Crime & Ethnicity

by Sasha Li
‘Examine the manner in which crimes committed by people of ethnicity are reported. Identify any patterns present in the reportage of ‘ethnic crime’ in terms of style, bias, language and repetitive themes and explore the possible consequences of these findings.’
When examining the ways in which crime is reported in Australia and the United States of America, certain elements begin to surface regarding the way that crimes committed by people of ethnicity are portrayed. Despite both these countries having specific rules in their codes of ethics forbidding the unnecessary use of race, ethnicity, nationality or religious beliefs, many media reports both blatantly and surreptitiously engage in using the aforementioned details particularly when reporting illegal activities. Through deconstruction and a close analysis of the language and imagery used it becomes apparent that these personal characteristics are used to construct reports that often single-out and demonise certain minority groups. What echoes from many of these reports is a sense of ‘us’, that being the dominant majority of Anglo-Saxon origin, and ‘them’, those who do not meet this criterion. This is a dangerous practice, which has the potential to reinforce stereotypes and perpetuate racism in society.
In July of 2001 Ray Martin presented a report titled Gangland: Open Warfare. The report was part of a segment in an episode of channel nine’s current affairs programme 60 Minutes. The segment was comprised of an initial investigative report into the gang culture and acts of violence present in certain areas of Australia, with particular emphasis on the suburb of Cabramatta, Sydney. This was accompanied by a live interview and forum with Detective Sergeant Tim Priest of the New South Wales Police Force. This exposé on ‘Asian gang activity’ exemplifies the sort of reportage that openly disregards the code of ethics and unashamedly relates crime with race. After critically looking at the language used in the report and the types of questions asked as well as reading the responses by the general public; one is able to detect the division and demonising as well as the detrimental ramifications of poisoning public opinion and creating a frightening level of hostility targeted towards Asian- Australians.
Reporter Ray Martin wastes no time in his introduction and immediately unleashes phrases like ‘alien to our way of life’ . What this choice of language implies is that the type of activity about to be disclosed is not one in which the dominant culture is involved in. It suggests that this horrific behaviour has been thrust upon the dominant culture by those who are outside of it. Once the notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’ was firmly established, Mr. Martin went on to elaborate and identify this foreign source of violence by stating that ‘some of our suburbs are now in the grip of Asian gangs.’
The live interview that followed the piece indicated that a great deal of focus was being placed on the ethnicity of the gang members, both by people in the live audience and by the police. When asked the question of whether gang violence was escalating because of police inaction, insufficient powers or lack of legislation; Detective Sergeant Tim Priest responded rather vaguely in saying that ‘it was a combination of all those’. He then makes a point of stating that ‘it is a global problem with immigration concerning Asians.’ His latter statement is one of great concern considering the influence of his position as a police officer and also the fact that he was being broadcasted on national television.
His comment undoubtedly points a finger of blame towards Asian migrants, his position and career carry with it a degree of authority thus minimising oppositional thought from viewers and legitimises his viewpoint. Add to this, the reach of the 60 Minutes programme and what arrises is a situation worthy of scrutiny. What Detective Sergeant Priest may or may not have realised is that his comment had the potential to deliver a devastating blow to the image of Asian migrants and the relationship between Asian-Australians and the rest of the nation.
Following this was a numerous amount of questions from the live audience, which tended mostly to draw connections between the ethnicity of the gang members with the crimes they committed. The questions generally ran along the lines of: Where did they come from? Who controls them? Why do they behave this way? How do we control them? Why don’t we send them back? The answers supplied by Detective Sergeant Priest were, to say the least, rather inane at times. At one point he stated that ‘immigrants coming to Australia should undergo a course of some kind in the country of their origin in understanding Australian culture, especially our laws, before they arrive. Imagine, if you will, an immigrant from south east Asia who comes from a totally different way of life, lands in Australia with no understanding of our laws and our culture — they are bound to get into trouble.’ While no one can deny that there are distinct differences between Australia and nations in Asia, one can surely be confident in asserting that murder would be a crime in any part of the world.
