Reddit’s cops and cop-watchers: Resisting and insisting on change in online interpretive communities

Abstract

This study explores how two subreddits—r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut (Donut) and r/ProtectAndServe (PnS)—function as online interpretive communities discussing the same topic: police conduct. Members of Donut construct a genre from videos depicting a history of police violence in order to advocate for policing reform, arguing that cop-watching practices that produce this genre are essential to driving changes in policing. Members of PnS construct a genre from similar videos in order to advocate for resisting systemic reform, reading these videos as professional development opportunities for police to reestablish legitimacy with the public. Donut insists on change, while PnS resists change. Donut produces a discourse which engages with historical instances of police misconduct; PnS produces a discourse which rarely engages with this history. Studying these processes of interpretation reveals how dissonant meanings can arise from the same material, how meaning is made in communities consuming and repurposing texts, and how historical narratives are essential to challenging structural inequity.

Keywords

Reddit cop-watching police violence online interpretive communities reform

Among the many online message boards hosted on the platform Reddit—known as subreddits—two have emerged as spaces where two very different, often oppositional, communities produce discourses about policing in the United States. The moderators of r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut (Donut) describe their subreddit as a home for “[l]aw enforcement abuse stories regarding: abuse of power, corruption, and other misfortunes in developing police states” (Bad_Cop_No_Donut, 2017). The moderators of r/ProtectAndServe (PnS), on the other hand, describe their subreddit as “Reddit’s Law Enforcement Community” (ProtectAndServe, 2017). Though other subreddits exist in which policing practices are the focus of discussion—such as r/BlackLivesMatter and r/Police—Donut and PnS had exponentially more subscribers than these others, 110,000 and 60,000, respectively, at the time of this study—even garnering occasional popular media attention (e.g. Ingraham, 2015; Sharon, 2015; Hayes, 2017). These were, by far, the biggest, most active forums for the critique of policing and police advocacy on Reddit at the time of this study. Both subreddits have grown exponentially in the period since the study was conducted, which saw the nationwide protests of the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s death. Donut now has more than 515,000 subscribers and PnS more than 210,000.

Though a scholarly literature about Reddit has been emerging over the last few years, much of it has focused on the general affordances of the platform, such as anonymity and pseudonymity (Van der Nagel and Frith, 2015), or on the way these affordances have allowed Reddit to shape specific social media events, such as Gamergate (Massanari, 2017) and the misidentification of suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing case (Suran and Kilgo, 2017). Other studies (e.g. Buozis, 2019; Literat and Van Den Berg, 2017; Massanari, 2015) have focused on analyzing how the members and moderators of individual communities—individual subreddits—produce distinct discourses and affordances using the architectural flexibility of Reddit, in which different subreddits are able to nurture different rules, practices, and forms of hierarchy. This latter stream of research takes advantage of Reddit as a repository of discursive evidence—in the form of multimedia posts and message threads—which are relatively more persistent and manageable than the torrent of data produced by sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Articulating a theoretical conception of different types of subreddits—such as Donut and PnS—may help scholars understand better how and why communities are formed and how those formations might shape the discourses created by each community. Therefore, I argue that Donut and PnS—and many other subreddits—can be understood as online interpretive communities, who use the digital spaces and tools provided by Reddit to develop and sustain an interpretive regime consisting of “the sharing, transfer, accumulation, transformation, and cocreation of knowledge” (Faraj et al., 2011: 1224). These practices constitute the discourses that emerge in these online interpretive communities around what Caliandro (2017: 6) calls a “focal object”—in this case the shared focal object of law enforcement in the United States. Other subreddits, likewise, engage in these practices around viral memes (Literat and Van Den Berg, 2017) or the investigation of a specific crime (Buozis, 2019). Analyzing these subreddits as online interpretive communities reveals the discursive practices which shape the interpretations and knowledge produced from such various raw materials as entertainment, political speech, and, in the present case, videos of police misconduct. In a historical moment, when many of the established modes of understanding how people think about political issues—such as polling—have been delegitimated (Byers, 2016), scholarly attention to meaning-making practices is all the more warranted.

