Newspapers as Capable Guardians? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Police Misreporting of Crime Statistics

Accurate crime statistics are fundamental to police accountability. Yet police have often been found to misclassify crimes and release manipulated statistics to create the appearance of effective policing. Since local newspapers typically reveal such misreporting, the widespread closure of newspapers could lead to increased misreporting. This can be conceptualized, in terms of routine activity theory, as the loss of capable guardians, or from the perspective of rational choice theory, as a reduction in expected costs for manipulating statistics.

Researchers from the University at Buffalo School of Management examined how local newspaper closures (n = 159) from 2002 through 2017 affect crime statistics reported by U.S. police departments, using Uniform Crime Reports data and a stacked regression difference-in-differences design.

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