Academic literature on the topic 'Crime news'

The vast majority of crime reporting occurs on local television news and in newspapers. Although crimes are extraordinary events, they assume an ordinariness that only daily reporting can give them. The obvious question is what does the news tell us about crime. This article compares the coverage of adult crime and the coverage of what the author has termed “KidsCrime,” defined as a story in which a juvenile was either the suspect or the victim (or both). What is the nature of that coverage? How consistent is it with official statistics? Are there differences between adult crime and KidsCrime coverage regarding offenses, victimization, production techniques, and other attributes? This examination of the crime coverage revealed (a) significant differences between KidsCrime and adult crime coverage, (b) a portrait of crime that was consistent and inconsistent with official statistics, and (c) a presentation approach that discouraged critical viewing.

The problem in research, namely how is the choice of words in mass media framing of crime news? What are the techniques and models of mass media framing of crime news? What is the response of the community to the use of non-criminal news language and its influence on society? This study aims to describe and inventory the concept of the crime language news framing in the mass media. The concept of framing described is related to the choice of words in mass media framing, techniques and models of mass media framing of crime news and public response to the use of non-criminal news language and its influence on society. The method used in this study consists of three stages, namely the stage of data collection, the stage of data classification, and the stage of data analysis. Data obtained from print media mass media. Technically, this research was conducted using the method of listening and proficient methods in providing data. The proficient method can be compared with the interview method. In data analysis, editing, coding, and matching methods are used. Based on data analysis, the choice of words in the language of news framing of crimes is generally in favor of the victim. News writers choose words that can accompany the reader's mind to sympathize with the victim. In addition, the focus of the news is framing with cognitive, empathy, and packing techniques. The framing model in crime news language has four structural dimensions of news text as a framing device, namely syntax, script, thematic, and rhetorical. Keyword: framing, language, crime news, and mass media

Background: Knife crime has become a common phrase used by the media, but it is not always clear what it refers to or what they mean when they use the term. Knife crime can cover many offences, making it challenging to define and estimate its prevalence. Methods Six UK online news portals were purposefully chosen to be included in the study, and knife crime news was searched retrospectively. Because English is the country's official language, only English online news portals were chosen. The term "knife crime" was used to search. The news portals were the: Metro, the Sun, the Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard. Retrospectively, news portals were initially searched with the search term Results In the assigned news portals, 692 reports were found between January 2011 and December 2021. The study revealed that the 11-20 years of age group individuals are more vulnerable as victims, and males are more reported as victims when compared to females. About 61.8% of knife crimes are reported from South England. Conclusion Knife crime risk is higher in early adulthood and among males. Street violence, fights/gang attacks, family issues and robbery are the leading causes of knife crime and have all been identified as risk factors that must be addressed with caution.

This study examines the role that the news media play in casting certain urban neighborhoods as particularly violent areas. It is possible that the news media serve as a key source of information about urban neighborhoods to the general public, just as the media are the main source of crime information to those who do not directly experience crime. Based on a thematic content analysis of newspaper reports of violent crime in four American cities, this study explores the language used by journalists to describe urban neighborhoods and the crimes that occur within them in reports of violent crime. Findings suggest that newspaper articles reporting crime in disadvantaged Black neighborhoods are likely to use intense language to describe the normalcy of crime and the terrible nature of crime in these areas. Reports of crime originating in affluent White neighborhoods are likely to highlight the unusual, shocking nature of the violence. Implications for perceptual and policy reactions to crime in urban neighborhoods are discussed.

In developing countries like India, crime plays a detrimental role in economic growth and prosperity. With the increase in delinquencies, law enforcement needs to deploy limited resources optimally to protect citizens. Data mining and predictive analytics provide the best options for the same. This paper examines the news feed data collected from various sources regarding crime in India and Bangalore city. The crimes are then classified on the geographic density and the crime patterns such as time of day to identify and visualize the distribution of national and regional crime such as theft, murder, alcoholism, assault, etc. In total, 68 types of crime-related dictionary keywords are classified into six classes based on the news feed data collected for one year. Kernel density estimation method is used to identify the hotspots of crime. With the help of the ARIMA model, time series prediction is performed on the data. The diversity of crime patterns is visualized in a customizable way with the help of a data mining platform.

