Corporate Crime vs Street Crime: How Grand Rapids news distorts and racializes crime

Last week, all four daily news agencies in Grand Rapids – MLive, WOODTV8, WZZM13 and WXMI 17 – reported on a story about a former CEO who was sentenced to prison and ordered to pay nearly $6 million in restitution to investors he defrauded.

However, in all four of the local daily news outlets, there wasn’t the same outrage over what the former CEO did as compared to those who engage in street level crime. This double standard is common in news reporting and has been for decades, both in terms of class and race.

There have been few stories of corporate or white collar crimes in the local news in 2024. Comparatively, street level crime inundates the local news coverage. On top of the frequency of street level crime, the local news agencies often use the images of suspects, with WOODTV8 being the leader in using images of crime suspects. In the above graphic is a collection of images from WOODTV8 crime coverage that I have collected for 2024. As you can see most of them are Black and Brown suspects. The same use of images does not apply to corporate crime, since there were no images of the ex-CEO in any of the 4 local news stories I monitored, despite the fact that he had defrauded investors $6 million.

On the matter of class difference between street and corporate crime, the local news is not only dominated by street crime coverage, they don’t use the same kind of narratives when reporting on street level crime as opposed to corporate crime. 

In Marie Gottschalk’s book, “Race, Power, and Punishment: Crime in the Streets and Crime in the Suites”, she highlights several ways in which this double standard exists. 

• Even when legal and extralegal variables are held constant, white-collar offenders tend to be less likely to be sentenced and receive shorter sentences than street crime offenders. 
• Social status may have an impact on sentencing decisions, as white-collar offenders who commit crimes usually committed by the upper-class are less likely to be sentenced to prison than white-collar offenders who commit crimes usually committed by the lower-class. 
• Scandals that expose the crimes of white-collar and the economic elite, such as Enron, result in higher sentences for white-collar offenders. 
• Access to resources may help high-status white-collar offenders bypass criminal justice interventions such as the usage of legal loopholes. 

These are also many of the same conclusions that the watchdog group, Corporate Crime Reporter has been documenting for several decades.

In terms of social cost, according to the FBI, corporate crime costs the US $300 billion a year.

The double standards I have pointed out not only have devastating social consequences, but psychological consequences as well. The news media’s constant use of Black and Brown crime suspect images perpetuates the belief that Black and Brown people engage in more crime, which is not accurate. When it comes to sentencing, Black and Brown people are disproportionately put in jail or prison for the reasons that Marie Gottschalk cites in her book mentioned above. 

Lastly, what is considered criminal in US law also skews how we understand crime and violence. For instance, paying people poverty-level wages is not illegal, but like most of the corporate pollution that exists is not a crime. I would argue that these are forms of structural violence, which are unfortunately normalized in US society.