Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States* Nicola Mastrorocco Arianna Ornaghi Trinity College Dublin Hertie School August 31, 2021 Abstract Do U.S. municipal police departments respond to news coverage of local crime? We address this question exploiting an exogenous shock to local crime reporting induced by acquisitions of local TV stations by a large broadcast group, Sinclair. Using a unique dataset of 8.5 million news stories and a triple differences design, we document that Sinclair acquisitions decrease news coverage of local crime. This matters for policing: municipalities that experience the change in news coverage have lower violent crime clearance rates relative to municipalities that do not. The result is consistent with a decrease of crime salience in the public opinion. JEL Codes: K42, D73 Keywords: Police, Local News, Clearance Rates, Sinclair *Nicola Mastrorocco:
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[email protected]. We thank Daron Acemoglu, Charles Angelucci, Ashna Arora, Elliott Ash, Sebastian Axbard, Jack Blumenau, Julia Cage, Livio Di Lonardo, Mirko Draca, Ruben Durante, James Fenske, Selim Gulesci, Massimo Morelli, Tobias Nowacki, Ben Olken, Aurelie Ouss, Cyrus Samii, James Snyder, Jessica Stahl, Stephane Wolton, and seminar and conference participants at the ALCAPONE-LACEA Workshop, Bologna, Bocconi, City University of London, the Economics of Crime Online Seminar, Glasgow, the Galatina Summer Meetings, the Hertie School, the IEB Political Economy Workshop, LSE, the NBER SI Political Economy, NEWEPS, the OPESS Online Seminar, the Oslo Political Economy Workshop, Petralia, Rochester, TDC, and Warwick for their comments and suggestions. Matilde Casamonti, Yaoyun Cui, Federico Frattini, and Doireann O’Brien provided excellent research assistance.