Is the crime news people crave the crime news they need?

Here’s a tricky contradiction about local crime news: Most Americans consume it, yet few say it’s easy to stay informed about key questions that news should, theoretically, cover.

More Americans follow news and information about crime than any other local topic except the weather. And 85% express interest in what local officials are doing to address crime. But just 22% of Americans say it’s easy to stay informed about that topic.

But crime is an issue Outlier’s audience cares about. In April, when Outlier partnered with the University of Michigan to ask 1,100 Detroiters about issues they want the city to address, “crime, safety, and violence was far and away the biggest issue,” Alvarez said. Meanwhile, in other surveys, when Outlier asks people about their information needs and priorities for Outlier’s coverage, they don’t bring up crime.

“We ask people not ‘What are you worried about?’ but ‘What do you need that you don’t have now? What is going to keep you and your family from meeting your goals over the next three months?” Alvarez said. “That focuses people on things that are more material, generally.”

The disconnect between the information needs Detroiters identity and the biggest local issues they point to is a little confusing. Noting the news “talks about crime all the time,” Alvarez wondered, “is that making people feel like it is something that has to be addressed?” In Outlier’s next survey, she plans to ask a question she hopes will fill the disconnect: “What do you need to feel safer?”

Streetlight Detroit was intended to help Detroiters feel safer

Alex Klaus gets frustrated with the way reductive local and national media narratives define Detroit as a dangerous, crime-ridden city. “It creates an unnecessary amount of fear,” she said. In August 2022, at the editorial meeting of several local news organizations including Outlier, Klaus, a freelancer and college student, proposed the idea of a newsletter focused on public safety to fill an accountability gap and meet a community need.

In May 2023, about nine months after Klaus’ pitch, that idea came to life as Streetlight Detroit, a biweekly newsletter “at the intersection of safety, justice, and policing,” seeking to “make sure Detroiters have the information they need to feel safer.” (We know that Americans who consume more crime news tend to be more concerned about personal safety.) It was hosted by Outlier, anchored by Outlier Media and Detroit Free Press reporter Miriam Marini, and included contributors from members of the Collaborative Detroit Newsrooms network (CoDe). Klaus, who had a front-row seat to the dysfunction of Detroit’s Board of Police Commissioners as a Documenter covering their public meetings, wanted the newsletter to tackle police accountability and solutions to crime beyond policing. It would embrace an expansive definition of public safety, covering wildfire smoke and winter storm outages, for instance.

In its first year, each issue of the newsletter typically included a narrative introduction, a rundown of headlines related to public safety, a deeper dive on a data point, and a section called Rewind that put a current public safety issue in historical context. Klaus, now a senior at Wayne State University pursuing a degree in urban studies and public history, wrote most Rewind stories.

Early issues also reflected critically on the negative impacts of traditional crime reporting. “Crime reporting often fails to provide information that might actually help people stay safe in the city,” one story spotlighted in the newsletter last July noted. “Decades of studies show that news outlets tend to exaggerate the prevalence of violent crime, painting an unrealistic and terrifying community portrait that can push residents to shift their political priorities or retreat from public life….The abundance of crime news is fueled by an uneasy alliance between police, reporters and a public fascinated by violent crime.”

In another story the same month featured in Streetlight, Outlier interviewed a longtime crime reporter about how the work has changed over decades on the job. “It’s complicated because you think you’re doing a public service and in many ways you are,” Detroit Free Press executive editor Jim Schaefer said, “but in another consideration, are you advancing a stereotype about your city in the neighborhoods? Are you contributing to the ‘Detroit is hell’ narrative?”

Alvarez called Streetlight a “high-quality product,” but it was also a heavy lift on top of other operations. And it didn’t resonate with audiences as much as Outlier had hoped. In May, marking the one-year anniversary of Streetlight Detroit’s creation, Alvarez wrote that “The audience for this newsletter is, frankly, too small.”

It was “our least popular [newsletter]…by a lot,” Alvarez told me. “And that was ok, but it didn’t grow very much.”

When Outlier conducted a reader survey collecting feedback about the newsletter, they found readers appreciated the content but didn’t really want to engage with it. “People were like, ‘This is so valuable! I don’t really want to open it,’” Alvarez said. Nobody wants to “read all day about developments in safety,” it turns out.

The collaborative has decided to reimagine Streetlight, and the newsletter is paused. Now, instead, each outlet is either establishing or labeling existing beats focused on safety, and Alvarez expects this coverage to be included in a daily newsletter by January, coinciding with Outlier’s general transition to more daily coverage. She’s come to see the topic of public safety as something that “needs to be integrated into the work that you do…I don’t think it works for a newsletter product.”

“Most of the time we’re trying to close information gaps. We’re trying to close accountability gaps. We’re trying to close connection gaps. And then, sometimes, we’re also trying to do narrative change,” Alvarez said. For instance, the narrative that crime is endemic to Detroit gives cover to auto insurance companies to wildly overcharge Detroiters. “If we allow this narrative to persist, we can’t do our job…closing accountability gaps, because it’s so pervasive that it allows people to get away with shit.” Additionally, the narrative that cities with Black urban centers are unsafe, in Alvarez’s view, can provide cover to officials who aren’t solving other problems. “Journalists should not be in the business of giving cover to people who aren’t doing their jobs,” she said.

“Crime is better for the news business than safety,” Alvarez wrote in Crain’s Detroit Business in September. “But safety is better for Detroiters.”

In Chicago, The Triibe’s Reframing Crime Narratives series is geared toward action, not a “state of despair”

In the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and in his early days as president, Morgan Elise Johnson and Tiffany Walden were infuriated by the national right-wing narrative that Chicago was a violent city.

“We saw, in political discourse, the ways in which the name of Chicago was being used,” Johnson said. (Remember Donald Trump’s “horrible ‘carnage’” tweet threatening to “send in the Feds”?)

“It became so painfully clear,” Johnson added, “that Black Chicagoans had no agency over our narrative, and that conversations around violence were really a dog whistle for calling Black people [and] Black communities violent in and of themselves.”

Local news, in Johnson’s eyes, was a relentless drumbeat of shooting tally totals and no solutions. “Watching and engaging with the news was a traumatic experience,” she said. “I couldn’t really wrestle with how this narrative was productive, or getting us to a safer, more healed state as a people.”

Johnson and Walden co-founded The Triibe in February 2017 as a for-profit outlet with a mission of “reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago and giving ownership back to the people.” It has covered news about policing and crime as it affects communities from the start, and also publishes community profiles, culture stories, and an events calendar.

This summer, The Triibe published a 10-part series, “Reframing Crime Narratives,” to “create space for community conversation about crime in Chicago.” The project received funding from the MacArthur Foundation and an Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice grant.

“We don’t regularly see viral videos of someone committing securities fraud,” Johnson noted in a newsletter introducing the series in June.¹ But “in our minds, we have an image of what crime looks like. It looks like young people gathering in large numbers. It looks poor and unkempt. It looks like property damage, assault, loud noises, and property theft — most of all, it looks Black.” (Violent crime is disproportionately covered compared to white-collar crime.)

The timing of the series was important, Johnson noted, because violence in Chicago tends to increase in the summer. At a time when she knew coverage of this violence would intensify, too, she wanted the package to generate deeper conversations about the structural issues that lead to crime (like housing), and real solutions. She knew, based in part on an audience survey via the Medill Media Lab, that audiences coming to The Triibe “want to know how they can help…our audience told us [they] don’t want to feel like [they’re] in a state of despair.”

The series, which consisted of 10 stories published between June and September, began with a reported piece in which residents of the Garfield Park and Englewood neighborhoods defined what would make their communities feel safe. Other stories in the package probed disparate experiences calling 911 and the relationship between social media and real-life violence. The series also centered hyperlocal efforts to combat crime by profiling Chicago’s peacekeepers, compiled a detailed listicle of Black-led organizations that assist Chicagoans experiencing “intracommunity violence,” and spotlighted how community and health leaders can support shooting survivors. And it sought to undo preconceptions and counter misinformation about crime, explaining what the abolition movement in Chicago actually looks like and debunking false claims about the Pretrial Fairness Act ending cash bail (nicknamed “the Purge law” by opponents). Of all of the published stories, this essay by a law professor arguing that the success of ending cash bail demonstrates the possibilities of “public safety [policy] not based on fear” was among the most impactful, Johnson said, because it effectively countered viral misinformation. (WVON, Chicago’s Black-owned and operated radio station, followed up to interview the author.)

The first story in The Triibe’s series, in which residents envisioned what a safe future would look like to them, reckoned directly with the role local news and language have played in perpetuating real-life harm. One woman said she believed that “changing the negative language and narratives that have permeated and become deeply embedded in the mindsets of Englewood residents would be instrumental in bringing about safety and security. Terms such as ‘crime-ridden,’ ‘dangerous,’ or ‘impoverished’ further stigmatize the community and perpetuate negative stereotypes and hopelessness among residents.”

Another interviewee reflected on how life imitates social media and local news. “Many youth actually want to live outside of what is being broadcasted in the media. However, they become disillusioned by what they see on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or the local news,” the community member said. “They feel that they either can’t overcome those obstacles or that they must conform to the negative images portrayed.”²

The series “slightly underperformed” in terms of audience engagement. Johnson attributed this to the prevalence of news about Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Convention this summer. “It was an atypical summer for us because violence reporting was not the dominant narrative,” she said. But Johnson sees the series as evergreen reporting that can continue to serve as a community resource and be resurfaced whenever relevant. The Triibe is “building out an impact plan” for featuring stories from the series in panel discussions.

Mainstream local news outlets still have a long way to go to reshape crime coverage to serve, not hurt, communities, Johnson said. But she has seen improvements to local coverage of Chicago crime in the seven years since The Triibe’s establishment — especially a change in how Chicago police are covered. She feels that The Triibe’s influence, and public critiques, of other outlets have made a difference.

“We’re teaching a whole community of people — not just about the news topics we cover…[but] how to read the news,” she said. “We’re encouraging them to critique and engage other outlets in the same way. So we lead by example.”

