From defund to refund the police: The hegemonic rupture and repair of policing logics.

This article examines how popular media sustains the prison-industrial complex (PIC) by propagating policing myths through a framework involving three interrelated concepts: "copspeak" (the rhetoric that normalizes police violence), "image work" (police efforts to shape their public image), and "copaganda" (media portrayals that sympathetically depict policing). It analyzes the 2020 racial justice protests as a moment of "hegemonic rupture" when dominant narratives about policing were publicly contested, but subsequently "repaired" through political and media responses that reinforced policing legitimacy and stifled abolitionist discourse. The authors argue that these discursive processes operate within broader social, political, and economic conditions to maintain public consent to the PIC, highlighting the challenges of imagining alternatives to policing. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for abolitionist narratives that resonate affectively and offer hopeful visions beyond fear and insecurity.