Police glorification in media is now an ordinary part of the zeitgeist, so much so that there’s an every-day word for it: copaganda. Copaganda is ubiquitous and comes in varied forms, with its most recognizable, virulent and studied form being television cop shows. It is not by accident that of the five longest running US prime time TV series of all time, two are from the Law & Order franchise.
Copaganda is a word with its roots in abolitionism, it is a portmanteau of cop and propaganda and refers to the pernicious and deliberate way the police are portrayed in popular media (primarily Hollywood) as a way to generate and reinforce a particular image of the criminal ‘justice’ system in general and law enforcement in particular. Even within the film industry, copaganda manifests in many forms, but its arguably most effective form is also the most popular, that of police procedurals. Although Law & Order is its contemporary poster child, it has many progenies including Criminal Minds, CSI, 24 and many others.
As a pioneering branch of copaganda the police procedural makes for an interesting examination specimen. A typical episode will have a cast of police officers, usually from a special unit of the FBI or such other intelligence agency or from a hyper-visible police department such as the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) or the New York Police Department (NYPD). The episodes are generally formulaic, they start with discovery or report of a crime and the rest of the episode works its way through the investigation, climaxing in a dramatic arrest at the end.
In copaganda, the portrayal of the police is consistent and predictable. The police are good and incredibly hardworking people who bravely sacrifice a great deal of their personal safety in very dangerous circumstances. All use of force and violence by the police is not only justified, it is unavoidable. Crime is everywhere, all the time, in numerous horrific forms, completely arbitrary and without nuance. But because the police are hardworking, self-sacrificial and intelligent, they always catch the bad guy at the end. It is a rare episode where the police don’t solve the crime, and in circumstances where the criminal slips from their hands, it is a source of great anguish for the individual officers, until the inevitable comeuppance. Most notably, in police procedurals crimes are independent of each other and do not ever speak to systemic problems of society or socioeconomic neglect of certain communities. Crime is simply caused by bad guys, usually classed and racialized, who must be stopped by whichever means the police has access to, and the system always does what it’s designed to do to make this happen.
Police procedurals are incredibly entertaining, and because they rarely invest in the characters as people outside of the police force, characters are easily dispensed with. Such a show can theoretically run forever, it is how Law & Order has managed to release hundreds of episodes and is still going strong.
Suffice to say this portrayal of the police is starkly devoid of any bearing with reality. In real life, the police are riddled with corruption, violence, misogyny, racism and elite bias. The police force owes its very existence to capitalism and imperialism, established to protect the upper class and their property from the insurgence of the dispossessed masses. Why then does the media consistently push a single view of the police, largely undeterred?
There is a long history of collaboration between Hollywood and the US policing organ, particularly the Department of Defence, the CIA and the FBI. So much so they have entire units dedicated to providing movie and film producers with consultants, creative input, script review and necessary hardware. Through this support, Hollywood gets to produce movies whose verisimilitude keep us glued for hundreds of episodes. In exchange, the police get to gag storylines and characters that do not show them in favorable light. This is the symbiotic relationship that birthed copaganda. According to the US DoD website, the DoD has long standing relationship with Hollywood spanning over 100 years, with one of their goals being to ensure that films “accurately depict military stories”. In other words, DoD is happy to admit to propaganda on their own website.
It is important to understand copaganda through its most popular form and what the genre exists to achieve, to understand the Kenyan DCI twitter account and why it’s so insidious.
While the Kenya police may not have a mature film industry to play with, they certainly have Twitter. Kenyans on Twitter are some of the most active online demographics in Africa. They have been known to effectively rally around a cause (including against the government), chase a perceived enemy out of the platform and of course, share a joke or two. But the platform is also heavily fractured, and this fracture produces many sub cultures. One of the more interesting dividing factors is political identity. On one side you have everyone in between liberals and communists, people who on average believe or believe they believe in decorum and justice which many sprinkle with just about equal abstraction and pretension (pejoratively referred to as “the woke” or “twitter A”). They are easy to weaponize especially with the right amount of activist-speak and whereas they revel in words such as “community” and “kindness”, many of them are generally combative towards real and perceived enemies. On the other side, you have a hodgepodge of more forms of bigotry than you can name, anti-intellectuals who have been known to proudly proclaim that reading is colonial hangover.
Within this chaos, the Kenya Department of Criminal Investigations (DCI) appears to have picked their spot in the arena, in the last two years or so, rapidly becoming one of the most visible state accounts on the platform.
