We’ve arrived at a moment where the catastrophic state of American justice is commonly attributed to the dysfunctions of policing and the horrific state of our prison systems. Many of us also are aware of the contribution of prosecutors to the persistent failures of the system. For decades, prosecutors have been central to shielding police from consequences for misconduct, to feeding people into the jails and preventing prisoners from seeking redress for wrongful imprisonment, to manipulating evidence to get convictions against convenient suspects, to determining what crimes get taken seriously and what crimes get ignored.
Radley Balko’s story on an attempt to smear San Francisco’s reformist district attorney Chesa Boudin is an important indicator of just how important prosecutors’ offices have been to the police-prison complex. It’s a familiar story. Reformist Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner has had to similarly deal with numerous overt attempts to undercut his authority, many of them coming from the Philadelphia police union.
Police and prison management (especially privatized prisons) know how to circumvent or ignore reformist mayors and county governments, as the last four years have shown. It doesn’t really matter what the mayor tells you to do or what practices the mayor wants you to stop. The most the mayor can do is fire the chief and get a new one. But a DA? The DA can strike at the heart of police power. It’s mutual, of course: the police can (and have, as in Baltimore and elsewhere) choose to make the DA look bad either by ignoring crime or in some cases by actively encouraging it.
What Balko’s story also reveals, however, is another component of the malformed system we live with today: the press. Balko is calling attention to the misconduct of a single journalist out to manipulate the news, but there’s a bigger system here to consider.
The United States got into its contemporary mess in part because of a sociocultural formation around crime, race, and order that took shape during the 1970s. There are deeper roots to keep in mind: sensational coverage of crime and popular journalism have been intertwined tightly since the 19th Century in the United States and Europe. Crime has been a key junction point for public imaginings of gender, sexuality, migration, race, violence, urbanization, and more abstractly, modernity as a whole.
Crime is also an understandably powerful conceptual connector between our understanding of social structure and individual circumstance. We encode attention to both in the law itself overtly and in ways we do not consciously plan. Crimes beg for narratives, even when we know little about who committed them—it’s one reason court cases are an important source for historians trying to understand the experience of people who did not have access to power or have their thinking put into archives. As victims, criminals and witnesses, something of their lives makes it way into what we can know via trials and police investigations.
In the 1970s, when urban crime rates in much of the US were genuinely high relative to earlier periods (and where high crime rates directly affected almost everyone living in cities), it made sense for crime generally to be a major ongoing story in the press and a major policy question for mayors, city councils, governors and federal officials. The problem is that the particular structure of crime reporting in that era became a powerful commercial and political logic for the press, a feedback loop that connected audiences, journalists and political authorities.
Reporting some crimes and ignoring others fed white urban and suburban ressentiment which produced in turn a predictable electoral wellspring that candidates became practiced at tapping into which produced the demand for more stringent laws, more constraints on judges, more funding for police—and sold more papers and got higher ratings on television. It scarcely mattered from the 1980s onward that each overheated circuit around that loop was a misrepresentation of reality, that the white audiences most prone to consume lurid stories of criminality were less and less at risk of being victims of crime, while at the same time, black and Latino communities were as exposed or more so than ever. It scarcely mattered that each intensification of that loop was eating a larger and larger proportion of municipal and state budgets and leading more and more non-white men to be imprisoned for longer and longer periods in more and more hopeless circumstances, and that the people benefitting from the runaway growth of the justice system were more and more insulated from accountability. Journalists largely did not investigate or reconsider the way they reported crimes.
Even when the evidence that lurid focus on the motivations and character of criminals was itself a form of cultural injustice—and a potential cause of crime, in the case of mass shootings—many journalists found it hard to break the loop. Even when the evidence that crime had not only fallen but that some crimes, most notably sexual assault, were poorly covered, it was hard to change.
So while the reporter in Balko’s article is an especially terrible example of misconduct, we should generally understand that mainstream journalism has been an integral part of how we came to the police-prosecutor-prison complex that we are so burdened with today. There is still a long way to go for journalism, online or otherwise, to cover crime and misconduct in a way that doesn’t feed preconceptions and reinforce the political power aligned behind injustice.