Co-opting “Danger” in Specialized Media for the Police

Abstract

Widespread protests for racial justice during the summer of 2020 raised foundational questions about the role of the police in U.S. society. In this article, the authors analyze an underexplored body of media representations that perform ideological work in this context. The authors examine specialized media targeting a law enforcement audience, asking how news articles published on the Web site Police1 represented the police profession and the protests for racial justice over a two-year period. The authors map major themes using topic modeling and qualitative content analysis. They find that the articles represent police work as dangerous and heroic and as simultaneously professional, legitimate, and accountable to broader legal and political systems. In addition, articles disproportionately represent the dangers experienced by police officers relative to the dangers caused by policing. Co-opting the concept of danger may reinforce the warrior mentality of police occupational culture, while precluding recognition of the patterned and racialized harms of policing.

The summer of 2020 saw the emergence of one of the largest protest movements in the history of the United States (Buchanan, Quoctrung, and Jugal 2020). Building upon earlier waves of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists and scholars framed the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery as symptoms of an ongoing emergency of anti-Blackness, state violence, and racial capitalism (Phelps, Ward, and Frazier 2021; Taylor 2016). Analyses of these crises homed in on the police, with many arguing that policing is inherently racist and beyond reform. Instead, movements advocated for shrinking the role of the police in society, with some calling to eliminate it altogether (Kaba 2020; Vitale 2021). The protests for racial justice brought conflicting constructions of modern policing into sharp relief. Critical perspectives that centered the harms and dangers caused by the police came up against enduring ideologies of crime and state power that have long worked to legitimize policing (Hall et al. 1978; Hirshfield and Simon 2010; Manning 2001). Many stakeholders—from activists and scholars to government and law enforcement officials—have navigated this terrain in debates over the scope and role of policing in U.S. society.

In this article, we ask how an underexplored yet ideologically important source of media represented the policing profession and the protests for racial justice during this time of upheaval. We analyze news articles curated specifically for a law enforcement audience and published on the Web site Police1. Like other sources of news media, articles on this site construct social problems through the signification work of framing (Benford and Snow 2000; Conrad 1997; Yazdiha 2020). We attend to how these articles represent various ideas of “danger,” a common preoccupation among the police (Sierra-Arévalo 2021). We also situate articles on Police1 as a form of “specialized” or “group” media: content that includes a specific subgroup of society as “both sponsor and main prospective audience” (Fine and Kleinman 1981). Group media reflect and construct collective identity and cultural discourse for group members (Corzine 1981). We examine how articles on the site characterize the police profession, amid widely circulating tropes of the police as “warriors” or “guardians” (Carlson 2020), and alongside critical perspectives calling for police abolition. We suggest that specialized media offer a novel entry point for analyses of audience-specific ideological work, including the construction of social problems and collective identities.

We analyze the articles published on Police1 through an inductive, mixed-methods approach. We begin by modeling topics in the entire corpus of articles published on the site over a two-year period between 2020 and 2021 (n = 7,821). We also model a subset of articles related to protests (n = 1,030). Topic modeling allows us to visualize themes across the body of articles on the basis of those articles’ relationships to one another. We supplemented our topic models with a qualitative content analysis of titles that fall within major topics. We find that the articles on Police1 represent police work as dangerous, heroic, and masculine, and as simultaneously professional and accountable to broader legal and political systems. Although articles recognize cases of police violence and misconduct, we suggest that representations of policing in group media ultimately co-opt the concept of “danger” by placing outsized emphasis on the dangers faced by police officers relative to the dangers caused by policing. Such disproportionate representations may reinforce the “warrior” mentality of police occupational culture, while precluding recognition of patterned and racialized harms of police violence.

Ideological Work in News and Specialized Media

News media are part of a nexus of factors that shape the public’s understanding of salient social “problems,” often in ways that reflect dominant discourses and interests (Conrad 1997; Hall 1982; Spector and Kitsuse 2017). Like many institutional entities, the media engage in framing: signification that identifies problems and attributes blame, articulates proposed solutions, and calls others to action (Benford and Snow 2000). For example, media and government representations of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a White mob razed the prominent Black neighborhood of Greenwood, framed “the Black community as a problem to be disposed of or strictly controlled” (Messer and Bell 2010:857). Framing in New York Times stories shifted after 9/11, locating social problems in racialized Muslim bodies and group pathology (Yazdiha 2020). In accounting for the processes that structure media representations, scholars have attended to political-economic dynamics such as the rise of major media conglomerates; organizational and interactional dynamics including the mutually beneficial relationships between reporters and government officials; and cultural dynamics such as prevailing symbols and struggles over meaning (Gamson et al. 1992; Schudson 2002). Collectively, these factors highlight the connections between news media and powerful economic, political, and social interests. They also point to the ideological consequences of media, which can incorporate dominant ways of viewing the world, while simultaneously representing extant social relations and inequalities as “outside of history: unchangeable, inevitable, and natural” (Hall 1982:76).

