Common tropes in crime news

Crime news employs specific narrative frameworks to simplify complex issues, often resulting in biased and stigmatizing portrayals. As Jens Ludwig puts it in his book Unforgiving Place: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, “if the business model of news and entertainment media is to give the people what they want, the people have been very clear on what that is: People want stories about psychopaths. We want serial killers and cults and premeditation.”[1]

Focusing on individuals over structural issues 

The media often prefers “individualistic definitions of crime” over complex cultural and political explanations. This simplifies stories and gives them “human interest” appeal, leading to events being viewed as the “actions and reactions of individuals rather than institutions, corporations and governments.”[2]

• Focusing on the "Bad Guy": Narratives frequently reduce defendants to essential criminal characters, using terms like “thrill killer” or “career criminal,” focusing heavily on the perpetrator and their individual characteristics (mentioned nine times more often than their social environment). This framing, which emphasizes individual pathology, fosters the conventional wisdom that violence is due to “bad people – people who are fundamentally different from the rest of us,” even though such individuals account for only “a modest share” of gun violence.[3]
• Ignoring structural issues: This trope reinforces the idea that violence is an individual failure, rather than explaining the drivers of disparities, such as structural racism, concentrated poverty and lack of access to social supports. Furthermore, when covering shootings, the news tends to focus on “discrete criminal events, not manifestations of structural conflict.”[4]
  • Intransitive verbs (e.g., transforming ‘kill’ into ‘die,’ as in ‘man dies’).
  • "No agent" syntax (e.g., ‘man was killed’), which entirely removes reference to the police as the cause.
  • Nominalization (e.g., “deadly officer-involved shooting”), which transforms the action into a noun, potentially leaving the agent and receiver ambiguous. The term “officer-involved shooting” is used to signal that violence committed by officials “happens passively or is not crime.”
  • Passive voice (e.g., ‘man was killed by police officer’ or ‘a civilian was killed’), which pushes the agent of the action to the background.[5]

Language

Common crime news tropes in language and phrasing frequently obscure responsibility, especially when covering institutional violence such as police killings: 

This kind of language occurs more often in descriptions of police killings than civilian homicides, appearing in 35.6 percent of stories about police killings. Importantly, it is “more prevalent for police killings in which the victim was unarmed—that is, precisely when our experimental results imply that such language works to soften judgments about the moral responsibility of the police officer for the killing.”[6]

Stigmatizing and sensationalist portrayals

News coverage often inadvertently perpetuates stereotypical narratives about the people and communities most impacted.

• Racial bias: When looking at news coverage of arrests, Black people represent 37 percent of the people who are arrested in news media stories, which is significantly higher than their rate in general US arrest data (mid-20s) and their population percentage in the United States (12–13 percent), reinforcing “the inaccurate narrative of the Black criminal.”[7] Furthermore, use of words like “gritty” or “urban” in crime stories can contribute to racial bias and stereotyping.[8]
• Harmful character tropes: Standard narratives often feature “’Good guy’ cops (who are treated as experts on gun violence)” versus “’Bad guy’ criminals” and “‘Helpless,’ stigmatized and/or dehumanized victims.”[9]