Public Criminology and Media Debates Over Policing

Abstract

Public criminology is concerned with public understandings of crime and policing and public discussions of such matters by criminologists and allied social scientists. For the purposes of this paper, these professionals are individuals identified by journalists on the basis of academic credentials or university affiliation as those who can speak to crime matters. This qualitative study investigates media statements made by criminologists and allied social scientists following the 2020 murder of George Floyd with two questions in mind: How have they responded to debates over reforming, defunding, and abolishing police? What insight can these responses provide about public criminology more generally? I analyze statements offered by criminologists in news reports and on Twitter using Qualitative Media Analysis, an approach that emphasizes the processes through which discourse is presented to audiences. I argue that recent criminological debates in the media concerning the future of policing have exposed unresolvable tensions among scholars who engage in the practice of public criminology, suggesting that the public is not receiving coherent, authoritative messages about these issues. The findings also raise questions about public criminology and illuminate new concerns regarding scholarly expertise related to knowledge claims and credibility relative to social justice.

Tweeting Toward Transformation: Prison Abolition and Criminal Justice Reform in 140 Characters

“…Since the widespread protests and uprisings in 2020, however, the demand to defund the police has been supported by a much broader group of social scientists, policymakers, and others who do not have abolition as the end goal (Henderson and Yisrael 2021). Recent research has explored news articles that reference public criminologists engaging with these BLM demands, highlighting competing and conflicting messages and interpretations, yet we know of no scholarship that has investigated these types of decarceration narratives using data gathered from social media (Schneider 2022).…”