The ideological work of news media is particularly pronounced in the realm of crime and policing. The news is integral to the social construction of crime problems (Baranauskas and Drakulich 2018; Christensen, Schmidt, and Henderson 1982; Fishman 1978; Sacco 1995). Crime is a “durable news commodity,” and crime reporting is influenced by the dramatic value of events, the conventions of commercial media, and access to sources, including the police (Fishman 1978; Sacco 1995:142). This often results in sensational stories that overstate the prevalence of violence and perpetuate racial stereotypes and hierarchies (Colburn and Melander 2018; Jewkes 2015; White, Stuart, and Morrissey 2021). The news also plays an important role in legitimizing policing. Although media coverage can construct problems of police brutality (Lawrence 2023), representations of law enforcement often rationalize police violence, reinforce the police mandate, and uphold the myth of police-based crime control (Hirshfield and Simon 2010; Manning 2001). Indeed, police acknowledge that they can influence the flow of information to the external environment through relationships with the media (Chermak and Weiss 2005). In short, the news can perpetuate ideologies of crime and state power (Hall et al. 1978). The case of crime and policing highlights the salience of the media to the ongoing construction of social problems.

Media also contribute to the formation of collective identities. Here, we turn attention to specialized or group media: communication channels oriented toward a particular subcultural group (Fine and Kleinman 1981; Goldstein and Haveman 2013). Common forms of group media include ethnic newspapers, religious magazines, political party literature, and publications for occupational or hobby groups. In contrast to the mass media, which incorporates several subcultural groups into its prospective audience, members of a distinct subgroup act as “both sponsor and main prospective audience” in specialized media (Fine and Kleinman 1981). This difference informs the representations of group members. Fine and Kleinman (1981) suggested that mass media rely on spokespersons of subcultures and present them in a way that makes sense to a general audience. By contrast, with a narrower and more homogenous audience, subgroup members are more likely to participate in the production of specialized media, and to use media to interact with other group members. Consequently, “specialized media are more likely to present a picture consistent with views of the members of their subsociety” (Fine and Kleinman 1981:175).

Yet group media does more than cohere existing perspectives; it further constructs the group itself. By connecting otherwise distant members, specialized media can increase the salience of subcultural identifications and transform “atomized individuals into a self-identified collectively” (Corzine 1981:172). Studies have illustrated the connections between the Black press and enhanced racial consciousness, ethnic periodicals and affiliations with other ethnic group members, and LGBTQ media and the formation of new community institutions (see Corzine 1981 for a review). Beyond the effects of cohering a community, group media offer resources, discourses, and symbols that are productive of a cultural field, versus merely responsive to it. For instance, Kirkpatrick (2017) argued that British video gaming magazines were key mediators in the process of encoding gender bias into the values and practices of gaming culture in the late 1980s. Shi (2009) showed how the content of two Chinese-language publications influenced the political opinions and voting decisions of a sample of Chinese immigrant women in San Francisco. Although the reception and interpretation of media can vary considerably across audience members, media offer a set of tools that individuals may draw upon to make sense of their situations and to guide their actions (Watson and Bargiela-Chiappini 1998). As the foregoing review suggests, news and specialized media offer opportunities to explore representations of collective identity, and the ongoing construction of social problems. We apply these insights to the case of policing.

Framing “Danger” in Policing

We focus on how group media for law enforcement frames the role of the police in society, and the “dangers” involved in policing. In recent years, police officials and reformers have debated the function of the police through “warrior” and “guardian” analogies. The warrior mindset positions the police as confronting a hostile world filled with potentially violent enemies (Stoughton 2014; Wall 2020). It reflects enduring aspects of police subculture, including an orientation toward crime fighting and coercive authority, preoccupation with danger and death, a masculine ethos, social isolation from the public, and loyalty to fellow officers (Loftus 2010). In light of the hazards of warrior cops, many have called for enhanced accountability and oversight structures, additional training, and a cultural shift to a “guardian” mentality, which frames the police as community protectors (President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing 2015; Rahr and Rice 2015; Stone 2011). Many members of the public, and police departments themselves, express an aspiration toward this vision of the police function, captured in the common motto to “protect and serve” (Meares and Prowse 2021). Yet Despite the distinctions between “warrior” and “guardian” tropes, Carlson (2020) showed that both are frames of police masculinity that make sense of the police prerogative and different kinds of violence.

