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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...)
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?
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.
Teen Vogue has been doing incredible journalism for years now. Seriously. At least 10 years (I remember they lit on fire when DT was elected the first time), possibly 20. They're good enough to be on my rotation of news sites I don't visit every day but do visit regularly.
It’s intriguing that certain publications often surprise us with exceptional journalism that diverges from their primary brand. Rolling Stone Magazine, for instance, has produced remarkable content unrelated to music.
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
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.
"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)
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.)
Every one that I've seen (which is several, but a long way from comprehensive—there are a hell of a lot of them) features the main characters frequently and deliberately violating suspects' rights, both Constitutional and otherwise, in order to get the evidence that they "know" has to be there, with widely varying degrees of ostensible justification being provided.
FWIW, The Wire strikes me as very much not “copaganda.” It has the rights violations you describe, among other things, but the thrust of the presentation seems to be: “this is real, this is routine, and this definitely is not working.”
Let's completely sidestep and ignore the issue of news release accuracy or completeness by police departments.
Let's talk about money... I think it's a open question as to whether or not it's necessary for so much money and time be spent on informing the public. It seems to me that it should not be so expensive or time consuming to release facts to the public in a timely fashion.
Who would be the target if that was the case? The stereo-typical right-winger is anti-government and pro-cop. The stereo-typical left-winger is pro-government and anti-cop. So neither would be a good target for anti-gov anti-cop literature.
It'd be awesome if the target was the non-stereo-typical people.
Both newer audiences were blinded in several spots and are prevented by group speech to acknowledge some realities. I'm not from the USA, so I see things from a vantage point. I'm not inside the mess.
The book preaches for the identitary leftist movement, historically associated with being oppressed. It capitalizes on the popular notion that police is the cause of their oppression.
The domestication effect narrative induces this audience to think less of the class struggle and more similarly to the right rethoric (less police, less police bureaucracy, less government). They've been long-term blinded. It's so obvious.
Eh, it has its purpose. One of the strongest arguments for keeping the 21-year drinking age is it teaches every generation of youth that the law is neither infallible nor uncircumventible. Learning to suss out submarines is basic media literacy. The form of the pedagogy is almost beside the point.
The book seems to be a cheap cash grab designed to monetize on the "cops are mean and corrupt" rethoric.
It's the modern equivalent of a wallet with the silk screened face of Che Guevara on it. It only serves to boost a domesticated leftist rethoric that is very much under control of the media itself (media does their anti-cop pieces once in a while to appease the pseudo-revolutionary youth).
Although police brutality and it's relation to sensationalist media are totally related, the book does nothing to solve it. It capitalizes on it. If anyone solves it, then the author has no next book to publish.
> the modern equivalent of a wallet with the silk screened face of Che Guevara on it
Sure. And I'd argue someone with that wallet is more likely to be knowledgeable about various elements of American and Latin American sociopolitical history than someone who doesn't. Even if just from reactions they get to it.
> It only serves to boost a domesticated leftist rethoric
In the short run. In the long run it breeds healthy scepticism among the intelligent. (It probably also radicalises some idiots. But I don't really have a systemic solution to stupid people.)
The separation of the left into an intellectual elite and a mass following is largely part of the domestication effect I was talking about.
The mere suggestion of a caste of "the intelligent leftist" is a cultural grenade designed to separate worker unions and create intrigue. I don't buy it. I believe intelligence does not come in a caste system and anyone can achieve it. The left _as a whole_ was domesticated.
I consider myself more of an ombudsman of the left rethoric than an "intelligent". My observations are very simple and very direct. I could explain it without the wallet metaphor (dude, you totally hand-picked that! It's hilarious).
> Forty percent of these gang members are domestic abusers, routinely assaulting their spouses or children
Bet you can't source that. At least, in a manner that matches your point about the 1M officers in America.
How do I know? Because I know the exact study that the number is derived from that people blindly repeat, and let's just say it is not a particularly powerful analysis.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325717460_Officer_i...
It’s even worse. The entire system covers up the gang members crime. And even when convicted, it’s often for a lesser crime. There gang members walk back to the street, fully armed and ready to kill the citizens they’re legally not liable to protect.