By focusing on the meanings made from police videos as a product of the discourses which these communities foster, this study explores active discursive interventions to the crisis of policing in the United States. As Bock and Figueroa (2018) have shown, similar communities on Facebook demonstrate broader tensions between “faith” and “reason” in discourses on police misconduct, revealing a tension between historicized narratives of misconduct and a historical engagement with policing issues. For Donut, these videos represent just one small part of a much broader crisis of police misconduct in which video evidence can help affect some change in policing practices; for PnS, they represent police as good-faith actors who use both physical strength and restraint to claim their authority. Donut insists on change, while PnS resists change. Donut produces a discourse which engages with historical instances of police misconduct; PnS produces a discourse which rarely engages with this history. Studying these processes of interpretation reveals how dissonant meanings can arise from the same material, how meaning is made in communities consuming and repurposing texts and how historical narratives are essential to challenging structural inequity.

Online interpretive communities

The theoretical concept of interpretive communities, initially developed by the literary scholar Stanley Fish (1980) comes to digital media studies via Lindlof’s (1988) adaptation of the concept for audience studies and Zelizer’s (1993) adaptation of it for journalism studies. In his initial theorization, Fish argued that communities—instead of texts, their authors, or individual readers—“produce meanings and are responsible for the emergence of formal features” (1980: 14). Essential to Fish’s understanding of the “interpretive strategies” (14) shared among community members is that these strategies allow communities to produce their own texts—if we are generous in our interpretation of what constitutes a text—rather than merely consume them. This communal interpretation is the mode of meaning-making in many different contexts—from the classroom (Fish, 1980) to the living room (Lindlof, 1991) to the newsroom (Zelizer, 1993).

Scholars have begun to apply this useful concept to digital contexts. Mitra (2010) studied a group of queer Indian bloggers and the interpretive strategies they used to produce shared meanings from the raw material of mainstream Indian media. Mourão (2015) explored how political journalists used Twitter to form professional interpretive communities in order to produce narratives about the 2012 U.S. presidential election. While this concept provides a useful way to understand how different communities make meaning from different material, the modes of meaning-making have been undertheorized, perhaps because critical scholars have focused more on the way that affect as an organizing principle has limited (Miller, 2017) or enabled (Papacharissi, 2014) democratic discourse in digital spaces, rather than focusing on interpretation or knowledge production. This meaning-making work performed by digital communities reveals just how interlinked the elements of the circuit of culture (Hall, 1997)—production, consumption, identity, and representation, in particular—are in the ways people use and understand media.

Faraj et al. (2011: 1224) define online communities as “open collectives of dispersed individuals with members who are not necessarily known or identifiable and who share common interests.” Regardless of whether they know each other, however, members of these communities produce knowledge through collaboration—another way of describing Fish’s interpretive strategies—through the “sharing, transfer, accumulation, transformation, and cocreation of knowledge … in ways that benefit them personally, while contributing to the community’s greater worth” (Faraj et al., 2011: 1224–1225). Like Zelizer’s (1993: 219) journalists who produce a “shared discourse and collective interpretation of key public events,” these communities coalesce around a focal object, or set of focal objects (Caliandro, 2017). Online interpretive communities, then, resemble less the affective publics Paparcharissi (2014: 116) has theorized on platforms like Twitter, than the more purposeful modalities of deliberation she contrasts them with. A discursive ethnographic approach may help reveal the modalities which constitute this particular kind of community.

As in the definition of online interpretive communities developed above, Reddit’s members do not need to be “known or identifiable” (Faraj et al., 2011: 1224) to one another, even if they subscribe to the same subreddits, since the platform allows users to remain pseudonymous and moderators discourage doxing—or the act of revealing other users’ personal information. Subscribers and participants in a single subreddit share, more or less, a common interest, the focal object around which they organize their community. In the case of Donut and PnS, the communities are organized around police conduct. The members of these subreddits “attend to both their individual and their collective welfare” by fostering a discursive space in which members can express themselves and seek out information and the group can produce a greater knowledge than the individual, a form of ad hoc crowdsourcing (Faraj et al., 2011: 1224). Redditors, in Fish’s (1980: 14) terms, “produce meanings” as a community, and the discursive elements which they produce in each message thread constitute the “formal features” of the texts that they write through their transformation and interpretation of evidence.

