Homicide Shows: What They Don’t Tell You About Murder

Some years ago, I worked as a writer on documentary series that featured real homicides. Each show would focus on one murder case that had gone through the courts, resulting in a conviction ( enabling us to use court evidence to reconstruct the story without fear of getting sued.) My particular episode was about a gruesome murder at a fast food joint, where an employee was beaten to death. The series usually featured a few suspects whom the police investigated for a bit, then dropped, to focus on the actual murderer. The trick was, in show after show, the murderers were rarely the kind of people who show up on fictional crime shows like Law and Order,  or CSI. In our series, the perpetrators were almost always poor people, whereas on TV, murder is committed by middle and upper middle class people, who occasionally hire thugs to pull the trigger.

The discrepancy got me thinking about the strange divide between television crime and real crime. On television, crime is big business. Prime time would be hard to imagine with crime shows. How would the networks get by without all the CSI and Law and Order spinoffs? For the past few decades, crime shows have composed on average about 25% of the primetime fare, not including news programs . Those statistics were compiled at a time when people didn’t have as much choice about what to watch online or on demand. I suspect once you throw in Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, all the vampire shows and the rest of cable, the rates would climb higher still. When we tune in to watch  crime, we want to see murders.

But what's on television,  and what’s really happening on the streets are very different. Over the past few decades, murder rates on television have been steadily rising. Studies have found that in the 1970s, homicide made up about 25% of all crime shown on television, whereas by the 1990s, it had shot up to 79% . But out in the real world, the exact opposite was true. Property crimes like theft make up most crime, whereas the homicide rate has been steadily dropping since the 1990s. New York City is a fascinating case in point: the home of Law and Order and CSI:New York was actually getting progressively safer as those franchises took off in popularity. In 1980, 2,228 people were murdered in New York; by 2012, it was down to 684, a reduction of almost seventy-five percent. Similar decreases were seen in other major cities, but you would never know it from watching CSI:Miami, CSI:New York or CSI.

Television is also wrong about who does the killing. On CSI and other crime shows, the murderers are usually people who are middle class or wealthier. In reality, it is generally poor people who kill, and get killed. Specifically, murder rates are highest in areas where there is significant income inequality. That means that living in a poor country doesn’t create high homicide rates, but living in a country where there is a wide gulf between you and richer people does result in more murders.  It is the income disparity of unemployment, and dead-end low wage jobs that create the frustrations and the short tempers that result in homicides against family members, friends, and less often, strangers . These patterns persist across nations, not just in the United States. America has a high income inequality rate, whereas countries like Canada redistribute income from the rich to the poor through taxes and social welfare programs. Canada’s homicide rate is much lower than America’s, despite sharing a common culture, and watching the same television programs. (Gun laws also play a role here, but the point I want to make  is that it isn’t rich people who are shooting each other, but poorer people).

So, on television, the cops are focusing on all the wrong people. They shouldn't be finding so many rich victims, nor should they be searching for rich suspects. What's more, they should slowly be going out of business, with fewer murders each year. Instead, they should be solving the murders of poorer people. In theory, television could make more shows like The Wire, which portrayed  poverty-led crime among drug dealers. But our society doesn’t want to admit that the land of opportunity is dependent on a vast underclass of people who are kept poor, and are at risk of murder. So, instead, it presents a different society, where most people are well off,  but they are at risk of being murdered. The enemy is not the system, but each other – your co-worker or your spouse. We are all potential murderers, so watch your back. This is a total fiction, but we happily go along with it, and broadcasters get rich on the perpetuation of this myth. We should be careful, though: when entertainment is mistaken for reality, the results can get ugly. Americans consistently vote for candidates who are tough on crime, and keep their gun laws intact, despite little proof that the middle class and the upper class are in any real danger from violence. If the livelihoods of the well-off are at risk, it is from job loss and smaller pay checks. But short of becoming a serial killer, you won't get into a cop show for being downsized.

All of this helps make sense of the one crime show I wrote for television. In our documentary, after the middle class suspects had been ruled out, the real murderers were found. They were two unemployed kids who were looking for drug money. That's what real homicide looks like, but you won't find it on prime time.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film producer and writer living in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv.