Wolf Pack: Tracking Media Coverage of Crime and Criminal Justice

The search bar has three fields: mentions, publications and time span. You can add multiple parameters to each of these using the (+) button.

Enter a sequence of up to 4 words, for example: “gangs”, “youth violence”, “police reports”, “inner city crime”. You can also search for names of people and places, law and policies, neighborhoods and cities. Using the (+) button, you may also search for more than one term at a time, to see a comparative view of how several terms were used over time.

The database maintains the exact text from the original news stories. This means that data was not preprocessed or ‘cleaned’ to remove common words (sometimes called ‘stop words’ in technical parlance). The database is case-sensitive. As the goal of this interface is to support an in-depth, historical understanding of the use of language in reporting on crime, we chose not to preprocess the data. This means that the results you'll see for ‘crime victims’ and ‘victims of crime’, for example, would be different. In your research, you may want to run several permutations of your search queries to cover these different expressions.

Choose a specific publication from the drop-down menu, an aggregate of all print or broadcast (TV and radio) news, or all publications in the database.

The publications available to search were chosen as influential national, regional and local news outlets from the 70s through the end of the century. We included both general audience outlets and newspapers from the Black press. From each publication, we collected all stories in which the word ‘crime’ appeared at least once, as a blunt tool to filter stories.

We pulled the news stories from the LexisNexis database. Note that some of the publications were not fully digitized and only had data for parts of the time span. Where there is no data, the graph line breaks.

You can search for the entire time span of the database, 1975-2000, or parts of this time span, for example 1990-1995.

The graph shows the frequency in which the search term appeared over the time span. To adjust for the different size and scopes of publications, frequency is calculated as the number of times a term appeared a month as a percentage of all terms of the same word length in the coverage that month.

The graph can be used to show trends, over months and years, in usage of the terms you've searched for, and compare these trends across media sources.

This database tracks how the American media covered crime from 1975-2000.

Media coverage of crime affects public perception and public policy. We built this searchable database for researchers, activists and any curious person who seeks a more nuanced understanding how mass incarceration happened. The language that journalists used in their crime coverage over time can offer important context in the development of criminal justice.

Some journalists used the term “wolf pack” to describe five teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman in New York’s Central Park in 1989. The term might have been applied to the journalists themselves.

This story by LynNell Hancock explores how two daily newspapers in Denver created a panic over youth crime in the summer of 1993. They published 233 stories using the word “shooting” that summer, an 80% increase over 1992 – a year when there were more murders. Banner headlines called it the “Summer of Violence,” and the Colorado legislature rewrote its juvenile justice laws that fall. Data analysis by Noya Kohavi, with reporting contributed by Carroll Bogert.

This story by Carroll Bogert and LynNell Hancock shows how the term “superpredator” spread like wildfire through the American media in 1995-96. Coined by a Princeton professor, the term described a supposedly growing cohort of young, violent men without a conscience. Juvenile crime had already begun to fall just as the “superpredator” myth was being repeated in newspapers across America, appearing nearly 300 times in forty major media before 2000, demonizing a generation of Black and brown youth. Data analysis by Noya Kohavi.

This story by LynNell Hancock examined media coverage of the Central Park jogger case, in which five Black and brown boys were wrongfully convicted of the 1989 rape of a woman in New York City. The media’s rush to condemn the boys for the crime, and the widespread use of animalistic terminology to describe children, typified the era’s racist and hyperbolic crime coverage and set the stage for harsh media language during the 1990’s.

Carroll Bogert, President of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering criminal justice

LynNell Hancock, Professor Emerita, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Noya Kohavi

Andrew LeClair and Nico Chilla

Wolf Pack was funded with a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University.