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Lights Camera. For decades, Hollywood has been setting the stage for a real life horror show playing out in our cities. With each heroic cop character, each criminal taken down in a blaze of glory, the silver screen has reinforced a dangerous myth that police can do no wrong, that they are the infallible protectors we need more of on our streets.
From Beverly Hills Cop to Bad Boys Rush Hour to Ride Along, a fictionalized narrative of noble warriors waging an endless war on crime has been burned into our collective psyche. But now the curtain is being pulled back on this decade's long propaganda campaign we call copaganda. As communities rally against the construction of urban police facilities like Atlanta's Cop City, we can trace the roots of public acceptance for the very concept back to our favorite TV shows in Blockbuster films.
On this episode Copaganda City, we'll examine how copaganda has manufactured consent for the rapid expansion and militarization of law enforcement across America. How the blurring of entertainment and reality has led us to this dangerous crossroads.
I'm Katie and I'm Eves.
You'll never look at your favorite cop drama the same way again.
You know.
I love to define terms so that we're all on the same page. How would you define copaganda?
Uh? I found a definition from Francesca Willow that I think really nailed it. Francesca is a blogger who writes about sustainability and racial justice. So Francesco says, copaganda is any form of media, news coverage, or social media content that portrays police in law enforcement in favorable ways to the public. The image of policing it creates often serves
to shield police from accountability and skeptical coverage. It boots public relations of police departments and portrays a version of policing that is dramatically different from reality, especially when it's regarding the working class and other marginalized communities.
Okay, so copaganda can be in the news, movies, TV, or even on Twitter and other social media.
Yeah, it's abundant, But that wasn't always the case. Before the nineteen fifties, cops were often portrayed as bumbling fools who couldn't do anything right, and that was aligned with the public's perception of cops at the time. Take Charlie Chaplin's nineteen seventeen Easy Street, for example, it was all about the police failing to maintain law and order. But TV shows like the nineteen fifties Dragnet established a formula of depicting heroic white police officers defeating criminals who are
more often than not black or Latino. The LAPD. We even reviewed Dragnet scripts before airy and required changes if they disapproved of any elements ensuring it portrayed police favorably.
Okay, So they didn't even try to be subtle.
And now we have black copaganda. So I thought I'd break down some common copaganda tropes we use seeing black people and connect the trope back to its real world implications.
Sound good, Yeah, I'm cool with that.
Okay. So the first trope the woke cop. That sounds oxymeronic to me. So the woke cop aims to portray the pigs as enlightened allies who understand and empathize with the struggles of the black community against systemic racism and police brutality. Maybe they themselves have been the victim of racism by other cops. Take, for example, Terry Cruise's character
in Brooklyn ninety nine. In season four, episode sixteen, Terry Cruz's character, who is also named Terry, is racially profiled while walking around his neighborhood after dark.
I was just walking down the street.
There's nothing suspicious or illegal about that.
Okay, you and I both you don't exactly look like you belonged in that neighborhood.
I lived there. Terry goes to his boss, another black and openly gay man, and Terry wants to file a complaint, but his boss, Captain Holk, gives him this advice, the most powerful action you can take is the rise through the ranks so that you can make large scale changes. Captain Holt convinces Terry to not file a report. So, despite having firsthand knowledge of how cops unfairly target black folks, their solution is to keep on keeping on. And that's
the problem with the woke cop. The woke cop never actually takes meaningful action to dismantle the systemic racism. They acknowledge. Their words are just empty rhetoric meant to placate viewers and perpetuate the illusion of reform from within the system. In the real world, this trope is insidious because it creates the false impression that having more black officers who get it is a solution. Rather than implementing comprehensive policy
changes and accountability measures. It reduces a systemic issue to merely one of representation. Cop trope allows copaganda to pay superficial tribute to the need for police reform without truly challenging the rampant abuse of power, militarization, the lack of transparency that plays law enforcement. It's a smoke screen that preserves the racist status quo under the guise of understanding
the problems with policing. So, while seeming progressive on the surface, this trope actually undermines radical change by perpetuating the myth that enlightened individuals can fix these issues, issues that require dismantling oppressive structures and holding police accountable.
Yeah, how wo can you get as a cop on a TV show?
Like what is the peak of wokeness? What can a cop do?
I think that's the thing. All it is is talk like they can acknowledge, like oh this really messed up, Like even they did this to me and I'm a cop, Like you know what happened to the blue brotherhood.
They can't go any farther than that.
