One of the main reasons city councils throughout the US and Canada approve big police budget increases every year is copaganda. According to Wikipedia, copaganda is “propaganda intended to shape public opinion about police or counter criticism of police and anti-police sentiment.” But that describes the intent of only one main source of copaganda: the police. The authors of other sources, including the mainstream media, TV shows, movies and books don’t, for the most part, intend to shape public opinion about the cops.
The mainstream media reinforces copaganda by uncritically reporting police press releases like stories about Ottawa police launching a body camera pilot that didn’t include any critical voices citing all the studies showing body cameras don’t reduce police violence.
Cop pop culture products aren’t explicitly meant to influence public opinion, they’re meant to entertain and make money. Whether they make people like cops more is debatable. What isn’t is that they cement racial attitudes, normalize bad police behavior and impede changes to policing in real life, as revealed by a report cited in a June 2020 National Public Radio story. Color of Change, which advocates for racial justice, teamed up with the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center on the study which looked at 26 cop shows and more than 350 episodes, across the 2020 season. It found that, with few exceptions, the shows rarely depicted how disproportionately Black people are targeted by police or how bias is baked into this system. Also, over and over again, the good guy – the police officer, the district attorney – was doing bad things. And it was being endorsed.
Wikipedia quotes The Daily Dot’s Brenden Gallagher saying, “The media has been regurgitating police PR since the days of Andy Griffith and now in the era of Brooklyn 99, it is just being used more often and more effectively.” The Andy Griffith Show was an American sitcom TV series that aired on CBS from 1960 to 1968. It starred Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor, the widowed sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, a fictional community of roughly 2,000–5,000 people. Brooklyn 99 is an American police sitcom television series that aired from 2013, to 2021 and starred Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg.
“Aaron Rahsaan Thomas comments on the history of copaganda in American television: “The past 60 years have seen shows like Dragnet (1951–1959), The Untouchables (1959–1963), and Adam 12 (1968–1975) establish a formula where, within an hour of story, good law men, also known as square-jawed white cops, defeat bad guys, often known as poor people of color.” Subsequent shows such as Hawaii Five-O (1968–1980) and Kojak (1973–1978) solidified this narrative, along with Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), Miami Vice (1984–1989), and Cagney & Lacey (1982–1989), which were “for the most part, told from the point of view of white cops occasionally interacting with people of color who were, at best, one-dimensional criminals, colleagues, bosses, sidekicks, and best friends. Even when blackness was not equated with criminality, it was often supplemented by an inhuman lack of depth or presence.”
In my post Why white people can’t wait for the zombie apocalypse, I talked about how the main character of the massively popular series, The Walking Dead, was Rick Grimes, a sheriff from a small Georgia town who didn’t seem to have a racist bone in his body – he even hooked up with the show’s bad ass Black female character!
Detective novels (which I, a police abolitionist, ironically read for escape) are rich sources of copaganda. James Patterson’s book covers declare him the world’s bestselling author. Patterson created characters like serial-killer hunting detective Alex Cross. This passage from Patterson’s 2020 novel Blindside is a classic example of copaganda. It’s narrated by NYPD Detective Michael Bennett after he has just shot and killed a young Black man who pulled a gun on him while mugging him:
“All I knew at the moment was that I couldn’t leave the scene. I just wanted to sit here with my thoughts. Silently I prayed, Dear God, have mercy on this young man’s soul. I thought about calling my grandfather, Seamus. Then I heard someone shout, “He did it.” It didn’t register immediately. Then someone else said it. I looked up and over my shoulder to see a small group of people facing me. A heavyset African American man of about thirty-five pointed at me and shouted, “That cop shot RJ for no reason. He murdered him.” I let him talk. It never did any good to speak up. People had to vent. This neighborhood had fought to shed its reputation from the 1980s. Crime, especially homicides, was down. Cops could only do so much. Neighborhoods and the people in them had to decide to change. And this one had. I could understand some misplaced anger over a shooting. The vast majority of cops try to do the right thing. That’s why they get into the business. A few go overboard. And like anything else, most groups are judged by the actions of a few. It’s been like that since the dawn of time. I recognized that prejudgment was contributing to this crowd’s growing fury. They were pissed off. Right now they were pissed off at me. I just took it. My heart fluttered and my hands shook.”
In addition to trying to make the cops look good, copaganda also aims to make cops’ critiques look bad. To that end, just after this scene, Patterson introduces an Al Sharpton-like character called Reverend Caldwell who the pro-police characters say only advocates for people who have been harmed by police…because he gets a cut of their settlements. (Like so often in real life, they provide no evidence of this.)
The earliest copaganda I remember watching is Get Smart, a comedy about a bumbling, James Bond-like character named Maxwell Smart. Smart worked for CONTROL, a secret US government counterintelligence agency based in Washington, D.C., that battled KAOS, an evil international organization. (This foreshadowed North American police forces referring to themselves as the Thin Blue Line between the “chaos” of violent crime and criminals and all the “good” people who obey the law.)
Sesame Street had several police characters, including Officer Krupky, a Muppet cop who appeared on the show during the 1970s and Kermit the Frog appearing as Detective Amphibowicz in NYPD Green, a Muppet parody of the TV show NYPD Blue.
Westerns were also an early form of copaganda with most Sheriffs being portrayed as white, male guardians of good. (Although, some also glorified bad guys like Jesse James.)
The Simpsons has Chief Clancy Wiggum, chief of police in the show’s setting of Springfield. Although Wiggum is portrayed as gluttonous, irresponsible, immature and often too lazy, cowardly, and corrupt to bother fighting crime, his character isn’t a critique of the institution of policing as Wiggum has two more responsible subordinate officers, Eddie and Lou.
In 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, audiences in the US and elsewhere demanded increased attention to how police were portrayed in crime shows and other media. This resulted in the cancellation of some programs such as the reality TV show Cops and A&E‘s Live PD.
In my post Why Afrikan Canadians should become data warriors, I wrote about how the police create their own copaganda using misleading statistics like the Crime Severity Index and the police to population (cop-to-pop) ratio that support the myths that violent crime is rising and that having more police per 1000 people in the population increases safety (neither is true).
Ottawa’s police chief adds to the virtually non-stop flood of copaganda by regularly ending his verbal reports to the monthly meetings of the Ottawa Police Service Board with feel good stories about Ottawa police officers helping citizens in need. Sometimes he reads grateful citizens’ own letters. However, the Chief never says whether the happy citizens’ are white, Black or anything else. Evidence suggests they’re likely the former.
At a time when so many Ottawa residents are struggling to make ends meet, Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe wants to give the police their biggest budget increase in 15 years. Despite all the evidence proving that investing more in police doesn’t increase safety, copaganda will help ensure that the Ottawa Police Service Board and Ottawa city council will vote to give the police every dollar they ask for – before they head home to unwind with an episode of Law and Order or Blue Bloods.