The first three of the collaborative practices defined by Faraj et al. (2011)—sharing, transfer, and accumulation—are three of the architectural features of Reddit. Each public subreddit contains threaded posts created by subscribers and non-subscribers alike, shared and transferable among the community and in the broader Reddit community. These threads accumulate over time and remain searchable and accessible unless they are deleted by a moderator. The last two of (Faraj et al., 2011) collaborative practices—transformation and cocreation—constitute the interpretive functions of the online interpretive communities. Redditors not only transform media and textual materials from outside of Reddit—in the form of posting a video, for example, and providing commentary and interpretation—they also cocreate the interpretive discourses surrounding these materials, both by posting replies and by upvoting or downvoting other replies to shape the presentation of those discourses. The analysis that follows will explore just two examples of subreddits as online interpretive communities in order to develop a better understanding of how these practices play out on the platform and how different communities shape the meanings made from a single type of focal object.

Method

In this study, I draw on digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis to explore each community’s discursive practices surrounding a focal object: videos of police conduct posted on each subreddit. For close textual consideration of posts in these communities, critical discourse analysis revealed the ways in which social formations—such as relationships between police and the policed—are constituted through discourse (Fairclough, 1995). Community members participate in the interpretive regime described above, not only to produce hegemonic or counterhegemonic interpretations (Hall, 1980), but, in the case of Donut, to make meaning out of raw evidence for the purpose, like other such communities, of producing knowledge to “create joint action for change” (Mitra, 2010). Whether or not the “joint action” actually takes place outside of the online community, members do articulate the need for physical practices—such as cop-watching (Bock, 2016)—which arise out of their interpretations. Social justice movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo show that digital practices can bring people into the streets and affect policy. Though popular (Roman, 2017) and scholarly (Massanari, 2017) critics have characterized Reddit as a discursive cesspit, and evidence abounds of it harboring “toxic technocultures” (329), studying the less sensational, more everyday discourses which it enables, might reveal a more complicated interpretive aspects of participatory culture on Reddit as explored by Massanari (2015).

Driving the observation phase of this digital ethnography was a commitment to exploring each subreddit as both a digital and social space. I conducted a systematic observation of both subreddits from 6 September 2017 through 9 October 2017, with additional, more focused observations of newer and older posts through December 2017 as themes for analysis emerged. During the initial observation phase, I accessed each subreddit between two and four times per week, until reaching a “saturation point” where observed patterns began to repeat and fewer novel observations emerged (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006). Each time I accessed the subreddits, I loaded each at the same time and only sampled threads from the front page of each. Between 25 and 30 threads appeared on both subreddits’ front pages, representing recent threads with the most upvotes, or the most approval or interest from the community. Loading the front pages at the same time allowed me to get a snapshot of what was important for each community at that moment and what was pushed by Reddit’s “Hot” algorithm which favors recency considerably more than overall engagement by weighing the first 10 upvotes as much as the next 100 and the next 1000 after that on any given thread (Salihefendic, 2015). Therefore, the focus of Redditors, and observers like myself, may be shaped more by Reddit’s algorithmic encouragement of newness than by Redditors’ preference for extended discussion. A certain story might dominate one or the other or both. Only threads in which a video appears in the initial posting, or threads which address an external video in the initial posting, or threads in which the word “video” appears frequently, were sampled, in order to capture all threads where video evidence is discussed in the specific or general sense. Other media, such as memes—though Donut explicitly discourages them—appeared during the sampling of posts, but they tended not to refer to specific events during this period of time and therefore did not necessarily provide the same opportunities for analysis of interpretive methods. In this way, I isolated 49 threads on Donut, which accrued 11,403 comments during the course of the ethnography, and 42 threads on PnS which accrued 2703 comments.

I read comment threads from top to bottom, thus acknowledging the way in which community members would interact with the threads at that given moment. Reddit’s “Best” algorithm, which is the default setting for how comments on a post are sorted, weighs both the percentage of upvotes and the total number of upvotes and downvotes to a specific comment, ostensibly giving readers a sense of which comments have been engaged with more positively and more frequently than others (Munroe, 2009). Though I did not participate by commenting or voting on posts, I did view the posts and comments as an ongoing practice and digital manifestation of a community. This method misses some of the contestation that may go on in communities via downvoting posts—since it specifically selects against more controversial posts—but reading disputatious responses to the most upvoted comments does allow for some acknowledgment of dispute.

Using a focal object (Caliandro, 2017), like video evidence of police conduct or misconduct, allowed me to analyze these communities in two distinct ways: first, by “chart[ing] the unfolding of online activities”—that is, the discourse on the subreddits—“in relation to offline events”—that is, the events recorded in the videos (Androutsopoulos, 2008); second, by “empirically reflect[ing] on the different social formations that the different affordances of social media and users co-create around the same focal object” (Caliandro, 2017: 6; Hine, 2015). Combining these two modes of analysis allows me to treat the subreddits as online interpretive communities that both read external texts—the videos—and create their own texts—the discursive elements on the threads. Of course, the selection of which texts—in this case which videos—to focus on is an essential part of the process of interpretation, so much of my analysis below focuses on the divergent nature of the videos chosen by participants in each subreddit.

