Crime and Embellishment : The Recent Hysteria Over Fear and Crime Is Based More on Myth and Manipulation Than True Danger and Dread

Crime is this year’s designated crisis--a lush opportunity for the Elected Ones to be especially eloquent, gnashing teeth and pounding podiums in their fervor to rain brimstone on all vile miscreants.

The feeble debate over prevention versus punishment is just for appearances, of course. Punishment is far more gratifying. Ignoring the impossibility of enforcing the laws already on the books, state after state foams up freshly recycled legal weapons against the enemy. The most recent anthem is “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” and only the storm crows squawk that nobody knows exactly what good these new laws will do, or what they will cost in money or misery or mess. The important thing is that we are, presumably at long last, getting tough on crime.

Gov. Pete Wilson launches his reelection campaign by signing the nation’s toughest sentencing law. Georgia proposes to one-up California by amending its state constitution to allow a “two-strike” policy. In the nation’s capital, Democrats shed the “soft-on-crime” taint of liberalism to steal the “Dirty Harry” thunder from Republicans. The House tries to out-tough the Senate.

This is all in response to an alleged and loudly reported public outcry. The headlines scream fear: “Public Fear of Crime Rises!” “Besieged by Crime!” “Kids Growing Up Scared!” The pretext for this hysteria is simple. Those consulted for the most recent public polls on the nation’s problems put crime at the top of the list. America is, we are told, a nation of locks and bolts, of sock drawers full of handguns, of children and old people hiding behind barred doors. Not a happy picture.

And maybe not an accurate one. According to the surveys and the experts who study the public fear of crime, we’re actually no more afraid than usual. The fear rates are high, but no higher than they have been for the past two decades.

Historically, the polls on the nation’s problems swing back and forth--economy, then crime. Sometimes there’s a focus on a specific subcategory--jobs, say, and then drugs, or the deficit trading places with gun control. But it’s always either crime or the economy, and we did the economy during the last big election.

This is an election year. Since the economy doesn’t look quite so bleak lately, the politicians have decided to plump for crime, and the news folk jump in gleefully because, as crises go, both the public and the press infinitely prefer crime. Crime is entertaining. Violence is exciting. Part of our unique American identity is the fact that we are the most violent and crime-ridden First World nation on the planet.

No matter what we claim in polls or anywhere else, Americans don’t just hate and fear crime. Most of us are also devoted to it. I confess: I help keep the TV ratings high for all those gratuitously violent programs. I buy tickets for big-screen ballistics and am mesmerized by two-dimensional smashing, slashing and gore. I inhale stacks of paperbacks about ornate rackets, bizarre murders and hard-boiled mysteries. Conflict is the core of art, and the human inclination to monkey with the social contract is a bang-up plot device.

Admittedly, I belong to that demographic group--white females--that fears crime most and is least likely to be victimized by it. Still, as an aficionado of violence, a crime fan, I have decided, with deep reluctance and regret, that much of what I and millions of others believe about this electric topic is raw hooey.

This embarrassing revelation was a result of the winter siege of crime-wave headlines. While the hysteria mounted on front pages, cryptic reports from the FBI and the Justice Department, buried deep in the sober sections, announced that the national crime rate fell slightly last year and has been remarkably level for almost 20 years. The direct contrast of a level and drooping crime rate with the “rising fear” headlines reeked of rat.

I called Gary Perlstein, a criminologist at Portland State University, to ask why, if crime was down slightly and fear was level, the headlines were spouting panic. Perlstein laughed. “There’s a book you should look at,” he said. “I use it in my classes. It will tell you what you want to know.”

Reading “The Mythology of Crime and Criminal Justice” was the most deflating experience of my crime-fan career. A smallish 1993 paperback, the book was written, and exhaustively referenced, by three criminologists, Victor E. Kappeler and Gary W. Potter of Eastern Kentucky University, and Mark Blumberg of Central Missouri State University. In their research, the authors reviewed and analyzed hundreds of studies of crime and the justice system.

Their basic conclusions go something like this: Though America has major, long-term crime problems, the public understanding of crime is clouded by politically and commercially powered fantasy. The hard life-and-death, fear-and-loss data that should guide our personal and public decisions regarding crime is often manipulated and sometimes downright deceptive. Politicians and governmental agencies, special-interest groups and the news media itself twist, exaggerate and occasionally fabricate information until it is no more connected to reality than the bogyman tales of childhood. Some of this deception is cold-blooded exploitation, and some is committed with passionate good intentions. But the result afflicts our lives with unnecessary fear and in some cases actually prevents a practical solution of the profound problems they disguise.