Hence, debates over the police function include corollary constructions of problems of violence or “danger” in policing. Fixation on danger is a long-standing feature of police work (Skolnick 1966; Van Maanen 1978). Sierra-Arévalo (2021) named this preoccupation the “danger imperative—a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety” (p. 70). Here, “danger” refers to “individuals and their actions that stand to do physical harm to officers” (p. 74). Officers are socialized into the danger imperative through formal training and informal culture, both of which emphasize an omnipresent risk of deadly encounters (Stoughton 2014). The danger imperative can reinforce the warrior mentality and the boundaries between the police and the public, as officers approach every situation as a threat. Yet the “guardian” framing of the police also implicates dangers. Here, the police see themselves as protectors, with the ability to reduce the dangers posed to potential victims. In practice, these multiple understandings of danger evoke racialized constructions of criminals and victims, with law enforcement officials framing their role as warriors when confronting Black and brown “bad guys” in urban contexts, and guardians when saving “good”—and implicitly White—kids from gun violence (Carlson 2020:414). Such constructions of danger, whether it is directed at officers or at “innocent” members of the public, both reinscribe the place of the police in society and legitimize officers’ capacity for coercive force.

By contrast, recent events including the murder of George Floyd, the protests for racial justice, and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have elevated alternative understandings of the dangers of policing. During the summer of 2020, scholars and activists centered the dangers caused by the police, with a particular focus on racial violence. This version of danger highlights dynamics like the disproportionate use of lethal force against Black, Native American, and Latino men (Edwards, Lee, and Esposito 2019; Harrell and Davis 2020), as well as “slow violence”: the diffuse race- and class-based harms of policing on individuals, families, and communities (Kramer and Remster 2022). Coverage of the U.S. Capitol riot framed the participation of off-duty police officers as endangering democracy and the rule of law (Westervelt 2021). The protests for racial justice ultimately raised foundational questions about the role of the police in society. Critical perspectives framed policing as intrinsically racist, vested in upholding race and class hierarchies, and ineffective at producing public safety (Bell, Beckett, and Stuart 2021; Kaba 2020; Vitale 2021). Discourses of police abolition and defunding framed shrinking the scope of policing as the solution to the problems and dangers caused by the police.

Amid these foundational struggles over the meaning of policing, what representations emerge in group media for law enforcement? In this article, we conduct an inductive analysis of themes in news articles published on a Web site with a police audience. Our examination of specialized media offers an opportunity to unveil the ideological work unfolding in this virtual space, including representations of the police identity, and the social construction of problems and dangers in policing. We focus specifically on how articles framed the role of the police in society, and the protests that unfolded following the murder of George Floyd.

Data and Methods

We analyze news articles published on Police1, a Web site that self-describes as the “#1 resource for law enforcement online” (Police1 2022). The site curates news articles and analysis on law enforcement topics, and it compiles information on job opportunities, policing products, grants, and training. Some content on the site is designated “Law Enforcement Only,” and official membership requires verification of employment with a police department. The site claims more than 650,000 registered members and 2 million visitors per month. Social media accounts affirm its reach: the Police1 Facebook page has more than 800,000 followers. To put these numbers in perspective, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that just over 665,000 police and sheriff patrol officers worked in the United States in 2021 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022). Although the pool of visitors to Police1 is broader—likely including many nonpolice users—the expansive reach of the site and its verified membership suggest that it effectively appeals to its target group of law enforcement. The site amplifies this idea through a page of testimonials from registered members. Comments associated with identified law enforcement officers make assertions like, “all of our patrol divisions follow on Facebook and regularly discuss material,” and “I start each working day by reviewing Police One. This is the only daily source of information regarding current issues in law enforcement” (Police1 2023).

Police1 is owned and run by Lexipol, a private company that provides policy manuals and training for public safety agencies. Lexipol is a leading police policy maker, contracting with 3,000 public safety agencies in 2018 (Eagly and Schwartz 2018). Notably, Lexipol’s manuals and trainings focus on liability risk management (Eagly and Schwartz 2018). Promotional materials on the Police1 site reflect this orientation. Though a private entity, we nevertheless see Lexipol’s ownership of Police1 as salient to its status as a form of group media. The site and its parent company hold police officers as their primary prospective audience. As a sponsor, Lexipol is embedded in the field of public safety. The company’s corporate interests and experiences in appealing to law enforcement presumably shape content to resonate with the police.