The DCI twitter account was opened in 2014, initially restricting itself to providing generic summary updates of new arrests or investigations. Gradually, the account started to provide more details not just of the crime but its execution, charges, sometimes going as far as to include mugshots of the arrested, which they were later barred from doing by the courts (but which they, regardless, seem to have resumed doing in 2023). As their posts drew more popularity and ire from both sides of the platform, the account shook things up and started editorializing and embellishing details of the crime for comic and narrative effect. As of now in January 2023, they have recently arrived at their current form- memeifying crime and employing colloquialisms usually common in the aforementioned bigoted side of twitter. If you saw a DCI account tweet and did not know it was from the Department, you would most likely profile the content as coming from a person with barely veiled contempt for victims of crime and whose presence on twitter is sustained by waves of the controversy they generate or desire to generate. This is the profile of the twitter accounts that will typically react to DCI threads with laughter emojis and that will jump to defend DCI from criticism. To the DCI account, they serve as both a mirror, a cheering squad and a defense team. They embody the profile the DCI desires to epitomize.
Over time a pattern has formed. The DCI account posts something controversial and generally disagreeable, there is uproar and lauding alike and so they up the ante in the next post, becoming even more bigoted and inflammatory. It is a collision course of the worst manifestations of the social internet and policing. While this behavior is certainly dangerous, it is edifying as a microcosm of policing generally and in Kenya in particular, in a number of ways:
Firstly, the Kenya Police does not care about white collar crime and goes to painstaking lengths to protect the elite class. On 23 July 2021, Kenyan newspapers widely reported that the DCI had made an early morning arrest of the then Mathira Member of Parliament Rigathi Gachagua at his Nyeri home. According to the media, the legislator was under investigation for allegedly registering 49 companies that were used to obtain tenders from the state, amounting to over KES 12B.
On that day, the DCI twitter account, ever swift to exalt their arrests in masturbatory language, made no mention of the high-profile arrest. In fact, they did not make a mention of Gachagua until a year later on 30 July 2022 (and a week to the general elections where Mr Gachagua would emerge as the Deputy President), after a ruling by the High Court directing that KES 200B belonging to Mr Gachagua be surrendered to the state, as he had failed to demonstrate how he had acquired the funds. This time the DCI made a thread, waxing lyrical about how Mr Gachagua had used his influence to obtain tenders illegally, which he financed through a microfinance Bank he owns.
This tweet was highly unusual, the DCI twitter account does not typically report on arrests related to white collar crime, much less those allegedly perpetrated by prominent politicians. In fact, a quick download of the last 3000 tweets from the account shows hardly any mentions of white collar crime. Instead, it hyper-focuses on blue collar crime, especially those of a violent nature. This is likely because it makes valorizing police bravery that much easier and a narrative of rampant violence justifies the continued existence of an equally violent police force. Given that Kenya loses a lot more lives to rampant corruption than to cases of isolated civilian violence, what is the DCI’s motive in inverting reality?
Secondly, even where crimes speak to obvious neglect of the poor (as in most theft), the police do not care and certainly proffers no solutions. This is not unique to the DCI, the police merely exist to react to the crimes of the poor and working class and to present carcerality as the only sensible solution, never mind the welfare of the harmed. It is why the DCI gleefully posts mugshots of people who were merely arrested for a crime and never what the police can do to support victims.
Thirdly, the police espouse the worst forms of sexism and other forms of bigotry. In cases of intimate partner or domestic violence, the DCI account has a penchant for being facetious, in one egregious case concluding a thread, where a male police officer had misused their firearm and put a woman companion in harm’s way, by cautioning women (“babes” they now condescendingly called them), against those kinds of men and urging women to pay their own way in bars, in effect blaming women for being victims of such violence.
Fourthly and finally, the DCI’s manner of narrating incidents of crime is no different from the police procedurals they are attempting to ape. They write with dramatic and cinematic flourish, where sleuths pursue, outwit and “smoke out” thugs. Aided by this language, memes and gifs, they achieve the same propagandist ends that Hollywood does: mainstreaming policing myths in the public consciousness.
There is a certain kind of literary writing Kenyan students are taught in schools, where everything, no matter how mundane, is narrated with obscene stakes, hyperbole and flare. Many people on twitter have pointed out that the DCI account has an eerie primary school feel in that way. I think that’s fitting, because just like composition writing in primary school, the DCI is in the business of make-believe.