The Police as Gatekeepers of Information: Immigration Salience and Selective Crime Reporting

What drives the supply of crime news? While prior research focuses on news media reporting, 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 transparency to the public. To test this, we use an LLM annotation pipeline to code out-group cues in about one million press releases published by local police stations across Germany (2014–2024). 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 sexual assaults), and (2) in the days before regional state elections in which immigration is a salient campaign issue. Our findings demonstrate how bureaucratic discretion shapes the supply of politically charged information.