We focus specifically on the articles in a “breaking news” section featured prominently on the Police1 home page. Articles on the site are curated from several sources. Most commonly, stories are published by the Associated Press or by local news outlets such as the Kansas City Star, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Star Tribune, to name a few. In addition, the news section includes in-house articles and analyses written by police officials and Police1 staff writers. These pieces are often more editorial in nature. We include them in our analysis because they remain germane to the question of emergent meanings across material published in the “breaking news” section. Our inductive analysis draws on the universe of stories published between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021. This two-year period allows us to examine the content of the article corpus before, during, and after the 2020 protests for racial justice. In total, we analyzed all 7,821 stories published on the site, as well as 1,030 articles related to protests. ¹

We began by modeling topics in all of the articles in the corpus and then the subset of protest-related articles to identify major themes. A topic model is any statistical model that uses semantic meaning in a large body of text to discover abstract themes or concepts. Topic modeling is a particularly useful tool when researchers want to analyze latent systems of meaning in a voluminous corpus of textual data. This is because topic modeling is automated and inductive; algorithms can process enormous collections of documents, and they do not code for predetermined themes. Instead, they unearth constellations of words that tend to co-occur, organizing these patterns into “topics” (Mohr and Bogdanov 2013). There are many affinities between topic modeling and sociological analyses of meaning. As DiMaggio, Nag, and Blei (2013) describe, “in their emphasis on relationality, topic models capture the insight, shared by linguistics and much of cultural sociology, that meanings emerge out of relations rather than residing within words” (p. 578). Given these capacities, topic modeling has been productively applied to analyses of representations and framing in media (DiMaggio et al. 2013; Scoville et al. 2022; Yazdiha 2020). In our case, it allows us to analyze frames in the Police1 corpus inductively, without imposing our preexisting assumptions onto the data.

Topic modeling unfolds through several steps. The first step is to vectorize the raw text of each article into numerical data that are compatible with topic modeling algorithms. In the field of information retrieval, “term frequency–inverse document frequency” (TF-IDF) remains standard for topic modeling and a wealth of other tasks. TF-IDF can be decomposed into two parts: the first is “term frequency,” which measures how important any given term is in any given document and refers to the raw count of that word in that document divided by all of the words in the document. This measure assumes that the amount of times a word is mentioned in a text is directly proportional to the weight that term has in the whole text. ² The second is “inverse document frequency,” which measures how unique any given word is to the document or documents in which it occurs and is calculated as the inverse of the amount of documents in which that word occurs. These two descriptions are then multiplied together to create a vector representation of each word as it pertains to each document. For the Police1 corpus, we took each article as its own document, then created a TF-IDF representation of the whole corpus using only the top 2,000 words with the highest TF-IDF scores. This final product of the TF-IDF algorithm is called a document-term matrix (DTM), as it is made up of, on the columns, the scores by each word and, on the rows, the scores by each document.

Once the text was vectorized, we could begin to model topics. We tried multiple topic modeling approaches and found the best results with non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), though results were similar across approaches. ³ The NMF algorithm asks what document matrix, W and what word matrix H would need to be multiplied together so that we arrive back at our original DTM. In other words, it attempts to group those words which would have to occur together in such a pattern so as to produce the original DTM. Importantly, this process requires the user to input the amount of topics they think is appropriate for the text. Otherwise, NMF would return its approximation of the exact same DTM, with each “topic” comprising just a single word. Instead, topic modeling seeks to project this approximation into the predefined amount of topics, so it must group together words which have a high probability of occurring together.

The number of topics to include in a model is not a given, and analysts aim to balance “granularity and interpretability” (Scoville et al. 2022:6). Farrell (2016) recommended selecting the number of topics on the basis of “a process of recursive interpretation of the model’s results based on prior findings” (p. 94). Following this “recursive” and subjective procedure, we observed that nine topics reflected the latent clustering of themes in the corpus and gave resolution to a subset of articles relating to protests and general public unrest following national events. Finally, once we decided on a topic model, we were able to go back and reassign each article with a topic label based on the vectorization of that article. This labeling gave us a method to return to the text not chronologically, as the articles had been arranged before, but rather on the basis of the topic which each article was most likely to be related to.

