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Memetic copaganda: Understanding the humorous turn in police image work

journal contribution
posted on 2021-12-01, 00:00 authored by Mark WoodMark Wood, A McGovern
Recently, numerous police organisations have made a strategic decision to employ humour on social media, via memes and other comical posts, to increase community engagement with their content and manage their public image. One key example of this practice comes from New South Wales Police, a state-based Australian police force whose self-described ‘meme strategy’ led to considerable increases in the organisation’s social media following. Through analysing the content of NSW Police’s memetic copaganda, in this article we unpack this approach to police public relations, detailing its rationale and implications. Police on social media, we argue, must address two very different regimes of visibility: ‘policing’s new visibility’, characterised by the increased visibility of police indiscretion as a result of citizen-produced content, and a ‘threat of invisibility’, in which the visibility of police-produced content on social media is always provisional, never assured. We consequently argue that the humorous turn in police image work represents a countermeasure to not only policing’s new visibility but also the ‘threat of invisibility’ facing police-produced content on social media.

History

Journal

Crime, Media, Culture

Volume

17

Article number

ARTN 1741659020953452

Pagination

305-326

ISSN

1741-6590

eISSN

1741-6604

Language

English

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Issue

3

Publisher

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD