Juvenile Crime Stories Use Police Blotter Without Comment from Suspects

Newspaper Research Journal, Fall 2004 by Simon, James, Hayes, Sean

The study concentrated on two types of juvenile crime stories: 1) stories in which a youth, defined here as someone age 18 or younger, was in trouble with the law, or 2) stories about institutions that serve or treat such youths. Given the desire to also look at stories about institutions that serve or treat such youths, the study included stories about the state Department of Children and Families and two of its institutions, the Long Lane girls' juvenile detention center and the Connecticut Juvenile Training Center for boys.

The methodology yielded 180 news stories, those generated by both the staff and six Associated Press stories. Editorials, columns and letters to the editor were collected and noted, but they were not used in the analysis. The analysis was complicated by the Courant's practice of running a weekly police log, consisting of single sentence reports on dozens of incidents. For the purposes of this study, these logs were considered a single item for a given day consisting of one paragraph. Breaking out each item in the log and treating it as a single, very short story would dramatize the use of the police blotter approach, but it would overwhelm the other stories being studied. The reader should consider, then, that dozens of additional single-item, single-source police blotter stories could have been treated individually and would have produced even more dramatic results on the lack of multiple source stories and on the short length of these crime stories.

Findings

Juvenile justice issues were a major source of news for Connecticut's three largest newspapers. Police were, by far, the most frequently quoted source; 81 percent of the stories examined included police comment (see Table 1). Other state government employees, including the governor, attorney general and legislators, were quoted in 34 percent of stories. Outside experts-such as academic experts or advocacy groups-were quoted in only 16 percent of stories. Despite the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the point of view of the juvenile, his or her attorney and family members was included in only 8 percent of the overall stories.

The stories averaged six paragraphs in length (mean). Police were a major source for all stories in the study. In stories up to four paragraphs in length, police were quoted in more than 90 percent of all stories, while none of these stories included quotes from juvenile defendants and outside experts. (see Table 2) In five-to-seven paragraph stories, police were quoted in 100 percent of stories; outside experts were quoted in 9 percent of these stories and defendants in 3 percent. In 8-to-13 paragraph stories, police again dominated, being quoted in 84 percent of stories vs. 14 percent of the stories quoting an outside expert and 14 percent quoting the juvenile defendant. Only in the longest stories-those 14 to 44 paragraphsdid the sourcing begin to even out. Both police sources and outside experts were quoted in 40 percent of the longest stories, while juvenile defendants were quoted in 15 percent.