- drug analysis
- DNA segment matching
- digital forensics
- lineup identifications
- police sketches
This isn't to say that policing in its current form isn't effective at all, but the media (whether intentionally or not) have done an excellent job as the propaganda department for the police.
Why improve when everyone believes you're superman?
but the media (whether intentionally or not) have done an excellent job as the propaganda department for the police.
Personally I say "no way is this anything but intentional". There's way too much pro-cop, pro-military-industrial-complex, pro-sook-agency crap on TV for it to be just accidental. Propaganda is exactly what it is.
I don't think it's an organized effort merely to promote law enforcement from a political standpoint.
Rather, I think such shows are made because they sell well to two crowds: the pro law enforcement crowd and those with a curiosity for true crime.
If you're buddy-buddy with the cops, they'll help promote you, talk to you about cool cases they worked, etc.. If you're instead critical of the cops, they're going to try and undermine you instead.
This means that doing a cop show that's anti-cop would be like doing a medical show without ever being able to consult a doctor. You can do it, but you're going to have to put a lot more work into research to get the same sense of verisimilitude.
You know how people who don't work in government don't realize Parks and Rec is a documentary?
And people who don't work in a white collar office don't realize The Office is also a documentary?
Well Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a documentary too.
The primary artistic liberty these shows take is to take a decade's worth of shenanigans, compress it into one season and cut out all the drudgery in-between. Basically all the stupid "that would never happen" crap happens but spread out over 100x as long and 10x as many people.
> In Hollywood, many movie productions are directly supervised by the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Film Liason Unit. Directors looking to borrow Army material for their movies need to apply to the DoD, and submit their movies' scripts for vetting. Ultimately, the DoD has a say in virtually every US-made movie that use military resources in their production.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/opinions/2016/10/24/how-po...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r...
your local government may keep stats E.G.: https://www.cabq.gov/police/public-reports/annual-reports/un... , https://staging.policescorecard.org/ (or the extremely hard to navigate FBI's UCR page https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/ )
It's remarkable that pseudoscience is a big part of how we (don't) protect our rights.
To rant for a second, it seems like a case of what I encounter at work too often as a data scientist. It drives me nuts. There's some statistical fallacy where lay people infer one thing, while the logical inference is something else for some subtle reason, and they respond to the critique with, 'well, yeah but we don't need a super rigorous answer here,' or something along those lines. As if a wrong answer is more correct when you 'don't need rigor.'
I think we're in that boat because people so easily mistake approximate correctness in the sense of 'this answer is very nearly the right answer' with approximate correctness in the sense of 'this reasoning is very close to the right reasoning.' The two are interchangeable often enough to create the bad habit, like if you discard an assumption that is very probably true enough, or discard a term that is small. But when they aren't interchangeable, they're really really not interchangeable.
(We're also in that boat because enough people cry wolf about rigor in the other direction, like complaining about discarding an error term that really is small enough to safely/rigorously discard)
Unfortunately, there have been multiple cases where it turns out the forensic analysis simply wasn't performed, the technician just put whatever the prosecutor wanted to see on the form.
Easy way around this is double-blinding the evidence. The fact that this isn't done should make DNA evidence inadmissible in court until the relevant authorities clean up their act.