AbstractAuthoritarian responses to rising violent crime rates have become a serious problem in Central America. Inspired by theories of agenda setting and media framing, this article examines the influence of news media coverage of crime on attitudes toward crime control. Using an original survey experiment, it tests the relationship between crime news, fear of crime, trust in government institutions, and support for authoritarian crime control measures in Guatemala. It finds that crime news influences support for authoritarian crime control via its effect on lowering citizen trust in government institutions. Exposure to crime news also affects self-reported victimization rates and levels of support for a presidential candidate promoting iron fist policies. These findings not only give insight into the relationship between crime news and political attitudes but also have implications for the rule of law and the politics of crime in new or fragile democracies.

This paper presents the results of a research project on the new modes of production of television crime news. The enquiry involved monitoring television newscasts of the five major channels in Buenos Aires City and interviews with news workers. We analyze the news content, the ways of narrating and enunciating crime news on television, the role played by the police in the structure of the news, the emergence of new sources of information and the production routines of crime news. Our findings suggest that most of the newscasts on television give prominence to crime news within their agendas and that its production and presentation has changed as the result of the spread of digital technologies as sources of information.

In today's modern society we are highly exposed to different media in our everyday life, and individuals may spend a large part of their time taking part in media debates, news and other information shared on different media channels. Through this, news media have become an influential factor for how individuals in today's society perceive and construct reality, and consequently the public's perception of crime. This critical analysis strives to elucidate how crime in Malmö is presented in Swedish newspapers. This report is centered on which discourses emerge throughout the chosen empirical material, how different crime types are presented and how victims and perpetrators are constructed in this material. By studying how Malmö is presented through a commonly used news media source, it is possible to uncover how collective understandings of crime are created and affirmed, which is essential in order to be able to influence this established (but arguably somewhat radical) image. Newspapers' presentation of Malmö differs from the description of other major cities in Sweden, and Malmö is often illustrated as a dangerous or unsafe city with high crime rates. The perception of crime in Malmö given through the official statistics are overshadowed by news media's accentuation of violent and lethal crime. A skewed division of crime reporting, may therefore be an important factor for the public's perception of crime in Malmö. Crimes are depicted as an effect of larger societal problems and an integral part of everyday life. Few articles dispute the established image of Malmö as dangerous, and the few who do only briefly highlight this to an extremely limited extent, resulting in the preservation and reproduction of the majority's presentation of Malmö as a dangerous or unsecure city.

Most text mining techniques have been proposed only for English text, and even here, most research has been conducted on specific texts related to special contexts within the English language, such as politics, medicine and crime. In contrast, although Arabic is a widely spoken language, few mining tools have been developed to process Arabic text, and some Arabic domains have not been studied at all. In fact, Arabic is a language with a very complex morphology because it is highly inflectional, and therefore, dealing with texts written in Arabic is highly complicated. This research studies the crime domain in the Arabic language, exploiting unstructured text using text mining techniques. Developing a system for extracting important information from crime reports would be useful for police investigators, for accelerating the investigative process (instead of reading entire reports) as well as for conducting further or wider analyses. We propose the Crime Profiling System (CPS) to extract crime-related information (crime type, crime location and nationality of persons involved in the event), automatically construct dictionaries for the existing information, cluster crime documents based on certain attributes and utilize visualisation techniques to assist in crime data analysis. The proposed information extraction approach is novel, and it relies on computational linguistic techniques to identify the abovementioned information, i.e. without using predefined dictionaries (e.g. lists of location names) and annotated corpus. The language used in crime reporting is studied to identify patterns of interest using a corpus-based approach. Frequency analysis, collocation analysis and concordance analysis are used to perform the syntactic analysis in order to discover the local grammar. Moreover, the Self Organising Map (SOM) approach is adopted in order to perform the clustering and visualisation tasks for crime documents based on crime type, location or nationality. This clustering technique is improved because only refined data containing meaningful keywords extracted through the information extraction process are inputted into it, i.e. the data is cleaned by removing noise. As a result, a huge reduction in the quantity of data fed into the SOM is obtained, consequently, saving memory, data loading time and the execution time needed to perform the clustering. Therefore, the computation of the SOM is accelerated. Finally, the quantization error is reduced, which leads to high quality clustering. The outcome of the clustering stage is also visualised and the system is able to provide statistical information in the form of graphs and tables about crimes committed within certain periods of time and within a particular area.