To this end, I used the following research questions to focus my analysis:

• How do community members produce meaning from single videos and series of videos?

• How do community members construct arguments about police violence and reform through these videos?

• What practices, online and offline, do community members recommend that others engage in regarding police conduct?

The communities: r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut (Donut) and r/ProtectAndServe (PnS)

At the time of this writing, these two communities had more subscribers than any other subreddits devoted to the critique of police conduct or police advocacy. Donut listed almost 110,000 subscribers on its homepage. The moderators call their subscribers “cop watchers” and the space where visitors can see how many users have visited the subreddit in the last 15 min reads “[X number of visitors] Examining the evidence.” As this language, and the subreddit’s tag line, indicates, Donut organizes itself around discussions of police misconduct, often focusing on the evidence of amateur videos and videos taken from mainstream journalism around the internet. Of the rules for posting listed on Donut’s homepage, most are concerned with the quality of posts; they discourage memes, comics, and reposts from other subreddits, preferring original content that aligns with their focus on stories of police abuse. Below these posting rules, a “Know Your Rights” section lists links and other information regarding the rights of the public to record police activity, and recommendations for livestreaming apps for such recordings.

PnS listed nearly 66,000 subscribers at the time of this study. The moderators call the subreddit “a place where the law enforcement professionals of Reddit can communicate with each other and the general public in a controlled setting…a great place for those who are already in the field, people who are aspiring cops, and anyone else interested in the world of law enforcement.” This description reflects the nature of the subreddit as “a controlled setting” where those with an affinity for police can discuss issues important to this community.

This control is ostensibly exerted through the enforcement of the eight rules for posting listed on PnS’s homepage, which include, “Do not post material that paints law enforcement in a negative light without a discussion starter (at least a paragraph) within the post or comments.” Redditors claiming to be law enforcement officers are required by PnS’s moderators to verify their accounts, though this process is not transparent to those not involved. Those Redditors then earn the right to display flair, or a brief line of text highlighted next to their username in each post in the subreddit, identifying them as an officer. For all users who have not been verified, a line of flair appears indicating that they are not a law enforcement officer (though of course this is not necessarily the case). Though PnS’s focal object is less clearly articulated than Donut’s, the community broadly focuses on police conduct, both positive and negative. PnS, however, more clearly articulates the identity of those welcome to shape the discourse on the subreddit. Verified law enforcement officers and their allies gain authority through the articulation and enforcement of the subreddit’s rules for discourse. PnS represents a digital space which is explicitly devoted to police image work (Mawby, 2002), specifically discourses which reinforce the legitimate boundaries of policing (Ellis, 2019) while acknowledging and contesting the discrepancy between police and public understandings of police work (Ellis, 2020).

Though there are other subreddits that focus on critiques of police and other police advocacy subreddits, these two were the most subscribed-to subreddits organized around these broad perspectives. Perhaps surprisingly, Donut had nearly 30 times the number of subscribers as the Black Lives Matter subreddit at the time this study was conducted. This suggests that the formation of communities on Reddit is as much informed by platform-specific modes of communication as by the broader discursive field. As I will explore below, these communities act more as outgrowths of other forms of online discourse than as mirrors of offline institutions, organizations, or movements. Donut’s discourse may represent a lot of what is being said by other critics of policing in the United States, just as PnS may represent standard police discourses, yet they distill these discourses into online interpretive practices on Reddit.

Frequently, Redditors in each of these subreddits levied their critiques at the opposite subreddit rather than at the policing community or critics of police in general, demonstrating the ways in which each “community collectively defines its unique identity in opposition to/connection with other spaces” as Massanari (2015: 2) argues of subreddits more generally. In this sense, though individual users’ identities are masked, they have constructed a collective identity through their shared communication practices (Milan, 2013). For Donut, PnS stands in discursively for cops in general; for PnS, Donut stands in discursively for cop-watchers in general. In a thread focused on a video of a police officer spraying a suspect with mace until she falls unconscious, one Donut member wrote, “that’s [sic] your peeps PnS” (pdeee, 2017). On another Donut thread about a sheriff convicted of grand theft, a Redditor wrote, “These are your colleagues, ProtectandServe, your people” (badf1nger, 2017). Even when the officers’ misconduct is particularly aberrant and unrelated to their performance of law enforcement duties, members of Donut still associate misconduct with PnS, if not all police in general. In a thread on Donut showing a news story about an officer who impregnated a 15-year-old, one Redditor wrote, “These are YOUR people, ProtectandServe. This is the company you keep, and therefore, the company you are known by” (JutNob, 2017).

