My grandfather writes and sends me a daily email. This morning he discusses the violent times we are all living in and how murder is everywhere. He discusses how he worries about the future of his family members because the United States is a dangerous place to live. He often provides explanations for this ‘increase in crime’ that I, as a criminologist, know to be untrue. Sometimes he will say kids are violent because of social media or video games, other times he will blame it on immigrants. Regardless, my grandfather lives in fear. He is fearful of someone breaking into his home, and at the age of 80, had a security screen installed in their nice suburban area in Colorado. He avoids downtown Denver because of his belief it is overrun by ‘gang bangers.’

However, where could all these ideas come from for him? My grandfather has never worked in the criminal justice system, he never studied it, he did not attend college but has such strong thoughts about policies that need to be enacted, problems with society, and he often states them as a fact. The answer: THE NEWS. Perhaps watching too much television can cause an overestimation of rates of crime both in reality and in the media (Hetsroni & Tukachinsky, 2006).

Media is not a terrible thing that is conspiring to ruin our minds. It can be very beneficial and can help share information, but we need to be aware of the downfalls of media and even which media we choose to watch. Many major news outlets are vetted resources for good news coverage but we also need to be aware of bias present in news converge and remember that “if it bleeds it leads” meaning that the news often reports crime because people are interested in watching “exciting” news coverage. Research has shown that entertainment and news media create an image that we are living in a dangerous world (Jewkes, 2015). It can be easy to become fearful after watching too much news if we let ourselves fall trap to losing the facts. “Factfulness recognizes when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better, we often do not hear about them, which can lead to a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful” (Rosling, 2018).

Public knowledge of crime and justice is derived largely from the media. Research has examined the impact of media consumption on the fear of crime, punitive attitudes, and perceived police effectiveness. Studies have found that the more crime-related media an individual consumes, the more fearful of crime they are (Dowler, 2003) (Kort-Butler & Sittner-Hartshorn, 2011).

However, we also are attracted to specific types of crime and victims when we choose to consume media. In other words, the media is aware of our crime preferences and will report on those more. Sociology professor Barry Glassner describes what he calls the ‘ideal crime story’ for journalists to report. He notes that society likes to read about innocent victims, likable people, and the perpetrator needs to be scary and uncaring about the crime (2009).

Our society is fascinated with crime and justice, where we spend hours watching films, reading books, television shows and social media that keep us constantly engaged in crime “talk.” Perhaps what we do not always realize is that the mass media plays an important role in the construction of criminals, criminality, and the criminal justice system. Our understanding and perceptions of victims, criminals, deviants, and police are largely determined by their portrayal in the mass media (Dowler, 2003).

The majority of public knowledge about crime and justice is derived from the media. (Roberts & Doob, 1986) (Surette, 1990) (Kappeler & Potter, 2018). Gallup polls are a type of public opinion poll conducted by the Gallup Organization, one of the world’s leading research-based, global performance-management consulting companies. These polls are used to gather information about people’s attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and behaviors on a wide range of social, economic, and political issues. Gallup polls are conducted through telephone interviews, online surveys, and face-to-face interviews, and they typically involve asking a random sample of individuals a series of questions about a specific topic. The results of the Gallup polls are often used by governments, businesses, and the media to inform their decision-making processes, and they are considered to be one of the most reliable and respected sources of public opinion data. Since Gallup polls began asking whether crime had increased in 1989, a majority of Americans have usually said that crime increased every year. . There is only one year where people did not think it did, which followed 9/11 (Swift, 2016).

Despite decreases in U.S. violent and property crime rates since 2008, most voters say crime has gotten worse during that span. Mostly, Americans’ perceptions of crime are often at odds with the data (Gramlich, 2016). Research has also shown that there are stark differences across party lines. Specifically, almost eight-in-ten voters who supported President Donald Trump (78%) said this, as did 37% of backers of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Just 5% of pro-Trump voters and a quarter of Clinton supporters said crime has gotten better since 2008, according to the survey of 3,788 adults (Gramlich, 2016). All of this is at odds with official data reports that will get discussed in more detail in the coming chapters. Since this is the case, why do people have this misperception about crime and criminality? Where do these myths develop?

The media plays an important role in the perception of crime, the American public’s understanding of how the criminal justice system operates, and policies Americans are willing to support for reform. Public opinion gets connected with pressure to change crime policies (Toch & Maguire, 2014) especially when there is a high fear of a certain crime (Dowler, 2003). The media can provide the public with an estimation of how much crime there is, the types of crime that are common, trends in crime rates, and the daily operations of the criminal justice system. However, the media often does not portray an accurate portrayal of crime and criminal justice Kappeler & Potter, 2018).