Panel 4: When Media Create the Story: Who Gets To Be a Victim, and Who Is Marked a Criminal?

Highlights from the panel:
 

• “We found that White missing women and girls received more initial coverage and they received more repeated coverage than the missing Black women and girls. And that piece about repeated coverage is really important, because not everybody is consuming media all the time -- like I am -- and so sometimes people miss stories. But when a story is repeated over and over and over again, it becomes much harder to miss it, right? So that repeated coverage piece is important.” – Danielle Slakoff
   
• “[T]he ideal victim is a person who, when they experience harm or they experience crime, they're believed to be innocent, blameless, and in need of our protection. So, in other words, they are worthy of our collective attention and our collective resources. And what we find in my own work is that those women who do not conform to the ideal victim stereotype, they're often shown as being somehow responsible for their own victimization. You'll hear victim blaming statements like they were using alcohol or drugs, or what type of clothing they were wearing, or that they were dating somebody with a domestic violence history.” – Danielle Slakoff
   
• “[T]he identity of the victim matters right for how someone's death is being covered by the media. So White women and young children in Chicago receive the most extensive news coverage, but beyond that, right, beyond just the number of articles we really see from qualitative coding, that they're also much more likely to be portrayed in these stories as multidimensional people whose lives matter. The way that we really saw this framed is like she was like a young superstar student at her high school, and she had such a bright future ahead of her. There was so much potential, and this was such a loss for her family, right, like she was a daughter, she was a granddaughter, she was a sister. So really sort of anchoring the language and the portrayal of the victim in this very sort of humanizing tone. On the flip side we actually didn't find as much, you know, for like older victims, or for Black or Hispanic victims, for male victims.” – Kailey White
   
• “[I]f you hold constant the identity of the victim, the racial makeup of the neighborhood where someone is killed actually shaped both the amount of coverage that they received but also the tone of that reporting in a significant, statistically significant way. And so in that way, right, it's also about the neighborhood beyond just the individual. … [B]y providing less coverage and less humanizing coverage of homicides that are occurring in predominantly Black or predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, what happens is this is leading to the normalization, right, of violence in these communities where homicides are treated as unremarkable or unsurprising.” – Kailey White
   
• “[T]he gun trace task force was robbing people nightly. They were planting evidence. They were stealing drugs. They were dealing drugs. There was at least three different drug dealers they were operating with that were sending the drugs that they stole to different places. They're making a lot of money off of this, and at the same time they were framed as the vanguard of a new kind of policing. Now none of this is new to any of us, but it was kind of new in 2007.” – Brandon Soderberg
   
• “So then you bring these cops in that were raised on this specific kind of policing. And then they're told to just go out there and get the guns by any means necessary. Don't worry about probable cause. Once they got a gun, no one gives a sh*t about what happened to them, or how you got that gun, including if you planted [it] on them. And so you have these cops that are sick with the same kind of violence that we're all infected by, but especially in communities that have been divested. … You are sending sick people in a community that has the same ailment, and you're expecting these cops to be able to regulate this or figure it out or act right in that system, it just makes no sense.” – Brandon Soderberg
   
• “[Y]ou had this remarkable situation where the cops were the perpetrators, the people who deal drugs or allegedly deal drugs or dealt drugs 20 years ago and don't anymore, but are still suspicious because they're living a life, and therefore they're automatically suspicious of still dealing drugs—those people were seen as the victims in this very narrow space.” – Brandon Soderberg
   
• “We know that in the U.S. mainstream media outlets get a lot of their profit from advertising revenue, and we know that historically, these stories about White missing women and girls have received an enormous amount of attention. You see lots of people engaging with these stories, sharing them and listening to them, and for that reason I think we are likely to continue to see this reporting, because there is such a strong link between, you know, these stories and the clicks and likes and shares that bring the advertising revenue.” – Danielle Slakoff
   
• “[R]esearch shows that police work harder to solve a case once it has received media attention, right? It puts pressure on police to solve this quickly. … [R]esearch shows that people who sexually assault White women tend to get longer sentences than those who assault women of color and specifically Black women. We also know, if you look at the death penalty that if the victim is a White woman or girl, you're more likely to see the death penalty as the outcome. And then … There's a study called “Where is Latisha’s Law?” Right? And what they looked at was 51 laws here in the U.S. that have been named after victims. And what they found was [] that 86% of those named laws are honoring White victims here in the U.S.” – Danielle Slakoff
   
• “[R]ecently I partnered with a nonprofit in Chicago, and we spoke with community members who are living in neighborhoods across the city that experience disproportionately high levels of gun violence. And we found that community members themselves are explicitly saying, … specifically community members who had lost a loved one to gun violence. … my case was not treated as important. The loss of my loved one was not seen as noteworthy or important, not just by the news media right, but, like just in general, this is sinking into them. … the message is coming across that, like, we are not valued, and our loved ones are not valued. … community members are not blind to the fact that this is happening, and it plays a toll, right, even as they're experiencing loss of loved ones from gun violence, it's another added layer of trauma that they're then having to experience.” – Kailey White
   
• “[T]heir idea of policing, and the police's idea of policing, and the media's idea of policing are rabidly different when you speak to someone in a community that's been heavily affected by this and the divestment that leads to crime and more homicides in these areas. And they're like. Well, I would like to walk to the store and not be afraid someone's gonna hit me in the head with a pipe. Fair enough. That's where it starts right? And then the cops say, yeah, we agree. That's why we've started an 82 person plainclothes specialized unit that patrols the city from 9 pm to 6 am. Peak crime hours in high crime areas. And that's why we need to jack up every person we see on the street, throw them against the wall, embarrass them. … There's no other option, but it's like no one's asking for that. That's not what anyone's conception of even violence reduction is. … it's all the same thing over and over again. and I'm only so direct about this, because I'm just like it doesn't work, and it's fake. … It's not real, it doesn't reduce violence. It just increases harm. But this is central to it.” – Brandon Soderberg
   
• “[A]ll I start with was like, this happened to someone. I'm going to start trying to write about it and talk to them. This takes a really long time. It can take 6 or 8 months to do these 3,000 words stories. It's kind of not a great use of time if you really calculated it. But what I'm just trying to say is that there are ways to do this, especially now, and that people don't is part of the problem, and that there's a lot of that, this sort of constant loop we've been talking about police and media, and how they keep pulling each other around. There are ways to just step out of that. And I just would encourage more reporters and more media people to do that.” – Brandon Soderberg