Likewise, PnS members address their critique of how videos of police misconduct are distributed and discussed at Donut. In a thread in which a video showing the arrest of NFL player Michael Bennett was discussed, one Redditor argued that despite how Donut interpreted the video—which was originally posted on Donut and then reposted on PnS—the video actually supported a more cop-friendly interpretation, writing, “Thanks for another quality video, donut!” (BaconOpinion, 2017). PnS members reject the way police are always portrayed in a negative light on Donut, describing Donut’s discursive methods as “not pro-accountability…just anti-authority” (comnavshipwreck, 2017). Some of PnS’s Redditors view their role specifically as pushing back against the portrayal of police on Donut, such as when one Redditor started a thread called “A video from /r/bad_cop_no_donut that did not belong-a reasonable measured and kind officer dealing with an unusual stop like a professional,” (lovelyrepost, 2017). In this way, each community sees the other as a home for the most salient discourse with which to contrast the discourse fostered in their own community.

Discourses of interpretation

Online interpretive communities use the discursive context they have carved out for themselves to engage in ‘the sharing, transfer, accumulation, transformation, and cocreation of knowledge’ (Faraj et al., 2011: 1224). But what are the ‘meanings’ and ‘formal features’ created through these processes that Fish (1980: 14) identified as the products of interpretive communities? Mitra (2010) adapted three of Lindlof’s (1988) analytical concepts in order to analyze informal online texts—such as blogs—as evidence of what online interpretive communities do: create community-specific genres out of the raw material of media; make meaning through community rituals and practices; and translate that knowledge into practices of social change. These concepts, taken together, offer a useful organizational tool for the analysis of Donut and PnS, and other subreddits organized around the context of a particular discourse.

Police videos as a genre

Rather than viewing genre as a set of conventions followed by the creators of media, scholars like Mitra (2010) and Lindlof (1988) understand genre as a construct co-produced by creators and the interpretive communities that consume media. Therefore, ‘the same content is interpreted by different communities to establish different genres’ (Mitra, 2010: 165). Thus, there is not one genre of police video that spans across Donut and PnS and other communities, but instead a unique genre produced by each community. However, as the following analysis will show, even a relatively new community like Donut, can reproduce a genre with a long history that refers to texts and interpretations created long before the formation of the community. By referring to “past interpretation[s] to generate current accounts’ these Redditors are able to ‘sustain cultural authority over discourses,” at least within each subreddit, in a way that Mourão (2015: 2) and Zelizer (1993) have observed journalists claiming similar credibility through their own community’s past interpretations. Though this view of genre calls into question any media text’s authority to represent the truth, these communities do tie their own interpretive work in producing genres from the raw material of police videos with the epistemological authority of those videos. Yet, rather than providing merely a ready-made interpretation of all videos that are subsumed within this genre, Redditors often use the genre, through references to other videos in the genre, as a tool or guide for interpretation.

