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How Crime Statistics Became News

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Crime Statistics in the News

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Abstract

This chapter examines the rise of crime statistics in the news from a historical perspective. It will start by examining the use of crime statistics in the nineteenth century in the French media and go on to consider the creation, back in the 1990s, of a statistics unit for the New York Police by the then Mayor Rudolph William Giuliani. In so doing, it will discuss key historical developments in the reporting of crime statistics by the news media and what this has meant to crime reporting in general. By so doing, it will look at important landmarks in the use of statistics in the news and examine why and how statistics were incorporated by journalists and how they were made firstly available to news reporters. This chapter provides a critical historical account that will look at the development of crime news in general and how it became to use statistics in the reporting of law and order.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Jairo Lugo-Ocando

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  1. Jairo Lugo-Ocando
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Lugo-Ocando, J. (2017). How Crime Statistics Became News. In: Crime Statistics in the News. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39841-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39841-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-39840-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39841-3

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