, they are no greater than elsewhere. So Ireland really does have relatively low levels of criminal deviance. In fact, comparative sociologists have found that, along with such phenomena as high levels of religiosity and unusual demographic patterns, the Irish are quirky in not murdering, robbing and maiming each other with greater zeal.

But international comparisons may not really matter, of course.  Just because our French and Italian cousins view their crime situations with equanimity doesn't mean that Irish people have to. The problem is not how crime in central Dublin compares to that in central Copenhagen but how crime compares now to the way things used to be. We all remember the good old days, when a person could leave the front door open and stroll the streets safely before returning to a home free from burglary. Only the facts stand in the way of this kind of nostalgia. The good old days include 1983, when the number of recorded indictable offences crept above 100,000. Nor, presumably, has everyone forgotten the joy-riding “epidemic” in Dublin that generated such panic. The table below presents the trends in the overall number of offences and in two (arbitrarily selected) offences from garda annual crime reports.

Crisis, what crisis?

Rather than an acceleration towards a crime-ridden society, there appears to be a remarkable stability in crime frequency in Ireland over the past 15 years. In some years there are small increases, in others small decreases, with changes of more than a few percentage points rarely observed. How, then, can the sense of panic be explained?  Compared to other countries, there isn't that much crime about in Ireland, and considering the last 15 years there hasn't been much of an increase. But public confidence has plummeted because we “know” that the crime situation is out of control, that the thugs are winning and that the criminal justice system is a shambles. But this public misperception sits uneasily with the more complete picture of crime emerging from the official statistics.

One possibility is that the media are responsible for this discrepancy between perception and reality. The historian Geoff Pearson argued in Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (which social commentators on crime should be forced to read and re-read), that every generation fears the moral decline of the present compared to the comfortable certainties of the past. What makes his book compulsive reading is its demonstration that there never was a golden, crime-free era, media attempts to remind us of the good old days notwithstanding.  Although Britain fondly remembers the “Teds” of the 1950s, for example, an examination of the headlines at that time suggests that the Teds were something frightening, new and foreign, a symptom of moral decay, lack of discipline and excessive Brylcreem. The Teds were banned by cinemas and feared by newspaper editors as a terrifying American import.

Pearson also shows that, in the inter-war period, press commentators presented the same nostalgic message about the Edwardian or Victorian past – things were better, crime was lower, the streets were safer, the beer was bitterer, the coins were heavier, and the grass was greener. But a look at newspapers in the Edwardian and Victorian eras reveals not a rosy contentment with the moral order but a sense of crisis and a fear of terrifying new crimes – plus ça change – a harking back to the 1820s, when everyone knew his or place. Alongside this sham nostalgia, it has been argued that the diet of horrific and atypical crime stories selected for coverage by newspaper editors and journalists distorts and blocks public understanding of the crime problem. As British researchers Williams and Dickinson have suggested, “crime reporting in the news media has been a focus of concern because of the assumption that the salience given to certain types of crime, notably those involving sex or violence, creates a distorted picture of reality which is reflected in the beliefs of news consumers.”

What about crime and the media in Ireland? Could vested interests have turned a manageable problem into a crisis?

That last sentence is not mine. It was the introduction to an article about crime in Ireland by Gene Kerrigan and Helen Shaw in Magill's April 1985 issue. Their piece summarised the results of an Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) crime-victimisation study conducted by Richard Breen and David Rottman.  Kerrigan and Shaw used these results as the basis for a devastating “j'accuse” piece about the presentation of the crime “wave” at the time. They highlighted the print media's pernicious tendency to present the social problem of crime in as hysterical a light as possible.  Titillating accounts of sensational crimes will inevitably hype the problem into a crisis. Rather than reporting crime in a sober and responsible way, the stories portrayed a society on the verge of breaking down. Kerrigan and Shaw quoted Breen and Rottman's study:

“All those concerned with reporting crime seem preoccupied with establishing that crime has reached unprecedented levels. Upsurges in crime are also attractive to the news media. Crime sells copies with a reliability few other news items can match.”
Alongside Kerrigan and Shaw's general attack on the media's presentation of crime, they especially highlighted a deliberate policy decision by the Evening Herald “to exaggerate the level of crime perpetrated…The effect would be to generate and generalise fear and a demand that ‘something' be done.” The Evening Herald was driving the crime bandwagon.

