Rules of Representation in Crime Coverage

Newsrooms and culture producers follow informal rules about which bodies get shown doing which crimes (who is 'the criminal' versus a 'perpetrator' or 'victim'), and those rules are decoupled from incidence data. Those editorial heuristics — shaped by aesthetics, liability, audience, and ideology — systematically distort public understanding of crime and race. — Making these implicit representational rules explicit would redirect debates from raw crime statistics to the editorial incentives that shape public fear, policing, and policy.