Fright Night The Mid-South Night Against Crime was a great opportunity missed. by Jim Hanas ast summer, I happened to overhear a conversation between two teenage girls at the main library on the corner of Peabody and McLean. They had been trucked into the city by someone’s father to work on a research project for school, and they were worried by the presence of a security guard, hovering nearby. “We don’t have a security guard at our library,” said the one. William F. Buckley Jr. “Well, this is a pretty bad neighborhood,” said the other. Right there in the middle of Central Gardens. Sure, Memphis has a crime problem, but the hysteria surrounding it might be worse than the problem itself. That young suburbanites glibly dub any area within the city limits “a bad neighborhood” says a lot about how crime is offered up to the public, especially by the media. While print outlets are not immune, TV news in particular lends itself to crime coverage that is largely anecdotal. Stories of individual crimes and their victims are compelling, all the more when they are stripped of their context and viewers are invited to silently think, “That could be me.” Little is offered in the way of perspective. Where do crimes happen? How many and what kind? Where are their numbers going up and where are they going down? Without answers to these questions, one is left with the impression that crime is everywhere, all the time. And what better opportunity could there have been to answer those questions than last Tuesday’s Mid-South Night Against Crime, an hour-long cooperative effort among the area’s six television news operations? Unfortunately, it was an opportunity missed. Rather than providing Memphians with much-needed context, the message of the night was that crime is everywhere and can happen to anyone. Which is true, in a French, existentialist sort of way, but as a news angle, it’s plain sensationalism. Anyone can die in a plane crash, too, but perpetual fear is not recommended. Some planes are safer than others. Community policing, which was reported on by WREG-TV Channel 3’s Steve Hayslip for the special, recognizes this, targeting areas with particularly high rates of crime. But too often for the media, crimes aren’t events that occur more or less often in different places for a variety of social and economic reasons. Instead, they are evidence of Crime with a capital “C,” a senseless layer of impending evil distributed evenly over the viewing area. “Bad things can happen to good people,” warns WHBQ-TV Channel 13’s Claudia Barr, before enumerating a string of particularly ghastly murders. “Robbery. Murder. Rape. Violent crimes happen every day in Memphis,” chimes in Valerie Calhoun, also of Fox 13, in the lead to a segment about being a good crime witness. “Suzie Morris thought her East Memphis neighborhood was burglary-free until someone kicked in her front door,” adds Keith Daniels of WMC-TV Channel 5. What about the promise, from Montel Williams’ canned introductory remarks, that the program would offer “real solutions”? To be fair, there were a handful of tips in the segments mentioned above, and there were several soft profiles on solutions already in place. But there seemed to be no middle ground between uncritical advocacy and scare-your-pants-off sensationalism. Few questions were asked and, accordingly, none were answered. The most unforgivable thing about Night Against Crime, however, was that there was no explicit mention of Memphis’ falling crime rate. For that seemingly important fact-oid, viewers had to stay tuned to WKNO-TV Channel 10 for Working Against Crime: A Town Hall Meeting, the roundtable discussion that followed. Memphis Shelby Crime Commission president Robert Bryden pointed out that, while still too high, overall crime in Memphis was down over 9 percent last year. The breakdown of violent/nonviolent crime was also telling. Only 18.5 percent of area crime is violent, which cannot be said for area crime coverage. Carried on the ample shoulders of Bill Kurtis (literally: The ill-choreographed program gave viewers almost continuous coverage of the former network anchor’s back), the town meeting put the preceding news product to shame. At times, it was superficial (call it a draw there), but the topics covered included domestic violence, poverty’s role in crime, the impact of casinos, and parental accountability, to name a few. All of them missing from Night Against Crime, and apparently from local TV newsrooms. Nonetheless, the arrangement that brought area stations together for an hour has been ballyhooed locally and lauded nationwide. Its impressive ratings were duly reported in Shop Talk, a widely read industry newsletter. What wasn’t reported there, however, was that only 7 percent of those who watched the program saw the town meeting on WKNO once the other stations went back to regular programming. Beyond symbolism, then, and a sort of All-Star Game for area talking heads, most viewers didn’t get anything but local news as usual. Real community commitment would have seen the town hall meeting broadcast on all six stations. They were only going to show Cops anyway.