Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America (Studies in Crime and Public Policy)

By making the crucial distinction between lethal violence and crime in general, they clear the groundfor a targeted, far more effective response to the real crisis in American society. Zimring is the William F. It is a mistake, urge the authors, director and fellow, respectively, of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, to conflate "crime" and "violence" as perhaps the most serious problem in the U.

In most forms of nonviolent property crime, both nation-to-nation and city-to-city comparisons between the U. Zimring and Hawkins analyze those patterns; review causality studies with an eye to lethal violence, judging media violence less important and gun availability more central than conventional wisdom admits illegal drugs are a factor, but the authors find them a contingent factor in lethal violence ; and suggest changes in criminal law practice and adoption of multifaceted loss-prevention strategies to prevent and reduce the human cost of lethal violence.

Thoroughly documented; will stir debate. Thank you for using the catalog. Crime is not the problem: Studies in crime and public policy. Violent crimes -- United States. Violence -- United States. Violent crimes -- United States -- Prevention. Summary Year after year, in poll after poll, crime tops the list of American anxieties.

Booklist Review It is a mistake, urge the authors, director and fellow, respectively, of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, to conflate "crime" and "violence" as perhaps the most serious problem in the U. Studies in Crime and Public Policy p. Illicit Drugs and the Death Rate from Violence p. Make this your default list. The following items were successfully added. There was an error while adding the following items. One or more items could not be added because you are not logged in. Yet, debate over whether media violence causes aggression and violence persists, particularly in response to high-profile criminal incidents.

Blaming video games, and other forms of media and popular culture, as contributing to violence is not a new phenomenon. However, interpreting media effects can be difficult because commenters often seem to indicate a grand consensus that understates more contradictory and nuanced interpretations of the data. In fact, there is a consensus among many media researchers that media violence has an impact on aggression although its impact on violence is less clear.

For example, in response to the shooting in Munich, Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology, avoided pinning the incident solely on video games, but in the process supported the assertion that video gameplay is linked to aggression. Others, too, have reached similar conclusions with regard to other media.

Scholars Glenn Sparks and Cheri Sparks similarly declared that,. Despite the fact that controversy still exists about the impact of media violence, the research results reveal a dominant and consistent pattern in favor of the notion that exposure to violent media images does increase the risk of aggressive behavior. Criminologists, too, are sensitive to the impact of media exposure.

For example, Jacqueline Helfgott summarized the research:. There have been over studies on the effects of TV and film violence over the past 40 years. Helfgott, , p. He cited studies on childhood exposure to violent media leading to aggressive behavior as evidence. In his pioneering book Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice , criminologist Ray Surette concurred that media violence is linked to aggression, but offered a nuanced interpretation. There is certainly a connection between violent media and social aggression, but its strength and configuration is simply not known at this time.

Surette, , p. The uncertainties about the strength of the relationship and the lack of evidence linking media violence to real-world violence is often lost in the news media accounts of high-profile violent crimes. While many scholars do seem to agree that there is evidence that media violence—whether that of film, TV, or video games—increases aggression, they disagree about its impact on violent or criminal behavior Ferguson, ; Gunter, ; Helfgott, ; Reiner, ; Savage, Nonetheless, it is violent incidents that most often prompt speculation that media causes violence.

More specifically, violence that appears to mimic portrayals of violent media tends to ignite controversy. For example, the idea that films contribute to violent crime is not a new assertion. Nonetheless, pinpointing a direct, causal relationship between media and violent crime remains elusive. The idea is that offenders model their behavior on media representations of violence whether real or fictional. One case, in particular, illustrated how popular culture, media, and criminal violence converge.

On July 20, , James Holmes entered the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises , the third film in the massively successful Batman trilogy, in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. He shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. At the time, the New York Times described the incident,.

