Start with some Stats of real crime versus what people think.
So who propagates this irrational terror?
In an editorial on crime (2/11/94), the Wall Street Journal claimed "it is very nearly routine procedure for criminals to kill their victims during a robbery to get rid of the evidence."
According to FBI statistics, there were 672,480 robberies in 1992, and 2,254 murders associated with robberies--so about 99.7 percent of the time, robbers did not kill their victims. Quite a different definition of routine.
My opinion
Crime is not newsworthy. We learn crimes, the most profitable crimes, how to commit them, how puny the sentences are (and they do seem puny to one who has not suffered them - 3 years without parole is simply a small, harmless looking line of text) how "normal" crime is, et cetera. We learn police tactics, we learn from criminals mistakes, we get ideas (copy-cat criminals, among others, find the media to be a virtual "how-to" guide), and most of all, we get fear. Fear to walk the streets, fear of others, fear and subconscious loathing of racial minorities. We get paranoia and discontent, we are immobilized by caution, we are tempted into vigilantism and reactionism.
But guess what? Crime sells. That's the main reason why "if it bleeds it leads". There are other reasons though.
We fear violent crime, while the ruling class fears crimes against property. Luckily for them police tend to treat the two as the same. When we fear crime and call out for more police , guns, and prisons, we expect it will prevent violent crimes - the crime that we suffer from. In the end all it does is help build the army separating the world's people from the world's wealth.
The ruling class wants us to fear and loath each other and each other's actions and decisions - ie, to fear democracy. They have no choice but to keep us divided - we outnumber them by too much. Probably the main reason so few people are revolutionaries is because they fear "power to the people" would result in a chaotic crime spree. (At this point in time, it probably would - but this isn't true always)
To fear one's fellow people enough to want to carry death machines for them is sickeningly cowardly. Don't be defeated by the terrorism.
How "if it bleeds it leads" helps "tough on crime" authoritarians