Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Publication Title
Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal
Keywords
Abolition, Copaganda, police PR, schools, youth programming
Abstract
Told in schools across the US for decades, Officer Friendly is a story about policing. Through the literal reading of books like Miss Frances’ 1953 Your Friend the Policeman, visits from McGruff the Crime Dog, and even the ever-expanding TikTok world of dancing SROs, the story remains the same: police keep us safe from the bad guys. In this paper, we draw on data from school and police social media accounts in a community in Alabama to expose the bad faith underpinnings of this story, and how it functions through ‘friendly’ police-youth programming in schools. This story relies on at least three narrative devices to move the plot forward: humanising the violent equipment/tools that police use to harass, maim, and wage death; legitimising the authority of the police through mentorship and education; and naturalising surveillance and suspicion by deputising a naughty pair of Elves on a Shelf. We conclude by proposing that the ultimate function of what we’ve detailed here – the rationale behind deploying these three narrative devices – is to construct a story through which, by the end, we’ve all been recruited into the ‘pig majority’.
Funding Source
This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Sage Journals.
DOI
10.1177/17416590241259662
Recommended Citation
Baggett, H. C., & Selman, K. J. (2024). School Copaganda in the US South: Tinsel, twinkle, and police-youth programming. Crime, Media, Culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590241259662
Comments
First published in Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal (2024). https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590241259662.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).