I don't think so. And I think we see this in reality too. You know, you'll have people running as the per agressive prosecutor, Like, you know, how how progressive can you be if your job is locking eggs up?
Girl?
It's so interesting to me when you see people this isn't in media, but in real life, speaking of real life, who were like in the civil rights movement and like literally fought fist fought cops and like turned into cops later on, especially for like huge departments like the NYPD.
I just wonder, like what happened between then and now.
I know it's different for everybody, but I think if there is a fictional account like that, could that person be more of a woke cop because they were kind of like woke before they were a cop.
What do you think about that?
No, Okay, I think it kind of goes to the like bad apples, Like, oh, it's just like the bad apples that we need to get rid of and then everything will be good. But I think the system itself is corrupting. So I do think there are people that go into law enforcement thinking that they're going to make a difference, they're going to be like officer friendly and like everyone's going to love them. But we just see
like it's a systemic issue. So you could be a good person in your heart, but one good person is not going to change this, you know, decades long institution. So like when you see like Terry Creuse's character, for example, like wanting to say something, but his boss kind of encouraging him to, you know, not make a fuss, And it's really indicative of what you see in the real world,
the blue code of silence. I know in twenty twenty, when a lot of people were talking about police brutality in Atlanta, they called out with the blue flu like, oh you don't want cops, Well, we're not going to answer any emergency services. So like people are saying, hey, stop killing black people, and your responses, well, that's my whole job, so I'm gonna call out. I'm not going to do anything. So I think it's a really interesting interplay between the TV and the real world.
Do you mean that these cops are being affected by propaganda that's spreading on social media?
What you mean in the instance you used.
Where there's a cop like saying, oh, y'all, y'all are saying this, and I just won't. We'll just not show up for the day. Like, do you think think part of that is them being affected by like rhetoric that they may misunderstand by being too deep into social media.
I don't think they misunderstand it. I think they understand that first and foremost there are allegiance is with being a cop, like when they say blue lives matter, like there's no such thing as a blue life. Like you are a human being, but you identify so much with your job that you are willing to not do your job if someone's saying, y'all aren't doing it correctly, you're
killing us, and we would like you to stop. And that is so offensive to them because they identify so much with this corrupt system.
Yeah, and they will often go into it under this guise of like I'm helping people, I'm doing this for a greater cause, and then tell on themselves when they can't even handle being criticized, which is like, if there is any position that you should be criticized, and it's in it's one in which your motto or your supposed guiding principle is to protect and serve.
I think they do. You protect and serve certain communities, certain property owning communities. I think that's the true nature of the police, is protecting property first and people third or fourth, if at all, But black folks not on their protect and serve list. Unfortunately, after the break, we're debunking more copaganda, so stay with us. Before the break, we broke down the woke cop found in copaganda. So, Katie, what trope is next? Troupe number two, the delinquent turned
law enforcer. Have you noticed this in TV and movies?
Yes, I have noticed that in TV and movies, and I've also noticed that in the like person who turns into a life coach route. In the real world, it's the cop that used to be in the streets but eventually saw the light and now protects and serves exactly.
The delinquent turned law enforcer is a former troubled youth or even ex criminal who was able to turn their life around and find redemption by joining the police force. We see characters like Officer Marcus Burnett in Bad Boys films, who is portrayed as a former troublemaker from the streets before joining the Miami PD or.
Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop played by Eddie Murphy.
The former Delinquence Abound. On the Beverly Hills Cop movie fan page, Axel Foley's biography reads. Axel was born on August twenty fifth, nineteen fifty seven, in Detroit, Michigan. He attended Mumford High School and became a small time juvenile hoodlum, but after a few years in which he was unemployed, fully joined the Detroit Police Department in nineteen eighty three. A talented policeman, Axel is also known to bend the rules, which annoys his boss, Inspector Todd Hm.
Bending the rules interesting quality of a cop.
Yeah, so, the delinquent turned enforcer portrays black cops to someone who understands the criminal element because they were once a part of it. In reality, this trope reinforces racist stereotypes that associates blackness with criminality from an early age. It implies that black youth are inherently delinquent and need harsh disciplining from law enforcement to get on the right path.
You might hear one of these characters say I used to run the streets. Now I'm taking down punks just like my whole self.
Yeah, or they'll say, growing up, I was headed down a bad path.
Until the police gave me a wake up call. Now I'm paying it forward.
Oh my god. This coppaganda can then attempt to justify their use of excessive force or unethical tactics. It's okay because it's root of an experience and understanding of the delinquent environment, Like we have to beat up these kids standing on the corner. It's the only way to inspire the use to change.
