Cops and Robbers: What Popular Culture Teaches Kids About Crime and Punishment

About the Book

How children's books, tv shows, cartoons, and films often reproduce stereotypes about "good guys" and "bad guys" in terms of crime, policing, and the role of the criminal justice system in society

In Cops and Robbers, Liam Kennedy examines children's popular culture to provide an understanding of how ideas about crime and the criminal justice system are produced and challenged. Based on an analysis of over 220 books, 12 films, and hundreds of television episodes/short videos geared toward children, Cops and Robbers considers the ideological impacts of children's crime media messaging about what counts as a crime, the causes of crime, the roles and responsibilities of cops and other crime-fighters, as well as the nature and boundaries of justice.

Kennedy demonstrates how kids' pop culture works to sustain the status quo and inhibits our ability to imagine alternatives to policing and prisons. He argues that children's crime media teaches them that it is correct to criminalize behaviors designated as threats to the capitalist social order, that the perpetrators of these acts are bad or even evil, unworthy of our sympathy, and usually incapable of change. Further, police and crime-fighters are shown to solve a wide array of community problems, produce peace and happiness, and require endless resources to preserve the social order and quell dissent. Finally, he finds that forced labor and incarceration are routinely framed as inevitable consequences – rather than policy decisions – for bad people who have made supposedly bad choices. Ultimately, Cops and Robbers will encourage social scientists, educators, and parents/guardians to think more critically about how children's crime media shapes ideas about crime, cops, and justice.

About the Author :
Liam Kennedy is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at King's University College at Western University Canada. He is the co-editor of Power Played: A Critical Criminology of Sport.

Review :
"In this powerful and unsettling study, Liam Kennedy shows how children's popular culture provides the foundational carceral scripts for our children, handcuffing their imaginations around harm, safety, and accountability. With clarity and rigor, Kennedy illustrates how even the most seemingly innocent stories – picture-book bears, heroic puppies, goofy villains – reproduce racialized ideas about 'bad guys' and render cops and cages normalized. Moving deftly from LEGO play to PAW Patrol, from Berenstain Bears to Dog Man, Cops and Robbers maps a dense landscape of copaganda and carceral common sense that is as intimate as the bedtime story. It offers scholars and caregivers concrete tools for asking better questions about what kids are being taught – and what else they might learn instead, revealing that alternatives to criminalization and incarceration are both thinkable and already in motion. This book should be required reading not only for criminologists, media scholars, and educators but for show runners, children's book publishers, and, most importantly, parents." – Michelle Brown, co-author of Under the Gun: Criminology Goes Back to the Movies

"Making serious study of what some might errantly deride as 'just cartoons', Kennedy demonstrates with rigor and verve the myriad ways our punitive law and order ideology runs cradle to grave and is certainly no laughing matter." - Travis Linnemann, author of The Horror of Police

"In this powerful and provocative dissection of children's crime media, Kennedy has given us a book that does justice to this largely overlooked topic. He exposes the ideological work these representations perform, showing how they play a central role in the construction of carceral logics and punitive mindsets from an early age. Cops and Robbers is written with verve, wit and imagination. And, most importantly, it offers an urgent reminder of the importance of popular criminology in the contemporary media landscape." - Eamonn Carrabine, co-editor of Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology

"Our children are under attack! Not by 'superpredator' criminals lurking in dark alleys and prowling the mean streets, as the worn-out police story goes, but by the copaganda targeting the hearts and minds of today's youth. This is exactly what Kennedy masterfully illustrates in Cops and Robbers, his wonderful new book on the ways popular culture for kids all too often turns out to be a popular criminology for kids that uncritically celebrates cops and cages as the primary way to manage social conflict. After reading this book, readers will no longer be able to see the cartoon of a cop chasing a bad guy as cute and innocent but rather guilty as hell." - Tyler Wall, co-author of Police: A Field Guide