Who’s the Victim Now? Media Bias and the War on Truth in Criminal Justice

The Dangerous Reversal of Crime Narratives: How America is Failing Real Victims While Elevating Criminals as Martyrs

Apr 25, 2025

time lapse photography of city during night time — Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash

We just concluded National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, recognized this April 6-12, 2025, a time when we mark all the progress made since its first recognition in 1981 and navigate the process for all the work yet to be done. VOCA, the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 was a significant milestone as was VAWA, the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 continued this beneficial focus.

This year, even this April, Victims’ Rights Week faces competition in the headlines with the two current affairs being discussed this April: the forced deportation of an El Salvadorian criminal gang member and illegal alien and the murder of a high school student in Frisco, Texas. Also, an article published about New York’s incarcerated transgender criminals, and how they are viewed as victims by lawmakers and task force members.

These amazing contemporary events support one conclusion: Justice fails when we confuse the victims from the criminals.

Tragic Murder Frisco, Texas

In what should have been a local case siloed in the Dallas-Fort Worth media market, we have a high school student at a track meet who was stabbed to death by another high school student from another school. From the local media at Fox 4:

‘The backstory: Austin Metcalf, a 17-year-old junior at Memorial High School in Frisco, was killed at a UIL District 11-5A track meet at Kuykendall Stadium on April 2. Police said a student from Centennial High School in Frisco, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony, stabbed Metcalf in the chest during a fight.An arrest report said that Anthony told a school resource officer that Metcalf "put his hands" on him. After the officer mentioned to others that he had the alleged suspect in custody, the report states Anthony said, "I’m not alleged. I did it."’

However, the way this story has been portrayed in national mainstream media, you might easily be confused that Anthony is not the victim, Metcalf is the person who was murdered on a school campus by Anthony, a 17-year-old student. We saw this similarly unfold in 2012, when George Zimmerman was charged with murder following false witness testimony generated by ‘family lawyer’ Ben Crump. The elected state attorney in the jurisdiction couldn’t bring charges, due to a lack of probable cause and evidence indicating self-defense, so the governor transferred the case to a prosecutor in another circuit who would bring charges.

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We must remind our young people who are being taught a wildly inaccurate version of history, that in the Zimmerman criminal case, Ben Crump was neither a prosecutor or defense attorney, merely a ‘spokesman’ for the family. Also, while the case was famously associated with the Florida ‘Stand Your Ground’ law, it was never once used by the defense.

Today, we have the Next Generation Action Network (NGAN) running point for the civil rights protection of the accused murderer. Minister Dominque Alexander, president of the organization and prolific criminal, attempts and fails to synthesize indignation in pace with his competition, by condemning Austin Metcalf’s father for attending a press conference and having him removed by police. Meanwhile, stories circulate about the successful fundraising and merchandising by Anthony’s family, completely distracting from the reality that a 17-year-old high school athlete was murdered.

Illegal Alien, Not Maryland Man

The other story that has drawn outsized national media attention is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Undisputed facts include that Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien from El Salvador and a documented MS-13 gang member. The MS-13 gang, Mara Salvatrucha was formed in Los Angeles, California among Salvadoran migrants to protect them from rival gangs. Many from El Salvador that were permitted to be in California under protected status were deported when the civil war in El Salvador ended and order was restored in 1992.

The actual constitutional and enumerated rights in United States Code, not the imagined or theoretical rights of most of those opposed to his deportation, was that he was not eligible to remain in this country. While orders are issued, right or wrong, Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador and is currently in the custody of the nation there. It has been revealed that he has been accused of acts of domestic violence and was stopped by police during a human trafficking run from the Texas border to Maryland via St. Louis, Missouri. He was also a thoroughly documented gang member with MS-13. Due process for illegal aliens is not a thing. Due process for those who enter the United States legally is codified in our laws and exist exclusively to those non-citizens.

Some members of Congress, point to a judge’s order to have Abrego Garcia returned to the United States - by the United States - while he is, as mentioned previously, a citizen of another sovereign nation and currently deported to that sovereign nation. If a North Korean Judge determined that you, a citizen or resident alien of the United States, within the United States, should be physically removed to North Korea, if attempted it could quite nearly be an act of war.