Like me.
This trope validates oppressive policing methods under the guise of officers having street smarts and personal redemption narratives. Yeah, I hate this one, and particularly why because it's giving trader like you came from the streets. Yeah, now you've beaten up talking about you know, like be sofferal right now. We saw this over the summer in Atlanta at Emory and across the United States with college kids, you know,
protesting Israel's genocide in Palestine. They were whooping their asses and I can just see I can just see them like, oh yeah, I'm from the streets, like I didn't get to go to college, and they're wasting their opportunities. So it's like you're seeing the same tactics the idf uses being used on college campuses in the United States, in cities where they're trying to build cop cities where they would train more Israelis to kill Palestinians and train mo
niggas to kill niggas. It's just like it's just such a mind fuck to see the layers and how like the copaganda just like keeps perpetuating itself, because like we said, it's not just it's not just fictional narratives, it's the news, it's social media. I've seen a lot of like TikTok pages of the friendly cops and the friendly soldier like get ready with me as I get ready for work
and I don't think like a hot cop. Yeah, and it's like, oh I'm on the beat, come right with me, and people in the ciments like oh I got arrest me missed the officer, like stand up. So yeah, just seeing like the impact that like not only these fictional narratives, but these nonfictional real world narratives like play into each other,
like they're feeding each other. The movies and the TV shows, you know, influence the watchers and then they grow up like idolizing the cops and then become cops and then you know, have this whole good guy narrative in their head, even if they're beating up a college kid about the head for protesting a genocide.
Yeah, and this one is particularly good for visual storytelling though, because you get that perfect arc of a person going for some you go from quote unquote bad to quote
unquote good. It's like you there is a really easy end, a really easy character to try to show someone who's really completely did a one eighty and turned their life around, because you've gone from supposedly being the bad guy and harming others, like maybe without you know, thought about it, and then you've gone to this person who's supposedly selfless in their service to others.
You know.
I mean, I feel like that's another element of it, because an easy way that cops can use to justify it because they don't get paid a lot that they can be like.
Oh, well, you know I'm doing this.
I'm not even making a lot of money, so they can really make it look like they're doing it for a higher purpose.
But you know what, on the money tip they get, so many perks do you know, if a cop like lives in an apartment, they don't pay for that apartment because they're like police cards out there and they're like security.
I've heard that. And also there's the other thing of like they get so much paid leave.
And when they fuck up, like when I'm in New York, like it'll be like eight cops coming out too, like a small smoothie chop and they're supposed to be like getting the stuff for free, or they like won't protect the smoothe chop.
Yeah, I feel like just also private businesses offer law enforcement.
Yeah, like y'all are fine. But also like going back to your like narrative arc, it's interesting too because like if you have a brain, the narrative arc just does not work.
Talk about that more.
Because you're you're the bad guy, right, You're you know, selling drugs, you know, presumably to people who want them, and then you become a cop and you're like harming these communities, so you're still like inflicting harm, but it's like what's behind the harm is seen as good.
Yeah, I would say that those people aren't thinking about the works that the cops are doing as harm.
Yeah, they show it. They'll be like, I solve this case by beating up a homeless man who had the knowledge but would not say anything. It's like, Okay, it's like they show, but it's like it's still not clicking to them.
There's another part to this where you have this arc of going from a quote unquote bad guy to a quote unquote good guy, is that the actual work or field work that the cops are doing is like good work. You know, like in reality, there are so many cops
who don't know what the hell they're doing. In general, in film and television, there's a lot of things that you have to play up for the craft itself, and that stuff, I think can also plan to this propagandistic narratives to where I remember back in I don't know this was when we were going through some or other reckoning in the United States when it comes to race and police lynchings. People would say things like why didn't they just like shoot them in the leg or something
like that. Joe Biden said that whoever said it, A bunch of people said stuff like that, And I think there's so much misrepresentation of violence that we've just gotten so used to, you know, people walking into rooms and not having their guns already racked is something that they do in film and television that like somebody who's ready to shoot somebody wouldn't do, or like having incredible aim at moving targets the cops might in a show, or having presence of mind like so many cops don't have
when they're in stressful situations. As we've seen time and time again, there are so many things that they portray with good cops that are not actually the truth because cops are obviously fallible, you know, they are flawed.
They do a lot of fucked up stuff.
