Book Description

From the Keystones Kops of early cinema to brodcast news coverage of the beating of Rodney King, the media's capacity to amplify police misconduct contributes to police reform. Good Cop/Bad Cop offers the first extended review of the influence of the mass media on local and federal law enforcement. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and drawing upon popular characterizations of law enforcement from movies, the press, television, and literature, this book argues that police reform is inextricably linked to the rise and technological development of the mass media. It illustrates how new forms of media communication generate new forms of information about police practices while revealing this information to the public for the first time. Periodically, this new information portrays law enforcement in a less-than-favorable light, ushering in public demands for police reform.But while the mass media exert an influence upon police practices, law enforcement officials also exert a powerful influence upon media coverage of crime and justice policies and practices. This book documents law enforcement's close monitoring of the police image as well as attempts by government officials to utilize mass media to further their crime control objectives. It also uses data garnered from a national study on police-media relations to provide a comprehensive discussion of the public relations skills performed daily by police media spokespersons. Unique in its coverage of the history of policing, Good Cop/Bad Cop casts the mass media as central to police reform and argues that a free and independent press is a prerequisite to innovations and improvements in policing.