Recently, I pushed my toddler on a swing at the playground while a group of children ran around us pretending to be “cops and bad guys.” The police officer was a dark-haired little girl, maybe five. Her role didn’t include helping anyone. She wasn’t supposed to do anything kind, or save anyone from harm. Her job was to chase other kids as they tried to escape an imaginary crime scene and put them in “jail.”
The tiny police officer was clearly understood by the kids to be playing the “good guy.” These preschoolers had already internalized the idea that putting human beings in cages is heroic.
But the child on the playground isn’t the only example of the dangerous narrative that police officers are perennial heroes, even when they are engaging in behavior that is decidedly not heroic. Books, toys and shows glorifying crime-fighting and incarceration are marketed to children from the time they are babies.
For example, in 2022, Paw Patrol, a show for preschoolers with a police dog, was Netflix’s most popular kids show worldwide. Lego and Fisher-Price both market toy jails to preschoolers. Nearly every major costume retailer sells police costumes — many with weapons as accessories. Children who aren’t old enough to write their own names are encouraged to dress up and pretend to hurt other people with toy batons, guns and grenades.
Children’s shows from Scooby Doo to Power Rangers to fairy tales follow the same basic “crime-fighting” structure. There are people in the world who are “good guys” and people who are “bad guys.” It is the job of the good guys to stop the bad guys.
This constant stream of pro-police propaganda (or copaganda) is partly why, when an officer murders someone, a significant chunk of the population sees the victim as the “bad guy.” Even when the crime is something as minor as selling loose cigarettes, like Eric Garner. Even when the victim is a child, like Tamir Rice. Even when there’s a video of the officer executing someone who didn’t commit any crime at all, like Philando Castile.
Hero-worship of killer cops is alarming. But it’s predictable. It’s hard for people to let go of a framework they’ve believed in their whole lives. And most of us learn to dehumanize “bad guys” in early childhood. Once a person is a bad guy, we don’t need to extend empathy or understanding. Because bad guys aren’t multidimensional. They’re just bad and it’s okay to hurt them. In fact, hurting “bad guys” is what makes you a good guy.
It’s no wonder that by adulthood, many Americans don’t see people charged with crimes as fully human. It doesn’t help that police procedurals fill the airwaves for adults too. Law and Order, CSI, NCIS, Blue Bloods and other crime-fighting shows promote a continued understanding of the world as full heroic good cops, and subhuman bad guys.
This partly explains why jailing remains hugely popular, despite the fact that, as stated in a 2021 University of Chicago Press Journals article , “incarceration cannot be justified on the grounds it affords public safety by decreasing recidivism.”
It’s why (in part), we spend $115 billion a year funding police departments, when research shows that using some of that money to expand access to health care, housing and education would more effectively reduce crime.
Media companies have a responsibility to stop the narrative that the jailors are uniformly good, and that people in jail are uniformly bad. That trope is, lazy and actively harmful to children. More than 5 million kids in the U.S. have (or have had) an incarcerated parent. Significantly, Black kids are six times as likely to have an incarcerated parent than white kids.
It doesn’t have to be like this, but it will take pressure from the public, especially parents, to change. A good first step is demanding that media companies include a more diverse array of voices in their storytelling. System-impacted kids and families should be included in focus groups and testing for kids’ media. Those voices should be at the table in other ways too — acting, producing and directing.
Copaganda fantasies prime our populace from a young age to tolerate human suffering. Whether our generation will stop pouring money into the criminal punishment system and start pouring resources into people remains to be seen. But we can help the next generation do better. We can stop using the phrase “bad guys” with our children. And, if our kids consume media with bad guys, we can have nuanced conversations with them about it. Because no one is all bad, and no profession is full of heroes.