Witnesses told the police that Mr. Then, as people began to rise from their seats in confusion or anxiety, he began to shoot. The gunman paused at least once, several witnesses said, perhaps to reload, and continued firing. A suspect was arrested in his Maryland home after making threatening phone calls to his workplace. Though criminologists are generally skeptical that those who commit violent crimes are motivated solely by media violence, there does seem to be some evidence that media may be influential in shaping how some offenders commit crime.

Discerning what crimes may be classified as copycat crimes is a challenge. According to Helfgott, various factors such as individual characteristics, characteristics of media sources, relationship to media, demographic factors, and cultural factors are influential. Given the public interest, there is relatively little research devoted to exactly what copycat crimes are and how they occur.

Part of the problem of studying these types of crimes is the difficulty defining and measuring the concept. In an effort to clarify and empirically measure the phenomenon, Surette offered a scale that included seven indicators of copycat crimes. He used the following factors to identify copycat crimes: Overall, a causal link between media exposure and violent criminal behavior has yet to be validated, and most researchers steer clear of making such causal assumptions.

In their review of media effects, Brad Bushman and psychologist Craig Anderson concluded,. In sum, extant research shows that media violence is a causal risk factor not only for mild forms of aggression but also for more serious forms of aggression, including violent criminal behavior. That does not mean that violent media exposure by itself will turn a normal child or adolescent who has few or no other risk factors into a violent criminal or a school shooter. Such extreme violence is rare, and tends to occur only when multiple risk factors converge in time, space, and within an individual.

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Surette, however, argued that there is no clear linkage between media exposure and criminal behavior—violent or otherwise. In other words, a link between media violence and aggression does not necessarily mean that exposure to violent media causes violent or nonviolent criminal behavior. Though there are thousands of articles addressing media effects, many of these consist of reviews or commentary about prior research findings rather than original studies Brown, ; Murray, ; Savage, ; Surette, In their meta-analysis investigating the link between media violence and criminal aggression, scholars Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey did not find support for the assertion.

The study of most consequence for violent crime policy actually found that exposure to media violence was significantly negatively related to violent crime rates at the aggregate level. It is plain to us that the relationship between exposure to violent media and serious violence has yet to be established. Researchers continue to measure the impact of media violence among various forms of media and generally stop short of drawing a direct causal link in favor of more indirect effects.

But others report contradictory findings. Patrick Markey and colleagues studied the relationship between rates of homicide and aggravated assault and gun violence in films from — and found that over the years, violent content in films increased while crime rates declined. Psychologist Christopher Ferguson also failed to find a relationship between media violence in films and video games and violence Ferguson, Another study, by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, examined violent films from — and found decreases in violent crimes coincided with violent blockbuster movie attendance.

High-profile cases over the last several years have shifted public concern toward the perceived danger of video games, but research demonstrating a link between video games and criminal violence remains scant. Further, psychologists Patrick Markey, Charlotte Markey, and Juliana French conducted four time-series analyses investigating the relationship between video game habits and assault and homicide rates. The studies measured rates of violent crime, the annual and monthly video game sales, Internet searches for video game walkthroughs, and rates of violent crime occurring after the release dates of popular games.

The results showed that there was no relationship between video game habits and rates of aggravated assault and homicide.

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Additionally, the researchers concluded,. Overall, the lack of a consistent finding demonstrating that media exposure causes violent crime may not be particularly surprising given that studies linking media exposure, aggression, and violence suffer from a host of general criticisms. They counter what they describe as moral campaigners who advance the idea that media violence causes violence. Given the seemingly inconclusive and contradictory findings regarding media effects research, to say that the debate can, at times, be contentious is an understatement.

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Nonetheless, in this debate, the stakes are high and the policy consequences profound. Anderson argued that such a focus presents media as a threat to family values and ultimately operates as a zero-sum game. As a result, attention and resources are diverted toward media and away from other priorities that are essential to understanding aggression such as social disadvantage, substance abuse, and parental conflict Anderson, , p.

