(1/many) #EconSky My job market paper investigates what police propaganda and its effects can teach us about the institution of policing. https://t.co/5bzHCTdmR2
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(2) #EconSky Televised stories told from the perspective of the police and often with the explicit cooperation of the police – known as “copaganda” – are ubiquitous in the US. Reality television shows that follow real police as they do their jobs are a particularly popular subgenre.
(3) #EconSky Hundreds of police departments and sheriffs’ offices have filmed with these shows. In a survey, I find that 90 percent of Americans have seen at least one of these reality shows.
(4) What does the omnipresence of the copaganda genre mean for the general public's conception of police, for the practice of policing, and for the communities being policed?
(5) I combine data on COPS segments with actual arrest data in filmed departments. The show portrays a world in which officers solve far more cases through arrests than they do in reality. How do cops respond to these distorted expectations in front of a live audience...?
(6) I use department-level arrest data in a staggered difference-in-difference design and find that arrests for low-level, victimless crimes increase by 20 percent while departments film with COPS' successor, Live PD.
(7) In FOIAed data from Live PD filming departments, I find that quality-of-life arrests increase most among officers actively filmed by cameras, but even non-filmed officers shift their behavior significantly.
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(Seriously though, this is SO cool - and I really appreciate you breaking it down in this thread! I just texted screenshots to my colleagues 😁)