The Berkeley Scanner sees public safety reporting “as one of the biggest ways to build trust with readers”

One of Emilie Raguso’s first reporting jobs, in the mid-aughts, was as a crime reporter for The Modesto Bee in California’s Central Valley. It was then (and remains) a more conservative area than other parts of the state. Working there exposed Raguso to a different worldview and culture than one from her “very, very liberal” upbringing, particularly around community perceptions of law enforcement and the military.

More recently, Raguso spent a decade as a reporter and editor at Berkeleyside, where crime was one of multiple topics she covered. In her time there, and especially after George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020, Berkeleyside, like many news outlets across the country, was reckoning with how it covered crime and public safety. Raguso has seen “a major shift in at least how journalism thinks about [crime] and, in many cases, how [journalists] cover it.” In some cases, though, she saw this shift as meaning that newsrooms, including Berkeleyside, “cover a lot of things less” — for instance, focusing on watchdog and reform crime coverage, but pulling back from daily crime news. (To this point: In Nieman Lab’s own backyard, The Boston Globe has reported on a split among local news startups on whether to publish a police blotter.)

Rolling back daily crime coverage struck Raguso as misguided. It’s important for the news industry to “think about the ramifications of all our coverage on our communities,” she said. But in her view, reporting on public safety is “one of the biggest ways that we built trust with our readers.”

At its best, Raguso thinks this kind of coverage can be reassuring to community members — answering concrete, immediate questions they have when they see a major police response, or traffic accident, or fire. “If news organizations are kind of turning away from one of the things that I felt makes us most trusted, we’re really leaving a big gap,” she said.

Perhaps worse, this is a gap that risks being filled by unreliable information on apps like Nextdoor and Citizen.

“We don’t need to cover every little thing,” Raguso said. But “crime and safety are inherently really interesting and concerning to people, and they are going to work to find the answers and look for more context wherever they can. And if news organizations pull back, and then people are left relying on completely unvetted…things like the Citizen app to get their answers, that does not lead to an informed community.”

In September 2022, Raguso created The Berkeley Scanner, a member-supported news outlet focused exclusively on crime and public safety reporting. “When the earthquake hits and the power goes out, TBS provides the latest updates, whether it’s breaking news in Berkeley or other critical coverage,” the about page states. “Police on your block, smoke in the air, helicopter overhead? The Berkeley Scanner finds out what’s happening.” Raguso aimed to fill a gap in Berkeley’s market, and also saw the beat as something a “one-person newsroom” could cover in a comprehensive, thoughtful way.

Think back to Detroit’s Outlier for a second: One of its stories observed that “Crime is hyperlocal, driven by relationships and living conditions within a block or even within a household.” The article suggested that the information that would actually make people feel safer is information tailored to their neighborhood. In Berkeley, Raguso’s early level of success may indicate that she’s tapping into a community desire for just that kind of hyperlocal information about crime and public safety.

As a one-woman show, Raguso publishes more than 30 stories a month, and has seen particular reader interest in stories about traffic, the district attorney election, and crime on Berkeley’s campus (catering to an audience of Berkeley parents). Among recent stories: she interviewed mayoral candidates about their positions on crime (and, in response to requests, provided a more general election guide), followed a conviction in a domestic violence case, covered a robbery of a mail carrier’s postal keys, reported on gunfire near UC Berkeley, and covered a contentious vote to dismantle a homeless camp.

The Scanner is already profitable, barely two years in, with about 2,050 free members, and 1,300 paying members (most pay between $8 and $18 a month). The paying members have commenting privileges, and Raguso said the comments section is active and mostly self-moderating. Though things can get contentious, Raguso said she feels it’s important for the Scanner to provide a place for community dialogue.

Raguso said she thinks carefully about when to include a mugshot or a name in her reporting — she typically includes mugshots for people “charged with serious crimes, often violent crimes,” which she believes matters from a community safety perspective. (As this publishes, there is a mugshot dominating the homepage.) But she’s also receptive to removing people’s names from stories if they ask, on a case-by-case basis. She’s received a handful of requests for removals since The Scanner’s launch in September 2022. “Cases often take years to resolve so we’re still in the early stages for anything I would have written about,” she said. The Scanner has focused on more serious and violent crimes, “including people with lengthy records,” which “would be less likely to meet the criteria for removal,” she added.

When Raguso was at Berkeleyside, she estimated receiving around six removal requests per year. “More often than not, I would remove it because the folks who asked met the criteria (either a lesser outcome than what was initially charged or more of a one-time bad decision, or a youthful offender or something like that),” she said. “It’s definitely something I handle quickly when people do meet the criteria for removal of a booking photo or, more often, their name.”

In an increasingly fragmented media environment, where journalists are competing with social media and government officials to supply information, Raguso thinks efforts like The Berkeley Scanner are more vital than ever. In this messier information world, “I think there’s an even more critical role for the media to play,” she said, “providing…trusted, vetted information about something people really care about.”

1. See also: “The Golden Age of White Collar Crime.”
2. That’s the same feedback La Converse, in Canada, heard from local youth about crime reporting, which informed the creation of its series Hood Heroes to celebrate positive role models.