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Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The recent FBI report that crime rates have plunged seven years in a row should be
cause for great joy. But many police officials instead have expressed frustration
that much of the public still doesn't believe they have. He blamed the media for
fueling public perceptions that crime still rages and criminals lurk behind every
street lamp.
But for many who call the shots in TV newsrooms, frustrated police officials and
FBI crime stats aren't likely to change how they present crime news. They've spent
the past two decades turning TV- crime verite into a sure fire formula for ratings.
That formula is ridiculously simple. Just have helicopters and mobile camera crews
hover over or roam around city streets looking for police car chases, dead bodies,
gang shoot-outs, and drug busts. And most importantly, make sure those city streets
are in black and Latino neighborhoods. The formula is bloody, exploitative, and racist.
But it is a smash success. It has hooked so many Americans on the murder and mayhem
nightly news broadcasts that the networks have spun off a legion of hybrid clones.
These shows simulate live-action crime chases and busts and worse they almost always
depict blacks and Latinos as violent criminals. This has convinced many white suburbanites
that their lives are at grave risk from violence-prone, drugged out Latinos and African-Americans.
The truth is they aren't. The FBI crime report noted that Americans are at less
risk of becoming a murder, robbery, or assault victim today then in past years. It
also noted that while blacks and Latinos commit a disproportionate amount of the
street crime in America most whites still aren't at risk. The overwhelming majority
of the crimes committed by blacks and Latinos are against other blacks and Latinos.
The media fetish with crime and the public's indulgence of that fetish is not
just harmless escapism and innocent fun. It has had disastrous public policy consequences.
It has boosted the number of persons jailed in America to a record high two million
prisoners. This is the largest number of any nation on the planet. Accodring to the
Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C. based public advocacy group, California alone
has built 21 new prisons since 1984, and taxpayers cough-up $4 billion yearly to
run them. In the same period the state could manage to scrounge up only enough funds
to build one new university campus despite a bulging student population.
It has prompted passage of an avalanche of three strikes and draconian drug laws
which have locked-up mostly black and Latino offenders for non-violent property or
drug-related crimes. It has ignited a wave of legally questionable random vehicle
checks, property searches and seizures, youth curfew laws, and injunctions that have
battered civil rights and civil liberties protections. It has fed stereotypes among
many whites that violent crime comes exclusively with a black or Latino face and
fanned suspicions among many blacks and Latinos that race is always the factor when
they are beaten or shot by the police.
It has fueled the dangerous cycle of arrest and incarceration for blacks and Latinos.
One out of three young black males are now in jail or prison, on parole or probation,
and many blacks and Latinos tell harrowing tales of being harassed by police for
driving while black and brown. It has allowed many politicians to offer quick fix
solutions such as more police, prisons, and tough laws rather than more drug counseling,
vocational job and skills training, education, and violence reduction programs to
keep the streets safer.
But TV executives don't seem to be much troubled by these things. They get their
ratings. The public gets its nightly dose of lurid crime sensationalism. And police
officials will continue to get more frustrated when the public believes that they
are doing nothing right in the battle against real crime.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of The Crisis in Black and Black. email:ehutchi344@aol.com
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