The Transnational Semiotics of “Policing Murals”: How Representations of Police Power in Murals Conceal and Reveal State Violence

Murals tell visual stories that legitimize/delegitimize formations of state power, conceal/reveal state violence, and attract collective interface from diverse parties. Scholars, artists, and organizers have studied murals as an aesthetic medium, tools for social movements, affective memorials, and episodes of conflict in the public space, but patterns and distinctions in the local, global, and digital duration of policing murals requires critical analysis. Policing murals refers to (1) murals made by police (and/or their advocates) to reproduce its preferred representations and (2) the censorship and control of unauthorized murals. Murals painted on police departments share semiotics globally, all of which conceal violence, and require visual decryption to interrupt hegemonic narratives. To compensate for absences in policing murals, I vetted their visual claims vis-à-vis insurgent murals with sentiments of abolition, such as demands to defund police. Using NVivo qualitative software, I conducted a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of policing murals. I assembled keywords from my literature review, which concerns the cultural reproduction and resistance of state power, to conduct an online search for relevant murals. To be included, a mural had to relate to state power and be painted on an exterior surface after the year 2000. I selected 289 images for analysis, which included 93 “policing murals” collected from over fifty police departments around the world. Additionally, I analyzed 167 murals that responded to and/or resisted formations of state violence. The corpus also contains images of vandalism, in-progress mural painting, and police washing away or painting over insurgent murals. In optimistic scenes of playgrounds and paperwork, policing murals omitted and obfuscated peoples’ lived experiences with white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, and state violence. Artists who opposed state power and violence painted murals as rapid responses to violence and death, visual accountability statements, tools to decrease social isolation, containers for hope and grief, sources for reparative political education, and portals to the worldly redistribution of resources, power, and love. Muralism is a morally neutral practice people use to construct oppositional narratives, validate or invalidate truth claims about police power, and to address, or erase, the structural foundations of violence.