I’m talking about those youtube videos.
Feels like lowkey copaganda to me.
Those videos have actually shown me how often police investigations are an absolute clown show actually
This isn’t surprising at all, it seems like a type of selection bias. Most people prefer to see the conclusion of a story, so crime stories where the criminals are caught make better stories. You know what else makes for a better story? Having a cop that was involved give a firsthand account. Bad bumbling cops naturally don’t make it onto these kinds of shows.
Yeah.
If they are actually doing documentary work, they have to suck up to the cops so that the cops will cooperate with them. If they’re too critical, they’ll stop getting help.
If they’re just rehashing Wikipedia or doing reaction content then they’re adding nothing anyway
My partner and I quit watching these after I pointed out that they usually cover small town murders, and almost every time the crime is eventually solved, it’s because the local police suck it up and finally ask for help from the state or FBI who actually know what they’re doing. Similarly, the videos of cold cases that aren’t yet solved rarely mention any involvement of more competent higher levels of police in the investigation.
I was overhearing a crime video my grandma was watching and holy shit the narrator could not be verbally sucking cop dick harder
There has been a fair amount of analysis of the social role of ‘true crime’ as a genre. To boil it way, way down, it’s about creating a representation of human evil to let people feel essentially righteous. It is peak centrism, uplifting the status quo by placing it as opposition to the unquestionedly heinous, and with it, current structures, like cops as law enforcement.
We sometimes watch stuff like this and I will point out when they are coming out with something bullshit.
Like a police officer saying how dangerous escooters are because someone was killed a few months ago by one. Cars kill multiple people a day.
There’s a lot more cars around than Escooters though.
Fatalities per passenger mile is also lower
For scooters or cars?
That’s great, but the issue is promotion of this type of media and its bias which favors the police. Your personal experience is encouraging, but does not refute the issue as a whole
What do you expect, do you want a crime documentary to sympathize with the criminals?
Occasionally they take the “investigation bungled by police” angle, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.
People want a story to have a conclusion. People who watch these shows want to know what happened.
And “got away on a technicality” stories sound like they’d be lawsuit magnets.
Bailey Sarian takes the investigation bungled by police angle most of the time, but yeah, there is a lot of copaganda around.
Nope. But I do expect them to call out incompetence, misogyny, racism…
Jeffrey Dahmer was just a hangry dude !
Jeeeeeeffffrrreeeeyy… That kiiiiiills people!
I always LOVED NYPD Blue growing up because the detectives actually seemed to care. They just wanted to catch the killers/rapists, could give a shit about your parking tickets. They seemed like genuine people who were only looking out for the public. They even went out of their way to keep people out of jail that weren’t involved.
lemmy finds out that the police do more than just appearing in green left weekly articles after beating up a minority
american cops have some of the worst crime clearance rates on earth despite having the largest budgets.
vs some civilized countries:
they put up these impressive numbers while sucking down most of the budget in every town, while abusing minorities and the homeless and anyone else they can. You ever have to deal with cops for insurance when you get robbed? They are making sure you aren’t scamming the insurance company, who they actually work for. They don’t give a fuck about helping you.
Wonder why those leftists aren’t happy with the state of things 🤔
Wonder why anyone could be pleased with it tbh.
Those are cherrypicked numbers. You are comparing COVID America to pre-covid other countries. France dropped from 80% to 50% in 2020
That’s a non-response.
These budgets are still huge, and this performance is still poor.
All I’m doing is pointing out that the above evidence is flawed. I can do that without a full-throated defense of the American police apparatus.
I wish you weren’t downvoted. It’s not one or the other. There can be terrible systemic problems with law enforcement and amazing people working in law enforcement at the same time.
Even if you take a US-centric view there is a huge variance in police work across the nation.
So do the fictional detective shows that are constantly popular for decades now. Propaganda.
But I love my British and Scandinavian detective series. They’re great!
It’s Scottish, but have you watched Dept. Q? Good shit.
You might like Varg Veum.
Me and partner watch a lot of drama series…crime/detective/cop stuff is so dominant it’s unreal.
notice how the cops aren’t even happy or good in their own propaganda 🤣
I mean it depends which ones are you watching.
True crime series usually deal with crimes where the perpetrator is undeniably guilty, and typically of very heinous crimes. It shows cases where the police is correctly doing what should be their job.
If there are any videos that show “we assaulted a random person on the street” type of police work in a positive way, I haven’t seen it yet.
The more underhand tactics all get a pass though. Outright lying to the suspect(s). Other dirty tricks to get, and keep, the suspect(s) talking without access to legal representation. Prison snitches who somehow obtain a perfect confession with details that only the perpetrator would know… but also the police who totally wouldn’t coach the sort of person who’d do anything for less time behind bars.
And there’s often the implication that suspects who jump the hoops and get legal representation, otherwise keeping their mouths shut are uncooperative scum who are probably guilty and should be thought of poorly, when it’s a perfectly valid way to act even if you’re completely innocent. In fact, it’s the best way to act because you have no idea if the police are corrupt and/or lazy and are looking to pin the crime on someone, anyone, and that might well be you.
I’ve experienced your second paragraph. Cops are not to be trusted.
I caught one show second hand where the detective said “the suspect had already retained a lawyer before we talked to him, which I considered very suspicious”.
I’m only generally familiar with the big crime podcast/documentaries that spilled into the mainstream about 10 years ago: first season of Serial, Making a Murderer. And both of those were highly critical of the police work and called convictions into question (and actually got the public attention on the wrongful convictions).
More recently, I’ve seen the HBO series on Karen Read, and it painted a picture of severe police misconduct that at worst tried to frame an innocent person, and at best botched the investigation to make a conviction of a guilty person difficult to impossible.
So yeah, crime documentaries often do show police misconduct and incompetence. At least the ones that hit my radar.
Serial it’s important to note, while the conviction was certainly done through wrong ways, it did not prove he was innocent in completeness iirc
They are high-key copaganda. It’s overt and blatant.
What portion of these documentaries talk about false convictions, for instance?
Bingo, the subjects of crime documentaries are sometimes very difficult to paint in even a neutral light. Most producers don’t even try, as if it were an honest effort to run their tongues over the cop’s shoes the entire time. I think that the 2011 documentary from Werner Hertzog (Into the Abyss) is the best I’ve seen in recent years, given the way he’s able to at least portray the subjects impartially.
Yeah, there’s always the underlying faith in the system in these types of stories. They assume that if someone was found guilty, they must have done it. The only ones that I see that go against that are ones where’s it’s been proven that they were falsely convicted, and even in those it’s usually framed as some freak one-in-a-million accident without anyone at fault.
The “Paradise Lost” doc about the West Memphis three was a good example of false convictions, fueled by satanic panic.
Copaganda is real
JCS criminal psychology is 100% copaganda. It presents cop interrogation techniques as a kind of science, as if the Reid technique wasn’t all about deliberately misunderstanding body language and coercing innocent people to confess.
Skip Intro has a good series on Copaganda. Talks about TV shows/fiction, but a lot of the messaging is the same.
Cops exist to protect property, not you.
If you want a good non-copaganda documentary though, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line is a worthwhile classic.
I mean these tend to focus on actual crimes and not like police coverups or misbehavior. I bet though police misbehavior documentaries would get good traffic though. I can tell you there are some good subjects of topic from chicago.
John Oliver does a great segment on the TV show ‘Law and Order’ and this exact phenomenon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I