Understanding how media may impact attitudes and behavior has been the focus of media and communications studies for decades. Numerous theoretical perspectives offer insight into how and to what extent the media impacts the audience. As scholar Jenny Kitzinger documented in , there are generally two ways to approach the study of media effects. One is to foreground the power of media.

That is, to suggest that the media holds powerful sway over viewers. Another perspective is to foreground the power and heterogeneity of the audience and to recognize that it is comprised of active agents Kitzinger, The notion of an all-powerful media can be traced to the influence of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, in the —s and proponents of the mass society theory.

The institute was originally founded in Germany but later moved to the United States. Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes outlined how mass society theory assumed that members of the public were susceptible to media messages. In this historical context, in the era of World War II, the impact of Nazi propaganda was particularly resonant.

Here, the media was believed to exhibit a unidirectional flow, operating as a powerful force influencing the masses. Though the hypodermic syringe model seems simplistic today, the idea that the media is all-powerful continues to inform contemporary public discourse around media and violence. Concern of the power of media captured the attention of researchers interested in its purported negative impact on children. In one of the earliest series of studies in the United States during the late s—s, researchers attempted to quantitatively measure media effects with the Payne Fund Studies.

Not everyone agreed with the approach. In fact, the methodologies employed in the studies received much criticism, and ultimately, the movement was branded as a moral crusade to regulate film content. We have seen this same policy battle fought and refought over radio, television, rock and roll, music videos and video games.

Their researchers looked to see if intuitive concerns could be given concrete, measurable expression in research. While they had partial success, as have all subsequent efforts, they also ran into intractable problems. Since that day, no way has yet been found to resolve the dilemma of cause and effect: As the debate continued, more sophisticated theoretical perspectives emerged. Efforts to empirically measure the impact of media on aggression and violence continued, albeit with equivocal results.

In the s and s, psychological behaviorism, or understanding psychological motivations through observable behavior, became a prominent lens through which to view the causal impact of media violence. Though influential, the Bandura experiments were nevertheless heavily criticized. Some argued the laboratory conditions under which children were exposed to media were not generalizable to real-life conditions. Others challenged the assumption that children absorb media content in an unsophisticated manner without being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

In fact, later studies did find children to be more discerning consumers of media than popularly believed Gauntlett, Hugely influential in our understandings of human behavior, the concept of social learning has been at the core of more contemporary understandings of media effects. For example, scholar Christopher Ferguson noted that the General Aggression Model GAM , rooted in social learning and cognitive theory, has for decades been a dominant model for understanding how media impacts aggression and violence. Though the methodologies of the Payne Fund Studies and Bandura studies were heavily criticized, concern over media effects continued to be tied to larger moral debates including the fear of moral decline and concern over the welfare of children.

Most notably, in the s, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham warned of the dangers of comic books, a hugely popular medium at the time, and their impact on juveniles. Based on anecdotes and his clinical experience with children, Wertham argued that images of graphic violence and sexual debauchery in comic books were linked to juvenile delinquency.

Though he was far from the only critic of comic book content, his criticisms reached the masses and gained further notoriety with the publication of his book, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham described the comic book content thusly,. The stories have a lot of crime and gunplay and, in addition, alluring advertisements of guns, some of them full-page and in bright colors, with four guns of various sizes and descriptions on a page. Here is the repetition of violence and sexiness which no Freud, Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis ever dreamed could be offered to children, and in such profusion.

Wertham, , p.

Concern about the impact of comics reached its apex in with the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Wertham testified before the committee, arguing that comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. The code remained in place for decades, though it was eventually relaxed and decades later phased out by the two most dominant publishers, DC and Marvel.

She concluded that in Seduction of the Innocent ,. Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain. Tilley, , p.

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In what many consider a sophisticated development, theorists began to view the audience as more active and multifaceted than the mass society perspective allowed Kitzinger, This approach differs from earlier views in that it privileges the perspective and agency of the audience. Another approach, the cultivation theory, gained momentum among researchers in the s and has been of particular interest to criminologists. The theory was first introduced by communications scholar George Gerbner, who argued the importance of understanding messages that long-term viewers absorb.