The types of questions asked by the community suggest that the association between crime and Asians is already deeply engrained in the hearts and minds of people. Ideally, what media reports should be striving for is to educate the people by attempting to crush negative stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. But the situation is anything but ideal. Less than a month later, 60 Minutes went on to follow up the previously discussed Gangland: Open Warfare by holding a forum in the heart of Cabramatta, at the Cabravale Diggers Club titled Law and Order.
Again Mr. Martin began with an introduction, which was sure to be provocative and evoke feelings of anger, fear and frustration. ‘If somebody in your family, or maybe a friend, is using heroin, blame Cabramatta. An addict has robbed your home or a dealer is selling drugs outside your kids' school — again, blame Cabramatta.’ Mr. Martin basically set out to promote Cabramatta as the crime capital of Australia and claimed that this one suburb is the source of a crime wave that has spread across the nation. Considering that Gangland: Open Warfare had previously related crime in the Cabramatta area to Asian-Australians, what then would be the effects of spotlighting Cabramatta as the ‘evil that is infecting every city and every town’ ? As extreme as it may sound, could that not be perceived as an attempt at establishing a link between all the crime in Australia with one particular suburb and ethnic group?
Accompanying the language and dialogue of these reports are images, and as with all images their meanings can vary depending on how and where it is placed as well as who is interpreting them. On the web page for Law and Order: Cabramatta Forum, the image that accompanies the transcript of the dialogue from the forum is a photograph of a stone dragon statue, being distinctly of Asian origin. When one considers some alternative images that could have been positioned next to this discussion on crime, gangs, guns, drugs and violence, the intended purpose of selecting this particular picture begins to leave very little room for misinterpretation.
One would assume that placing an image such as a gun for example, which by convention and contract has come to symbolise violence and crime would have perhaps better suited the contents of the page. Or by the same token, an image of a syringe, which on both denotative and connotative levels has strong links to illicit drug use, could have also been an appropriate substitute for the photo of the dragon statue. So then, the question of ‘why the dragon?’ must be asked. Sadly, one struggles to find an answer that does not suggest that it was anything short of an effort to establish a connection between the topics of crime, drugs, gangs and violence being discussed at the forum and the Asian-Australian community.
As previously mentioned, in an ideal world, the media would be making attempts to shatter racial stereotypes and assist in promoting unity between people, both within national communities and the world. Many journalists may argue that while the media may not be bringing about the decline of racist attitudes, they are in no way responsible for creating the views that people hold in their hearts and minds. Although this argument holds some degree of merit, what must be acknowledged is that ‘while the media are not to blame for racism, they are deeply implicated in reproducing the assumptions which maintain popular misconceptions about race as an inevitable cause of social divisions’ . A journalist has to understand and respect the immense amount of power that language has. After all, language is the brick and mortar of the journalism profession, transmitting countless intended and unintended messages to the readers, listeners and viewers in a single word, phrase or juxtaposed fact.
The power of language is particularly potent in a headline. Headlines are by far the most prominent elements of news reports. They subjectively define the situation, and express the major topic of a news report. At times a headline may be constructed in a way that leaves it open for various understandings to be taken from it by different people. What makes for great journalism is the ability to phrase thoughts in such a precise manner that it allows no room for misinterpretation. This should apply throughout the story, including the headline. For example a sports headline declaring, "Indians extend Boston’s massacre" may not have intended to evoke the racist stereotype of the savage American Indian, but it has the potential to hurt just the same. This type of headline could create a situation where negative and inaccurate notions of Native- Americans as brutal or perhaps even uncivilised may be awoken, this in turn would no doubt dampen the image of this community in the eyes of their fellow Americans.