In the literature researchers don't agree whether news content in China in an era of media commercialization still functions to promote the dominant ideology of the ruling Communist Party. The thesis is a theoretical discussion of ideology, ideological hegemony and its evolving nature, with the consideration of Chinese situations. The theoretical discussion concludes that the dominant ideology in China is changing with the demands of a changing world, and so is media's representation of ideology. With some explorative data of crime news on three domestic and non-domestic news web sites to illustrate the theoretical discussion, the author of the thesis finds that in an era of media commercialization the ideological influence still plays a bigger role than the commercial influence in shaping crime news content of domestic media. Moreover, ideological messages are distributed through crime news in such subtle and indirect forms as the selection of official news sources, the frequent indication of the death penalty, the positive presentation of the police, and the attribution of individual causes to crime.

This study examines how residents of New Orleans, Louisiana were depicted on a variety of evening news programs in the days after hurricane Katrina. A qualitative content analysis of television news transcripts and select audio-visual footage reveals how the media framed crime, the perpetrators of crime and "looting." Media perpetuation of myths such as residents shooting at helicopters and the focus on "looting" and crime had on initial rescue and recovery efforts are also discussed. Results illustrate that the focus on crime, criminals, and looting was more pronounced in cable than network news. Looting was framed as a criminal endeavor and residents were labeled as criminals without evidence. Violent crime was the most frequently-referred to type of crime. The media as a constructor of moral panics, colorblind racism in the form of a coded racist script, and cultural fear of crime support these results.

The interaction between news production and reception realised by written hard news texts is generally characterised as implicit. However, under the pressure of marketisation, news companies, by using multimodal resources and the internet, produce various types of semiotic effects to make their news texts more interactive and entertaining while maintaining the traditional informative and authorial stances. In this research, I will examine crime news texts as a discourse type and investigate how news companies in Japan and the UK establish an interpersonal relationship with their readers through news reports, juxtaposing images in page-based multimodal news provided online. My main aim is to discuss the interpersonal meanings realised in the data based on three analytical and methodological tools: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a semiotic approach to language proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), the visual grammar, an application of SFL to the visual mode, devised by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) and corpus linguistics. This analysis shows that in the process of news production, facts are interpreted and recontextualised in order to maximise discoursal values. It also shows that the British and the Japanese press realize criminal meanings according to their contextual and cultural values and practices.