Rather than examine the effect of specific content within any given programming, cultivation theory,. The cultivation process takes place in the interaction of the viewer with the message; neither the message nor the viewer are all-powerful. In other words, he argued, television viewers are, over time, exposed to messages about the way the world works.

In this context, Gerbner found that heavy television viewers are more likely to be fearful of crime and to overestimate their chances of being a victim of violence Gerbner, Though there is evidence in support of cultivation theory, the strength of the relationship between media exposure and fear of crime is inconclusive. This is in part due to the recognition that audience members are not homogenous. Instead, researchers have found that there are many factors that impact the cultivating process.

While it would be wrong to suggest that the violence that saturates popular culture directly causes violence in the larger society, it is arguable that such violence serves not only to produce an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues. When young people and others begin to believe that a world of extreme violence, vengeance, lawlessness, and revenge is the only world they inhabit, the culture and practice of real-life violence is more difficult to scrutinize, resist, and transform.

For Giroux, the danger is that the normalization of violence has become a threat to democracy itself. In our culture of mass consumption shaped by neoliberal logics, depoliticized narratives of violence have become desired forms of entertainment and are presented in ways that express tolerance for some forms of violence while delegitimizing other forms of violence. Sternheimer rejected the idea that media causes violence and argued that a false connection has been forged between media, popular culture, and violence.

Like others critical of a singular focus on media, Sternheimer posited that overemphasis on the perceived dangers of media violence serves as a red herring that directs attention away from the actual causes of violence rooted in factors such as poverty, family violence, abuse, and economic inequalities Sternheimer, , Theoretically, these foci have been traced to the influence of cultural and Marxist studies. For example, criminologists frequently focus on how social anxieties and class inequalities impact our understandings of the relationship between media violence and attitudes, values, and behaviors.

Influential works in the s, such as Policing the Crisis: Since that time, moral panic has become a common framework applied to public discourse around a variety of social issues including road rage, child abuse, popular music, sex panics, and drug abuse among others. Into the 21st century, advances in technology, including increased use of social media, shifted the ways that criminologists approach the study of media effects.

Instead, we exist simultaneously both online and offline, an. Facebook is real life. The changing media landscape has been of particular interest to cultural criminologists. Michelle Brown recognized the omnipresence of media as significant in terms of methodological preferences and urged a move away from a focus on causality and predictability toward a more fluid approach that embraces the complex, contemporary media-saturated social reality characterized by uncertainty and instability Brown, As an example of this shift in understanding media effects, criminologist Majid Yar proposed that we consider how the transition from being primarily consumers to primarily producers of content may serve as a motivating mechanism for criminal behavior.

Here, Yar is suggesting that the proliferation of user-generated content via media technologies such as social media i. Over the years, from films to comic books to television to video games to social media, concerns over media effects have shifted along with changing technologies. While there seems to be some consensus that exposure to violent media impacts aggression, there is little evidence showing its impact on violent or criminal behavior. Nonetheless, high-profile violent crimes continue to reignite public interest in media effects, particularly with regard to copycat crimes.

Criminologists and sociologists are generally reluctant to attribute violence and criminal behavior directly to exposure to violence media. They are, however, not dismissive of the impact of media on attitudes, social policies, and social control as evidenced by the myriad of studies on moral panics and other research that addresses the relationship between media, social anxieties, gender, race, and class inequalities. Scholars who study media effects are also sensitive to the historical context of the debates and ways that moral concerns shape public policies.

The self-regulating codes of the film industry and the comic book industry have led scholars to be wary of hyperbole and policy overreach in response to claims of media effects.

Future research will continue to explore ways that changing technologies, including increasing use of social media, will impact our understandings and perceptions of crime as well as criminal behavior. Resolution on violent video games. American Behavioral Scientist , 51 8 , — Twenty-five years of research on violence in digital games and aggression.

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