Such fictions aren’t new, but with modern communications systems they are much more powerful and widespread than they ever were in the limited days of word-of-mouth. Inevitably, the news media are the main mythmongers. Sometimes the news actually creates a myth by reporting a rare incident as if it were common. More often, the media swallow and spread propaganda dished out by special-interest groups and, most effectively, by government agencies.

Government, the criminologists explain, has a vested interest in defining crime and spreading the definition to include any groups or behaviors that “are perceived to be a threat to the existing social order.”Like any other organism, government’s first interest is preserving and expanding its own power. While individuals can certainly make strenuous efforts to guide things in a more sensible way, the weight of the system, the organic chemistry of government, makes it very difficult for them.

Genuine crime and violence are certainly things to fear. But neither hysteria nor garlic can protect us from them. If we are to make any progress in reducing crime rates, we need to separate myth from reality.

I SHOULD HAVE STARTED CATCHING ON IN THE ‘70s, when we all were stunned by reports of legions of Halloween sadists who poison treats, sprinkle cookies with ground glass and razor-load chocolates for handing out to innocent trick-or-treaters. As we all know too well, terrible things can and do happen to children, and our “kid” buttons are hot-wired to emotion. But this particular horror story was mostly fantasy.

Bill Sheehan, director of communications for the National Confectioners Assn., says there has never been a verified incident of Halloween candy tampering. Not one incident that led to illness or injury, much less death. Yet many hospitals still provide free X-ray exams of Halloween candy. Parents (I among them) rifle the booty, tossing out anything homemade, everything that isn’t commercially sealed. Our national fear spawned those big bags of individually wrapped, bite-size candy bars. Every year, the local news sources announce cautionary lists of dos and don’ts. Whole communities have abandoned the door-to-door ritual in favor of costume parties and haunted-house fund-raisers. In 1982, a national Halloween Hotline was established, sponsored by the candy industry and the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police. Charlie Higginbotham of the chiefs’ group says he thinks he’s one of few who ever dial the number anymore; he calls each year to make sure it’s working.

Parties do minimize the accidents that happen when masks with small eye-holes slip and kids trip over trailing costumes in the dark, and trick-or-treating is not exactly a major loss to the culture. Still, I’m ashamed of the way I treated the old couple in the next block who tried for years to give the local children beautiful, homemade caramel apples.

I should have also suspected something when the missing children campaign began in the early ‘80s. Sparked by the abduction and murder of little Adam Walsh in Florida, it pushed the ultimate kid button. The horrifying story of Adam’s death, and the subsequent well-intentioned efforts by his father, John, to prevent similar tragedies exploded into a national myth that had maniacally perverted strangers kidnaping, abusing and murdering anywhere from 800,000 to 1.2 million American kids each year. TV movies chronicled the tragic tales. Keene-eyed children staring from milk cartons had me pricing a leash for my grade-schooler and scaring him daily with warnings about “weirdos.”

Then the Denver Post won a Pulitzer for a series of articles that ran in May, 1985, revealing the truth about missing children. According to the Post, as much as 95% were runaway teens. A portion had been taken by divorced parents in custody disputes. A tiny fraction of the reported numbers were actually lost or stolen children. Current reports indicate a fluctuating rate of 50 to 150 actual abductions by strangers per year since the late ‘70s. Even with the three tragic and highly publicized cases in California and Missouri, the 1993 numbers are expected to be on the low end.

Mark Warr, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the study of fear of crime, encountered the effects of this myth personally. “Several years ago, when one of my children was in elementary school,” he says, “the police came by and wanted each of the kids to participate in this program where they put an ID number on the teeth of the children. This was a national program. And the point was, if you’re ever abducted and murdered, we can identify your body. Now what in hell are we doing to the children of the United States, teaching them something like that? The probability of being abducted and murdered is less than one in a million, literally. And yet we’re scaring the hell out of thousands and thousands of our kids. So some of the things people do out of fear are very harmful. To me it’s even questionable whether parents ought to ingrain in their children a fear of strangers. What happens is we end up with a society in which nobody trusts each other. “

The miserable truth is that most murdered children are killed by their parents. The bulk of child abuse and molestation is committed by family members or friends. In the era that discovered the pathology of the family, parents and law enforcement agencies all over the country stampeded for the red-herring stranger myth. Many still believe it; it’s much easier to fear an invisible monster in the bushes than to worry about the very people you love and lean on. Maybe it’s less painful to think your child has been kidnaped than to accept the guilt for the abuse that drove him or her away. And while any action that saves a child’s life is worthy, blind panic doesn’t help anyone.

