While crime in all categories is significantly down, nearly half of Americans still view it as either an increasing or serious problem.
How can the reality of crime and the perception of crime be so starkly different?
One part of the answer is simple: misinformation about crime is being reported by media outlets for a host of reasons. Take, for example, the six major media outlets in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Sentencing Project (Project) released a report in December of 2024 detailing the Project’s analysis of how these local media outlets covered youth crime issues. The report found that the media outlets—four television stations and two newspapers, with the conservative WBFF, Fox45 television being the worst—routinely, and excessively, provided their audiences with “skewed and misleading information about youth crime.”
This is not an anomaly: for decades, local media markets have sensationalized coverage of youth crime in blatantly obvious ways to spike public fear while substantially driving up their market shares and advertising revenues.
And what was the result of this media desire for profit over fact-based journalism?
The Project put it this way:
“The coverage has likely contributed to a shift in public opinion toward tough-sounding policies that conflict with the evidence on what works to reduce youth crime and promote youth success. Indeed, problematic coverage appears to have been a factor behind the bipartisan passage of a juvenile justice bill in Maryland in April 2024 that rolled back evidence-based reforms enacted only two years earlier. The new law imposes harsher responses on youth that are not grounded in research and that are likely to worsen crime, damage young people’s futures, and exacerbate the Maryland youth justice system’s already severe racial and ethnic disparities.”
During the 2024 Maryland legislative session, Fox45 coverage, in particular, was designed to stoke public fear, already saturated in the collective social mindset about youth crime. That coverage certainly contributed to the bipartisan “get tough” on youth crime measures that emerged from the legislature. The Project’s report made these specific findings about this type of misinformation-driven media coverage:
- Disproportionate focus on crimes committed by youth;
- Misleading representation of youth crime trends;
- Failure to support assertions of rising youth crime rates with accurate and representative statistics;
- Widespread use of fear-inducing rhetoric about youth crime; and
- Fox 45, relative to other news outlets, was much more likely to air sensationalized coverage highlighting youth crime incidents and perceived leniency in the justice system.
The inherent tragedy is that this misinformation-driven media coverage about youth crime will only increase the number of youths in violent juvenile detention centers. NBC News carried a report in February 2025 about how violent these centers have become, putting both staff and youthful offenders at risk. In August 2024, the U.S. Justice Department issued a report that found, after a three-year investigation, that youths in Texas juvenile detention centers, of which 80% are Black or Hispanic, are routinely subjected to physical abuse by staff through the excessive use of pepper spray and prolonged cell confinement, as well as being sexually abused by other youths and staff.
In effect, the current crisis in all juvenile detention centers nationwide begins with local news media outlets stoking the public’s fear about youth crime that inspires state lawmakers to campaign on a tough “law and order” rhetoric, and then enact legislative measures, which, in turn, keeps the human traffic flowing into violent, overcrowded, and understaffed detention centers where physical abuse and criminal training await them.
When it comes to youth crime reporting, local media outlets are the primary source of coverage. In politically conservative communities, there is generally a racial bias in the media coverage, as evidenced by the Fox45 coverage in Baltimore. The station’s biased coverage produces an array of direct and even collateral misinformation that shapes policy decisions in the juvenile justice system.
The Project’s report offers several significant suggestions and conclusions. For example, elected officials and policymakers should address youth crime policy issues with both public safety and youth well-being as priorities, not appeasement or acquiescence to misinformation-driven local media coverage.
Further, the report suggests that in dealing with local media coverage about youth crime, youth justice reform advocates should:
- Engage reporters and editors to discuss problematic coverage and promote better practices for covering youth justice issues.
- Meet with editorial boards and local network news management teams to discuss any problematic practices in their recent coverage of youth crime and to brief them on best journalistic practices for covering crime and delinquency.
- Contact beat reporters covering youth crime issues: to respectfully discuss problematic coverage, familiarize them with best practices for covering youth crime issues, and urge fairer and more balanced coverage.
- Make presentations on best practices for covering crime and youth justice issues at journalism conferences and workshops.
- Document false, misleading coverage in local media outlets. Suggested strategies include: (a) conducting or commissioning rigorous content analysis studies like this study on Baltimore; and (b) preparing and circulating critiques documenting instances where media outlets present false and misleading content that violates journalistic norms and best practices.
- Respond to the problematic coverage quickly using multiple approaches. Advocates can prepare opinion columns, fact sheets, press releases, social media posts, and other materials to contradict false and misleading media narratives with objective facts. These findings must be shared with elected officials.
With respect to local media coverage, the report offered the following five suggestions to local journalists covering youth crime issues:
- Review your crime coverage to avoid focusing a disproportionate share of coverage on youth under age 18, who are responsible for roughly 10% of crime nationally, as measured by arrests and victim reports.
- Be careful in making assertions – or repeating assertions from police, prosecutors, or political leaders – claiming that youth crime is increasing. Always support claims about increases in youth crime with reliable statistics that account for historical trends, not just recent fluctuations.
- When citing statistics, use data responsibly by presenting broad trends in total arrests or arrests for all violent crimes, rather than focusing on isolated offense categories.
- Avoid citing people who use false or inflammatory rhetoric about the youth justice system, as this will predictably raise fear levels among the public.
- When covering youth justice policy issues, present alternative policies in a balanced way that takes into account evidence on what works and what doesn’t to reduce youth offending. Overwhelmingly, research shows that confinement in residential facilities typically increases the likelihood of future justice system involvement and damages young people’s futures. Compelling evidence also shows that youth diverted from the justice system have better outcomes than comparable youth who are charged in juvenile court. Therefore, journalists must challenge assertions made by proponents of more detention, incarceration, and other punitive practices.
There are more than 27,000 juveniles housed in roughly 625 juvenile detention centers scattered across the country. This is a significant decline from the nearly 110,000 housed in such centers in 2000. The overwhelming majority of these juveniles are Black: 228 Black youths per 100,000 as compared to 49 white youths per 100,000, according to the Sentencing Project.
Much of these racial disparities can be attributed, either directly or indirectly, to the racial bias inherent in local media coverage of youth crime, the use of fear-based rhetoric of political candidates seeking to gin up votes by fear, and racial profiling/discrimination of law enforcement, who often treat Black and Brown youth with zero tolerance.
We must all do better.
