Balko: For police PR flacks, quack lives matter

[Nevilledog]

https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/for-police-pr-flaks-quack-lives-matter


The San Francisco activist and attorney John Hamasaki tweeted out this amusing thread today:

Link to tweet

Twitter avatar for @HamasakiLaw
John Hamasaki
@HamasakiLaw
Watch for "cops save baby ducks" stories in the next few months. Media collaborates with police to produce these puff pieces after every police brutality incident.

Literally every dept does these after police killings, it's amazing. Thread

kron4.com
SF officers ‘quack the case,’ save baby ducklings
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) – When a mother duck’s babies fell through a grate into a drain in Oracle Park Sunday morning, San Francisco police officers quickly quacked the case. Averting a fla…
3:54 PM ∙ Jan 31, 2023
1,854
Likes
633
Retweets

The entire thread includes six stories about cops rescuing baby ducks. Which is a lot!

I’ve written quite a bit over the years about how local media cover police, but until today I was unaware of this particular trope. So I did a quick Google search of my own. And, my goodness. I had no idea!

I found 30 — yes 30 — separate stories from just the last two years before I decided I’d spent enough time on this post. I’m sure a more thorough search would have turned up a lot more.

What’s incredible is not just that so many baby ducks keep wandering into storm drains, but also that there are so often police officers nearby to save them, and that word of these rescues keeps finding its way to a local news reporter. It’s quite the fortuitous string of coincidences.

In any case, please enjoy these 30 stories about police saving baby ducks.

This post is not paywalled, so you won’t be billed.

(Sorry.)

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