It is possible to test the media-bias claim in a methodical way. A quantitative analysis by myself and others of crime stories covered by the main Irish newspapers (the Irish Times, the now-defunct Irish Press, the Evening Herald and the Star) over a two-month period in early 1994 confirmed the tremendous bias in crime portrayal. Rather than a representative picture of the offences occurring in Ireland, newspapers provide an almost chemically pure, unrepresentative picture of crime in Ireland, with the least frequent and most serious offences (murder, abduction and sexual assault) featured most often and the most common crimes featured most rarely. Measured in words, the longest crime articles also tend to be about the most serious offences, adding to the skew already present in crime selection. General articles about crime trends were also found to be pessimistic (why is Ireland's relatively low crime rate never discussed? If official figures were ever released giving us the highest crime rate in the EU, it would certainly make the front pages). The priority of stories with more vulnerable victims and less vulnerable offenders was also evident. The second table, for example, compares the average article length for stories involving murders of male and female victims by male and female offenders.

Is there any good journalistic reason for this observed pattern, except that the contrast between a male offender and a female victim is more salacious than that between a male victim and a female offender? (Or is the point being missed? Maybe salacious journalism is good journalism.)

Kerrigan and Shaw's claim that the Evening Herald was the leader in the crime-hyping market also found some empirical support. As a newspaper, it contained the greatest proportion of crime stories to other stories during the  analysis period. In the survey of crime perceptions held by the public mentioned above, it was also found that readers of Independent Group newspapers tended to have the greatest fear of crime, regardless of previous victimisation experiences, and using statistical techniques to control for educational and social-class differences between newspaper readerships.

In other words, Kerrigan and Shaw's Magill article emerges as a piece of genuinely good journalism about crime, simultaneously explaining, clarifying and accusing. They put into words an intuitive sense of the whole phenomenon (causes and effects) of crime reporting that influenced and was confirmed by dry empirical research a decade later. The only question that remains is the degree to which a distorted media picture of crime actually matters. Crime hysteria is dangerous because it distorts public opinion. With moral panics maintaining a distorted public opinion, the reality of the crime phenomenon is obscured, and it becomes impossible to discuss the development of a rational set of social policies towards crime. A rational approach might acknowledge, for example, that while it's not improbable that tactical decisions taken by the gardaí and minister for justice will influence crime levels, the phenomenon is a good deal more complex than this. As any first-year sociology student knows, crime is an aspect of modernity, a by-product of urbanisation and industrialisation and the evolution from traditional society. As any garda will tell you, crime has a lot to do with young people, and when their haemorrhage through emigration periodically eases, it's quite possible that crime might rise a little (it might even be a price worth paying). And as anyone who has ever taken the time to visit the Dublin District and Circuit Courts will know, crime is clearly also about poverty and inequality, especially the grinding poverty of certain urban communities where the Celtic Tiger never roams and terrifyingly high unemployment rates undermine people's sense of control over their lives. And finally, as anybody who has ever thought for more than 20 seconds about it will realise, a lot of crime involves drugs, and a sincere and serious debate about the social efficacy of drug-use criminalisation is more than overdue.

If the current trend in crime reporting is maintained, however, then the reality of crime will continue to be obscured behind a daily diet of villains, thugs, monsters and people “just born bad.” Crime-prevention innovations will be limited to calls for more gardaí and extra prison places. An ever-more retributive public will demand an Irish criminal-justice system shaped according to the disastrous US model. On the other hand, a responsible media analysis of the crime problem in Ireland might just be more interesting to the typical reader, could reduce disproportionate levels of fear of crime and might enable a more forgiving public to at least listen to arguments supporting rehabilitation.  But don't hold your breath.

Dr Mick O'Connell lectures on the psychology of crime and on social psychology at the Department of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin.