The headlines on a recent spike in ram raids paint a picture of a country with youth crime at crisis levels. But data shows that's not the case, and some say the media could do better at putting the robberies in context.
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Photo: photo / RNZ Mediawatch
Many news media outlets have run a series of alarming videos showing young people, mostly teenagers, smashing cars into department stores and stealing the goods inside.
The New Zealand Herald carried reports about a ram raid “crime wave” or a “youth crime ram raid spree”. Newshub honed in on a “ram raid epidemic”. "Auckland young people 'out of control' as ram-raids ramp up," Stuff reported on 20 April.
On Today FM, presenter Tova O’Brien even described the raids as a form of "terrorism".
"When I lived in London a few years ago, it felt like my camera operator and I were covering another terror attack every single week," she said.
"Thankfully no-one has died as a result of these reckless raids just yet but this is still a form of terrorism. It is terrorising communities."
In that monologue, O’Brien touched on the idea that media coverage could be helping fuel the ram raids.
"I do fear the more we talk about it, the more we put in the news and play the shocking CCTV footage, the more some morons will think it's choice as to copycat those crimes."
That sentiment was expressed by a number of commentators.
Also on Today FM, former police detective Lance Burdett told Leah Panapa the media may be giving offenders notoriety.
"The media have a big part in this and it's not the media's fault, but it's the way it could be portrayed in a different way. The media might want to think about instead of having those action shots of people going through, of having a lot more interviews with the owners of the shop post-event."
Meanwhile on RNZ National, Kim Hill mused that it might help if ram raids were given a name that sounds a little less cool.
Stuff’s Ali Mau backed that call in a column for Stuff where she pointed out that so-called ‘king hits’ started to sound a lot less kingly when they were dubbed ‘coward punches’.
Perhaps it would help deescalate things if the media rebranded ram raids as 'coward shunts' or 'broken window shopping.'
But that still wouldn’t address a more fundamental problem with these stories.
They tend to paint a picture of a horde of lawless young people thumbing their noses at society, leaving audiences with the feeling youth crime is 'out of control'.
Last weekend's Herald on Sunday foregrounds anxiety about a surge of kids committing crimes. Photo: photo / RNZ Mediawatch
But that doesn't marry up with the data available.
The most recent figures from the Ministry of Justice show the opposite: crime rates for children under 13 and young people 14 to 17 years old have fallen by 65 percent and 63 percent respectively over the last decade.
If audiences have a distorted picture of youth crime rates, that may just be a function of the way news works.
News organisations understandably tend to hone in on stuff that’s exciting or rare. When it comes to crime, that means grisly assaults or audacious misdeeds. No-one wants to read about the cars that go to the garden centre or the hairdressers, and don't smash through the front window of a Noel Leeming.
That hyper-focus on often statistically anomalous events has contributed to a well-studied phenomenon where news audiences tend to believe crime rates are going up even when they’re going down.
The same distortions can occur on other topics too. In early April, The Project featured 35-year-old Hayden Harvey, who contracted the heart condition pericarditis after taking the Pfizer vaccine.
The story covered Harvey's difficulties getting treatment for his vaccine injury, and subsequently co-host Jesse Mulligan told viewers myocarditis and pericarditis are much more common from Covid-19 than from the vaccine.
But the story nevertheless circulated widely in social media channels devoted to vaccine misinformation.
Nine days later, TVNZ 1News reporter Kristin Hall reported on an increase in people turning up to hospitals or doctors' offices with predominantly unfounded fears they're suffering myocarditis and pericarditis as a result of the vaccine.
Bryan Betty from the Royal NZ College of GPs told her the uptick happened following more media and social media attention on the conditions.
“Towards the end of last year and the start of this year, there was a heightened awareness of myocarditis and pericarditis as a potential follow-on from the vaccine. And certainly this year it has picked up with the publicity that has been out there about the two conditions," he said.
Harvey’s story was newsworthy, but the fallout from that report and others like it on social media, shows honing in on rare events can leave audiences with the impression that they're more common than they are in reality.
When it comes to ram raids, some commentators have been raising the spectre of a youth crime wave to push for tougher penalties on young offenders.
On Newstalk ZB presenter Heather du Plessis-Allan blamed the raids on lighter sentences for young offenders and a more strict police pursuit policy - in spite of the fact both policies had been in place during a large reduction in youth crime in recent years.
"Ram raids are not new, kids getting away with lighter sentences than adults is not new, crime bosses using kids for organised crime because of those lighter sentences is not new. It doesn’t help that the youth justice system is reportedly overloaded. But making it harder for cops to do their jobs and catch these kids is almost certainly not helping," she said.
On The Nation, Annabelle Lee-Mather cautioned against that sort of reaction.
"I think it's important we don't overblow it into this huge community issue when actually there's plenty more rangatahi in our communities doing awesome mahi, staying home and doing their homework and making nice dancing videos on the TikTok," she said.
Katie Doyle (Ngāpuhi), a reporter for Pou Tiaki at Stuff, made similar points in a story about the drivers of youth offending.
She said media organisations often create a misleading narrative about youth crime, even if it's done inadvertently.
In her eyes, that narrative is shaped by reports that fail to carry information about the factors driving youth crime, or context on the overall statistics on youth offending.
"While the headlines may make you think youth crime is ballooning completely out of control, the statistics don't back up that narrative.
"That can be difficult from a journalism perspective because we have to deal with things like word limits, and you're trying to stack up information as things are happening in real time, but there are little ways you can add context. I think it's worth it to take more time to do a story and do it right, than to take less time and do only half the story."
Headlines also had the potential to undermine even nuanced reporting on the ram raids, Doyle said.
Highlighting the most dramatic or polarising quote from an interviewee could make a story clickable, while undermining more balanced writing in the story itself, she said.
"I think we need to be really careful that just because a quote is really great or really hard-hitting and will probably get a lot of clicks, that it's actually telling the real story."
"We have a responsibility to the truth, and we have a responsibility to tell things like they are, and we need to be doing that, and I don't think even slightly distorting something is really acceptable."
Doyle called on news organisations to balance reporting on negative events like the spike in ram raids in the longer term by making a greater effort to also report on good news stories.
That could include the decade-spanning drop in youth crime, or other positive stories about young people achieving, she said.
"I would put out a challenge to media companies: at least once a week have a good news story lead your bulletin. Have a good news story lead your website. I think it's what people need."