I’m talking about those youtube videos.
Feels like lowkey copaganda to me.
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.
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.
Yes!
Nope. But I do expect them to call out incompetence, misogyny, racism…
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.
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.
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
Those videos have actually shown me how often police investigations are an absolute clown show actually
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.
It shows cases where the police is correctly doing what should be their job.
That’s debatable. I’ve seen a lot of them where they’re interviewing the cop and they say things like “they knew he was guilty in their gut”. I personally don’t think police should be using their gut to investigate crimes. The documentary people only question statements like that if it’s one of the ones about a guy who ended up being innocent.
I’m very anti-police, but the gut instinct and feelings can’t be quantified, it’s a feeling you get after you talk to someone, or hear them speak that says “something feels off and we need to look further into this”.
We’ve all felt it after certain situations. It’s obviously not evidentiary for court, but is a starting point to an investigation. Especially in crazy cases where you may be talking to a person that chops people up in their garage.
Using that tactic on someone with a broken tailight is nonsense though lol.
“something is off. I feel it…” maybe my dude is on the spectrum, maybe has severe social anxiety, maybe it’s Maybelline.
How often is gut-feeling actually just bias and/or bigotry under the surface though? I feel like we shouldn’t use those gut feelings to make judgements, ever, without examining exactly why we’re having that response. The suspect might just be socially awkward or neurodivergent and that gut-feeling is actually just unexamined prejudice.
I agree with you that gut feelings are absolutely important things to acknowledge in general. Unfortunately a lot of people do not let their gut feelings go when presented with further information that contradicts it.
A lot of shows about crime have one cop who had a gut feeling and then dismisses all of the evidence that contradicts it like an alibi or forensics that show it was someone else.
Yup. Plus manufactured drama and entertainment.
When youve only got a hammer, every problem is a nail.
The cringiest thing is when the narrator overanalyze every movement and portary the body language of the criminal as “telltale signs of guilt”, and if the suspect is innocent (some videos also include arrests of innocent people), the narrator immediately say the body posture are “telltale signs of being innocent”. Lmao wtf. Y’all read the entire story before making the documentary, hindsight 20/20.
Can you name some examples of what you’re watching where this happens? You might like JCS Criminal Psychology on YouTube, he covers forensic interviews and goes into detail on how both the interviewer and interviewee act.
I don’t know why we’re so obsessed with using posture and tone to infer criminality when we have perfectly good forehead slope ratios to achieve the exact same thing.
Why use the pseudo-scientific polygraph when the much simpler pseudo-scientific calipers can do the trick? Plus, the racism is included with the calipers, you don’t have to do any work in that regard!
Intuition matters — it’s part of how people make sense of things, and I’d expect investigators to use it to focus their attention. But when cops talk about ‘just knowing’ someone was guilty, that’s not a reliable narrative of how the case actually unfolded. It’s more about self-mythologizing — building a story where they zeroed in on the suspect through instinct alone. That kind of framing works well in interviews and promotion boards, but it (ideally) oversimplifies what real investigation looks like.
There are, of course, counter-examples. But those are usually more the subject of documentaries about injustice in the justice system.
There are, of course, counter-examples. But those are usually more the subject of documentaries about injustice in the justice system.
Yeah that’s why they shouldn’t be using it. Maybe I’m more sensitive to it because I can be really socially awkward but I can’t help but think about how I’d be fucked if I ever ended up the subject of one of these investigations because I have a lot of the same behaviors they use to justify their suspicion towards someone when I get nervous
Yeah. I’m with you there. We don’t display the proper amount of anxiety, either being too detached or overdramatic, and suddenly they are laser focused on us.
“Why did you google how long it takes a person to asphyxiate?”
“I watched a movie where a guy holds his breath and got curious as to whether it was bullshit or not.”
“Why is there a sword in your online cart?”
“It was aspirational. Swords are expensive and I don’t know if I’ll get enjoyment commensurate to the cost.”
“You like big words don’t you. You think you’re pretty smart, eh? You think you’re smarter than me?”
“W—well… I mean… I don’t have enough evid—”
Nightstick to the face. “Stop resisting arrest!”
My point was more about unreliable narration than the interaction between gut reactions and neurodivergence. That’s a legitimate concern. One hopes that the non-gut-reaction part of the process vindicates us.
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
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”.
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
There’s nothing in this person’s comment that sounds like they’re trying to refute anything.
I think they can speak for themselves, lol…
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.
They might just rely on police reports Because they don’t have the resources to do actual investigation.
Yeah. They definitely are biased towards the cops, probably because that’s where they get most of their information from when writing the scripts.
I watch them anyways, but with a healthy dose of skepticism. I really wish there was an explicitly anti-cop true crime channel.
Ironically I usually end up leaving those videos still irritated at police for failing to do even the most basic detective work. But I also used to watch COPS as a kid because even back then I was like “what the fuck are these pigs doing, what a bunch of monsters” but then I later found out that it was supposed to make cops look good? Like really?!? 😆
I was overhearing a crime video my grandma was watching and holy shit the narrator could not be verbally sucking cop dick harder
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.
No, not just you. I saw someone comment on this years, and years ago, calling “Copaganda”. They were right, and so is everyone else I’ve seen talk about it, the way these documentaries glomp all over them like a 5-year-old with a hero complex is fucking pathetic coming from adults.
John Oliver does a great segment on the TV show ‘Law and Order’ and this exact phenomenon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I
Always has been
Youtube varies from genuinely good content, to generic filler, to complete and utter trash, and there is much of the latter two because it’s not curated by anyone (other than by algorithms).
Try “We Own This City” from David Simon, if you want a documentary on the police that isn’t propaganda.
