Chapter 1
The Crime Beat: Crime Waves
By Dave Krajicek

Lincoln Steffens, the famed muckraker, worked as a police reporter for the New York Evening Post a century ago. In his autobiography, Steffens wrote about a spurious burglary crime wave that sprang from politics and the competitive zeal among newspapers:

"Every now and then there occurs the phenomenon called a crime wave. New York has such waves periodically; other cities have them; and they sweep over the public and nearly drown the lawyers, judges, preachers, and other leading citizens who feel that they must explain and cure these extraordinary outbreaks of lawlessness. Their diagnoses and their remedies are always the same: the disease is lawlessness; the cure is more law, more arrests, swifter trials, and harsher penalties."

Little has changed since Steffens' time. Crime waves still bubble up. Some are legitimate, some bogus. Often, they are sparked by an appalling example of a particular crime, such as a school shooting or child abduction. Law enforcers and journalists begin highlighting look-alike examples from the daily log of crime, and a false trend is born – false because often the crimes had been happening in obscurity all along. The attention simply moved them higher on the news agenda.

Politics and finances often play a role.

One example happened in New York in 1976 when newspapers and TV stations trumpeted a trend of robberies and assaults against the elderly. Over seven weeks, two papers and one station ran 55 stories about the trend.

The reaction followed the pattern predicted by Steffens. The mayor condemned the juvenile justice system. The police expanded its Senior Citizens Robbery Unit. The state legislature passed laws that mandated prison sentences for those convicted of violent crimes against the elderly. Network television and newspapers across the country picked up the story, and the following spring a Harris poll showed a significant uptick in the national fear of crime.

One hitch: The trend was a myth. Mark Fishman, a Brooklyn sociologist, conducted a study that revealed the facts behind the frenzy: "It is doubtful that there really was a crime wave or any unusual surge of violence against elderly people…The police statistics from the NYPD do not show a crime wave. In fact, for one type of crime, homicide, the police showed a 19 percent drop over the previous year's rate of elderly people murdered."

There was a story behind the crime-wave stories.

In 1974 the issue of crime against senior citizens moved high on the research agenda in national law enforcement circles. It became a popular subject for federal grant applications by police departments. A large police organization held a conference on the topic in 1975, the year the NYPD's Senior Citizens Robbery Unit was created, and in February 1976 "Police Chief" magazine devoted a special issue to the subject.

When an elderly person was killed in New York, police reporters were directed to the new unit, where the commanding officer was pleased to feed them quotes and anecdotes that helped raise the unit's profile and prompted an expansion of its staffing.