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By Palika Makam
I’d like to start with a painting. First, inhale and exhale deeply to help you anchor. Think of a moment when you felt safe. Where are you? Who do you see? Do you hear anything? Do you feel anything? Paint the main points from line to line until the symbol becomes transparent in your mind. You may see a friend, instructor, or member of the family circle; you may see a place, like your room or your homeland. Through my paintings as a media activist, I have facilitated and participated for years in this painting many times, in many places, with other people of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. No one has ever included a police officer in his safety symbol.
I am not offering this training as the best abolitionist; I am still a very student of abolition, learning from black revolutionary women, such as Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who have helped make abolition a tangible practice, framework and purpose for our shared liberation. I propose this exercise as a deeply interested user in how images and narratives count the policies, practices, and behaviors that shape oppressive systems, and how they can lead us to a more just and empathetic future. I hope you can hold your security symbol by reading this article.
As a U.S. program manager. With the human rights organization WITNESS, a component of my task is to exercise communities to document abuses committed through state actors such as the Police and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for use as evidence and defense. We see in real time how this documentation is essential to spread national and federal abuses of law enforcement, to inspire others to take to the streets to help the lives of other black people, and to fight false data about protesters and victims. police violence. But just as we use mobile phone cameras, storytelling, and social media to make a percentage of the fact and protect us, many police components also use those teams to present themselves as kind, heroic, and fun members of the network whose kindness can overcome the movements of a few.” rotten apples.” This is called copagand.
Sometimes the copagande is created through the police officers themselves, like this country music clip posted through the Nashville Metro Police Department that shows Sgt. Henry Particelli doing a song with his guitar while other people show symptoms that say “Peace” and “United We Stand Up, Divided We Fall.” This branch of police and many others across the country are turning to social media posts to help counter negative stories and images, such as this one, where white police officers pose with a black boy with a Black Lives Matter sign, or Austin, which shows the police. all the thank you letters they claimed to have won from members of the network. Other times, social media videos of kneeling policemen hugging protesters, or messages from them that provide snacks and tears to black women and children, while fearful youth tremble and cry, are promoted among the general public, and even through allies and activists. Array The goal of these videos is to be the type of individual police officers, however, it is vital not to forget that each and every officer friends also have a firearm in their hips and enjoy qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that, as The Appeal explains, may well protect officials such as the police from liability in case of misconduct. Array, for example, when the higher force is used. Take, for example, the “dancing policeman” of Ohio, a white cop who went viral in 2015 by a video in which he danced outdoors with young black men. The officer was investigated and finally exonerated in 2019 after footage of the framed camera appeared of him punching a black man in the face.
We have also noticed many examples across the country where police officers kneel with protesters for one minute and abuse and despise their constitutional rights the next. A protester in Orlando shared a symbol of officials praying with protesters, with the text: “Literally forty-five minutes later [branch members] put us in front of the crime of nearby status. Another protester in New York tweeted a video of police officers taking a knee, with the text: We were beaten alive an hour later. And after the uniformed Officer of the New York City Police Department was filmed kneeling with the protesters on the street, reports continued that his branch wounded the crowd, beating them with batons. and protesters spraying pepper spray in the city. This trend raises the question: are these police officers supporting the lives of black people or are they participating in performances that take the hearing to the next level?
As the co-gande continues to circulate and resurface, as it does after any case of high-profile police violence, I ask those who wish to help in the lives of other black people who think critically and are skeptical of what they are seeing before sharing or internalizing. it. Array Cops does not want your help advertising your image; they already have the funding, strength and hedging policies in their way to do it themselves. Instead of joining, the copagande serves to undermine the black motion for lives, to promote the discourse that police violence is a challenge for bad cops rather than a systemic challenge, and to minimize the genuine violence and trauma caused by the police. to black communities.
Kindness is not an antidote to police violence or the explanation for why others take to the streets amid a global pandemic. They’re on the streets because, according to a 2017 report, the United States spends more than $100 billion a year on police. They are angry that so many physical care staff members were forced to paint without a good enough protective apparatus at the beginning of the pandemic; Teachers are asked to threaten their lives to repaint, while spending cash from their own wallet to buy basic school supplies; and that evictions are expected to increase as tenants try to earn the rent. People are concerned about qualified immunity and the fact that we live in a country where police officers can kill a woman while they sleep and not suffer consequences. They suffer years of police abuse, surveillance and verbal and physical abuse. So, until the police also defend deferring their budgets, making an investment in black communities, supporting transparency with disciplinary records, urging their unions to withdraw Trump’s approvals, offering framed camera images to the public, and breaking the code of silence, they are not part of the solution and not being glorified as such.
I understand why other people gravitate towards copagandy. Between a racial crisis and a pandemic, we’re tired. It is in our nature to be optimistic, but it is vital to perceive when this desire for positivity becomes toxic. For some, copagande videos verify that not all cops are murderers, however, no revolution has been comfortably won. The replacement in social justice is painful, messy and slow. Just as I see other people gravitating towards copagandy, I also hear them repeat the same question before any misleading verbal ex-scrolling about the police and privileges: “But are there any policemen ready?” This factor is neither productive nor applicable to the genuine challenge of blacks being killed with impunity through the police. No number of videos featuring officials conveying fundamental human decency can cope with systemic police violence. The most productive question is, “Why do these smart cops do something to help black people’s lives?”
Instead of sharing copaganda videos to foster hope, what would happen if we rethought what hope looks like? What if we shared the symbols of volunteer street doctors who care and help the injured protesters? Or the wall of mothers who formed a human chain to block federal agents in Portland? What if we shared photos and videos of various self-help teams across the country distributing water, snacks, masks and other materials to protesters on the streets? The videos and symbols shared in the protests shape the way the story is told and our long term imagines. So, before publishing, don’t forget that the motion isn’t fighting for more cops, not even big ones, but for genuine investments and community-centered responses to help black people’s lives. Think of that safety symbol you painted in your brain at the beginning of this room and look around to see that, in fact, we are the ones who serve and protect. It’s a bit of hope.
Want more Teen Vogue? Look at this: How to monitor misconduct safely and ethically
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