Community-oriented copaganda: Anti-Black violence in a visual archive of policing

Abstract

Like legitimacy crises of the past, recent high-profile murders of Black individuals by the police have led to renewed crises of police legitimacy. As a response to both the racialized violence and the subsequent legitimacy crisis, community-oriented policing is once again being heralded as a bi-partisan solution to the problem. In this article, I situate such a solution as in alignment with, rather than a departure from, racist police violence. I do this by conducting a visual analysis of a federal archive of photographs said to represent community-oriented policing asking what the images reveal about the actual nature of this model of policing and one of its practices—copaganda. At the same time, I analyze the work of the archivists and the ways they seek to rebuild legitimacy through affective manipulation—or what I term community-oriented copaganda—and the photographic capture and marketing of racialized bodies. I ultimately theorize the archive as an expression of racist police power and anti-Black counterinsurgency that uses police power to reproduce race. In doing this, I show how copaganda can be read against itself to reveal its contradictions, exploitations, erasures, and violences.