Making Choices: The Influence of Media Coverage on Police-Community Relationships

Recent events highlight a need to better understand the media’s influence on policing and public perceptions. People’s exposure to situations and information helps create their perceptions, but the growing access to information because of advancing technology and the rise of online media platforms highlights a new source. As such, the question arises of whether those advancements have led to a difference in people’s willingness to report crime to the police. It is common for people to share consumed media to the point that traditional media is no longer the sole source of information. That change, along with the reality of cell phones and social media vastly increasing the chances of everyday police-citizen interactions being recorded and posted online, presents the foundation for this study’s exploratory research question: does the change in media impact the way negative police-community interactions influence the choice of reporting a victimization to the police? With this focus, the study’s purpose is to build upon cultivation theory’s application to reporting choices with the additional layer from exploring the issue in a period where advancing technology has impacted its influence on perception building. The key research questions revolve around whether negative police-community interactions change the choice of reporting, and whether there are race and gender differences. This study uses three distinct interventions with interrupted time series analysis to start exploring those questions. These models treat a highly-publicized negative police-citizen encounter as a shock (i.e., intervention) to examine whether there are any significant changes to victimization reporting. Using the victimization reporting data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) over the multiple decades along with the specific events, this exploratory study begins to identify patterns that help guide future research. This study identified patterns in reporting choices following these events. Race and gender influence the choice of reporting to the police. Furthermore, those populations saw variations in the impact of these events, especially the 2014 intervention year. That highlights the reality that highly publicized events are important pieces of why people are willing to report their victimization to the police.