Is it just me, or does crime documentaries have a biased "pro-cop" vibe to it?

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.

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.

im just not a fan of the true crime industry. it makes me feel ill

So do the fictional detective shows that are constantly popular for decades now. Propaganda.

But I love my British and Scandinavian detective series. They're great!
- You might like Varg Veum.
Me and partner watch a lot of drama series…crime/detective/cop stuff is so dominant it’s unreal.

JCS criminal psychology is 100% copaganda. It presents cop interrogation techniques as a kind of science, as if the Reid technique wasn’t all about deliberately misunderstanding body language and coercing innocent people to confess.

Skip Intro has a good series on Copaganda. Talks about TV shows/fiction, but a lot of the messaging is the same.

Cops exist to protect property, not you.

If you want a good non-copaganda documentary though, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line is a worthwhile classic.

huh interesting, I always took the vibe of JCS to be "these are the dirty tricks they pull, shut the fuck up and get a lawyer because you won't win in an interrogation room"
maybe that's me projecting into it though idk

If you like true crime and also someone not afraid to call out when the cops fuck up, I recommend Bailey Sarian. Love her "Honey let me TELL YOU" vibe, but that'll be a turn off for some people so YMMV.

I don't recall cops coming up much in Barely Sociable but he's great too though he hasn't posted in a while, and his stuff is less true crime and more mysterious stuff in general.

Netflix had a few really good ones that showed how the cops lied or bungled things.

There’s a YT video by Fern that goes over a story about some german cops burning a drunken black man alive and covering it up. Non-copaganda crime documentaries exist, although they’re rare. I love crime media, but I always take it with a grain of salt since the genre is generally pretty biased.

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.
- Bailey Sarian takes the investigation bungled by police angle most of the time, but yeah, there is a lot of copaganda around.
Nope. But I do expect them to call out incompetence, misogyny, racism...
Yes!
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.
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:
  src
  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.
- 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.

I mean these tend to focus on actual crimes and not like police coverups or misbehavior. I bet though police misbehavior documentaries would get good traffic though. I can tell you there are some good subjects of topic from chicago.

focus on actual crimes and not like police coverups or misbehavior.
I would consider the latter to be actual crimes. But I understand your meaning.

Copaganda is real

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.

John Oliver does a great segment on the TV show 'Law and Order' and this exact phenomenon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I

They might just rely on police reports Because they don't have the resources to do actual investigation.

They are high-key copaganda. It’s overt and blatant.

What portion of these documentaries talk about false convictions, for instance?

Bingo, the subjects of crime documentaries are sometimes very difficult to paint in even a neutral light. Most producers don't even try, as if it were an honest effort to run their tongues over the cop's shoes the entire time. I think that the 2011 documentary from Werner Hertzog (Into the Abyss) is the best I've seen in recent years, given the way he's able to at least portray the subjects impartially.
The “Paradise Lost” doc about the West Memphis three was a good example of false convictions, fueled by satanic panic.
Yeah, there's always the underlying faith in the system in these types of stories. They assume that if someone was found guilty, they must have done it. The only ones that I see that go against that are ones where's it's been proven that they were falsely convicted, and even in those it's usually framed as some freak one-in-a-million accident without anyone at fault.

Listen to some about MMIW from Indigenous perspectives, like the Stolen podcast. It depends on who you're listening to but cops drop the ball a lot when it comes to finding indigenous women and reporters that are worth their shit don't tip toe around that. Many unsolved cases have less of a bias towards cops in general I think.

I also think that Casefile is actually pretty unbiased, though I haven't listened in a while, but I remember hearing a lot about how cops fuck up on those.

I've been watching The Blacklist with my wife. I've remarked that it's very honest in it's portrayal of law enforcement, in that they are all dishonest, corrupt, and criminal.

Not really a fan of the show, but I love James Spader's portrayal of Raymond Reddington. I lose interest when he's not in the scene. Just wanting to watch him has gotten me through to season 9.

I’m so tired of people opposing a “pro-cop” bias. You can be against corruption in police departments without being pro-criminal. Police are the people we should be supporting, because they enact the force of law, which is what keeps society stable. That there is corruption among the police just means we need to attack that problem directly, not get rid of police. Those who want to get rid of police are anarchist fuckwits who want crime lords to rule society, and they should be dealt with the same way we deal with criminals.

why do you think not being "pro-cop" makes you pro-criminal?
- If you’re simply against the establishment of having police, you're by default “pro-criminal.”
Those who want to get rid of police are anarchist fuckwits who want crime lords to rule society, and they should be dealt with the same way we deal with criminals.
Oh yeah, that makes total sense, if someone doesn't agree with you they're a criminal. /s
The full expression is a few bad apples spoil the bunch. Police are thoroughly corrupt in the United States and it could be argued with plenty of corroborating evidence that it is a feature and not a bug.
Your little piggies stood by en masse in Uvalde while eight year olds were slaughtered. But you better believe they'll be cashing their overtime checks after assisting the ICE raids to help haul off undocumented Grandmas.
That the stable society you love that they help uphold?
ACAB
- Even if 100% of the police officers in the country need to be replaced, we still need police. Are you truly debating this?
Wait. You mean to tell me there's corruption in the corruption factory??
Sooo..Do you prefer the flavor of brown polish, or black?
- You’re an idealistic moron. Find me a society that exists on a scale like a modern nation that doesn’t have police. Your fantastical communism exists on a kibbutz and nowhere else.
This is the Internet, get the fuck out of here with a practical and realistic opinion.
- But I like shitting on the sidewalk. 😉

Sure, cop shows are like that as well. They are so unrealistic.

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?!? 😆

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.

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.

Always has been

I don't watch those, but from how it sounds, my expectation is that they tell it from the cops perspective. Because surely it wouldn't be from the criminal's perspective? Perspective would bias it already

I mean they do try to solve crimes? So if the "cops" win, it is good?

Yea... but the cops attitude and tone of voice is kinda disgusting, and they treat everyone like criminals, even when questioning the victims. Their bad behavior never gets pointed out.

Skip Intro has a good series about this.

I've had the opposite with the ones I've watched on Netflix

Old but if you haven't seen Making a Murderer you should give it a watch.
- I have! The first season was great

Have you ever noticed that these crime documentaries are anti-crime??

LOL

You're being disingenuous. I think what OP is getting at might be both that cops are never in the wrong, and that the guilty is always clear.
At this point, I'm tired of glorification of police. They get it wrong. A fucking lot.
There's a good reason Brooklyn 99 ended. At least that had the balls to do it.
- Which was weird, because honestly that flattered the police in no way.
- It would be cool seeing a documentary about a serial killer where they're all "yeah he was based as hell ACAB"

~~what's using ableist language a sure sign of?~~
thanks mods ❤️