4 ms·

Copaganda, a shorthand for the tendency of police communications officials to make wildly false statements to influence public opinion, is indeed a real issue.

• ceejayoz 4y ago
  Copaganda also describes true but misleading statements, and includes things like news organizations naïvely taking the cops at their word, shows like CSI and Law & Order, etc. In this case, "Any item stolen from you?" seems to include having an Amazon package stolen off your porch, which happens widely (including to me) here in suburban upstate NY too.
  • readthenotes1 4y ago
    Is someone's stealing something off your porch not stealing? This level of crime used to be something we'd attribute to failed communities and not acceptable for civilized people (those living in cities)
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Porch piracy seems the easiest thing in the world to catch especially in the era of work from home and infinite ring cameras. Not bothering indicates nobody really cares because Amazon is subsidizing it.
    • topaz0 4y ago
      Amazon stole (to the court's knowledge) 8.2 million dollars from its workers and was not penalized. Was there a poll about that too?
      • readthenotes1 4y ago
        whataboutism! Or as my mom told me, two wrongs do not make a right
        • topaz0 4y ago
          Extremely relevant here though. It's propaganda in the sense that there is much more media handwringing about a missing package on an upper middle class person's porch than there is about thousands of dollars of wage theft a year from poor workers. It's these misplaced priorities all together that make the propaganda work. Edit to add: this example just happened to be on my mind recently. I intended it as an evocative example of priority setting, not as a thorough proof or something. But there is plenty of other evidence that crime reporting is carried out according to a propagandist program. For example, media critics have carefully surveyed how routine crime statistics are reported, and found that the ones that get headlines are often extremely cherry-picked and reported on out of context. Like "murders in neighborhood x increased 20% this year" is often the headline when murders overall in the area are going down, other crime is down even in that neighborhood, and the 20% is based on a baseline of like 10 murders anyway, so the 20% increase is well within the noise. And of course, they leave out the comparison to ten or thirty years ago, when the rate was substantially higher. Crime reporting is like that year after year, no matter what is happening to crime rates overall. Not to mention that "so and so thinks briefly about reducing police budget" is considered newsworthy -- even when those budget reductions rarely come into effect -- while the norm of police budgets that balloon year after year and are overspent year after year is rarely mentioned.
        • ceejayoz 4y ago
          > Or as my mom told me, two wrongs do not make a right... Sure, but you can learn a lot about a society based on which of the two wrongs they care about.
  • CPLX 4y ago
    What’s misleading about asking people if they’ve had something stolen from them and then printing the results? It’s a bizzare criticism given that the usual approach to determining how much crime has happened is to ask the police department.
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      It’s misleading because headlines like this evoke muggings and breakins more than having your bottle of shampoo disappear from your porch, and because there’s no corresponding rate elsewhere to compare against. Most of the folks in my very low crime neighborhood have still lost a package once every few years. Are we technically crime victims? Sure. Is our area dangerous? lol, no.
      • CPLX 4y ago
        The headline says half of SF residents in survey have been victims of theft. Which is exactly what the survey results said. What's the misleading part. It didn't say muggings or break-ins it said theft. It also didn't ask if people felt their neighborhood was dangerous. That's a different type of question that also isn't necessarily a crime statistic. For example, do you think it's dangerous if there's a deranged person outside your home with a knife claiming he's going to knife the next infant he sees? According to crime statistics that's completely irrelevant to the neighborhood's safety. Different numbers measure different things. It's just such an odd specific criticism to call a survey copaganda, when it appears to be one of the very very few crime related metrics I have read that is NOT collected and communicated by cops.