Once your eyes adjust to detect camouflage, you find it in strange places. Why, for example, do the media consistently accept the rape statistics offered by victim-advocacy groups? The usual claim is that one out of every four American women will be raped during her lifetime. This statement is regularly delivered as fact in every form of news. Yet these numbers are disputed by most authorities. Rape statistics vary widely depending on who’s doing the research, and all the results are currently in doubt. The Bureau of Justice Statistics 1989 National Crime Survey, which includes crimes not reported to the police as well as those that are reported, finds that about 8% of American women will be victimized by rape or attempted rape in their lifetimes. Feminist author Rene Denfeld devotes an entire chapter to challenging the one-in-four claims in her forthcoming book, “The New Victorians.”

“Where do these terrifying statistics come from, and what are they based on? Not from government figures or reliable studies, nor are they based on legal definitions of sexual assault. In fact, they come from just two surveys done by separate feminist researchers, Diana E.H. Russell and Mary P. Koss. Their surveys . . . are fraught with scientific flaws. Russell and Koss have included everything from consensual sex to obscene phone calls in their figures on rape and sexual abuse. Their numbers have little to do with what most people call rape.” As Denfeld points out, broadening the definition of rape to such extremes trivializes and obscures the real victims of what is a vicious and terrifying crime. It also inflates the statistics grotesquely.

Under pressure from feminist groups, the national survey rape questions were revised and made more specific in 1992. The first results of the revision won’t be out until this fall. The criminologist who helped design the rape questions for the national survey was fear researcher Mark Warr. His work reveals that, not surprisingly, rape is the crime women under the age of 35 fear most.

I asked his opinion about the numbers. “I am very much on the low end,” he said. “Which is to say that from the National Crime Survey, we find the probability per year for a woman is on the order of one in a thousand. I’m certainly willing to admit that there is undercounting here. But even if the underreporting is fairly large--and I don’t believe it is--we’re still going to have small numbers.

“In the local rape crisis center (in Austin), they argue that one in three women is raped every year. Those people do good work. I respect it. But they are not criminologists, and they have a vested interest in inflating the numbers to convince people that they provide a necessary service. It’s not like it’s some innocuous academic debate. It’s unnecessarily scaring people and restricting their freedom.”

His concerns reminded me of another fairly recent crime myth. Last year, a national publicity campaign announced that Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for wife battering in America. The Washington Post investigated the claims and found that special-interest groups had misrepresented various research. There is no credible evidence of an increase in domestic violence on that day.

The expose was widely reprinted, but apparently the message didn’t get through. In my town, and in towns across the country, the news hissed again this year about wife abuse triggered by the big football game. This fiction is already becoming part of “common knowledge.” The only debate permitted is whether guys are more likely to batter if their team wins or if it loses. So much for the mystic power of truth.

SERIAL KILLERS FASCINATE ME, and I am not alone in my predilection, if a growing body of paperback and television exposes are any indication. Such killers are, after all, the ultimate Monstrous Stranger, as close as modern “sophisticated” society comes to Satan. Serialists do exist, and their numbers may be growing. But the national panic over serialists in the ‘80s was apparently inflamed by a web of misinformation. Its residue persists in popular culture and in the law enforcement agencies that benefit from the myths.

The serialist scare grew with the ghastly revelations of John Wayne Gacy’s suburban Chicago crawl space in 1978, the 1979 conviction of Ted Bundy and the mounting toll of Washington state’s Green River murders that started in 1982. The final inflammatory straw came in 1983, when a drifter and convicted murderer named Henry Lee Lucas confessed to about 300 murders over many states. It took more than two years for journalists to puncture the Lucas claims, which were eventually reduced to about 10 murders. In his bid for the limelight, Lucas guaranteed publicity by (falsely) claiming responsibility for a high-profile child abduction case--the Adam Walsh murder.

Many news stories of the time depicted serial murder as a sudden epidemic claiming 4,000 victims each year. The Justice Department and the FBI were the sources of this information, but the numbers were grossly exaggerated, based most often on a category called “motiveless murders.” In effect, it made every unsolved murder the work of a serialist.

Kappeler, Potter and Blumberg estimate an actual 50 to 60 victims a year between 1971 and 1987. They concede an outside possibility that the number is between 300 and 400 per year, saying, “This is a terrible figure, but it is far short of the much-quoted 4,000.”

According to Supervisory Special Agent Les Davis, a spokesman for the FBI, the agency no longer makes public estimates about the number of serialists and their victims. “Since (the mid ‘80s), with the more experience and development we have in this area, you start to realize that you really don’t know, and you can’t throw numbers around like that.”

