How pop culture presents crime stories and emphasizes biases
It’s an uncommon phenomenon in pop culture: true crime productions became increasingly popular over the past decade. This is not something new though: TV shows based on real events have been around for a long time — just think of the early 2000s, when “Forensic Files” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” were big hits. Yet, there has never been a higher standard of quality than what is available today.
In 2020, quarantine brought to light Joe Exotic from “Tiger King,” the eccentric owner of a zoo in Oklahoma, arrested for scheming the murder of Carole Baskin, an animal rights activist. However, the genre was reinvigorated by “Making a Murderer” (2015) when following Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, arrested for killing a woman in 2007 and since then trying to prove their innocence. Both documentaries are available on Netflix.
With the revival and escalation of movies, TV shows, books, and podcasts about true crimes, an old theory still holds true: people love stories that violate ethical standards. Criminality is legitimately understood as part of everyday life, according to Maurício Dieter, a Criminology and Forensic Medicine professor at USP Law School (University of São Paulo, Brazil).
“To understand today’s existential issues, we need to look at crime from all angles: from where do you live to what time do you leave your house, what are you carrying in your purse, in your pocket, how do you dress,” says Dieter.
Criminality has taken on a central role in our modern lives. This is due to urban density, the concentration of inequality, massive investment in public security, and the prevalence of moral panic in society.
It is only possible for true crime genre to survive because there are countless cases of violence, and its essence is to reveal details of the offenses and what is behind the scenes. They usually employ investigative journalism techniques, including interviewing witnesses, collecting audience recordings, verifying security cameras, and recording phone calls. Everything looks very amateurish — after all, real life is not produced.
Popular streaming services offer dozens of high-quality true crime titles: “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” (Netflix), “Amanda Knox” (Netflix), “I Love You, Now Die” (HBO), “The Staircase” (Netflix), “Mommy Dead and Dearest” (HBO), “The Witness” (Amazon Prime). They all review unsolved or contested murder cases and dispute potentially unfair convictions.
These productions have contributed to the debate about how race, social class, privilege, and sometimes merely bad luck can influence judgments. In some situations, they expose so many flaws in the justice system that the case is reopened. It happened after American real estate heir Robert Durst declared he committed murders, during the filming of HBO’s miniseries “The Jinx.”
Another attribute of true crime productions is their tendency to focus on stories about white people, whether they are criminals or victims. It reflects how these narratives were approached in the past.
Origins of the modern true crime genre
True crime reports have endured for centuries. Around 1550, murders and other forms of violence began to appear in British literature. In the United States, this narrative was first printed in the magazine “National Police Gazette” in 1845.
Early in the 1920s, the periodical “True Detective” laid the foundation for modern true crime in America. Its popularity peaked in the 1950s, at a time when many stories involving sexual violence were featured. Women were illustrated in a femme fatale style on the covers, which usually didn’t correspond to reality, just to overdramatize the cases.
Many of the crime details were provided by the police station directly to the journalists. Rather than just making people understand the reasons behind a murder case, there was an attempt to sway the community to side with the cops. These officers mainly were white: in 1943, for example, less than 1% of New York Police Department agents were black, as narrated by Arthur Browne in the book “One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York” (2015).
Reporters who received those stories were also predominantly white. The lack of black journalists in the press was the subject of a notice by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, in 1968. “The news media must publish newspapers and produce programs that recognize the existence and activities of Negroes as a group within the community and as a part of the larger community. Recruit more Negroes into journalism and broadcasting and promote those who are qualified to positions of significant responsibility”, says the document.
The author of “Murder, American Style” (2010), journalist David Krajicek, who headed the police segment of the “New York Daily News” from 1987 to 1992, describes an unofficial precondition for the newspaper’s reporting: to make the news, a crime must involve an attractive white woman brutally killed in an intriguing place. Murders without these elements were not covered.
There are still traces of this behavior today. That might explain why Samuel Little, who confessed to murdering more than 90 people in the United States between 1970 and 2005, remains relatively unknown to the general public. Although the serial killer’s stories are pretty detailed, the majority of his victims were black women.
Brazilian society’s reality
In Brazil, the most famous cases, whether those involving the victim (Isabella Nardoni) or the criminal (Suzane von Richthofen), reflect the same behavior: white or middle-class individuals dominate most narratives. However, the Social Inequalities by Color or Race in Brazil report by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) in 2019 showed that the black population is 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than whites.
“There is a misconception that crime is only investigated in the middle class,” says Beto Ribeiro, director of the Brazilian TV series “Criminal Investigation,” which is in its ninth season. “We discovered well-investigated cases that never made it to the media as we produced the most popular topics. From the 90 episodes we have aired, 60 have told a story about a poor person.”
He explained that cases such as Nardoni’s are given so much attention because “they clash with the Brazilian upper-middle-class. The story would not have received the same attention if the victim had been a black girl from a favela”. “In Brazil, sometimes the most important thing is whether you are poor or rich than whether you are white or black. The Brazilian racist will even like a black person if it’s someone famous or rich because social class is all that matters.”
“It’s a fact: poor people don’t make it to the news,” says journalist Luiza Lusvarghi, author of the book “Crime as a Gender in Audiovisual Fiction in Latin America.”
We have racial and social issues. Particularly in Brazil, black people are not a significant part of the so-called elite, so there isn’t much news about them. No wealthy black population means they won’t get much attention from the media.
In Brazil, 75% of black people are among the poorest, and 70% of white people are among the richest, according to the IBGE.
Distortion of reality
Many true crime stories are told about and by non-white people. Yet, despite their positive reception from media and audiences, they do not go on to become heavyweights like “Tiger King” or “Making a Murderer.” “The Last Defense,” a series produced by Viola Davis, examines accusations against a multiracial group of incarcerated people. Payne Lindsay’s podcast “Atlanta Monster” shed light on a serial killer who hunted on black men and boys in Atlanta, leading to the HBO series “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children.”
Jane Murley, the author of “The Rise of True Crime” (2008), argues that the lack of diversity in mainstream true crime misleads the public’s perception of what a crime is and who the real actors are. “This idea has serious implications to our public policies, in terms of the consequences for criminal justice and in the fact that we neglect the homicide that most occurs every day.”
As Murley points out, crimes are committed by people of all races, classes, genders, and ages, and the victims are not always beautiful, white, or young, and all of them deserve justice.
For more non-white people to be featured in books, documentaries, and podcasts, they must be seen as people.
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This feature story was originally published in Brazilian Portuguese at UOL.com.br on October 23, 2020: https://tab.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2020/10/23/como-a-cultura-pop-abracou-as-tramas-policiais-e-evidenciou-preconceitos.htm