So as part of that trope and the propaganda, it's also the elements of craft that are inserted, I think in some ways sincere way for the craft itself, but also still kind of a thoughtless way of doing things, because it does perpetuate certain misinformation about the way that law enforcement works, in the way that shooting works, in the way that violence works, in the way that human responses when you know your sympathetic nervous system is a
light works. There are so many things like that that are misrepresented in fiction that leads into that propagandistic thinking too.
Yeah, because we saw in Uvaldi when there was an active shooter in the elementary school. Cops were there for so long, just standing outside, knew the person was in there, knew they were shooting kids, and did not do anything. A mom came to get her kids out. She came, They handcuffed her, She got out the handcuffs, jumped a fence, and then broke into the school to get her kids while the shooter were still in there. You'd expect the cops to do something like that. Yeah, it's a bunch
of y'all. Y'all got all this gear, but let a nigga use a counterfeit twenty dollars bill, then it's on and popping. They'd be on this stuff They like don't matter, Like something that's not a threat, something that's not killing kids. They're all about it. You know, there was this man on the subway who was getting stabbed and there were cops in the other car. But you know, you can move across the cars in the subway. The cops was
just looking. They did not try to help this man, and so he sued them saying like, oh, you should have helped me. In the Supreme Court is like, oh, they don't have the obligation to help you. So what are you here for?
Yeah, to shoot?
Yeah, it's like they don't have the obligation to help you, but there's good Samaritan laws around being protected.
If a normal citizen.
Yeah something with who probably doesn't have a gun, who probably doesn't have training on what to do in this situation. But the cops, who presumably do, they chilling.
Another thing that I was thinking about this is in terms of storytelling, is that often you're talking about exceptional situations, exceptional people, and exceptional experiences. So of course the story that they're going to tell about this good cop at the end of this narrative arc is going to be someone who is larger than life and who has like
these perfect qualities. Because of that, and because that's kind of how storytelling has to work, Like most of the time, most people don't want regular stories.
They want stories about exceptionalism.
The cop who don't care and gets off, Yeah, hides in the parking lot.
Hides in the parking lot, plants the drugs. That's that's one of the accurate examples.
Yeah. So by nature of a cop appearing in a.
Show, I mean, it feels to be doing the most.
They have to be doing the most and that also means that, like the propaganda's got to be there from the beginning.
Yeah, but other jobs like don't have that, you know, Yeah, like teachers.
I was thinking teachers.
Some of them are portrayed as like, oh, they're so great, like what was that one? Freedom writers. Some of them are portrayed that way. But some of them, I think most of them are portrayed as just like regular ancillary characters like you know, we have Abbot elementary, but they are not, you know, saving the hood, not all of them.
The cop is more often the lead, yeah, not the sub supporting character. I mean, they do have supporting characters, but there are frequently cop leads shows.
Okay, Katie, bring it home.
What's the last copaganda trope that we have to develop?
An oldie but goody trope number three, the internal affairs cop.
Okay, I'm intrigued.
The internal affairs cop trope portrays them as the good cops working to expose corruption and misconduct within the police force from the inside. This trope avoids a meaningful criticism of systemic issues and attempts to show that exceptional individuals can reform the system. The internal affairs officer is a principled outlier working to root out the stereotypical bad apples
within the department. They are portrayed as embodying the ideals of law and order that their corrupt colleagues have abandoned. This trope focuses on individual acts of heroism that expose misconduct, but it diverts attention from the deeper issues that perpetuate racist policing practices in the real world. It suggests meaningful reform can come from simply having more good apples rather than comprehensive policy changes.
Even if a show or a movie is critiquing the police, it's almost like the only counter force is other noble police.
Yeah. That reminds me of a twenty twenty three Medium post by Julian A. Kil Rose. In it, Rose states cop shows that critique cops are still copaganda. The purpose they serve is to justify the existence of police and policing by framing virtuous cops as the antidote to a disease institution. You'll see this in the moving Training Day, where a cop takes down Denzel who plays a crooked LAPD officer, or in twenty one Bridges where Chadwick Boseman Rip plays a detective who exposes a dirty cop for
trafficking drugs. The internal affairs trope often still upholds an uncritical view of policing itself. The cops may be taking down bad cops, but they are working to preserve the integrity of the institution, rather than questioning its fundamental role in perpetuating racial injustice. This trope may intend to show how accountability exists within law enforcement, but it ultimately protects
the status quo. It reduces systemic racism to a problem of a few bad apples that can be rooted out by heroic individuals, and it avoids the need for real structural or forms and policing.
Who want to do all that work for real? For real?
Why are you trying to do all that work of trying to change something from the inside.