To visualize these results, we plotted the probability that any given article would be a part of a certain topic by week. Then to make general trends easier to see, we passed these probabilities through a Gaussian filter and used those altered probabilities as the y-axis in the figures below. In the field of signal processing, this relatively simple filter is designed to isolate signal from noise by minimizing outlier values while maximizing values closer to the mean, along a normal or Gaussian distribution, in our case, with sigma, or variance, equal to 1. This technique allowed us to see general trends in the data without having to account for week-to-week variations in the probability distributions.

Although topic modeling is a useful technique for exploring a voluminous corpus of text, interpretation of topics is facilitated by human understanding of the data. To this end, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of article titles featuring salient words. Seeing the words within a topic as related and often co-occurring, we selected a subset of words from each topic that were the most probable and substantively meaningful. For instance, in a topic that corresponds to “danger” (topic 2 in the model of the complete corpus) we selected the words shoot and suspect—compared with other less probable and salient words such as man and vehicle—and then identified article titles and subtitles featuring these words. This produced a subset of 386 articles, whose titles we analyzed through a combination of inductive and deductive analysis. Further inductive analysis allowed us to add precision to the topic by identifying emergent subthemes. In the case of the “danger” topic, we found stories that pertained to several types of gun violence: general criminal incidents, incidents targeting officers, and stories of police use of force. Qualitative analysis also enabled deductive coding rooted in extant theory and literature. We could look for frames of “danger,” such as the danger imperative versus the racialized dangers caused by policing. We engaged in a similar content analysis of titles in the protest articles. For instance, we analyzed titles that included the word protester, Portland, or capitol, corresponding to three major peaks in the topic model.

Our analysis of article titles is thus not representative of the entire corpus; by selecting keywords from each topic, we omit titles that contain other words within the topic and articles that include keywords in the main text, but not the title. The number of titles analyzed as a subset within each topic may not be proportional to the topic’s frequency in the corpus. We also did not conduct a qualitative analysis of every topic from the models, instead focusing on those that were particularly prevalent or relevant. Hence, we interpret the title analysis as capturing a small, but important fraction of articles associated with a topic. Despite this limitation, the title analysis allows us to systematically describe variation across titles associated with the same specific words, which we see as a valuable means of illustrating related representations and frames. In the following discussion, we draw on findings from both the topic modeling and the qualitative content analysis as we present an overview of major themes in the Police1 news corpus, followed by analyses of the articles that specifically pertain to the protests.

Findings

Representing Policing as Dangerous yet Professional

Our topic model of the entire corpus of articles revealed several emergent themes (see Figure 1). As would be expected, prominent topics corresponded to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (topic 7) and the protests for racial justice (topic 8). The probability that a document would exist in these topics increased in expected ways alongside the timing of the first wave of COVID-19 in the United States and the murder of George Floyd and subsequent mobilization through the summer of 2020. Other topics of interest included topic 2, which we labeled “danger” given the high probability of words associated with shootings, crime, and injury; topic 9, which we labeled “family”; and topics 1, 4, and 6, which we see as associated with the police professional field through their respective emphasis on training and experience, political processes, and legal dynamics. In the following discussion, we explore each of these themes in greater detail on the basis of the qualitative content analysis. We exclude topics 3 and 5, which appeared to deal with promotional content, not a small part of the articles published on Police1.

Figure 1.

Topic model of the entire Police1 news corpus.

Words associated with danger emerged as one of the most probable and consistent topics in the model (topic 2). In analyzing titles including the words shoot and suspect (n = 386), articles homed in on gun violence. For instance, the headlines, “1 dead, 5 wounded in shooting on Greyhound bus in Calif.,” and “2 dead, 1 wounded in shooting at Texas A&M University-Commerce” were posted within an hour of each other on February 3, 2020. These kinds of articles emphasized the criminal dangers posed to the public. Another set of articles focused on officers using lethal force to subdue violent subjects. For instance, an article published on November 13, 2020, ran with the headline: “Police: Okla. Man shot by officers suspect in 2 killings: authorities said a suspect’s ‘reign of terror’ came to a close this week after a police pursuit ended in a fatal shootout.” Articles focused on dangers to the public and the role of the police in subduing threats reflected the “guardian” trope, positioning the police as protectors. Beyond representing the prevalence of shootings, many articles homed in on violence targeting police. They described officers shot and killed while responding to domestic disturbances and conducting traffic stops. Some articles focused on ambushes of officers or instances of officers killed off duty. Such titles reinforced the “danger imperative” by suggesting that violence targeting police was common. Collectively, these articles characterized the dangers to which police responded, the violence they used in response, and the violence that targeted officers. Stories painted a picture of an occupation filled with danger, and they positioned officers as on the frontlines against society’s greatest threats.

