Perspectives
Patrick Olajide, Senior Analyst
Monday 3 June 2024
Crest Advisory Senior Analyst Patrick Olajide spent a year examining news coverage of homicides in London as part of a personal research project. Here he summarises his findings and argues tackling disproportionate violent crime requires us to change the way it’s reported on and discussed.
Crime is a harrowing thing to experience. At all levels it can have a devastating impact, leaving lasting impressions on its victims, their families, their friends and the communities around them. It can mean second-guessing yourself, avoiding taking certain routes, at certain times or wearing certain things. It can create health challenges, social challenges, financial challenges and more, leading to depression, anxiety or the desperation for a form of escape. And for some victims, experiencing a crime can be the catalyst for future offending, leading to violent or fatal consequences.
How we talk about crime matters, especially given the vulnerabilities it feeds off and the vulnerabilities it can create.
As a Senior Analyst, one of my proudest achievements at Crest Advisory has been our 2022 research into the use of stop and search powers by the police. This was a piece of work that was personally important to me; going directly to Black adults and children across the country to hear their views, their experiences and their concerns around crime, policing and the use of stop and search. But, it was also a piece of work that I found personally challenging.
For me, it laid bare the cyclical - and at times cynical - way in which issues affecting Black communities are reported on and discussed within public discourse. How the deaths of young Black boys were often debated in discussions on how to tackle serious violence, but with little mention of their lives. How “sympathy” for Black people could intertwine with racist stereotypes about a “unique” danger we present to others and to ourselves; back-pedalling on decades of research into the complex causes of crime.
But it also left me with questions.
Black people in London are disproportionately affected by violent crime, including murder. But is how we talk about Black victims proportionate? Is it sensitive? Is it appropriate? Does it truly recognise the vulnerabilities affecting marginalised communities, or does it instead descend into moral panics around “Black culture”?
These are the questions that I spent the last year seeking to answer in my in-depth qualitative study; analysing one hundred articles published by press, media and public reporting outlets across 2022/23, alongside publicly available data from the Metropolitan Police Service.
Going into this research I had many questions, but a year later I have come to one clear conclusion. If we are to truly tackle the inequalities in violent crime we need to also tackle the inequalities in our understanding of violent crime - this means changing the way we talk about and report on crime to centre victims, their experiences and vulnerabilities. Below I summarise my key findings (a link to the full research paper is available too).
Black victims were least likely to be humanised within coverage of their deaths - across the articles I reviewed there was often extensive, unsettling detail, about how someone had died but little about their life; about who they were and the impact their loss had left in its wake. This was especially true for reporting on the deaths of women of colour.
Sensationalism sells in ‘lawless London’ - it was concerning to see headlines and articles where highly emotive language was used to insinuate a ‘unique dangerousness’ to living in the capital. Here reports presented an image of a “lawless London”; likely stoking fears around violence and crime across the capital, but particularly about London’s Black communities. Articles reporting on the death of a Black victim were five times more likely to reference wider fears around violent crime than coverage of White victims.
Overall, how we talk about crime matters. Whether in public debates, news segments, reports or articles, how we report on and discuss crime, particularly violent crime, is important. It shapes how we as a society view crime, how we see the victims, how we treat the perpetrators and what we believe the solutions to crime are. Not all communities are equally affected by crime. Poverty, deprivation, inequality and other fundamental problems within the structure of our society have all been shown to leave our most marginalised communities, the most at risk.
But by its nature, the world of crime and justice that we see in the news is not the real world, it’s a curation. It can, however, have significant impacts on the real world, through its influence - impacts that are likely to grow during an election cycle, where coverage of crime and the challenges tackling it receive increasingly polarised attention.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author.
If you would like to read more, you can find Patrick’s full report, “Between the Lines - How do UK news media outlets report on Black homicide victims in London?” available here.
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