{"id":67830,"date":"2015-12-28T10:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T15:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=67830"},"modified":"2015-12-22T00:45:33","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T05:45:33","slug":"media-spin-on-violence-against-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/12\/28\/media-spin-on-violence-against-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Media spin on violence against police"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2<\/a>News stories of officers being attacked and killed while in\u00a0the line of duty have become regular features of the nightly news broadcast, but does this increase in coverage reflect an increase in reality? My analysis suggests\u00a0no.<\/em><\/p>\n

A count of stories of police officers killed in the line of duty shows that media attention to these killings has\u00a0increased dramatically since\u00a0the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Between one third and one half of all of the\u00a0news stories that the “legacy” networks\u2019 (ABC, CBS, NBC) have done on this topic\u00a0over the last ten years have appeared in the last year. Fox News has\u00a0run more stories on this topic this year than it did over the four previous years combined.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/span>Actual\u00a0incidences of\u00a0fatal\u00a0violence\u00a0against police officers perpetrated by\u00a0civilians, however,\u00a0have not been on the rise.\u00a0Data on police officer deaths compiled by the FBI and the National Law Enforcement\u00a0Memorial Fund shows that the year since Michael Brown\u2019s death has not been\u00a0especially dangerous for police officers, at least when it comes to the danger of being\u00a0maliciously attacked by another person. According to the National Law Enforcement Memorial\u00a0Fund\u2019s data, in the year following Michael Brown\u2019s death, 43 police officers were shot and killed,\u00a0which is significantly less than the average of 54 police officer shooting per year over the last\u00a0ten years. Looking back even further, policing is much safer now than any time in the last 45 years.<\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The impression that civilians are targeting officers, then, is a reflection of media coverage, not reality. This is a phenomenon called agenda setting<\/em>, a process by which the media put an\u00a0item on the public agenda.<\/p>\n

What’s particularly troubling\u00a0here is not necessarily\u00a0that the media has put police killings by civilians on the agenda, but that they have failed to do so when it was. Many more officers\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0being killed in the line of duty in 2011, the most lethal year\u00a0for police officers over the last ten years, and yet the\u00a0news media gave scant attention to their deaths.<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u00a0explains this divergence between the reality of violence against police\u00a0officers and the degree to which the news media covers it?\u00a0It is not simply a matter of ideology. Fox News — the most conservative of the news outlets shown here — has\u00a0run more stories on police officer deaths this year than the other news outlets, but we can see\u00a0the same basic pattern across all news outlets, with the exception of National Public Radio.<\/p>\n

I suspect that the answer has to do with news framing and the way in which news\u00a0organizations display their objectivity by giving equal time to “both sides of the story.” Faced with\u00a0questions and criticism after each high-profile event of police violence against civilians, police\u00a0spokespeople constantly remind us of the dangers faced by their officers as a means of blunting\u00a0those criticisms. In giving equal airtime to “both sides” of the issue, news outlets help to spread\u00a0this message. Whether out of an internal desire to be “balanced” or in direct response to these PR moves, media has picked up the\u00a0“dangers of\u00a0policing” narrative.<\/p>\n

Ironically, in their effort to tell a balanced story, the news media has\u00a0interjected itself in a contentious debate by\u00a0presenting\u00a0a false symmetry of violence when, in reality, the newsworthy trend is the dramatic increase in deaths at the hands of police.<\/p>\n

This narrative is not only\u00a0bad for understanding what’s really happening between police officers and civilians, it may also be\u00a0bad for police officers themselves by distracting us from the more common sources of police officer death.\u00a0As the National Law\u00a0Enforcement Memorial Fund notes, over the last three years the leading cause of police officer\u00a0deaths in the line duty is car accidents. Indeed, while the number of officers shot and killed is\u00a0lower this year than for the same time period last year, the total number of officers killed is\u00a0higher, and that is due to the much higher number of officers killed\u00a0in accidents.<\/p>\n

The news\u00a0media would contribute much more to the important conversation about the relationship between civilians and police if they were more honest about the relative rates of harm from each to the other.<\/p>\n

Aaron Major, PhD is\u00a0an associate professor of sociology at the University at Albany – SUNY. He does research in the areas of globalization and economic policy, neoliberalism and public policy, and social inequality.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News stories of officers being attacked and killed while in\u00a0the line of duty have become regular features of the nightly news broadcast, but does this increase in coverage reflect an increase in reality? My analysis suggests\u00a0no. A count of stories of police officers killed in the line of duty shows that media attention to these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":68483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12508,2056,233,129,23624,133],"class_list":["post-67830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activismsocial-movements","tag-crimelaw","tag-death","tag-media","tag-media-newsopinion","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/01\/212.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67830"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68497,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67830\/revisions\/68497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}