Ignoring Jack the Ripper and his English peers, as well as major outbreaks in other countries, authorities commonly claim that the serial-killer phenomenon is unique to the United States. Based mainly on Lucas and Bundy, serialists are described as roaming widely from state to state. Yet the truth is that most serialists do all their grisly work in one town or region.

Although most of the mistaken information came from the Justice Department, Kappeler, Potter and Blumberg are quick to deny any implication of conspiracy. They do point out, however, that the inflated epidemic claims and the depiction of interstate roaming as a serialist pattern helped justify the founding and funding of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., and the computerized, interstate Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Civil libertarians and local law enforcement agencies had successfully resisted this expansion before the serialist panic.

Maybe this new crime-fighting capacity was a result of inadvertent misrepresentation, and maybe it has been beneficial (without statistics, however, that’s impossible to know.) But it seems fair to remember that the first beneficiaries of any inflated crime rate are the governmental agencies to which we turn for protection.

WHEN SURGEON GENERAL Joycelyn Elders was foolish enough to mention at a press conference last December that legalizing drugs might well reduce our crime rate, that it was an idea worth studying, the President and the other political powers-that-be ducked and denied and distanced themselves from her immediately. Her 28-year-old son was arrested within the week for trying to sell cocaine to an undercover agent, effectively discrediting Elders’ statement and shutting her up.

But Elders didn’t invent the notion, and it isn’t just crackpot tokers who support it. The liberal Dr. Benjamin Spock and the conservative William F. Buckley agree with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, economist Milton Friedman, legions of criminologists, federal judges, medical professionals and other respectable types who have called for serious consideration of legalizing drugs.

The reasons are clear. The “War on Drugs” has failed. As with Prohibition, criminalizing drugs has done nothing but create a tidal wave of crime. The $1.3 billion spent on efforts to interrupt the flow of drugs into the United States from other countries has been wasted. The ban on cheaply produced drugs is an excuse to drive the prices up so that users commit more and more crimes to pay for them. Illicit profits are so high that traffickers can afford to corrupt law enforcement officers into cooperation. With no legitimate way for dealers to settle business disputes, bullets act as judge and jury. Drug-dealing gangs conduct turf wars in our streets, and the death toll of innocent bystanders becomes an excuse for more posturing by politicians.

Meanwhile, the CIA and the Presidents--Reagan and Bush--who launched the latest “War on Drugs” have been accused of aiding and abetting the drug lords of Asia, Central and South America and the Middle East. Money laundering, military assistance, direct cash supports, smuggling and downright trafficking have all been laid at the door of various government agencies.

Illegal drugs have been the pretext for enormous growth in the size and power of law enforcement agencies. “The Mythology of Crime” authors state that more than 20% of state and local law enforcement budgets is spent on drug enforcement. The federal effort alone costs more than $13.2 billion a year. More than 58% of federal prison inmates and 21% of all state inmates are imprisoned on drug offenses. From 1980 to 1992, the adult prison population of the United States rose 166%. Between 1980 and 1990, drug arrests in the United States increased 114%. Of the 829,344 felony convictions made in the United States, 33% are for individuals arrested on drug charges. Of these, 39% were not, according to the authors of “The Mythology of Crime,” “for drug trafficking, not for selling drugs to innocent schoolchildren, but for possession of drugs, most commonly marijuana, the most innocuous of all the legal and illegal drugs. Even so, all of these felony convictions account for only a little more than 1% of the Americans who use drugs.” (The Office of National Drug Control Policy says 7%.)

Meanwhile, the Netherlands, where it’s legal to possess 30 grams or less of marijuana or hashish, has a low drug-usage rate and a low violent-crime rate.

Would politicians deliberately create myths about something as serious as drugs? In 1989, with public attention wandering away from the “War on Drugs” to other social problems, George Bush arranged for the Drug Enforcement Administration to make a high-profile bust right in front of the White House. The arrest was immediately followed by the President’s national TV speech on the drug problem. Later, word leaked out that the DEA had gone to considerable lengths to persuade the drug dealer to meet the agents in front of the White House.

The war on drugs could escalate to include more substances. With the campaign mounting against tobacco, cigarette fiends like me, who comply peacefully with restrictions on smoking in public places, smell a full-scale ban in the wind. Such a law would, with a stroke of a pen, turn millions of honest citizens into criminals. It’s no news that nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on earth. During the recent unsettling dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the vodka shortages produced grumbling, but tobacco shortages triggered riots. I have nightmares of tending tobacco plants under grow-lights in my attic and dying in a hail of bullets as the drug squad storms the stairs. Imagine whole new tribes of smugglers building fortunes on bootleg tobacco.

