Cops and Robbers

"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