Prior to 1994 I had little interest in the activities of the police. As a mass media consumer I was aware of the prominence of crime in the daily news agenda and I watched, read and listened to potted summaries of rape, mayhem and murder. Frequent too, were stories of police malpractice, incompetence and corruption. Police stories were also a significant part of television drama with programs like the long running British series The Bill, and a range of Australian productions: The Feds, Halifax f.p, Rafferty's Rules, Blue Heelers, State Coroner, and Water Rats. The police also featured at the cinema with crime genre movies Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, USA), Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, New Zealand) and Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, USA) becoming box office hits. My interest in the portrayal of police change dramatically when on the 7th of October 1994, I was appointed Officer-in-Charge of the Media and Publications Branch of the Australian Federal Police (AFP). I was responsible for all aspects of the communication function including: media liaison, crisis management, media management, publications and internal communication. My branch dealt with media inquiries from local, national and international media across the gamut of issues facing the AFP. These ranged fiom industrial issues about budgets and overtime, allegations of corruption and incompetence, and operational matters as diverse as burglaries, alleged Nazi war criminals, peace-keeping operations and drug 'busts'. Needless to say my police stakeholders did not always see things the same way as my media colleagues. I was seeing at a practical day-to-day level the complex taxonomy of police/media relations outlined by Putnis (1996). Putnis noted the ubiquity of the police and the media as social institutions and observed that their daily operations involved a complex, dynamic, relationship constructed out of many thousands of interactions, across all levels of the organisations, in many different settings. My experiences in dealing with the media became the genesis of this study. My aim is to expand our understanding of the police/media relationship by exploring characteristic forms of print news-media reports about policing, the impact these reports have on police, and on law and order policy. The possibility of bias towards police in this study is acknowledged given I was a member of a police service fiom 1994 until 2002 and the research relies heavily on 'participant observer' techniques (Kay 1997; Potter1 996; Schofield 1993). Every effort has been made to maintain a critical perspective on the subject matters raised and it should be noted my association with police ended prior to the writing-up phase of the research. In addition to comments fiom my supervisory panel, ongoing discussions with media colleagues were another strategy adopted to ensure balance in the writing-up of this study. This is a unique study in that it offers an insider's perspective of police/media relations and at a time that represented a watershed for police. The early 90s was a period of straightened finances for public sector agencies and police, like other agencies, were under pressure fiom governments to demonstrate the efficient use of public monies (AFP 1995; Grieve 2000). Reform programs swept through policing with many, like the AFP, being organised along business lines (Palmer 1995; Etter 1995; Rohl 1999; WAPOL 1999). The 90s were also a watershed for criminal organisations with the emergence of transnational criminal syndicates, such as drug traffickers, that had the potential to impact on crime at a local level without even entering the country, let alone the jurisdiction, in which the crime took place (Bliss and Harfield 1998; Palmer 1995; McFarlane 1999). In order to combat these syndicates, police began to work in a more cooperative fashion and formed loose coalitions, often across countries, in a manner similar to the criminal syndicates they were trying to combat (Palmer 1995). The 90s also saw the continuation of committees of inquiry and royal commissions into police malpractice (Landa and Dillon 1995) and the inevitable bad press for police (Wood 1996; Munday 1995). The media and police have a symbiotic relationship and it is a critical one as most members of society have little direct contact with the criminal justice system. Information about crime, and the efforts of police to combat it, is obtained second hand through fictional accounts from such vehicles as television dramas, and from the news media. As aptly described by Hall et al. (1975), nearly thirty years ago, the media is the link between crime and the public. The police are therefore heavily reliant on the media to provide a balanced account of the panoply of issues surrounding the criminal justice system (Cowdery 2001). At its most fundamental, police require the support of the communities they serve in order to be effective, and the news media can have a major impact on perceptions about police performance (Reiner 1997; Surette 1992). As organisational entities, police need to compete with other bureaucracies for public hnding, and the media is an essential tool in generating positive publicity about successful operations and policies. The media is, therefore, critical to the maintenance of positive relationships with the two most important stakeholders in the policing function: the community and the government. McGregor (1993) provides a useful summary of the literature relating to print media coverage of policing issues: there are substantial discrepancies between official accounts of criminal activity and press reports of crime; the media tends to homogenise crime by concentrating on a limited range of crimes (mainly violent crime) and drawing facts from a limited range of sources (police/court reports); the media over-report serious crimes, especially murder and crimes with a sexual element; and, the press concentrates crime reportage on events rather than issues, so crime incidents and specific crimes form the bulk of crime news as opposed to analyses of the causes of crime or remedies, trends or issues. McQuail (1994, p.256) reminds us that assessing media performance on the basis of media content, measured against the extent to which content relates to reality, is open to question. He argues that there is no general answer to questions of meaning construction, but media research has pointed to several elements in a more general framework of social and personal meanings including clues as to what is more or less important, salient or relevant in many different contexts (1994, p. 379). An important research question concerns the impact of news media practices, particularly given the significant costs to the community flowing from the commission of crime, its investigation by police, and the processing of offenders through the criminal justice