The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [66]
On occasion the degree of attention becomes so skewed that reporters start seeing patterns where none exist—the massively publicized “wave” of tourist murders in Florida in the early 1990s being a memorable example. By chance alone every decade or two there should be an unusually high number of tourists murdered in Florida, the statistician Arnold Barnett of MIT demonstrated in a journal article. The media uproar was an “overreaction to statistical noise,” he wrote. The upturn that so caught reporters’ fancy—ten tourists killed in a year—was labeled a crime wave because the media chose to label it as such. Objectively speaking, ten murders out of 41 million visitors did not even constitute a ripple, much less a wave, especially considering that at least 97 percent of all victims of crime in Florida are Floridians. Although the Miami area had the highest crime rate in the nation during this period, it was not tourists who had most cause for worry. One study showed that British, German, and Canadian tourists who flock to Florida each year to avoid winter weather were more than 70 times more likely to be victimized at home. The typical victim of crime in Florida, though largely invisible in the news, was young, local, and black or Hispanic.3
So was the typical victim of drug violence in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when some reporters and social scientists avidly implied otherwise. “The killing of innocent bystanders, particularly in the cross fires of this nation’s drug wars, has suddenly become a phenomenon that greatly troubles experts on crime,” began a front-page story in the New York Times. It is “the sense that it could happen to anybody, anywhere, like a plane crash” that makes these attacks so scary, the reporter quoted Peter Reuter from the RAND Corporation. According to the New York Daily News, “spillover” crime from the drug wars even affected people in “silk-stocking areas.” In fact, a New York magazine article revealed, thanks to a crack cocaine epidemic, “most neighborhoods in the city by now have been forced to deal with either crack or its foul by-products: if not crack houses and street dealers or users, then crackhead crimes such as purse snatchings, car break-ins, burglaries, knife-point robberies, muggings, and murders.” TV newscasts, needless to say, breathlessly reported much the same, with pictures at eleven.4
One expert eventually became skeptical of the reporting and set out to examine whether New Yorkers were truly at equal and random risk of falling victim to drug-related violence. What Henry Brownstein, a researcher with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, found when he looked at data available from the police was almost exactly the opposite. About two out of one hundred homicides in New York City involved innocent bystanders, and most drug-related violence occurred between people connected to the drug trade itself. When innocent people did get hurt, Brownstein discovered, often they were roughed up or shot at not by drug users but by police officers in the course of ill-conceived raids and street busts.5
Drug violence, like almost every other category of violence, is not an equal opportunity danger. It principally afflicts young people from poor minority communities, and above all, young black men. But reporters and politicos never seem to lack for opportunities to perpetuate the myth of indiscriminate victimization. “Random Killings Hit a High—All Have ‘Realistic’ Chance of Being Victim, Says FBI,” read the headline in USA Today’s story in 1994 about a government report that received big play that year. Had the academics and elected officials who supplied reporters with brooding comments about the report looked more closely at its contents, however, they would have learned that it was misleading. As Richard Moran, a sociology professor at Mount Holyoke College, subsequently