In early April in Baltimore, a woman filmed a police officer walking toward her. “Hey, Officer Friendly with the cherry cheeks!” she shouts, taunting the unmasked policeman. He pushes past and coughs right in her face. (The sergeant was later reassigned.) In June, Baltimore rapper Kaflow Kaboom released a song sampling the video, called “Officer Friendly,” which slams the officer’s actions and other miscarriages of the criminal justice system: “So fuck you to Officer Friendly/ And by the way, fuck you to Zimmerman.”
This was a particularly bitter pandemic-themed update, but Officer Friendly—the elementary school educational program, most popular from the 1970s through the 1990s, that positioned the police officer as kindly community protector—has been fodder for civilian satire for years. You can buy a poster, originally printed in 1991 (now reprinted for the benefit of the Bail Project and the Black Visions Collective), featuring the words “Officer Friendly?” in blazing white against a blue background, over a threatening figure in a gas mask brandishing a huge weapon. Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 single “One Time’s Got No Case,” about being profiled, stopped, and questioned by racist police officers, tossed in the reference: “The cops throw me out in the street/ They found my gun like thieves/ Officer Friendly has got a new beat.” A grunge band from Rochester used the name for a couple years in the mid-1990s; more recently, on the zombie-apocalypse show The Walking Dead, characters call Rick Grimes—small-town sheriff turned violent survivalist—“Officer Friendly,” coating the words with sarcasm.
For those who’ve been subjected to police brutality or have good reason to be suspicious of authority figures, the very idea of “Officer Friendly” is absurd. But for another kind of person (white, comfortable, middle-class), the name triggers thoughts of a lost utopia of public service and well-executed community policing. Remember when police would help us find our lost dogs, pat us on the head, and send us home with a tinfoil badge? In our moment of reassessing the role of law enforcement in society, this sort of “good cop” nostalgia gets used to neutralize any critical sentiment; you can find it everywhere, from children’s entertainment like Paw Patrol and Lego to adult debates over “bad apples,” defunding, and abolition. But a look at the origins and intentions of Officer Friendly reveals the purposeful construction of that nostalgia—and suggests one reason why “copaganda” exerts such a powerful influence on the American imagination.