The Red Badge of Booger
If we are reconsidering the text of copaganda, do we also need to rethink the symbols we use?
No symbol of the power of a sheriff is more pervasive or potent than the five-pointed star badge. At the end of the short story “The Tin Star” (also a movie), the dying sheriff tries to impart a life lesson to his successor. He points to his badge and whispers, “There’s nothing in it kid…Only a tin star.”
Now-deceased Sheriff Royce “Booger” Pruitt, the longest-serving sheriff in America, reigned for 50 years in Glasscock County, Texas (out West by Odessa). He said he was given nothing when he started, no training, no guidance, just a badge with a five-pointed star in the center, a symbol that everyone now associates with sheriffs everywhere.
I saw Booger’s badge at the SMU library in Dallas, Texas, which hosts a special collection of sheriffs’ badges. His was made from a silver (not tin) peso. These “cinco peso” badges were the real deal, a Texas sheriff with me at SMU said in awe. The first were made in the 1800s.
Some sheriff histories claim that the idea of a “badge” comes from medieval shrievalty, like a crest to identify friends and foes in battle. One sheriff-loving historian claims, “This shield was apparently a holdover from the era of knighthood and heraldry in medieval Europe.” He goes on to explain that sheriffs used tin badges on occasion, which were made by traveling artisans and stamped with the sheriff’s name. American sheriffs used a star to distinguish themselves from their Mexican counterparts, who carried a long staff, a baton de juste, per this same author (though I have not been able to confirm this independently).
We can all be forgiven if this sounds charming, a bit of folksy frontier history straight out of the spaghetti Westerns. But the actual history of the badge is more disturbing, finding its origin in a sense of American supremacy and rough border justice.
Because defacing American coins was against the law – and metal suitable for badges was hard to come by – Texas sheriffs started transforming Mexican pesos, which were primarily pure silver in the 1800s, into stars as badges. These were used mainly by border sheriffs, who felt that they were testing their mettle by the Rio Grande and sticking it to people on the other side of the border. Eventually, the Texas Rangers liked the pesos so much that they adopted the symbol as their own in 1962.
Since then the “cinco peso” badge has become somewhat of a fetish item for Texas sheriffs. Some continue to wear them or embed them in pistol handles. Now the peso badge is considered a collectible, and you can order your own online. A former Crockett County, Texas sheriff, Jim Wilson, who went on to have a career selling guns on NRA TV in addition to putting out some self-produced albums, used the badge as part of his online lore: he waxes poetic on the relative merits of the badge, its influence, and its association with border security. The badge is now a message. (“Back the badge” is an effective slogan for a reason.)
Last week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors heard testimony about the cost and unreliability of police propaganda, particularly “public information officers” who produce copaganda that journalists often regurgitate directly as “news.” According to Mission Local:
The SFPD’s Strategic Communications and Media Relations Unit is responsible for letting the public and the media know what the police are doing. It has nine positions (although only eight are currently filled), including three public information officers and a videographer, and a staffing budget of $1.6 million.
Just this week, Mayor London Breed appointed Matt Dorsey, who leads the unit, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a choice widely seen as pandering to the anti-Chesa Boudin contingent in the city.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office has a large “media relations division,” with 42 employees who cost the county $4.8 million per year, to say nothing of the outside media consultants like Cole Pro Media, which charges thousands of dollars to consult with law enforcement departments about how best to whitewash police violence. Remember the Minneapolis police originally claimed that George Floyd “appeared to be suffering medical distress.”
On top of his department’s media team, which churns out press coverage favorable to the department as a whole, Alex Villanueva – nominally a Democrat – has taken to right-wing media, including 32 appearances on Fox News as of April, less to justify his various bad acts than to present himself as a beleaguered, honest politician who is under attack from, as he says, the “woke left.” Who needs campaign spending when you have department spending?
This broader issue implicates the machinery of state propaganda itself, meaning both journalists’ content and our conveyance of that content. Whether to participate in copaganda’s symbology, though, is more strictly a question of conveyance. It's not about what we should cover, but how we cover it. It’s on us.
Many media organizations (and some law enforcement agencies) have agreed to stop using mugshots, although the practice is still dreadfully common. I have come to believe that images of law enforcement supremacy, like the sheriff badge or the emoji of the sheriff, exert a similarly malign influence. I am as guilty as the next journalist in the critical space – for The Appeal I worked on a series called “The Badge” about sheriffs, and I now regret using such a laden image as the marker for a product intended to produce accountability. Looking back, I worry how such choices enabled my work to produce myth, even as I attempted to expose corruption, violence, and wrong-doing. Starting a story with an image that is so commonly associated with truth, justice, and the American way sets a backdrop against which the story is then read. The sheriff’s badge seems to whisper, “Another bad apple but never forget the barrel’s honorable history.”
In “Performing America’s Toughest Sheriff: media as practice in Joe Arpaio’s Old West,” Chris Lukinbeal and Laura Sharp analyze the ways in which the mainstream media – which highlighted how cruel and violent Arpaio was as a sheriff – often amplified his fame through attempting to critique it. They point out that a large part of Arpaio’s political power came from his process of myth-making – he loved all press, especially bad press. The very things the media criticized were, he realized, politically popular with his base. Similar to Villanueva crying victim on Tucker Carlson, Arpaio used the spate of “Sheriff Joe” headlines in the left-leaning mainstream media to show how he would not be a victim, would not back down, but would defend his tanks, the pink underwear, and “tent city.”
Lukinbeal and Sharp show how story selection and narrative framing can reinforce the very structures they seek to fell. Symbols, a special sort of subtle narrative framing, have this effect all the more insidiously. A “good” reader, even one horrified by people dying of heat in the tent city, can still have society’s construction of sheriffs as “good” burned into their brain yet again by the simple flashing of a badge.
One alternative method might be to stop taking the images law enforcement give us, with flags and badges (or skulls and stars). We can instead transform the symbols into images that represent the complexity of our reporting. To do so honestly, I think there must be a kind of alteration so that it's clear to the reader what those complexities are. This image comes to mind from the New York Times, which shows a police badge disintegrating into a black background, like an omen in the night sky.
Lukinbeal and Sharp cite Francisco Garcia’s resistance mural, Para al Arpaio. Inspired by the DREAM Act, Garcia describes the mural as depicting the sense of being a Latino in America:
In the background is a deportation van next to the city of Phoenix. Across the whole piece is also a scripture from the bible in Luke 6:45, ‘A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.’ As you walk right to left while staring at the gun barrel, you notice the barrel is following you … [The mural] was painted to give the viewer an experience of what immigrants in Arizona are feeling, intimidation with the fear of deportation. (As cited in Lukinbeal and Sharp)
I have personally grown increasingly uncomfortable with using images of badges and the like uncritically, or, at least, without some acknowledgment or transformation. As advocates, the media, and communities seek to transform the ways in which law enforcement is permitted to write their own stories, do we need to also rethink the images they and we use to depict them?