Thus far, this paper has primarily focused on those who create the media i.e. reporters, journalists etc. However, much of what they report is heavily influenced by external forces. There are numerous other factors that contribute in shaping these media reports, and many outside parties who are also accountable for bias and inaccuracies. Such sources of influence include government officials as well police officials and officers of various rankings, who provide the media with quotes and figures that can be misleading, exaggerated, sensationalised and at times rather blatantly racist. Following incidents in Sydney during the early spring of 1998 involving ‘Lebanese gangs’; NSW State Premier, Bob Carr, and the NSW Police Commissioner, Peter Ryan joined the radio shock jocks in feeding a nationwide hysteria about ethnic gang violence and dangerous streets by describing the parties involved as ‘Lebanese’ and ‘ethnic’ gangs. From this, the criminal in Sydney had a new police Identikit profile. To the established picture of young, male, and "Asian appearance" was added 'Middle Eastern appearance'.
The tendency by the police to use race and ethnicity as descriptive features of a suspect undoubtedly is also a major contributor to media reports appearing biased and relating crime with race. All too often, we will here such statements as "The suspect is described as a thin, black male, 20 to 30 years old, about 5 feet 8, who probably uses a bicycle to cruise neighbourhoods." These descriptions not only lack geographical specificity, they imply that people from these places all look enough alike to allow another person to immediately identify a stranger's ethnic background. What they also assume is that everyone will have the same idea of what people of a particular ethnic group look like. While there are certain elements in appearance that are shared by people of certain ethnic backgrounds, the same can also be said about whites as well. Although ‘Caucasian’ is used to describe fugitives in small-scale crimes such as armed robberies or assault, it is rarely used in the context of organised crime. In a report concerning the condemnation of Mark ‘Chopper’ Read’s book Hooky the Cripple being recommended for Queensland schools by the Federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, Read was described as ‘a self-confessed murderer, criminal, assailant, arsonist and torturer’ . However; never in the article was Read described by neither Minister Nelson nor the writer, as an underworld personality, gangster, ‘Australian criminal figure’ or anything to that effect. Nor was the ancestry of the Read family mentioned in any way, shape or form.
Why is it then relevant to describe Cabramatta as the ‘Asian drug capital of western Sydney’? Or refer to acts of violence and murders in the Cabramatta area as ‘gang warfare’ or ‘Triad activity’. As well as dubbing certain criminals as ‘gang leaders’ or ‘gangsters’. In the same issue of the Herald-Sun that the Mark Read story featured in, was a story about the use of surveillance technology by police. In this report, the late Dino Dibra was described as ‘slain gangster Dino Dibra’ . If statistics truly indicate that Cabramatta has the highest amount of drug-related offences in western Sydney, then why not simply dub it the ‘drug capital of western Sydney’? The truth may well be that ‘stories of crime sell because they are stories of temptation, fall and sin. They are dramatic and tell of passions and experiences beyond the personal knowledge of most ordinary citizens.’ These fancy titles generate a sense of intrigue and mystery. It taps into the curiosity of certain parts of the public who are interested in peeping into unfamiliar worlds and at times excited by the mystique of organised crime and criminal conspiracies. In this case, tales of ‘ethnic organised crime’ are golden opportunities to combine the two elements and create sensational headlines and stories, which, as entertaining as they are, concentrate far too much on the dramatic aspects rather than focus on simply reporting the facts.
During an extensive study on crime news, criminologists Peter Grabosky and Paul Wilson discovered that there was a universal acceptance amongst journalists that the most newsworthy crimes were those involving violence and death. While violent crimes by whites are also reported and at times sensationalised in the media, the criminals and the offences they commit are not often related back to their race, where as the same can not be said about similar crimes committed by people who are not of Anglo-Saxon background. When Victor Pierce was shot to death in a Melbourne car park in May 2002, the media reports of his murder referred to him as a ‘large scale drug dealer’ and a ‘hardened criminal’ . Never was he described as a ‘white drug dealer’ nor were any other such allusions made as to what racial background he was from. One the other hand, reports about the late Alphonse Gangitano, who was also a victim of murder by gunshot, apart from listing his criminal activities as a drug dealer, and stand-over man, also stated that he had come from a respectable Italian family. Similarly, when Alphonse Muratore, a Melbourne fruiterer, was shot dead in 1992, reports concerning his death were surrounded by stories of ‘Italian Organised Crime’ and ‘Mafia-Style groups’ operating within the Australian fruit and vegetable industry.