system. The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates the cost of crime in Australia is approximately $19 billion, while the cost of dealing with crime is another $13 billion (Mayhew 2003). The news media, articulated through radio talk-back hosts, are seen as having undue influence on how public funds on crime control are spent (ABC, The Media Report, 1 August 2002; Chan 1995; Cowdery 2001; Dixon 2002; Weatherbum 2002). These commentators have pointed to the serious public policy issues arising from the contribution made by the media towards what Weatherburn describes as an irrational public debate about law and order (2002, p. 12) and Hogg and Brown have coined 'the uncivil politics of law and order' (1998, p. 4). As Hogg and Brown (1998, p. 4) observe: crime is depicted as a problem of ever-increasing gravity set to overwhelm society unless urgent, typically punitive measures are taken to control and suppress it. The influence of the media on public policy has long been recognised. As Paletz and Entmann (l981, p. 6) observe: they influence the decisions and actions of politicians; they are open to manipulation by the powerful which insulates the powerful fiom accountability to the public; they reallocate power amongst the already powerful; they decreased to a marked extent the ability of ordinary citizens to judge events; they foment discontent among the public; and they preserve the legitimacy of the political, economic and social system. Ethnomethodological approaches (Ericson and Haggerty 1997) underpin the research in this study. The ethnomethodological approach was used because of its wider scope, employing as it does, observation, interviewing, and document-analysis techniques (Ericson et al. 1987, p. 77) and its ability to provide meaning and context to the phenomena under observation (Hall 1978; Willis l981). Ethnomethodological approaches are complemented by news framing analyses (Barkin and Gurevitch 1987; Blood, Putnis and Pirkis 2002; Capella and Jamieson 1996; Coleman 1995; Entman 1993; Kitzinger 2000; Keely 1999; Darling-Wolf 1997; London 1993; Pan and Kosicki 2001; Miller and Riechert 2001; Pirkis and Blood 2001; Reese, Gandy and Grant 2003; Scheufele 1999) to explore the news media frames employed in the genre of print crime reporting. What emerges from the study is evidence of a one-sided, highly negative, discourse about policing implemented through a range of media frames centred on conflict and broader xenophobic and egalitarian narratives. Despite the advantages police have as information gatekeepers, their attempts to manage the media environment have met with little success (Hughes 2004; Williams 2002) and the need for police to restrict access to police communications is being challenged (Crime and Misconduct Commission 2004, Inquiry into the effects of a Queensland Police Service decision to adopt digital technology for radio communications). There are exceptions, of course: the news media are not all bad. Routine reporting of crimes, where details of offenders are publicised, greatly assists the work of police as reflected in the case of 43-year-old Mr Colin George Dunstan which is discussed in Chapter Eight. Dunstan sent a series of explosive devices through the mail system in Canberra and police provided the media with photographs of the devices, Mr Dunstan (who was the main suspect), and his vehicle. The media coverage restricted Mr Dunstan's movements and led to his early arrest. Similarly, publication of the details of missing persons, warnings about lethal batches of drugs and crimes such as drink-spiking, enable police to reach a mass audience efficiently and quickly. And at a more abstract level, as noted by McQuail (1994, p. 34), modem communication vehicles can make a positive contribution to cohesion and community. The emergence of the 'yapping pack' form of journalism (Tiffen 1999, p. 207) has resulted in elements of the media exercising a worrying degree of influence over what should be a broader and better informed debate about criminal justice issues. An illustration of this process occurred toward the end of this study with the widely reported spectacle of the Premier of New South Wales presenting his replacement police minister before radio presenter Mr Alan Jones for his endorsement; the subsequent involvement of that minister in operational police matters (Williams 2002); and the departure of the state's police commissioner as a result of sustained media attack (ABC, The Media Report, 1 August 2002; Weatherburn 2002). These incidents say much about the influence of the news media in relation to police matters and makes this study a timely one. What follows is a literature review examining contemporary trends in policing and the media; a detailed analysis of two major case studies involving complex police operations; an analysis of a number of examples of print media reports about policing, to identify typical, or characteristic, media frames; the findings from nearly 50 interviews with senior people involved in the policelmedia interface; and an examination of changes in the milieu in which media reports about policing occur.

Crime levels are a perennial development problem in Latin America and a renewed concern in the United States. At the same time, trust in the police has been falling, and questions abound about citizens' willingness to support government efforts to fight crime. We conduct a survey experiment to elicit willingness to contribute toward reducing crime across five Latin American countries and the United States. We compare homicide, robbery, and theft estimates and find a higher willingness to contribute for more severe crimes and for higher crime reductions. In addition, we examine the role of information on the willingness to contribute by conducting two experiments. First, we show that exposing respondents to crime-related news increases their willingness to pay by 5 percent. Furthermore, while we document a 7 percent gap in willingness to pay for crime reduction between people who under- and over-estimate the murder rate, we find that this gap can be wholly eliminated by informing them about the actual level of crime. On average, our estimates suggest that households are willing to contribute around $140 per year for a 20 percent reduction in homicide. This individual-level predisposition would translate into additional investment in public security efforts of up to 0.5 percent of GDP.

Crime is a major problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. With 9 percent of the world's population, the region accounts for 33 percent of global homicides. This dataset makes extensive new survey data available to help identify what anti-crime policies citizens in the region demand from their governments, as well as who is demanding what and why. This dataset accompanies a recent report on Combating Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean.