Political calls to crack down on crime are echoing in our media ahead of the upcoming election - not for the first time. Two seasoned journalists showed this was part of a pattern in a report on crime coverage which recommended new approaches. It was commissioned five years ago - but never saw the light of day.

Political calls to crack down on crime are echoing in our media ahead of the upcoming election - not for the first time. Two seasoned journalists showed this was part of a pattern in a report on crime coverage which recommended new approaches. It was commissioned five years ago - but never saw the light of day.

Picture this: an election is looming and one of the electorate's top concerns is seemingly out-of-control crime.

Pressure groups are hammering the message that offenders are getting off lightly.

They've got support from National, repeatedly accusing the incumbent Labour government of being soft on crime.

Expert, evidence-based analysis of criminal justice is increasingly drowned out in the media by a clamour for more punitive measures.

On the back foot and losing the public debate, Labour starts talking up legislative changes to lengthen sentences and increase penalties for crimes that hit the headlines most often.

That, of course, is a description of the 2002 general election, where the Sensible Sentencing Trust and National Party leader Bill English spearheaded a tough on crime narrative following a number of high-profile murders.

If it sounds familiar, it's because history repeats and everything old becomes new again in the justice debate from the 1990 election, where the National Party campaigned on a 'return to a decent society' to the upcoming one in October.

All that is spelled out in a 227-page report titled 'Developing good practice in criminal justice and journalism'.

It was commissioned in 2018 by the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group (Te Uepū Hāpai i te Ora), and written by the current editor of Newsroom Pro and former editor of the Sunday Star-Times, Jonathan Milne - and by David Fisher, a senior journalist at the New Zealand Herald and former chief reporter at the Herald on Sunday.

"It is important our audiences are able to form an accurate picture of the communities in which they live through the media they consume. Surveys on public perception of crime show this is not the case. The surveys also show our communities develop these inaccurate perceptions through the media they consume," the report concluded.

The report calls for reporters to include context and facts about crime - to explain the 'why', rather than just the 'what' and the 'how'…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details