July 30,2000
Martin Schwartz gives seminar to T.U. Criminal Justice students
By Cathy Willoughby
Staff Writer
Crime is down since the 1960s. Yet our perception is that crime is up, committed at random, by those strangers among us, criminals.
"Are we afraid of the wrong things?'' asked Martin Schwartz of Tiffin University Criminal Justice students Saturday morning. They were participating in a pro-seminar given by Schwartz, a professor of sociology and department chair at Ohio University in Athens. He has studied the public's perception of crime and shared his findings with the TU students.
"The more youth crime goes down,'' Schwartz said. "The more afraid we are of youth crime, and it is down dramatically over the last decade.''
He said that two-thirds of people who participated in a nationwide survey, reported school violence worried them a great deal, yet in reality, the number of children killed in schools is down. This is one of what Schwartz calls media's development of a "moral panic.''
"The media rarely lets the facts get in the way of a good story,'' Schwartz told the students. By distorting the facts and reporting only on the more outrageous crimes, the media develops an overreaction in people.
One of the largest panics, said Schwartz, is the concept that America is a land of juvenile homicide, especially within schools. Billions of dollars is being spent by school systems on security guards and cameras, mandatory identification cards and banning book bags. "Minimum security prisons have less security than some schools,'' he said. "I live in Appalachia, where schools have leaking roofs, yet they seem to come up with the money to finance security guards.''
He said that the media, and others, are ignoring an enormous amount of facts. "Only 10 percent of schools reported a serious crime of any kind,'' he said. "In a representative sample of 1,234 schools, there was not a single murder, and any crime involving a weapon was extremely rare.''
Of the 110,000 schools in the nation, there are 54 million children attending, and only six or seven have actually been under attack. And there are less than 20 deaths from violence in all schools in any given year. "That is a record low for the United States, like all youth crime,'' Schwartz said. "We are now at a record low for school deaths. So why are 'killer kids' an epidemic in America, when deaths are at a record low.''
"Less than one percent of the homicides of school age children occur at schools,'' he countered. "Most are killed by family members at home. So the argument I make here is, is spending a billion dollars on security devices the right way to spend school dollars when 23 percent of adult Americans are functionally illiterate, and the dropout rate is still 29 percent. If schools have an additional one billion dollars, they should put it in education.''
He said a similar media panic was induced in the 1980s. That was the time that everyone's attention was focused on missing and exploited children, Schwartz said. From news shows to milk cartons, a picture of a missing child appeared everywhere, sometimes enhanced by a computer to show how the child may look, after being missing for so many years.
"Why not show a picture of the father,'' Schwartz said. "That's who probably has the child, and we would probably recognize him better.''
In reality, Schwartz said, the vast majority of these children were either thrown out of their own homes, or runaways, escaping physical or sexual abuse by their family. And others were in the custody of one of their parents. "The FBI has always maintained that there were never more than 200 to 300 open cases of missing children,'' he said. "You are 50 times more likely to be hit by lightning and killed, than kidnapped.''
There is a similar problem with adult crime perception. "One of those is workplace violence,'' he said. "People are going to work with uzzis and everyone is afraid of the post office. The chance of being hurt by a co-worker are insignificant, less than one in 2 million. Less than 1,000 people are killed each year on the job, and the two most dangerous occupations are cab driver and police officer. A postal worker is actually one of the safest jobs.''
We have a distorted view of crime, Schwartz said. Today, we are convinced that crime is random, and violent crime is committed by weird people, and no one is ever safe in America.
"One thing we know from studying criminology,'' Schwartz told the students, "is that crime is not random, it's patterned. And that the way people become offenders is patterned. Crimes are committed by people with certain kinds of backgrounds, as are the ones most likely to be victims of criminals.''
He said people want to believe crime is random, because the reality is the opposite. "Our biggest crime problem is intimate violence,'' Schwartz explained. "Most rapes, and beatings, especially for women and most homicides, are committed by intimates, people they know.''
He said on college campuses even though most rapes are committed in dorm rooms, by the women's escorts, shrubs have been taken out so strangers can't jump out at them. And emergency phones are put up outside, all around campus. "At Ohio University, they have only been used for crank calls,'' he said.
Schwartz said people perceive criminals are "those people.'' "It can't be my boyfriend, husband,'' he said.
The major problem with our false perceptions, Schwartz said, is our nation's resources are being wasted. "We are wasting millions of dollars to deal with mythical hazards and have less to do with real problems,'' he said. "What do we have left to deal with other problems, like declining morals, lack of education, unemployment and housing conditions.''