alt Hacker NewsCopaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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Though the thesis of the article is clearly true, the way they discuss manufacturing crime panics detracts from the argument. There actually does seem to be something going on with retail theft, and I say this based on speaking to people who work in retail.
2 retail workers in the last 2 weeks have told me about thefts happening in their stores where someone loads up a cart with merchandise and rolls it out the door. It doesn't mean that society is crumbling or that we need police to be more vicious, but I think there is something going on and it would be worthwhile to address it somehow. It feels corrosive to the fabric of society when this stuff happens. Maybe not as corrosive as cops beating and killing people, but it's also bad.
If you haven’t already spotted the copganda, you may be blind.
> In each case, there were almost immediate policy responses that increased the budgets of punishment bureaucrats, passed more punitive laws, and diverted the system’s resources from other priorities. For example, the shoplifting panic led California state lawmakers to furnish $300 million more to police and prosecutors so they could punish retail theft more aggressively. A few months later, the California governor announced yet another measure, the “largest-ever single investment to combat organized retail theft,” adding another $267 million to fifty-five police agencies. Justifying the move, the governor said: “When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they’ll walk straight into jail cells.”
I don't understand how you can tell this story, pivot to a discussion of people who you feel selectively report statistics, and then never get back to the obvious question of whether crime rates decreased after these policy responses. (They did, significantly, and in some hot spots like San Francisco quite a lot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-crime-decline-c...)
See also perhaps:
Teen Vogue, I apologize for not recognizing your journalism earlier.
The best example of Copaganda or Copraganda are police dogs. The public love them, think they're cute.
The cops love them because they're basically a living version of the huge maglite flashlight; uncooperative subject being a general pain in the ass holed up somewhere? Send in the dog, that'll teach 'em!
They're also a breathing probable cause generator.
Drug dogs are worse than a coin flip for correctly signaling on drugs (I don't know about explosives or the 'flash drive' dogs and yes, the latter is A Thing) but I wouldn't be surprised if the latter were also BS.
The dogs are extremely eager to please, and they can pick up on cues from their handler that the handler thinks there are drugs.
The US Supreme Court ruled they're constitutional regardless of being worse than random, which at the time was one of the more perplexing rulings by the court. It gave cops free license to bypass a constitutional right.
The article is really bad. The writer doesn't bother to argue the actual issues, he just hand waves all off them away and presents his beliefs as fact. He calls the shoplifting epidemic going on in California a "panic", as if it's not real. Of course it is, because shoplifters currently face basically no consequences.
>The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored.
A good point, but criminals still must face consequences for their actions.
>And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue.
That's just nonsense.
It is surely a sign of the times that this is in Teen Vogue.
no matter where you are on the political spectrum, one thing we can agree on is the topic: this is definitely propaganda about cops (my comment so far is a tldr; myself, i expected the article to be about cope-aganda)
i feel i can get a quicker read on people listening to them rather than reading something carefully crafted. I searched and listened to this
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Police are state-funded gangs with a piece of paper providing them the right to summary executions. Forty percent of these gang members are domestic abusers, routinely assaulting their spouses or children. Don’t let their flimsy piece of paper prevent you from defending yourself against their violent violation of attempted murder.
They all too often believe themselves something above civilians in the US, forgetting there are only two statuses — civilian and military. And they aren’t military.
Don’t let your cowardly local congress critters forget the abuses and murders they commit against their own constituents.
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Is the article photo AI? Some hands look weird and the outfits are all different, and a bunch of other weird details.
A little aside on story writing:
Police and Medical procedurals are the main settings for stories with the character growth flipped. Meaning, that in these procedural tragedies (typically, though some comedies do exist) the growth in the story, the change, is not in the internal lives of the characters, but in the story itself. The birth of this was with Edgar Allen Poe's detective stories [0], but most famously popularized with Sherlock Holmes. In these tales, the characters are very flat and unchanging from story to story, experiencing little growth through an individual episode. Though in recent media, we tend to see growth in characters over the course of a season, belaying the procedural model a fair bit
Some variations exist in the procedural setting with Legal, Journalism, Fire/EMT, Cybersecurity, Coast Guards, Forestry/Game Wardening, and Political setting serving as mostly variations to the Medical and Law Enforcement settings. The most novel and most recent additions to the procedurals are in Historical Restoration and Cooking/Kitchens. If I've missed any, please let me know.
So, to me, thing like copaganda more reflect the dearth of settings that the procedural model of story telling has available. The variations above really aren't as dramatic as the literal life and death stakes that Police and Medical situations come across every story. You can get close with Legal and Fire/EMT settings, and you can also have high stakes and life and death with Political procedurals, though typically off-stage. The nature of the audience's attention is just naturally going to gravitate to the most dramatic stories, and those are the Medical and Police ones, I think.
[0] https://poemuseum.org/poes-tales-of-detective-fiction/