Working group The police as gatekeepers of information Immigration salience and selective crime reporting Add to calendar 2025-10-14 17:15 2025-10-14 18:30 Europe/Rome The police as gatekeepers of information Hybrid event Seminar Room 2 and Zoom YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Oct 14 2025 17:15 - 18:30 CEST Hybrid event, Seminar Room 2 and Zoom Organised by Department of Political and Social Sciences This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Ashrakat Elshehawy, Assistant Professor at the University College London. Who decides which crimes become news? While prior research focuses on the news media, we study a crucial upstream gatekeeper of information: the police. We argue that the police act as strategic bureaucrats who increase the disclosure of out-group cues (ethnicity, nationality) when immigration is salient to signal competence and transparency to the public. To test this, we use LLMs to annotate a novel dataset of about one million press releases published by local police stations across Germany between 2014 and 2024. Using a regression discontinuity in time design, we demonstrate an increase in out-group cues in police communications (1) following a nationwide shock to immigration salience (the 2015/16 Cologne New Year’s Eve assaults), and (2) in the days before regional elections in which immigration is a salient campaign issue. Our findings demonstrate how bureaucratic discretion shapes the supply of politically charged information.The Zoom link will be sent upon registration.