A second topic framed the stakes of danger in terms related to family (topic 9). In an analysis of titles including the words family and child (n = 102), articles positioned officers, generally men, as members of normative families that were left behind when lives were cut short. An article published on September 7, 2020, captured this theme with its headline: “Hundreds mourn St. Louis police officer killed in the line of duty: Officer Tamarris L. Bohannon, 29, leaves behind a wife and three young children.” The emphasis on family was pervasive. Articles honoring fallen officers referred to their “dedication to family” as a defining characteristic. Another vein in this theme showcased stories of officers coming to the aid of families or children. Articles with titles like “Ind. cop helps rescue child, women from collapsed house” and “Mass. cop helps save 3 children from fire after spotting smoke on patrol” described heroic acts on the job. Other articles offered feel-good stories such as officers’ adopting child abuse victims or buying gifts and essentials for struggling families. These stories framed officers and the police profession as honorable, and the emphasis on protecting and providing for women and children suggested distinctly masculine notions of valor. Prevalent themes thus reinforced dominant aspects of police occupational identity through an emphasis on danger, heroism, and masculinity.

To further parse the “danger” topic, we ran an additional model on the articles within topic 2 (see Figure 2). ⁴ We note several dynamics of interest. First, a subtopic focused on camera and video footage (topic 7) peaked during the summer of 2020, at the height of the racial justice protests. Titles during this time period, such as “LAPD releases body camera footage in controversial [use of force] incident,” framed cameras as a source of accountability and recognized the dangers of policing. Second, a subtopic focused on shootings (topic 1) experienced a dip through the summer of 2020, but then rose again to become one of the most probable by the end of 2022, highlighting the pervasive coverage of gun violence. Subtopics also emphasized the dangers faced by police: topic 5 included words associated with injuries and officers. Finally, topic 3 reiterated the intersections of danger and family, while topic 9 included words associated with police heroism, such as rescue and help. This analysis again demonstrated the prevalence of themes of the dangers faced by officers—some intersecting with frames of family and heroism—and the dangers posed by gun violence, versus the dangers caused by policing.

Figure 2.

Topic model of “danger”-related articles.

Additional emergent themes related to policing as a professional field. One topic emphasized police professionalism via training and experience (topic 1), and two others situated policing within broader political and legal systems (topics 4 and 6, respectively). Articles about training, captured in titles featuring the words training and experience (n = 164), included narratives from the training academy, news on police reforms, “how to” articles on subjects such as defensive tactics, and recommendations for specialized trainings on firearm use, drug interdiction, crisis intervention, autism awareness, and others. Many articles on training were promotional, aligning with Lexipol’s corporate interests in police policy. They nevertheless constructed the police profession as structured by specific expertise that officers acquire through training and experience on the job.

Meanwhile, articles on political and legal contexts further framed policing as regulated by policy and law. Many stories described local political developments that affected police departments, captured in headlines like “LA city council votes to create unarmed crisis response team” and “Ill. city votes to lay off or furlough police officers.” These articles were captured by stories with attorney and vote in their titles, the two most probable words in topic 4 (n = 84). Articles on the legal system—those with titles featuring court and evidence (n = 142)—tended to focus on court decisions that shaped the trajectory of police policy. Stories covered decisions ranging from relevant Supreme Court cases on vehicle stops to local rulings on lawsuits from police unions. A subset of stories focused on court determinations of the legality of officers’ actions. For instance, an article published on December 2, 2020, described “court approves officers’ use of force to restrain a possibly mentally ill subject who died during the struggle.” Collectively, articles in topics related to police professionalism portrayed the police as internally governed by specialized training, and externally regulated by democratic and legal processes.

Across the analyzed titles related to danger and regulation, a smattering of articles covered instances of police violence and misconduct. Stories described officers being fired or indicted for shootings, and they covered other forms of illegal and unethical behavior. Such cases were captured in titles like “Denver officer fired for not giving first aid to gunshot victim who died” and “69 convicted on ex-Houston cop’s false evidence could see new trials.” These kinds of stories recognized the dangers of policing, while simultaneously emphasizing accountability mechanisms within and beyond police departments. Indeed, some articles explicitly addressed accountability processes for law enforcement, with titles like, “Increasing accountability through early intervention.” However, coverage of police misconduct was comparatively rare. By way of illustration, among all the articles published in November 2021, 58 dealt with serious criminal incidents, 32 covered injuries sustained by police officers, and 13 referenced cases of misconduct or accountability measures. To put these numbers in context, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 129 officers were killed in the line of duty in 2021, while an ongoing analysis by the Washington Post has shown that police have shot and killed more than 1,000 civilians annually since 2015 (Perine and Arnold 2022; The Washington Post 2023). Although measures of police killings and officer deaths only capture a facet of the dangers associated with policing, they nevertheless suggest disproportionate coverage of the dangers facing police officers.

