My parents watch Criminal Minds and similar shows all the time, two friends of mine bought a book about a serial killer and my Twitter timeline is full of people talking about a new true crime podcast. It's just my bubble or is it a broad cultural phenomenon?
It's definitely a double-edged sword. Recently, in Brazil, a podcast about a child murder (The Evandro case) got popular and a television series will be made about it. The podcast emphasize all the bad decisions that the police took during the case and the satanic panic that reitereited popular distrust on African rooted religions in the country. That would be a good exemple, I guess. But the sheer amount of content that idealize police action is... weird? frightening?
Yeah it is bad. Sadly the core of most of these stories are that the police are good, faults and all, and that regular people simply cannot police themselves and solve crime. But copganda has been in the cultural zeitgeist for decades now in the USA. Not sure how it is in other countries but the overall attitude toward the police in the states is good but bad apples sometimes spoil the bunch.
Where I live people call the cops because the neighbors music is too loud. People involves the police even in the simplest conflicts, they act like rich people nannies.
Oh we have that in the states too. I remember either it was on here or back on the sub, someone shared a story about a US town where the police where called for everything. Shit you not, one of the calls was for squirrels fighting in someone's front yard.