I think it's a folly of youth. And then you get into these institutions when you're young, and then you kind of realize you can't change it.
But you got to pinch it now, or you don't want to change it.
Or you really have bought in, or you think you are doing good, and you are kind of confused and the cops are the good guys, and I think it changes you ultimately, how.
Do you think it changes the person?
Just make them a part of the system, a cog. You know, you got to keep it moving. And I've been in jobs where I'm like, oh, I'm gonna make these changes and make those changes. I never been a cop.
Check that to be clear.
But you think like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, and it's like, no, you're not this company, this police force, this whatever has been around before you, and it's gonna be around after you. And ain't too much gonna change from what you're doing on the inside, filing your little report, stop writing on them papers. I feel like Atlanta is the most known cop city, but there are cop cities that are popping up all over. Mayor Eric Adams in New York announced that he wanted
to build a cop city in New York. There's one proposed in Baltimore. They're all over the country, And you know, a lot of copaganda shows were put on pause during the twenty twenty uprising, like Girl. They even tried to cancel pop patrol. They did, they paused cops. You know that I remember those they pause cops, and you know, I think that shows that they know that the propaganda is linked to all the brutality, because if there wasn't any association or correlation, would be the point of pausing
these shows. But now the shows are back and better than ever, and we see kind of like the backlash of people like standing up to this, you know, militarized police force.
It's like a school to prison pipeline. Really there could be an observer or a watcher or a media consumer to militia man pipeline. Oh absolutely, you know for some people it's you know, that's not how all people get
into it. Obviously, we have all these other things conditioning the indoctrination that we get from our parents and our upbringing and our environment and all that kind of stuff like who's in our life, But there is a direct line from like seeing these people on television and seeing how they're uplifted in the roles on television and then being like, well, that's kind of cool. I want to
be that. I remember, I don't know where I was at, but man, this kid who had to be like three two three was decked out in cop stuff, like had a cop car, on the shirt cop on that cop car, on that hat cop car.
He was rolling his hand.
I was like, dangn And he was talking about being a cop, and she was like his mom, I'm assuming who that was, but family member was just like, oh yeah, like the yeah, you're a cop, Johnny or whatever his name was, Like she was like kind of hyping up
the cop thing because he was clearly into it. So you go from consuming the media and then you go to being like, yeah, maybe I want to do that, to being like, yeah, I actually can do that, because in the United States it's pretty easy to so easy organized as a militia if you want to.
Or even easy to become a cop, or easy to become a cop that too. What I know for sure is for too long we've been indoctrinated by fictionalized narratives pedaled through our screens, a steady diet of copaganda that has manufactured consent for the unchecked militarization of American law enforcement. As far as our bulldoze in this expanding police state encircles of black communities, we must reckon with the true costs of the stories we've allowed to shape our reality.
Every fictionalized hero cop blasting their way through city streets brought us one step closer, one step closer to wit and seeing those same streets transformed into battlegrounds, battlegrounds patrolled by real life militarized forces. The copaganda era is over. It's time we start writing our own narrative, one of liberation, one of courage in the face of an increasingly dystopian landscape. A story where the people, not the police, are the heroes.
And now it's time for roll credits, the segment where we give credit to a person, place, or thing that we encountered during the week eves. Who are what would you like to give credit to?
I would like to give credit to long drives and silence. Usually I'm very inundated with noises and all kinds of media, and I know that I shouldn't be doing more than
one thing at the same time. A lot of the time when I am doing it, doing too much, like I'm on my phone on driving, No, not when I'm driving, just in general, like on my phone, on the on the computer, you know, on all these watching TV, doing multiple things that want washing dishes, you know, lighting candles, whatever I'm doing all at the same time, and I think the car is a nice place to have an excuse to remove distraction. Not like I need one, but you know, it's easy to get wrapped up in that
when you're not in the car. When you're in the car, you're trapped in this moving sauna. Right now, it's hot, so it's a sauna.
Yeah.
So that's what I want to give credit to today.
I appreciate a silent drive. I would like to give credit to phone calls. I feel like they're a lost art. There's not that many people that I can just call up and it's normal. I caught up this one friend. We were like to him and it's in the conversation, He's like, is everything okay? Like what's going on? I was like, I'm never calling you again. I'm not. But so I appreciate those people where you can just call
them up. They call you. You don't guy to schedule it. Yeah, and shout out to DD because that's who I be calling my friend Indidi and with that we will see you next week.
Bye.
Hie.
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves, Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison.
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