Reality Police Shows as a New Arena of Public Oversight: Mediatized Visibility, Mutual Surveillance in Indonesian Policing Context
- AIOR Admin
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Daniel Artasasta Tambunan, Adrianus E. Meliala, Supardi Hamid, Ilham Prisgunanto
Indonesian National Police College, University of Indonesia
This article starts from a simple but often overlooked question: what happens when everyday police work becomes a recurring object of public observation through reality television? Focusing on reality police shows in Indonesia, the study examines how mediated visibility reshapes relations between policing, public evaluation, and accountability. Drawing on a mixed methods sequential explanatory design, the analysis combines a large-scale audience survey (N ≈ 2,100) with in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, observations, and document analysis. The findings show that reality police television significantly expands the visibility of police actions and invites audiences to assess police conduct in moral and normative terms. Viewers do not merely watch; they evaluate, compare, and judge. Yet this heightened visibility does not automatically translate into procedural transparency. Instead, it is filtered through media logic that prioritizes immediacy, action, and narrative coherence, often leaving legal complexity and organizational deliberation at the margins. Qualitative evidence further suggests that the presence of cameras alters police behavior, encouraging caution and performative self-regulation rather than consistently strengthening substantive accountability. At the same time, the study reveals that public scrutiny generated through reality police shows does not operate in isolation. Informal audience oversight intersects with formal regulatory mechanisms, producing a multilayered and sometimes tension-filled configuration of accountability shaped by differing temporalities, authorities, and normative expectations. Building inductively on these empirical patterns, the article develops the Circuit of Mutual Surveillanceas a middle-range conceptual model to capture the reciprocal relations through which police, media, audiences, and regulators simultaneously observe and respond to one another within a mediated visibility environment. By reframing reality police television as a consequential site of public oversight, this article contributes to policing and surveillance scholarship and offers empirically grounded insights into the promises and limits of media visibility for democratic policing.