From defund to refund the police: The hegemonic rupture and repair of policing logics

In this paper, we examine the role played by popular media in propagating myths around policing and buttressing the prison-industrial complex (PIC). We provide a conceptual framework for understanding how policing logics are amplified, contested, and resonate through popular media as part of a hegemonic process to sustain the PIC. We suggest that the scaffolding for these logics is built through rhetoric that normalizes the routine violence of policing ( copspeak ), the ways in which police create and control their own image ( image work ), and the widespread tendency of popular media to portray policing in a sympathetic light ( copaganda ). We disambiguate these distinct yet overlapping concepts and offer a framework to illustrate how discursive challenges, or ruptures, to PIC hegemony are absorbed and repressed essentially foreclosing abolitionist imaginings.