Crime

Who Gets To Be A Human In Crime Stories?

Framing matters, and most of the media sucks at it.

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Amber Guyger (L), Botham Jean (R)

As a former journalist and future litigator, I spend a lot of time thinking about framing. I worry about how stories are told and from whose point of view. This is especially important to me in the context of criminal cases that become news. Even outside the clearly biased, partisan websites and cable channels, the way that straight, “neutral” news reporters cover crime stories reflects their own biases, and in turn impacts how their audiences view a story. That’s not necessarily the problem in itself. The problem is that newspapers are mostly full of the same people — relatively well-educated, middle-class, overwhelmingly white, and skewing slightly male — who often have the same biases.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press tweeted a breaking news update: “Dallas police officer [Amber Guyger] said she gave ‘verbal commands’ that neighbor ignored before she fatally shot him.” This is an addition to the story of the white off-duty Dallas police officer who recently killed a black man in his own home after breaking in because she got mixed up and thought he was an intruder in her home. The linked story gives more information, noting that attorneys for the man who died, Botham Jean, say Guyger’s version of events is “‘self-serving’ and contradicts neighbors’ accounts.”

But the tweet has what the AP sees as the news, and the news bends over backwards to identify with the shooter. The tweet implies that Guyger, who is identified as a police officer in the tweet but was in reality simply an off-duty citizen at the time of the incident, had some authority to command her neighbor to act, despite the fact that he was in his own home and she was the intruder. It attempts to present a mitigating narrative, which gives the audience some sense of her thought process. It begs us to see her as human. It identifies the victim — who, by the way, is dead — in passing as “neighbor.”

News organizations rarely go out of their way to help their audience identify with criminals (unless they are mentally ill, white male school shooters), especially when so little is actually known about the case. It’s usually the opposite. I’ve been obsessed for days now about a crime story the New York Times published last week about an 18-year-old from Central America being charged with rape in Brooklyn after breaking into an apartment through a window.

It’s a very similar case: home invasion with accompanying crime horrifying enough to make the news. The main difference is instead of adding mitigating information about the teenager who allegedly committed this crime, the story goes out of its way to demonize him. The headline and a tweet declared him a member of MS-13, the gang that President Trump likes to bring up when he’s fearmongering about immigrants. The story and a separate tweet from the paper also identified him as “carrying a forged green card.” There has been no breaking news statement with his version of events to my knowledge.

Neither the alleged gang affiliation nor his immigration status are related to the crime in the story, nor are they backed up by particularly convincing facts. As the Times pointed out in a different article published in the paper on the same day, there is no link between undocumented immigration and an increase in crime. As for the gang affiliation, there’s no suggestion in the story that this was a crime intended to benefit a gang. The gang fact itself is unconfirmed and based on a police officer’s conjecture. Any crime journalist, and most responsible citizens, should by this point know that the police wildly inflate gang affiliations around the country, including New York, in ways that tend to be racially discriminatory. These details seem to be in the story simply to underline for the audience that this is a bad person (it would seem from this framing that the audience the New York Times metro section is writing for these days is President Trump).

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Millions of people read crime stories in the AP and New York Times daily. They pick up on who it is okay to empathize with and who is categorically evil. This is the small kind of stuff that determines for a whole society which kind of people are fully human and which are undeserving. We deserve better from our media.

Shane Ferro is a law student and a former professional blogger. She is (obviously) a bleeding-heart public interest kid.

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