Fair Use:

Media create false impression
that juvenile crime is on rise

By VINCENT SCHIRALDI
For the Los Angeles Times

Recently, as it has every fall since 1993, the
Justice Department announced a significant 11
percent decline in serious and violent juvenile
crime over the previous year — double the per-
centage of decline in adult crime.

Yet how can juvenile crime be dropping when
we seem to be watching young bodies being
wheeled out of schools on gurneys nightly on the
news? One explanation is because saturation
coverage of the acts of a handful of kids is skew-
ing our nation’s understanding of crime by youth.

This kind of coverage began in earnest two
years ago, after two shocking killings by juve-
niles in the same week, one in New Jersey involv-
ing 15-year-old Sam Manzie, who killed an
11-year-old boy, and the other in Pearl, Miss., in-
volving 16-year-old Luke Woodham, who stabbed
his mother to death, then shot two classmates to
death.

At that same time, authorities announced ju-
venile crime data showing a 30 percent decline
in juvenile homicides over the previous three
years.

The Mississippi killing was the first of a trend
– not of increasing school shootings but of in-
creasing media coverage of juvenile crime.

According to the Berkeley Media Studies
Group, most of the time when kids are depicted
on the evening news, it is in connection with vio-
lence, even though less than one-half of I per-
cent of juveniles were arrested for a violent
crime last year.

Indeed, this trend holds true for all crime cov-
erage. Between 1992 and 1996, while the homi-
cide rate in the U.S. dropped by 20 percent, cov-
erage of homicide on the ABC, NBC and CBS
evening news increased by 721 percent. Not sur-
prisingly, polls showed six times as many people
ranking crime as the No. I problem in 1993 as did
in 1992, and fear of crime has been at or near the
top of the polls every year since.

To be sure, the rates of adult and juvenile
crime are higher now than in the 1960s, although
rates for both have been declining. Yet one-third
of Americans believe that crimes committed by,
adults are on the increase and even more believe
that juvenile crime is on the increase. Why? Per-
haps it’s the connection to highly publicized
school crimes.

Nowadays, it is impossible to talk about juve-
nile crime and not discuss school shootings. Yet
school shootings are extremely rare. In a popula-
tion of about 50 million schoolchildren, there
were about 55 school-associated violent deaths
in the 1992-93 school year and fewer than half
that in 1998-99
. .
By comparison, in 1997,88 people were killed
by lightning — what might be considered the’
gold standard for idiosyncratic events.

In addition, kids are not killing one another at
an increasing rate. In fact, they rarely kill one
another. Failure to put juvenile crime into con-
text has resulted in a public that is misinformed.

Polls show that Americans believe that juve-
niles are responsible for 43 percent of homi-
cides; they actually are responsible for about 9
percent.

Although there was less than a one-in-a-mil-
lion chance of being killed in a school last year,”
71 percent of respondents to a Wall Street Jour-
nal poll believed that such a killing was likely in
their school. In a Washington Post poll, almost
two-thirds of parents listed school violence as
something worrying them the most these days.”

Politicians are fed back these fears and mis-
conceptions about juvenile crime.

In supporting his Violent Youth Predator Act
of 1996, Rep. Bill McCollum, R-FIa., stated:
“They’re the predators out there. They’re not
children anymore. They’re the most violent crim-
inals on the face of the Earth.”

It is no more fair to stereotype U.S. high school
students as Luke Woodham than it would be to-
taint all adults with the sins of Timothy McVeigh.
Our kids are the ones on the other side of the yel-
low tape, weeping over the death of their class-
mates, just like the rest of us. As we set public
policy, that is something we need to remember.

————
Vincent Schiraldi is director of the Washington,
DC-based Justice Policy Institute.