THESE EXAMPLES ARE A small fraction of the mountain of crime mythology most of us have been fed. All of this information is available in the drab professional journals, but the mainstream media, from the news to sitcoms, from the front page to the comics, often delivers exactly the opposite message. I, and millions like me, want to believe the worst.

Some 90 million Americans sit down to watch TV every night, and one in 10,000 of us goes out to imitate the violence, according to a TV social-impact researcher. But the rest of us are affected, too. We buy the intensely dangerous cathode world as more real than our own humdrum experience. We become suspicious. Distrustful. Afraid.

Scary tales are ancient and reliable tools. You rally support for war by drawing the enemy in classic monster terms--ruthless destroyers of the social order, laughing as they bayonet babies.

The mechanism is simple. Like all animals, we humans respond to information, even secondhand information. The watch crow calls from the treetop, and the whole flock rises, fleeing danger. In simpler days, anything we heard about was important to us. If somebody staggered into camp hollering “saber-tooth!” we didn’t ask for proof before we grabbed our spears. Small-town citizens of the buckboard era didn’t wait for a government report when the fire alarms sounded, they grabbed their buckets and ran to help. Those reflexes serve us well in most catastrophes. But in a modern technological world, we see children starving 12,000 miles away, the murder victim’s mother screaming across the continent. A huge nation of crime is deposited in our living rooms nightly.

There is rarely anything we can do about it, but we respond. We think that if horror can strike that guy over there, it threatens us, too. Call it sympathy or empathy or stupidity, it’s one of the best things about us. It’s what makes rescuers risk their lives in earthquakes and blazing buildings for people they don’t even know. And it makes us vulnerable. We try to protect ourselves with taboos against yelling fire in a crowded hall or crying wolf when it’s just a mean dog with a gimpy leg. But we can be lied to.

And we let it happen again and again, precisely because most of the news doesn’t actually touch us directly. After all, we believe a lot of mistaken, goofy things. Many of us believe we’ll suffocate if we cover our entire bodies with gold paint, that hair and fingernails go on growing after you die, or that saltpeter depletes the sex drive. A lot of us believe in professional wrestling, the second coming of Elvis, or that the Mother Ship will beam us up to a peaceful cloudland. It doesn’t necessarily affect our day-to-day functioning. Most of us get to work every morning and put food on the table and make it to Little League games on time. We can afford to swallow every crime myth that comes along because they’re entertaining, but they don’t intrude much.

But it’s hard to see the long-term, big-picture price we pay for that delicious roil of fear--the loss of sleep, the loss of trust, the erosion of civil rights. Real, deadly, destructive crime--fueled by the ready availability of guns--does exist, and the hysteria doesn’t help the people who are faced with it every day.

We need to cut through the vapor to see the real problem. Legalizing drugs would eliminate much of the violence that surrounds banned substances. If we are serious about protecting our children from the things that endanger them most, we must examine the family itself. But the myths surrounding these topics are so emotional and pervasive that it seems politically impossible to push past them.

We need to keep in mind that we aren’t doing so badly, given our natures. The number of murder victims, for example, is a very tiny percentage of our huge population, less than .001% of the total population per year. Fewer than suicides. Far fewer than those killed in motor vehicle accidents. Consider that humans are the most aggressive and dangerous predator on the planet. Smart tigers turn tail at our scent. And yet we are astoundingly well socialized. We live piled up in cities, claw to jaw, by the millions and we do not have bloody mayhem on every street corner every minute of every day. That happens in my adored television world, but there is, after all, a difference between realistic and real. The majority of us will never yield to our natural impulse to brain the lady who shoves in front of us in the supermarket line or to pitch our boss through the office window. If any system, agency, or chunk of machinery ran with 99.999% efficiency, we’d consider it an incredible success.

Do we get credit for it? Rarely. We focus on the failures. We seldom hear about things like the growing, prospering black middle class, the strides toward equality for women, the dropping infant mortality rate, or the fact that we are generally living longer and healthier than ever before in human history. Government agencies rarely announce their mission completed so they can disband. No activist group ever seems to stand up and holler, “We did it! We defeated the monster! We won!” That would put them out of business. Problems are always worse now than ever before. Failure breeds scary stories that produce fear, which leads to acquiescence. Failure buys tax dollars, feeds political campaigns and spawns social-work programs. Failure is where the money is.