“Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicions against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to the things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people's lives.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“Cultural copaganda is all around us--from the CIA , starting in the 1950s funding projects like the Iowa Writers' Workshop or fronting literary magazines to influence modern journalism and fiction writing, to the DEA paying Hollywood in the 1990s to insert drug war propaganda into popular television shows, to the vast array of police and military consultants who shape every fictional TV series, podcast, or movie that touches on crime. Shows like COPS and Law & Order have done a lot to distort society's understanding of what the punishment bureaucracy does.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“The entire genre of police procedurals mythologizes punishment bureaucrats and the allegedly sophisticated technologies they wield. And it's not just Hollywood--fictional copaganda planned and paid for by the police and their industry allies is on TikTok and Youtube, and it's behind many community groups, online posts, neighborhood listserv emails, and charitable campaigns that seem genuine to the unassuming public.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“The concept and terminology of "mugging" as opposed to, say, "robbery" was created as part of the panic, even though there was no evidence that this ill-defined activity was increasing. This is similar to the creation of the term "carjacking" in Detroit in the early 1990s.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“On the day Chicago police murdered Laquan McDonald, a seventeen-year-old Black teenager, in 2014, Chicago cops had six full-time public relations employees. As the city fought in court to keep evidence of the child's murder secret and then later to control the uproar when a judge ordered it to release a video of the shooting, Chicago increased its police budget to pay for twenty-five full-time positions devoted to manipulating public information. The 2024 budget funded fifty-five.
Chicago is not alone. Cities across the country spend enormous amounts on police PR, and even elected officials are often kept in the dark about it.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“For decades, studies have found that families of police officers experience domestic violence at astronomical rates: between 24 and 40 percent of all families with a police officer report criminal domestic violence. That is a rate of domestic violence up to 400 percent of that of the general population.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“Copaganda obscures the active role police play in doing bad things. Many people have criticized the police-invented term "officer-involved shooting" because it obscures who is responsible.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“Because of the fearmongering about poor people and unhoused people through around-the-clock coverage of anecdotal stranger crimes, the news has conditioned people to misunderstand the nature of risk and vulnerability.”
Source: Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
“Do you love me enough that I am allowed to be damaged? Do you love me enough that I am allowed to be weak in some places?”
Source: Unexpressed Feelings