By User Sfoskett on en.wikipedia: cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 01:56, 11 April 2017 (UTC) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57908935

Transgender Violent Crime and Incarceration

Lately, when there is a brutally violent irrational crime, aren’t we much more mindful of the gender identity of the perpetrator, especially whether it is mentioned. Research often requires that I reach way back into reports from years ago. However, I was surprised recently reading a Barna report on churches and the reluctance to attend services from 2007. This document was a summary of issues that the church (meaning the entire church at large) and it wasn’t the issues that the church was bringing, it was the issues that the church at large was being confronted with. At that time, gay and lesbian issues were front and center, especially dealing with issues such as ordination, service, and membership. That chain of letters including the BTQIAA+ just didn’t exist yet. It is just amazing how recently the focus of that community, themselves, was not united as a policy block until after the Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriage.

Today we are constantly persuaded into believing that this is one of the most substantial and consequential issues of our time. Recently, I read the most insightful article by Hannah E. Meyers. I hope you read it too. She exposes how we are not collecting crime data on the overly broad spectrum in the transgender community, whether justice involved or incarcerated. Are the members of the transgender community markedly more violent? We can’t know and we won’t know until we take the data seriously.

More details have been released recently on Audrey Hale, the Nashville Covenant School shooter but obviously not every transgender is a school shooter, but what if a disproportionate number are committing acts of mass violence?

Meyers writes in Commentary:
All of these cases raise a very obvious question: Do transgender Americans commit crime at higher rates or of different types than “cis-gender” Americans?
The answer is: We have no idea.
Whereas crime data exist for all other demographics—race, age, educational attainment, etc.—we are not systematically collecting or analyzing stats for trans offenders. Apparently, it’s too politically uncomfortable to call attention to transgender people as anything but victims.

Her illuminating article delves much farther into the institutions dedicated to keeping transgender criminals in the status of mistreated political and cultural prisoners. As we have seen nationwide, incarcerated convicts especially chronic sex offenders, suddenly and radically restate their gender like a storm in a cloudless sky for the purpose of serving their time in a female prison. The pregnancy rate in women’s prisons in states where this is permitted has increased. Meyers notes one such convict in New Jersey has impregnated two females.

For instance, the New York City TGNCNBI Task Force (transgender, gender non-conforming and nonbinary individuals in custody) has the stated purpose of preserving the dignity and recommending policies addressing the underserved needs of those individuals in a corrections setting. The product is an advisory group that views the population whom they advocate for, mainly as victims of the system, without regard to their status as criminals, and worse, as danger to the public and other inmates. The bail reform madness in the State of New York has had the unforeseen effect of concentrating the most vile, dangerous, and predatory criminals, those so heinous even the most liberal judge can’t release them and put them all in a corrections environment that no longer has any semblance of normal healthy society.

Criminals are not victims

There was a trend in victim service circles to refer to those who endured criminal abuse, that they should be called survivors rather than victims. In law enforcement, we need people to fit that legal definition. It’s clear that we need to make sure that the situational title, victim, is preserved as a term with dignity such that those will bear that without shame.

Most of the social upheaval in the last 13 years should be attributed to the public being misled about cases where they were manipulated by the media and activists to believe the offender was the victim.

If you don’t agree with me, do the work, watch the videos and listen to the 911 calls. Case after case, and for the most part quite unremarkable cases, were painted as questionable. Don’t listen to snippets or opinions; go to the sources, the walk-throughs, the police interviews.

When we, as a nation, let ourselves be manipulated by those media and activist voices, people are murdered, business get burned down, and the police get blamed.

We have seen it time and time again and today, we must resolve that we won’t be manipulated. I live just shy of a thousand miles from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, but the media hasn’t told me about any murders in Little Rock, Memphis, Jackson, Ms., or Atlanta. They’ve siloed that information for their local audience and the only reason we are hearing about the other high school stabbing is because the Frisco case is still in the news. Let’s focus on higher things!

Please keep all our peace officers in our prayers.

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com. His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.