In sum, articles published on Police1 in 2020 and 2021 reflected major events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd. Coverage of these events was embedded in a body of articles that represented the dangers of policing, including the violence that officers confronted, experienced, and used. Language associated with family and honor framed the stakes of police work, reinforcing common elements of the police occupational identity. At the same time, articles emphasized the professional character of the policing field. Indeed, the topic capturing training and experience was one of the most probable, and other topics situated policing within broader legal and political structures. Taken together, articles on the site framed policing as a legitimate and accountable professional realm, on the one hand, while disproportionately representing the dangers faced by officers and downplaying those experienced by the public, on the other. In the next section, we home in on the themes that emerged specifically within articles related to protests to examine how Police1 news represented these pivotal events.

Representing the Protests for Racial Justice

Several topics in our model of protest-related articles corresponded to key moments over our two-year time frame (see Figure 3). For instance, topic 9 included words directly associated with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis; topic 2 captured protests and demonstrations that began at that time; topic 4 addressed events in Portland, Oregon, which saw enduring mobilization through the summer of 2020; and topic 3 included words associated with the siege of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Other topics focused on sources of police regulation. Topic 5 included words associated with legislative changes, topic 6 addressed investigations into policing, and topic 8 focused on budgets and politics. We elaborate on the substance of these themes through an analysis of article titles.

Figure 3.

Topic model of protest-related articles.

Multiple representations of danger emerged within topics that dealt directly with the protests for racial justice (topics 2, 4, and 9). In June 2020, several articles recognized the dangers of policing. They noted cases of officers marching with protesters and police chiefs calling for justice to be served. For instance, one article ran with the headline: “Several Minneapolis police officers issued a public letter condemning the killing of George Floyd and seeking to work toward regaining public trust.” Another quoted a Michigan sheriff saying, “when we see injustice, we call it out on the police side and the community side.” Articles represented the death of George Floyd as an egregious case of police misconduct and a source of harm to the public. However, another vein of articles soon emerged on the dangers the protests posed to police. Coverage of the protests in Portland particularly evinced this theme. In an analysis of titles including Portland (n = 75), articles described protesters locking officers inside a precinct, setting the police union building on fire, throwing objects at police, and “doxing” officers online. Articles elaborated with leads like: “rioters hurled rocks, punched a police sergeant in the face and sprayed a chemical irritant at officers, police said.” Meanwhile, coverage of injuries sustained by protesters in Portland was comparatively rare. Out of 75 articles analyzed, six described injuries to protesters, while 29 dealt with harms to officers and damage to property associated with the protests.

Articles in the protest category also included coverage of the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol (n = 93), offering an interesting analytical parallel to descriptions of the racial justice protests. Many stories about the attack on the Capitol covered the harms experienced by Capitol Police officers. In the days following the insurrection, several articles with video footage were published with headlines such as “LEO getting crushed by mob at Capitol” and “violent mob drags police officer down Capitol steps.” Multiple articles described events and investigations surrounding the death of officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered a stroke the day after the siege. Coverage also focused on criticism of the Capitol Police Department’s response and subsequent changes to security. Of particular interest, another set of stories focused on the participation of local law enforcement officers in the attack itself. They addressed specific incidents of officers facing consequences for participation, with headlines such as “Houston officer resigns after being linked to Capitol attack” and “Pa. cop charged in siege on US Capitol.”

Comparing the coverage of January 6 with that of racial justice protests, both shared an emphasis on the dangers and harms experienced by officers. Articles also included piecemeal examples of affinities between law enforcement and the causes taken up by groups involved in both events. This kind of case-by-case coverage precluded deeper analyses of national patterns in the dangers posed by police, which included the racial harms elevated by the protests for racial justice, and the threat to democracy reflected in officers’ participation in the siege of the Capitol.

