CRIME IN THE NEWS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21431, 4 September 1931, Page 7

CRIME IN THE NEWS

THE DETERRENT ASPECT. More and better crime news. That is the rather startling demand of a member of the New York State Crime Commission and, of the New York City Commission on Crime Prevention —Thomas S. Rice. But it is not for the mere pleasure and excitement of reading stories of murder, banditry, and racketeering that Mr Rice urges the press to print more crime news. It is because he believes it would be an effective aid in reducing crime. “Every determined effort to reduce crime in the United States or other countries in modern times,” he writes in the Panel, the bulletin of the Association of Grand Jurors of New York County, “ has originated; has been sustained, and has been carried to more or less successful conclusion by the playing up of crime news systematically and persistently in newspapers and periodicals.” Mr Rice roundly scores those " theorists and sentimentalists ” who would “ minimise crime news,” and calls for “more and better crime news, particularly in the newspapers of Greater New York.” In full agreement with this contention, the New York World-Telegram makes the point that crime news should be considered in its two aspects: “ (1) Its undoubted, absorbing, perfectly legitimate interest to normal human beings as the true account of temptations, passions, and impulses that beset other human beings. (2) Its power to shock a menaced public into concerted action against crime and against social and economic conditions that can be shown to breed crime.” To try to deny the first of these aspects would be silly, we are told: “Murder has thrilled and horrified—but also deeply interested —mankind ever since Cain killed Abel. If interest in crime is immoral, then three-fourths of the world’s literature and at least half its conversation are immoral. The vast majority of human beings can read volumes about crime and talk for hours about crime without becoming in the least • criminal. For the small percentage who are persuaded to crime by suggestion, the conditions under which they live are usually far more to blame than what they read. Crime news, then, merely as a matter of intense and legitimate public interest, is news that editors cannot suppress or if thev pretend to be editing newspaers. Coming to the second aspect, the WorldTelegrum asks whether any factor in reducing' crime is more important than crime news. And here the newspapers can do much: “They can marshal facts and figures into impressive aggregates. They can show how and why crime goes undetected and unpunished. They can dwell upon an actual criminal case ; nd point out just where it reveals the injustice of social conditions, the weakness of the law or the incompetence of the police. They can debunk crime of its heroics, show what a cowardly rat the bom bandit becomes the moment the gun is in somebody else’s hand, follow the .criminal through to the grim end where the excitement and the ‘romance’ are all, gone and only a cringing wretch remains to testifv that crime docs not pay. Exaggeration of crime news, morbid over-em-phasis of crime news, disgusting exploitation of crime news are undoubted risks of printing crime news at all. But these risks are nothing to the risk of suppressing or even minimising crime news.