What Makes True Crime Ethical?

Every so often somebody asks me how I can love true crime and also spend so much time complaining about it, and the honest answer is that those are the same activity. You do not complain that carefully about something you don’t care for. I complain because the genre is capable of being one of the most morally serious things we make, and because its default setting, the thing it does when nobody is paying attention, is to turn a murdered person into content and hand their worst day to strangers as a Friday night.

Both of those are true at once, and the whole ethics of the thing lives in the gap between them. So let me try to be useful rather than just aggrieved, and lay out how I actually tell a serious piece of true crime from a carnival, because after enough years of it you develop a checklist, and mine might save you some time.

Start with who’s watching, because it isn’t who you think

The lazy assumption about true crime is that its audience is a bunch of ghouls, and it is worth getting rid of that assumption first, because it poisons everything downstream. The audience for true crime is overwhelmingly women. Forensic science is one of the fastest-growing university subjects and something like seven in ten of the students are female. That is not a coincidence and it is not an appetite for gore.

The writer Rachel Monroe, in the smartest book anyone has written on this, argues that people raised as women absorb, constantly, from childhood, the message that they are prey — that the world contains a category of person who might do something to them specifically — and that an obsession with the details of exactly that can be a way of trying to master a fear you were handed and never asked for. When a woman listens to four hours about a murder, she is not usually enjoying the murder. She is rehearsing survival, or grieving in advance, or trying to make the shapeless danger she has been taught to expect hold still long enough to be looked at. Any ethics of the genre that starts by sneering at its audience has already failed. The audience is mostly serious. It deserves serious things.

The default setting

The problem is not the audience. The problem is what gets made for it, and the default is exploitation, and I mean that structurally, not as an insult.

Consider the standard failure, which happens so often it barely registers as a scandal anymore: a streaming service makes a lavish series about a famous killer, and the families of the people he killed find out their loved ones are being portrayed, in intimate and painful detail, at the same time as the rest of us — because nobody called them. Nobody asked. A relative of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims put it plainly when Netflix did exactly this: it is a shame, she said, that people can take our tragedy and make money. That is the default setting of the genre in one sentence. The dead become material, the grief becomes a product, and the people to whom the grief actually belongs are not consulted, because consulting them is friction, and friction is expensive.

And notice who gets the treatment. True crime does not spread its enormous attention evenly. It pours it onto young, white, conventionally pretty victims and lets everyone else fall through — the poor, the Black and Indigenous, the addicted, the sex workers, the ones a producer decides no audience will “connect with.” There is a name for it, coined years ago: missing white woman syndrome. It is not a minor bias. It is a decision, made thousands of times, about whose death is worth a documentary and whose is worth a paragraph, and it is one of the most revealing things the genre does, because it tells you that even our mourning has a market, and the market is prejudiced.

The detective problem

Then there is the thing the podcasts and the docuseries accidentally built, which is an army of amateur detectives.

Some of this is fine and some of it is even good — a determined amateur has, on rare and real occasions, shaken loose a cold case that the professionals had shelved. I will come back to that, because it matters. But the ordinary version is a comment section deciding, on a hunch and a grainy photo, that it knows who did it, and then doing to an innocent person what a mob has always done, except faster and with a wider reach. People have been named, hounded, and had their lives dismantled by strangers who were sure, and who were wrong, and who felt, throughout, that they were helping. “I was just asking questions” has become one of the most dangerous sentences on the internet. The line between investigation and trespass is real, and true crime spends a great deal of its time cheerfully pretending it isn’t there.

But it can do good, and pretending otherwise is its own dishonesty

I am not going to leave it there, because the genre’s defenders have a real point and a fair review admits the strong version of the other side.

True crime, done seriously, keeps unresolved stories in the public eye, and sometimes that is the difference between a case that dies in a filing cabinet and a case that finally moves. A podcast that spent years, carefully and with actual reporting, on the disappearance of a young woman named Kristin Smart genuinely helped surface witnesses and pressure that contributed to a conviction, decades on. That is not nothing. That is a family getting an answer they had been denied for a lifetime, because someone told the story well and refused to let it go. The genre can be an instrument of justice and memory and not only of appetite. The point is not that true crime is bad. The point is that it is powerful, and power is exactly the thing that has to be used carefully or it does harm by default.

The checklist

So here, after all of that, is how I actually decide, and it is not complicated, which is the point of a checklist.

Does it keep the victim a person? Not a body in a field, not a plot device, not a face on a thumbnail, but someone with a life the piece bothered to render. Does it aim its anger in the right direction — at the killer, at the institutions that failed, at the apparatus — and never at the dead? Did it consider consent: were the families spoken to, does it need to exist, or is it simply strip-mining a fresh grief because the algorithm is hungry? Whose victim did it choose, and does that choice quietly repeat the market’s prejudice or push against it? Does it report, or does it play detective and endanger the living? And does it know when to stop — is there restraint in it, or does every reenactment linger and every ad break cliffhang on somebody’s real death?

None of those questions is hard to ask. What is hard is that the answers cost money, every time, and the exploitative version is always cheaper and always faster, which is why the default is what it is. A piece of true crime becomes ethical the moment it decides to pay the more expensive price — to treat the dead as people who were owed something, rather than as raw material that happened to be lying around. You can feel that decision in the work. It reads as restraint, and restraint, in this genre, is the whole of the morality. The carnival never restrains itself. That is how you know it’s the carnival.