Copaganda

Copaganda (a portmanteau of cop and propaganda) is propaganda intended to positively shape public opinion about police or counter criticism of police and anti-police sentiment. Quotes Copaganda … is the system of government and news media propaganda that promotes mass incarceration, justifies the barbarities and profits that accompany it, and distorts our sense of what threatens us and what keeps us safe. Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (The New Press, 2025), p. 7 Copaganda is any news story that uncritically advances a police department's image or helps undermine reform efforts. Adam Johnson, 'The 8 Most Popular Types of 'Copaganda': How the Police Play the Media' (2016), AltNet What exactly does copaganda get wrong? If you watch enough ​"true crime," you might be convinced that murderers and home invasions are everywhere, and the victims are almost always young, white women. In reality, rates of violent crime are less than half of what they were 30 years ago, and the actual leading causes of death in this country are heart disease and cancer. Plus, murder victims are disproportionately men of color. Meanwhile, tax evasion by the rich amounts to an annual trillion-dollar crime, more than 1,500 times the magnitude of all reported robberies in the United States. And employers steal an estimated annual $50 billion from workers through wage theft. Then there’s what actually happens during most police investigations; the police clearance rate for homicides is at an all time low, with about half of U.S. murders going unsolved. There’s also a staggering rate of wrongful convictions — studies suggest 6% of state prisoners and 4% of people on death row are innocent — and a prison system that’s totally incompatible with rehabilitation or restorative justice. Perhaps the biggest thing copaganda gets wrong is the underlying cause of crime, and what we don’t do about it as a society — such as put real resources into tackling systemic inequality, racialized disinvestment and cycles of trauma. In These Times Editors, 'Beware the Copaganda Machine' (2022), In These Times Copaganda is a very particular type of propaganda that is designed to get people to support the punishment bureaucracy system as it's 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. [...] The second function is to get us thinking that crime is increasing. ... A third major function of copaganda - this is probably the most insidious and the most important - is that, contrary to all available scientific evidence, copaganda gets us to link crime and safety to the little policy tweaks that these bureaucrats make. ... The fourth function of copaganda is a complete and utter omission: sweeping under the rug the violence and the harms of the system. Alec Karakatsanis, 'How Media Copaganda Hides the Truth about the US Punishment Bureaucracy' (2022), Current Affairs ... 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. Alec Karakatsanis, 'How Media Copaganda Hides the Truth about the US Punishment Bureaucracy' (2022), Current Affairs 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. Rumsha Sajid, 'Introduction' in Copaganda Clapback: A Resource to Fight Back (MediaJustice), pp. 7,8