Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News | Hacker News Reader

Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

teenvogue.com

184 pointspavel_lishin64 comments

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/

Docganda is no less prevalent in the media but I don't think it's remotely as often recognised. While there is a significant worsening in the services provided there are now multiple shows of hyper competence and capabilities despite the funding challenges putting the issue on hospital admin not on funding streams. Still no recognition of the really big problems with treatment of certain disease classes and insurance denial. It's hard not to see it in the same light as copganda.

Hm. Do you have examples of this alleged hypercompetence and "docganda"?

I've seen lots of medical dramas which, while not the main subject, place some emphasis on corruption, big pharma, perverse incentives, malpractice, doctors that do needless surgeries, cases where "do no harm" is not followed, insurance denying rightful treatments, funding problems from corporate sponsors, drug addictions in doctors, exploiting nurses, residents making mistakes because they are exhausted, etc.

Of course, all sprinkled with personal drama, romance, and interesting cases, this being television after all. One example in mind is "The Resident", but there are others.

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.

People have lost faith that society can work for them and have observed those in power engaging in corruption and grifts. They then conclude that only a sucker plays by the rules.

There's bound to always be some number of people in that situation, but there's also plenty of ways we can do better to make society work for more of us.

My pet theory is that the #1 problem in the USA in the past few decades is wealth inequality, and if we can find ways to stop the rich extracting wealth from the poor, many of our issues will sort themselves out.

It's worth a shot. It seems clear that political power can be bought, and when rich people buy their way into power, most of the time it's a bad thing

It is a policy choice that crime is allowed, inequality and low crime exist side by side in places like Shanghai, Tokyo, and Singapore

The difference is that being poor in those places does not lead to life or death desperation amongst poor people.

Being poor in Shanghai leads to returning to whatever bumfuck village for government benefits because you don’t have a Shanghai hukou

The other two don’t have such an issue because they have cheap and small housing options, which are effectively banned in the US due to the effect of various regressive and “seemingly progressive” housing policies

What do you mean by "low crime"? All of those places are well known for their 'secret societies'.

The idea that crime is caused by "society being unjust" is a very common delusion.

It's much simpler. People notice they can just take things with no consequences...so they do.

The culture that I live in here in the Czech Republic would paint your statement as pretty false. The police here are extremely laid-back and it's pretty easy to get away with petty thievery, yet crime is exceptionally low because people are not desperate enough to risk even the low chance of getting in trouble. You only take chances when you have nothing to lose and you only have nothing to lose when you have been completely excluded from society.

In addition to avoiding the risk, it just feels good to play by the rules if you think the system is reasonably just. I suspect a large fraction of people prefer to be honest and pay for the products and services they want.

> where someone loads up a cart with merchandise and rolls it out the door

There's 2 different things here, though. There's casual shoplifting, and there are organized gangs of shoplifters. What you're describing is organized gangs of shoplifting, and that's not cause by a corrosion in the fabric of society, that's caused because these gangs know that retailers aren't interested in stopping them.

A random person might steal an item or two, but a random person isn't going to load up a cart with merchandise and walk out the door. But organized crime will happily take advantage of retailers who won't do anything about them.

I meant to suggest the other direction - brazen theft of a cart full by organized gangs is corrosive to the fabric.

A person sneaking an item or two into their pocket is pretty much only affecting the store and that individual. I guess it has a broader effect if it happens so much that the store locks up the merchandise so customers have to ask for assistance.

Interesting—my reaction is the opposite. Organized crime sucks, but it doesn't strike me as a social problem, but rather an enforcement problem. Organized crime finds a technique that works because they're constantly looking for new ways to steal, and if the retailers don't find a way to close that loophole (like, for instance, security guards), then they'll just keep exploiting it.

On the other hand, when shoplifting is normalized to the point where everyday shoppers don't feel any shame about shoplifting, then that shows there's significant damage to our social fabric. But this isn't what's happening.

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.

"PC on four legs".

I've never heard of dogs sniffing for electronics https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/24/dog-can-sni...

This is going throught the courts in New South Wales, Australia, right now.

The police have been using drug dogs, which are known to have only a 30% hit rate, as an excuse to strip-search teens on their way into music festivals, despite there also being evidence that young people in possession of drugs tend to give them up when told the dog has indicated on them. And they haven't even been properly recording their 'justification' for the searches.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/13/nsw-p...

Here's hoping they get a smackdown from the courts. The NSW police seem to be the worst in Australia for this and are basically killing the music festival scene in that state, through a campaign of harassment and charging extortionate, mandatory fees to public events.

> 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...)

> They did, significantly, and in some hot spots like San Francisco quite a lot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-crime-decline-c...

That article doesn't say any such thing in the way you are strongly implying it does.

In that it doesn't discuss retail theft at all. Violent crime is down. It refers to property crime, but only one (relatively small, about 11%) segment of property crime is retail theft.

The government threw money to combat "organized retail theft" and you point to a reduction in violent crime as being a result?

Indeed, California itself seems to believe it had no effect: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee... - "reported retail theft remains at roughly the same level as during the 2010s and lower than it was in earlier decades"

I point to a reduction in property crime as being a result. The page you've linked here doesn't attempt to measure retail theft in 2024; it summarizes a report with a data cutoff in 2022.

Notably, if you click into that report, it also illustrates a huge reduction in property crime since California passed its three strikes law in the mid-1990s. That seems like another big example of how we can directly observe "more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer", despite the author's claim that it doesn't.

It really, really seems to me like the author is engaging in the behavior he describes as "copaganda", selectively telling only the stories that fit in with his vision of how public safety ought to work.

Crime rates are not a valid source when they aren't being reported. An example of the problem with only relying on internet data when everyone from SF knows what is happening.

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.

People have been shoplifting for millennia. The very first shop ever created by a caveman probably got stolen from. And people have been caught and getting away with it at some probability forever, too. Why has it all of a sudden generated such a panic?

A large number of shoplifting incidents went viral over the past few years. This drew attention to the long-standing problem of shoplifting, and generated public pressure behind the reformers with long-standing proposals for what should be done to reduce shoplifting. This is how all political change happens. (It's frustrating, of course, for people like the author who don't think the long-standing proposals are a good idea.)

"In its 2024 report, Retail Theft: A Data-Driven Response for California, the Commission found that despite a recent uptick, reported retail theft remains at roughly the same level as during the 2010s and lower than it was in earlier decades."[1] (not sure why they had to post it as a PDF)

1: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee...

Btw does anyone know if TV shows like The Rookie are part of Copaganda? Or if it's just bad writing?