Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
46 comments
·May 14, 2025bittercynic
harimau777
People have lost faith that society can work for them and have observed those in power engaging in corruption and grifts. They then conclude that only a sucker plays by the rules.
bittercynic
There's bound to always be some number of people in that situation, but there's also plenty of ways we can do better to make society work for more of us.
My pet theory is that the #1 problem in the USA in the past few decades is wealth inequality, and if we can find ways to stop the rich extracting wealth from the poor, many of our issues will sort themselves out.
slibhb
The idea that crime is caused by "society being unjust" is a very common delusion.
It's much simpler. People notice they can just take things with no consequences...so they do.
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SpicyLemonZest
> In each case, there were almost immediate policy responses that increased the budgets of punishment bureaucrats, passed more punitive laws, and diverted the system’s resources from other priorities. For example, the shoplifting panic led California state lawmakers to furnish $300 million more to police and prosecutors so they could punish retail theft more aggressively. A few months later, the California governor announced yet another measure, the “largest-ever single investment to combat organized retail theft,” adding another $267 million to fifty-five police agencies. Justifying the move, the governor said: “When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they’ll walk straight into jail cells.”
I don't understand how you can tell this story, pivot to a discussion of people who you feel selectively report statistics, and then never get back to the obvious question of whether crime rates decreased after these policy responses. (They did, significantly, and in some hot spots like San Francisco quite a lot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-crime-decline-c...)
7e22v837278gb1p
If you haven’t already spotted the copganda, you may be blind.
aeve890
Does Brooklyn 99 count as copaganda?
tdeck
If you like video essays, this channel has a few relevant ones: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IX6bIxTsLbo&pp=0gcJCYsJAYcqIYz...
danaris
Nearly every police procedural does.
Every one that I've seen (which is several, but a long way from comprehensive—there are a hell of a lot of them) features the main characters frequently and deliberately violating suspects' rights, both Constitutional and otherwise, in order to get the evidence that they "know" has to be there, with widely varying degrees of ostensible justification being provided.
FridayoLeary
The article is really bad. The writer doesn't bother to argue the actual issues, he just hand waves all off them away and presents his beliefs as fact. He calls the shoplifting epidemic going on in California a "panic", as if it's not real. Of course it is, because shoplifters currently face basically no consequences.
>The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored.
A good point, but criminals still must face consequences for their actions.
>And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue.
That's just nonsense.
xbar
Teen Vogue, I apologize for not recognizing your journalism earlier.
throw0101d
See also perhaps:
farleykr
It is surely a sign of the times that this is in Teen Vogue.
flkiwi
Teen Vogue has been doing incredible journalism for years now. Seriously. At least 10 years (I remember they lit on fire when DT was elected the first time), possibly 20. They're good enough to be on my rotation of news sites I don't visit every day but do visit regularly.
vjvjvjvjghv
It’s intriguing that certain publications often surprise us with exceptional journalism that diverges from their primary brand. Rolling Stone Magazine, for instance, has produced remarkable content unrelated to music.
resize2996
Not completely out of their wheelhouse but _Wired_ has done good work recently.
m-ee
Kim Kelly does excellent labor reporting for them
KennyBlanken
The best example of Copaganda or Copraganda are police dogs. The public love them, think they're cute.
The cops love them because they're basically a living version of the huge maglite flashlight; uncooperative subject being a general pain in the ass holed up somewhere? Send in the dog, that'll teach 'em!
They're also a breathing probable cause generator.
Drug dogs are worse than a coin flip for correctly signaling on drugs (I don't know about explosives or the 'flash drive' dogs and yes, the latter is A Thing) but I wouldn't be surprised if the latter were also BS.
The dogs are extremely eager to please, and they can pick up on cues from their handler that the handler thinks there are drugs.
The US Supreme Court ruled they're constitutional regardless of being worse than random, which at the time was one of the more perplexing rulings by the court. It gave cops free license to bypass a constitutional right.
Nursie
This is going throught the courts in New South Wales, Australia, right now.
The police have been using drug dogs, which are known to have only a 30% hit rate, as an excuse to strip-search teens on their way into music festivals, despite there also being evidence that young people in possession of drugs tend to give them up when told the dog has indicated on them. And they haven't even been properly recording their 'justification' for the searches.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/13/nsw-p...
Here's hoping they get a smackdown from the courts. The NSW police seem to be the worst in Australia for this and are basically killing the music festival scene in that state, through a campaign of harassment, and charging extortionate , mandatory fees to public events.
brzm15
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zoklet-enjoyer
I've never heard of dogs sniffing for electronics https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/24/dog-can-sni...
beej71
"PC on four legs".
fsckboy
no matter where you are on the political spectrum, one thing we can agree on is the topic: this is definitely propaganda about cops (my comment so far is a tldr; myself, i expected the article to be about cope-aganda)
i feel i can get a quicker read on people listening to them rather than reading something carefully crafted. I searched and listened to this
FridayoLeary
This article is trying to sell a pernicious lie that effective law enforcement is a bad thing.
ihsw
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alganet
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bryanlarsen
Who would be the target if that was the case? The stereo-typical right-winger is anti-government and pro-cop. The stereo-typical left-winger is pro-government and anti-cop. So neither would be a good target for anti-gov anti-cop literature.
It'd be awesome if the target was the non-stereo-typical people.
alganet
Anti-cop is anti-government. It's the same thing.
Both newer audiences were blinded in several spots and are prevented by group speech to acknowledge some realities. I'm not from the USA, so I see things from a vantage point. I'm not inside the mess.
The book preaches for the identitary leftist movement, historically associated with being oppressed. It capitalizes on the popular notion that police is the cause of their oppression.
The domestication effect narrative induces this audience to think less of the class struggle and more similarly to the right rethoric (less police, less police bureaucracy, less government). They've been long-term blinded. It's so obvious.
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djoldman
Let's completely sidestep and ignore the issue of news release accuracy or completeness by police departments.
Let's talk about money... I think it's a open question as to whether or not it's necessary for so much money and time be spent on informing the public. It seems to me that it should not be so expensive or time consuming to release facts to the public in a timely fashion.
JumpCrisscross
> anti-gov porn literature
Eh, it has its purpose. One of the strongest arguments for keeping the 21-year drinking age is it teaches every generation of youth that the law is neither infallible nor uncircumventible. Learning to suss out submarines is basic media literacy. The form of the pedagogy is almost beside the point.
alganet
I don't understand your reply.
The book seems to be a cheap cash grab designed to monetize on the "cops are mean and corrupt" rethoric.
It's the modern equivalent of a wallet with the silk screened face of Che Guevara on it. It only serves to boost a domesticated leftist rethoric that is very much under control of the media itself (media does their anti-cop pieces once in a while to appease the pseudo-revolutionary youth).
Although police brutality and it's relation to sensationalist media are totally related, the book does nothing to solve it. It capitalizes on it. If anyone solves it, then the author has no next book to publish.
JumpCrisscross
> the modern equivalent of a wallet with the silk screened face of Che Guevara on it
Sure. And I'd argue someone with that wallet is more likely to be knowledgeable about various elements of American and Latin American sociopolitical history than someone who doesn't. Even if just from reactions they get to it.
> It only serves to boost a domesticated leftist rethoric
In the short run. In the long run it breeds healthy scepticism among the intelligent. (It probably also radicalises some idiots. But I don't really have a systemic solution to stupid people.)
relaxing
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Though the thesis of the article is clearly true, the way they discuss manufacturing crime panics detracts from the argument. There actually does seem to be something going on with retail theft, and I say this based on speaking to people who work in retail.
2 retail workers in the last 2 weeks have told me about thefts happening in their stores where someone loads up a cart with merchandise and rolls it out the door. It doesn't mean that society is crumbling or that we need police to be more vicious, but I think there is something going on and it would be worthwhile to address it somehow. It feels corrosive to the fabric of society when this stuff happens. Maybe not as corrosive as cops beating and killing people, but it's also bad.