What exactly does copaganda get wrong? — Copaganda

"Copaganda is any news story that uncritically advances a police departments image or helps undermine reform efforts."

"Copaganda is a very particular type of propaganda that is designed to get people to support the punishment bureaucracy system as its currently constituted in this society. One major function of copaganda is that it wants to narrow our conception of harm to only those types of harms that the police and prosecutors and courts deal with. So, for example, copaganda focuses us on certain types of interpersonal harm such as shoplifting, burglary, robbery, murder, the kinds of crimes that the police are likely to arrest people for and patrol for. But it doesn’t steer us toward much more significant types of harm such as water pollution crimes or air pollution crimes, which both kill orders of magnitude more people in this country every year than all murder combined. [...]"

"Ultimately, copaganda sustains a grip on our collective imagination to imagine a world without police. [...] In a carceral system that is systematically death-making and grief-denying, debunking copaganda is life-affirming."

"... one of the most offensive, grotesque things about copaganda and about the current media system is that it is pointing us toward all of the wrong solutions. We have the most heavily incarcerated, heavily policed, and heavily surveilled society that we’ve ever had. And it is not reducing the amount of interpersonal violence in our society. It does not work. The police do not prevent these shootings."