DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

In the late 1980s there was a rash of news reports across the nation about dog fighting and pit pulls attacking people.

It built over many months and reporters were often under pressure to "localize" the supposed craze. In Denver, an Emmy award winning reporter, unable to find any evidence of this epidemic, arranged a staged dog fight for her photographer to shoot. (She was convicted on criminal charges but her superiors who did the cheerleading for the story were not.)

Eventually these stories and this epidemic died out. In the years since then I know of only two stories -- a San Francisco attack story and the Michael Vick dog fighting case -- that remain of the one-time epidemic. Do you suppose pit bulls stopped biting people?

More likely, there was never such an epidemic, either of biting or of fighting, at all. Journalists are great at manufacturing outbreaks of crime. Even the great muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, supposedly an idealistic friend of the people, cackled in one chapter of his autobiography, "I enjoy crime waves. I made one once..."

One of the best documented imaginary crime waves took place in New York City in 1976, when journalists kept emphasizing murders and robberies of senior citizens. Known as "push-in" crimes - offenders would shove elderly people into their apartments from behind as they opened their apartment doors -- reporters had the help of police in telling these stories, which should have been a tip-off to someone. Among the results of this crime wave was the creation of a law enforcement task force, attacks on the juvenile justice system, and new penalties enacted by the legislature.

Criminologist Jerome Miller later noted, "At the time, no objective evidence backed up the premise of this reporting." And later, hard statistics showed murder of the elderly actually declined during the period of the "crime wave." And fortunately, this news came out in time for the governor to veto the new laws.

What journalists didn't know at the time, was that a federal agency was offering grants to municipalities that had senior citizen crime units and that news coverage helped to validate the local unit, so the police steered reporters to the crimes involving the elderly.

That's how a lot of alleged "trends" come about. David Krajicek, a recovering New York City crime journalist, has written, "Because of the interest by journalists, the police pluck these cases from the vast pile and feed them to the media, which present the stories in the form of a crime wave. Often, the same types of crimes had been occurring in happy obscurity all along."

We are seeing it happen now. University of North Carolina student body president Eve Marie Carson was killed on March 5. Auburn University first year student Lauren Burk of Marietta, Georgia was found shot on the side of an Alabama highway. These crimes are being tied into the Feb. 14 shooting rampage by a former student at Northern Illinois University and the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shootings to suggest rising campus violence.

Some have added the Reno disappearance and murder of Brianna Denison, although she was home in Reno from college in California, and the Jan. 7 case of Meredith Emerson, whose body was found in a Georgia mountain area, although she was no longer a college student.

In Arizona and Nevada and other states, education policymakers are considering changing campus rules to allow guns on campus, even though there is no evidence that the supposed epidemic of campus violence actually exists as anything except a string of rare and unrelated incidents. Many of the cases cited do not stand up under scrutiny. Eve Carson was not on campus when she was killed. It is a stretch to call it a campus crime. Even if she had been, North Carolina has 46 colleges, some of which have more than one campus. How many killings of students in North Carolina have taken place over how many decades? Doesn't this call for some perspective?

The United States has hundreds of colleges and even more campuses and a population of 300 million people. Where is the evidence that the few cases cited are any more than rare exceptions?

It is a mistake to rush to a basic change in public policy, such as guns on campus, until we know whether the epidemic of campus violence actually exists. Such a rush could mean keying educational policy to the freakishly exception instead of to the norm.