Apparently HN hasn’t gotten their fill of humans hiding behind a piece of paper murdering other innocents, yet.
>Because I know the exact study that the number is derived from that people blindly repeat, and let's just say it is not a particularly powerful analysis.
Because it was self reported?
Considering the number of news articles I have seen, where the police as an organization intimidate women preventing them from coming forward about domestic violence, I imagine that the number is way way way too low.
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/
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.
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.
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 much simpler. People notice they can just take things with no consequences...so they do.
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.
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 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.
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...)
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"
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qODLKGy8kqo
>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.
1: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee...
Every one that I've seen (which is several, but a long way from comprehensive—there are a hell of a lot of them) features the main characters frequently and deliberately violating suspects' rights, both Constitutional and otherwise, in order to get the evidence that they "know" has to be there, with widely varying degrees of ostensible justification being provided.
My ire is more at the box usage than the content, honestly. The second oldest profession also involves sales. Just snake oil instead of self.
Heed Kendrick: turn the TV off.
Let's talk about money... I think it's a open question as to whether or not it's necessary for so much money and time be spent on informing the public. It seems to me that it should not be so expensive or time consuming to release facts to the public in a timely fashion.
Just a little wrong here or there in the name of profit to ease the heavy burden of having the power to shape opinion.
It'd be awesome if the target was the non-stereo-typical people.
Both newer audiences were blinded in several spots and are prevented by group speech to acknowledge some realities. I'm not from the USA, so I see things from a vantage point. I'm not inside the mess.
The book preaches for the identitary leftist movement, historically associated with being oppressed. It capitalizes on the popular notion that police is the cause of their oppression.
The domestication effect narrative induces this audience to think less of the class struggle and more similarly to the right rethoric (less police, less police bureaucracy, less government). They've been long-term blinded. It's so obvious.
Eh, it has its purpose. One of the strongest arguments for keeping the 21-year drinking age is it teaches every generation of youth that the law is neither infallible nor uncircumventible. Learning to suss out submarines is basic media literacy. The form of the pedagogy is almost beside the point.
The book seems to be a cheap cash grab designed to monetize on the "cops are mean and corrupt" rethoric.
It's the modern equivalent of a wallet with the silk screened face of Che Guevara on it. It only serves to boost a domesticated leftist rethoric that is very much under control of the media itself (media does their anti-cop pieces once in a while to appease the pseudo-revolutionary youth).
Although police brutality and it's relation to sensationalist media are totally related, the book does nothing to solve it. It capitalizes on it. If anyone solves it, then the author has no next book to publish.
Sure. And I'd argue someone with that wallet is more likely to be knowledgeable about various elements of American and Latin American sociopolitical history than someone who doesn't. Even if just from reactions they get to it.
> It only serves to boost a domesticated leftist rethoric
In the short run. In the long run it breeds healthy scepticism among the intelligent. (It probably also radicalises some idiots. But I don't really have a systemic solution to stupid people.)
The mere suggestion of a caste of "the intelligent leftist" is a cultural grenade designed to separate worker unions and create intrigue. I don't buy it. I believe intelligence does not come in a caste system and anyone can achieve it. The left _as a whole_ was domesticated.
I consider myself more of an ombudsman of the left rethoric than an "intelligent". My observations are very simple and very direct. I could explain it without the wallet metaphor (dude, you totally hand-picked that! It's hilarious).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_stick_ideology
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Bet you can't source that. At least, in a manner that matches your point about the 1M officers in America.
How do I know? Because I know the exact study that the number is derived from that people blindly repeat, and let's just say it is not a particularly powerful analysis.
Apparently HN hasn’t gotten their fill of humans hiding behind a piece of paper murdering other innocents, yet.
Because it was self reported?
Considering the number of news articles I have seen, where the police as an organization intimidate women preventing them from coming forward about domestic violence, I imagine that the number is way way way too low.
It is a photo of NYPD. Some of the officers are wearing their vests over their uniforms and some aren't. There are also some wearing jackets.
- The black officer's hands in the back are "possibly weird until you zoom in" - it's just the shadow/low-light hiding his pinky.
- outfits all different.... that's... fine?
- "bunch of other weird details"... downvoted because you didn't even try...