In all three of these murder cases, the victims had been connected to organised crime and the underworld. All were widely publicised and dramatised with the use of certain pictures, effects and phrases such as slow-motion images of Gangitano leaving court and the use of the phrase ‘execution-style’. However, the mentioning of race and ethnicity were only present in the cases concerning the two men of Italian background. A brief journey into the past is required to discover why this type of practice occurs so prevalently in the contemporary media. In both Australia and the United States, the majority of mass media has generally been established and controlled by whites. White-run news organizations historically used racial identifiers to distinguish the person from white people. If you were not white and you were in the news, your race would be mentioned. Black people, like American Indians, Asians, and Latinos, were regarded as a "separate society". So it was natural to identify them by race so that white readers would know the story wasn’t about white people. The use of race had nothing to do with the details of how a person looked. All that mattered was that they were not white. While the world has changed dramatically through technological progress, a growing acceptance of multiculturalism and an ever-decreasing barrier between the various nationalities, it is rather disappointing to see that while a publication is now accessible by virtually anybody from anywhere in the world with just a click of a button, the content remains fiercely dogmatic and ethnocentric.
Hitherto, the overriding case of this paper has been driven by the endeavour to scrutinise the media portrayals of crimes committed by people of ethnicity, to detect signs of bias and misrepresentation and evaluate the effects of these findings. Discoveries ensuing from the investigation have revealed an array of subtle and on occasion fairly blatant misuses of race, religion and nationality in the pursuit of reporting crime. The consequences of these instances have generally been discussed in the context of encouraging stereotypes, creating negative public opinion, dividing communities and demonising certain ethnic minority groups. However in the larger scope of things, these effects, as damaging as they are, come a close second to the final devastation that may eventuate. What features in the articles and media reports are words, the hostility and bigotry that boils in the hearts of people are emotions and opinion; these are not necessary harmful in a physical sense. But consider the consequences of what would happen if for instance constant negative media attention were to elevate prejudices to the point where decisions are made to not hire certain minorities, not to rent housing to them or to cause governments to cut social programs. When these ramifications are recognised, what once may have been considered confined to the emotional side of life and seemingly less serious, has now transcended beyond mere discourse and entered the realm of the physical world with the potential to deny people their basic needs for survival.
The relationship between crime and ethnicity is one, which, according to both the Australian and American journalists’ codes of ethics should simply not exist. Yet the use of race, nationality, religion and colour is present in reports from all levels of the media industry. From African-Americans to Asian-Australians, a clear trend of division and demonising arrises in the media portrayals of crime; particularly when dealing with issues of urban and organised crime. Within such trends exists a dangerous force, with the potential to provoke prejudice and in turn create a social situation where the ethnic communities are further alienated, heightening their apparent need to band together for a sense of security. This subsequently results in a declining cycle of decreased understanding and ascending hostilities.

Reference List
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/australia/2002/05/item20020502105756_1.htm- ‘Police Suspect Payback in Pierce murder’, (2 May 2002), ABC News Online, http://www.abc.gov.au/news/2002/05/item20020502095853_1.htm
- ‘Alphonse John Gangitano’, Crime Scene , http://www.melbournecrime.bizhosting.com/agangiatano.htm- ‘Italian Crime Connections’, Crime Scene , http://www.melbournecrime.bizhosting.com/itallianconctns.htm

Author contact: sashli_8@hotmail.com

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