At the same time, topics within the protest-related articles emphasized internal and external regulation of the police. One set of themes (topic 5) focused on lawmakers and legislation. Most articles dealt with state-level regulations to policing in response to the murder of George Floyd. For instance, several described efforts to end qualified immunity for police officers, implement bans on chokeholds, or place other limits on use of force. Another theme dealt with police budgeting (topic 8), with articles describing decreases or increases in police budgets made by city officials in response to social movements, budget pressures, or changing crime rates. Headlines of articles were largely descriptive, though the few that editorialized proposed reforms or budget cuts tended to emphasize the risks of limiting police authority or budgets. For instance, an article on reforms to traffic stop policies in Virginia ran with the subtitle, “Critics say the new policies would damage officers’ ability to proactively fight crime and keep Virginia’s roadways safe.” A third topic included articles that addressed reviews and investigations (topic 6), often into police misconduct. Within this theme, one strand of articles dealt specifically with protest policing. Articles described investigations into excessive use of force during protests in Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia. Another strand focused on investigations into incidents or patterns of bias, reflected in headlines such as “4 California officers on leave amid probe of racist, anti-Muslim posts online.” Within the topics on police regulation, stories recognized instances of police misconduct and racism, while situating the police within a variety of accountability structures. Collectively, themes in protest-related articles paralleled themes in the whole corpus, representing protest policing as dangerous—both to civilians and law enforcement, but with a heavy emphasis on risks to officers—and as professional and regulated. We draw out some implications of these representations in the following discussion.

Conclusion

The murder of George Floyd and the protests for racial justice centered a critical analysis of the dangers posed to the public by the police. Protesters called attention to racialized harms ranging from police killings to slow violence. Since the summer of 2020, debates have continued across the country around the role of the police in society and the scope of U.S. policing. In this article, we draw attention to an unexplored element within these debates: sites such as Police1 that specifically target a law enforcement audience. As a form of group media, articles published on Police1 do ideological work, constructing problems in policing and defining the role and collective identity of the police by framing the nature of the profession. We asked, how did articles on the site represent policing and protests during a time of upheaval and contestation?

Our inductive analysis revealed several emergent themes of interest. Consistent with previous research on police occupational culture, many articles in the corpus elevated the dangers faced by police officers and told stories of police heroism, often reinforcing masculine concepts of valor. At the same time, topics in our models revealed an emphasis on police professionalism, highlighting officers’ training and experience, and legal and political sources of regulation. Our analysis of protest-related articles revealed similar trends: disproportionate representations of harms incurred by officers, coverage of internal and external accountability mechanisms, and sporadic recognition of instances of police violence and misconduct. We see articles as collectively representing policing as dangerous yet professional and accountable. At a time when the very enterprise of policing has come into question, news articles for a law enforcement audience affirm the legitimacy of the field.

The “dangers” associated with policing are manifold. Previous research has highlighted how the police guardian trope frames officers as protecting the public from society’s dangerous elements, how the police warrior trope emphasizes dangers officers face, and how critical perspectives emphasize police as a source of danger. Although articles on Police1 reflect all these dangers, we find evidence that suggests the site disproportionately covers the risks and harms officers experience compared with those policing poses to the public. We suggest this disproportionately co-opts the danger concept, turning attention to the hazards of police work and away from harms including the racialized violence of policing centered by the protests for racial justice, and the threats to democracy posed by law enforcement participation in the Capitol insurrection. Uneven representations of the dangers of policing in group media for law enforcement may be particularly consequential given their target audience. By amplifying notions that the public is a source of danger and threat to officers, stories may reinforce the oft-critiqued “warrior” mentality of policing. Meanwhile, case-by-case coverage of police violence and misconduct may preclude broader recognition of and grappling with patterned harms that transcend individual incidents to permeate the field of policing.

We can only speculate about the consequences of Police1 news coverage, based on past scholarship describing the relationships between media and the construction of social problems and collective identities. Indeed, our analysis is descriptive and raises many additional questions that could be empirically explored to offer explanatory accounts. Some questions pertain to the effects of group media. How do officers engage with the Police1 site? How does specialized media influence officers’ understandings of their occupational identity and role? How does this compare with the influence of general media? Other questions could investigate the underlying processes behind the production of specialized media for law enforcement: how are these articles curated, and how do they compare with other group media outlets for law enforcement? Still others could compare representations of policing in group media with those in other sources of media, including the mainstream media and media that reflects other relevant subgroups like watchdog or social movement groups. To what extent is the framing in group media for the police unique versus aligned with broader media representations of crime and policing? We hope that our initial analysis of an overlooked data source offers a generative starting point for additional research on the ideological work performed by specialized media.