America’s True Crime Addiction: The Glorification and Dehumanization
Ada Lambert | February 23, 2023
Crime fiction has been around for hundreds of years, flourishing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It wasn’t until around 1966 that true crime began to gain public interest. Since then, there has been a steady increase in true crime media and entertainment.
There are multiple channels that streamed true crime documentaries throughout the day — one of these being Investigation Discovery (ID). My mother is a huge fan of this channel; she can watch it any time of the day — even while she falls asleep. These types of documentaries incorporate real interviews mixed with re-enactments of the crime featuring low-profile actors. This is where my exposure to true crime first started.
In the new age of media, there is tons of access to true crime entertainment, and we are consuming it more than ever. In a poll by yougovamerica, they found that 58% of women watch true crime, while only 42% of men do. Women are twice as likely to have true crime be their favorite genre.
In 2022, Netflix released the biopic series “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” Unlike a documentary, the biopic style dramatizes the true events of a person's life. The budget for this was 300 million dollars. To put this into perspective, a typical budget for a show on ID would be around 300 thousand dollars.
This is one problem: companies are profiting off tragedies, and it’s only getting worse as the world of entertainment becomes more unethical. This is seen in how the Dahmer show affected the families of his victims after the show had been released.
The families noted that the producers had never reached out to them for permission or personal accounts of what happened. They also received no compensation, despite some of the victims having children and grandchildren.
Some critics felt that the show sensationalized his crimes and made him out to be a sympathetic figure, and some also worry that it can glorify or normalize criminal behavior, and in some cases, even inspire copycat crimes.
Despite the negative backlash it received, the show was Netflix's ninth most-watched English language series of all time. This goes to show that true crime entertainment continues to capitalize off of dehumanization.
Another component of the true crime industry is the fear-mongering it is creating within U.S. society. Despite violent crime rates steadily declining since the 1990s, the fear of crime has increased exponentially. True crime entertainment is built to instill fear and to warn people about what could happen to them if they don’t take precautions.
This idea runs on the assumption that people who experience violent crimes just weren’t smart enough. People on social media take true crime cases as a means to educate, to tell you how you can ensure that you won’t end up a victim too. This is all well and good until you start to live in constant fear — when checking under the car before you get in just isn’t enough anymore.
Take the Idaho murders, for example. After the brutal stabbings of four Idaho University students, social media went into a frenzy. This case, just like many others over the past few years, quickly gained the attention of true-crime-loving consumers. Social media allows these cases to open to the public and allow people to get involved — aka internet sleuthing.
On one hand, some would argue that social media has had a positive effect on solving crimes. That is not what I concluded from the internet involvement in this case. It was like watching all logic and reasoning go up into flames.
This case exposed the real danger of amateur sleuthing. People were driving to the home of the victims to personally investigate the possible entry of the murderer. There were rumors floating around about one of the surviving roommate’s boyfriend being the killer. This person received death threats and harassment for months before the arrest of Brian Kohberger.
When the affidavit was released, there was a statement explaining that the surviving roommate saw the murderer on his way out of the house and went into her room without calling the police. Internet sleuths instantly took to theorizing how she could have been involved with the death of her roommates, criticizing and accusing her.
Later, the roommate revealed she had been under the impression that her friends were partying upstairs and figured Kohberger was just someone passing through. It was a party house, so this was a typical occurrence. After all, why would your first assumption be that someone had just murdered all your friends?
The most ironic part about this case is that the suspect’s name came as a complete surprise. All the amateur sleuthing was just a means of entertainment. The detectives on this case were criticized for months, when they were investigating quietly under everyone’s noses so they could keep the suspect from being informed of their leads and ensure that the arrest would go smoothly.
This is just one example of how true crime has become a trend to participate in. Social media creates a split between what is reality and what is fiction. When these stories are broadcasted for the world, there’s an opportunity to interact in a way that completely disconnects from the weight that the crime actually holds.
We often overlook that these people have grieving families, partners who loved them and that they still deserve autonomy. Rather than sending condolences, we rip their lives apart like hungry vultures, eagerly searching for some easter egg that nobody else has found yet. As a society, we have stripped people of their humanity.
Uncertainty is a part of life. There is no guide to surviving our own sense of mortality and there will never be a fool proof way to escape it. Don’t get me wrong, there is no harm in being prepared. The world is a dangerous place. But true crime entertainment is not the place to find survival tips — no amount of knowledge will earn you a pass to full control over life.
The human state is fragile; we live on the precipice of death constantly. If we dwelled on all the incidental (and much more common) ways to die, we would never leave our homes. But we don’t think about those things; it would be exhausting to worry about all day long. There’s no movies about the woman who toppled down the stairs and hit her head on the cement tile or about the biker who got hit by a car on a curvy road. There’s no story, no means of intrigue.
When we engage in true crime entertainment, we are only giving more power to fear and an anti-empathetic society. Violence will never truly be eradicated, but it doesn’t have to be glorified.
Last week, someone told me that if I take an Uber or Lyft anywhere I should immediately pluck out a strand of my hair and leave it in the car, that way there will be evidence for police to find if I go missing.
America, this addiction has gone too far.