Cops in Culture #0: Introduction

Our society is really good at telling itself stories about the police. These stories are everywhere. We raise our kids and entertain ourselves with them. We tell ourselves these stories, even though we all already know them.

We’re familiar with the different sub-genres; police procedurals, action thrillers, buddy cop comedies, and whodunnits, starring an array of stock characters from folksy beat cops to mavericks who get results, genius detectives, and gun-blazing action heroes.

We use stories about the police to ask ourselves questions about morality, society, and psychology. And, as the front line of the state’s power, police characters allow writers to tell dramatic stories about violence.

Most often, we use these stories to reassure ourselves about the status quo. Writers turn to cops so easily for the same reason that members of the public do: when things go wrong, it’s hard to imagine turning anywhere else.

All this means that even when cops aren’t present themselves, they’re never far from view. Like the cardboard cutouts of officers which are displayed in shops to discourage theft, our media inundates us with images of police, acting as a constant reminder of our place in the scheme of law and order.

The American scholar Mark Anthony Neal calls this ‘copaganda’ — ‘the reproduction and circulation in mainstream media of propaganda that is favorable to law enforcement’ — and, he argues, it serves a real function beyond trivial entertainment.

Simply put, copaganda actively counters attempts to hold police malfeasance accountable by reinforcing the ideas that the police are generally fair and hard-working and that Black criminals deserve the brutal treatment they receive. Such cultural framing has been critical to buttressing the need for a more expansive criminal justice system that fuels mass incarceration.

Fictional representations teach us a language and an attitude for discussing the police which reappear in news reporting and political debate. We are used to seeing cops as upstanding bastions of morality, or as the beleaguered last line of defence against social collapse, bearing the worst of humanity’s dark impulses so that we, the passive audience, don’t have to.

Even when the propaganda is less direct, the outcome is the same. The shows which put the police in a bad light, which depict officers as corrupt, violent, or incompetent, tend to reinforce the principles of the system. They teach us that the problem with policing is that we need better behaved officers, showing us the ‘bad’ cops in order to make us thankful for the ‘good’ ones.

So where does this leave people who want to abolish the police? If all this implies that abolitionists must simply hate these shows, the reality is more complex. As with so much in our culture which promotes ideals we stand against, many of us who have directly suffered at the hands of police have a conflicted experience consuming these stories.

When TV networks and film studios take these most stressful, violent, isolating experiences and repackage them as entertainment the resulting product often is, indeed, entertaining. The stories are good. The moral dilemmas are gripping. It’s fun to try to crack the case alongside the detective on screen, learning to think like a cop and view everybody with suspicion. It can even be nice to buy into the idea that there is a team of good people out there who have taken on the thankless task of keeping us safe and ensuring that rightness and fairness prevail...

Given the role that media representations play in shaping how people feel about the police, the conflicted feelings of abolitionists in the audience are worth taking some time to reflect on.

But it’s not all copaganda, of course; there is art which criticises the police, refuses to excuse or overlook the violence that they do, and even invites us to imagine a world without them. This may be less common in mainstream cinema and television, where funding is hard to come by for truly resistant works, but is easy to spot in music, where anti-police lyrical traditions are kept alive by generation after generation of MCs, folk singers, and punks. And, beyond the commercial sector, artists strive to give voice to perspectives and experiences that can’t be reconciled with the dominant message.

Just as mainstream culture constantly reinforces the essential centrality of the police to our society, these dissident works serve to disrupt this hegemony, helping to keep the alternatives in view.

This series, Cops in Culture, invites writers to reflect on how the police and our experiences of policing are represented back to us by creatives. We seek out abolitionist perspectives on police everywhere we find them: in paintings and sculptures, musicals and performance art, lyrics and stand-up routines, music videos and graffiti, comics and poems, novels and nursery rhymes. We will discuss the mainstream representations which train us to view the police as an essential facet of human society, and the dissident, rebellious and resistant works by those who demand the space to think otherwise.

If you would like to contribute to this series, please get in touch.