Redditors on Donut refer to past instances of police misconduct in which video evidence played an important role in order to interpret more current events in this genre. For example, in a thread discussing an article in The Atlantic that correlated the emergence of widely circulated amateur video online with a growing distrust of police, one Redditor invoked perhaps the first prominent amateur video in this genre: George Holliday’s recording of the beating of Rodney King. The Redditor compares the way in which the King video was played over and over again to the virality of amateur videos in the age of social media, writing, “I think its seeing the videos in the raw that makes people angry” (phungus_mungus, 2017). In another thread about an officer who drew his firearm on a group of 12-year-old boys, a Redditor compares the police officer’s actions and statements to a pattern they have observed in other such videos going all the way back to Rodney King, writing, “I remember the big one I started to see on all the reality cop shows after the Rodney King incident…is constantly yell[]ing ‘Stop Resisting!’ anytime they go hands on with a suspect” (goose7771, 2017c). More recent examples of these videos are also used in the interpretation of current cases, such as when two Redditors discuss the video of police shooting Tamir Rice in relation to another contemporary case (DWarren_57, 2017). Other Redditors use videos that are still being discussed in the media and on Donut—such as a video showing the arrest of a nurse who refused to take blood from an unconscious suspect in a hospital (Indra_Sen, 2017), and videos of the law enforcement response to protests in Paris (deathakissaway, 2017)—in order to interpret incidents not directly related to these more prominent events. Other times, Redditors place the videos under discussion in a broader historical context, such as one thread in which Redditors compare the police response to protests in St. Louis to other protests in U.S. history: ‘Like LA in the 90s bad,’ one Redditor writes; ‘Like Detroit 1967 bad,’ another responds (r1ckj0526, 2017). In this respect, police videos, in the discursive context created by Donut, belong to a much larger corpus, a genre created by the producers of the videos and the members of the online interpretive community. This genre contextualizes each event and each video as part of a history of police violence, one in which the sum of video evidence stands in for a larger phenomenon that is contested by the discourses of PnS.

Redditors on PnS, on the other hand, refer to videos less well-known to the public in order to construct their own genre of police videos. Discussions on PnS rarely engaged with past videos of police misconduct as such, instead focusing on videos that make sense of more contemporary examples of policing with little regard to the experience of victims of potential police misconduct. For instance, in a discussion about a video showing a police officer shoot a news photographer, Redditors referred to other videos in which officers shot people, in part, because they could not clearly see their actions in the darkness. “That cane video,” one Redditor writes, “immediately made me think of dinkheller.... I can see why he shot him if that officer has seen that video” (VincentRAPH, 2017). The implication is that the officer may have been familiar with the danger of suspects coming out of the darkness to attack an officer, in part, because there are videos that show such behavior that have been prominently shared in the law enforcement community. In another discussion, Redditors compare a video in which an officer verbally demeans a young person during an arrest to a similar video, even going so far as to narrate the events in the older video in their comment (Twigsnapper, 2017b). In reference to another video in which a woman is forcibly removed from her car and pepper-sprayed for refusing to give a police officer her license, critiqued the woman’s scream as bad acting, writing, “Also her scream was the funniest part of the video. It was like a low effort unsurprised scream” (El_Hombre_Grande, 2017). Other discussions focus on a protestor being pepper-sprayed in the genitals (zLassiter, 2017) and refer to an unarmed motorist approached by an officer with his gun drawn a “loudmouth” (medical_bacon, 2017). In part, because they do not engage with the same historical videos of police misconduct, the genre constructed around these police videos in PnS serves to delegitimize the perspective of the victims of police violence and to lend authority to the police perspective. Those targets of policing become inconveniences, the focus of ridicule, or sources of entertainment in a way that produces a starkly different meaning from the genre created in Donut.

Making meaning from police videos

In creating such different genres from one another, these two online interpretive communities make different meanings from a quite similar pool of media content. Many different meanings arise out of the interpretive practices in both communities—especially on a longer timeline than sampled for this study—but each community fosters a dominant meaning for the videos they choose to share and interpret: for Donut, these videos represent just one small part of a much broader crisis of police misconduct in which video evidence can help affect some change in policing practices; for PnS, they represent police as good-faith actors who use both physical strength and restraint to claim their authority.

