Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States

Nicola Mastrorocco and Arianna Ornaghi ()
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Arianna Ornaghi: Department of Economics, University of Warwick

Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department

Abstract: Do the police respond to media coverage of crime? In this paper, we study how a decline in news coverage of local crime affects municipal police departments in the United States. Exogenous variation in local news is from acquisitions of local TV stations by a large broadcast group, Sinclair. To control for other content changes that might be induced by Sinclair but are not municipality-specific, we implement a triple differences-in-differences design that interacts the timing of the acquisitions with an indicator for whether the municipality is covered by the news at baseline, a proxy for exposure to the local news shock. Using a unique dataset of almost 300,000 newscasts, we show that stations that are acquired by Sinclair decrease their coverage of local crime. This matters for policing: after Sinclair enters a media market, covered municipalities experience 10% lower violent crime clearance rates relative to non- covered municipalities. Finally, we provide evidence to suggest that the effect is consistent with a decrease in the salience of crime in the public opinion.

Keywords: Media; accountability; police (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 K42 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-02, Revised 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2020/TEP0720.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2022)
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2021)
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2020)
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tcd:tcduee:tep0720

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