The Police as Gatekeepers of Information: Immigration Salience and Selective Crime Reporting

Ashrakat Elshehawy, Arun Frey, Violeta Haas, Sascha Riaz and Tobias Roemer
Additional contact information
Ashrakat Elshehawy: Unknown
Arun Frey: Unknown
Violeta Haas: IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Sascha Riaz: Unknown
Tobias Roemer: Unknown

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: What drives the supply of crime news? While prior research focuses on the news media, we study a crucial upstream gatekeeper of information: the police. We argue that the police act as strategic bureaucrats who increase the disclosure of out-group cues (ethnicity, nationality) when immigration is salient to signal competence and transparency to the public. To test this, we use LLMs to annotate a novel dataset of about one million press releases published by local police stations across Germany between 2014 and 2024. Using a regression discontinuity in time design, we demonstrate an increase in out-group cues in police communications (1) following a nationwide shock to immigration salience (the 2015/16 Cologne New Year's Eve assaults), and (2) in the days before regional elections in which immigration is a salient campaign issue. Our findings demonstrate how bureaucratic discretion shapes the supply of politically charged information.

Keywords: bureaucratic politics; immigration; large language models; natural language processing; police (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12-05
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05399885v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05399885v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05399885

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().