Redditors on Donut, again and again, made a three-part argument in producing meaning from the videos they discuss: first, they argue the police are only held accountable for their misconduct when there is video evidence of that misconduct; second, video evidence must be amplified online or through traditional media—that is, it must go viral—in order for police to be punished; third, if police are only punished when there is video evidence of misconduct, then a significant amount of misconduct must be going unnoticed and unpunished. Videos, then, have the power to show what many in the Donut community already claim to know—that police overstep their authority and violate people’s rights often and with impunity. During the period of the digital ethnography, at least eight threads focused on the video of a forcible arrest of a nurse in Utah who refused to draw blood from an unconscious suspect in her care. Redditors argued that the video has value because it shows an unreasonable use of force, but it did not result in repercussions for the officer until the nurse sent the video to the media and it became a widely discussed story. The police department’s resistance to punishing an officer until video evidence was widely shared, for Donut, was evidence that they must be ignoring the vast majority of complaints about misconduct. “Even eye witness accounts won’t make a difference,” one Redditor writes, comparing the incident with the nurse to another incident (Indra_Sen, 2017). In the discussion about the article in The Atlantic, Redditors argue that videos are “only the messenger.” The power of videos as a messenger is also seen to validate knowledge about police misconduct that was not captured on video. One Redditor writes, “I’m not going to forget the countless abuses that happened off camera”; another writes, “More like, video proved what minorities were claiming all along” (phungus_mungus, 2017). Others interpret police officers’ good conduct as evidence that they would have been more violent if they were not aware of being videotaped. One Redditor writes, “The cop kept his cool because he saw he was being videotaped. Cops are scared to death of being videotaped and as soon as he saw that he became officer friendly” (WanktheMank, 2017). In this respect, the behavior in the video has less power to shape interpretation and the meaning made from these videos in Donut, than does a broader understanding of policing and its relationship to video evidence. Furthermore, Redditors consider the perceived deterrence of amateur video combined with the prevalence of videos of police misconduct as magnifying the videos’ power to stand as evidence for a much larger crisis. In a thread about a video showing a police officer punching a teenager, one Redditor writes, Yeah makes you think about how much s**t the police got away with before everything was videotaped. There’s so much potential for abuse, and even with cell phones we still see a ton of it. Tough to imagine just how widespread and common it was to see excessive force. (BlackestPanther, 2017)

As these statements indicate, the genre produced by the community on Donut relies on knowledge or beliefs that lie well outside of the bounds of the videos themselves; but the interpretations of the videos do serve to produce and reinforce a shared meaning of the world beyond the confines of the subreddit.

Redditors on PnS, on the other hand, use videos of police as evidence for the valorization of police and police work, engaging in image work (Mawby, 2002) that contests the public’s divergent understanding of police actions (Ellis, 2019). Police are, by turns, represented as both vulnerable and physically powerful. The genre created from these videos in PnS produces meanings that contest those on Donut. In a discussion about a video showing police shooting a man who was carrying a knife, one Redditor denies the broader crisis which drives meaning-making on Donut, writing, To suggest they shot an unarmed man in the back just because is, yet again, ridiculous. It amazes me that no one ever asks the question of why either. Why would a cop, in this age, wearing an activated video camera, actually think they could just execute a minority for absolutely no reason other than for shits and giggles and get away with it? That’s literally never happened. (Ello_returno, 2017)

This Redditor draws on an assumed knowledge about what it means to be a police officer and the relationship between police work and video evidence. Just as the discussants on Donut use the presence of video cameras to interpret behaviors in certain ways, so do those on PnS. The Redditor quoted above, however, uses it to deny such recent examples of exactly what they are describing, most prominently the video of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, being shot in the back by a police officer. Yet, others critique the very foundation of that video evidence, calling people who film police the “peanut gallery” and “idiots” who have no business recording police at all (ursachargemeh, 2017). For PnS, video evidence is both pointless—because, they claim, police do not generally engage in misconduct—and the foundation of an argument that police are not reckless enough to engage in misconduct when they know they may be filmed. These conflicting interpretations both support the idea that police act in good-faith. Other Redditors on PnS use more intimate knowledge of police work in order to make meaning out of what they see in these videos. In a discussion about a video showing an officer with his gun drawn during a traffic stop, one Redditor describes the vulnerability of the police in such situations, writing, ‘The cop does not know for sure he is going home tonight and he has a right to prepare himself for bad guys. I see the cop stand there quietly, taking the [verbal] abuse, like a professional’ (medical_bacon, 2017). For the community on PnS, the meaning of a gesture like drawing one’s gun on a person in a vehicle makes sense because, in part, the community members who shape these meanings draw on their own knowledge of the experience of law enforcement professionals to interpret these videos. The meanings produced serve to contest the countervailing meanings which support a call for policing reforms and accountability.

Police videos and community practices

Through the development of these genres of police videos and the meanings made from them, the communities on Donut and PnS also produce discourses which suggest ways in which community members can translate their interpretations into offline community practices. Whether community members actually go out into the world and engage in these community practices is beyond the scope of this study, but their interpretations of video evidence are used to support arguments for the adoption of certain offline community practices (Mitra, 2010; Day and Schuler, 2004). Like the genres and meanings created in the two communities, these practices diverge sharply between Donut and PnS. The discourses on Donut suggest that its members should adopt cop-watching practices to empower themselves and produce change in policing practices. On the other hand, the discourses on PnS suggest that its members can translate their interpretations of police videos into professional development opportunities in order to reinforce or reestablish the public’s trust in police and reclaim their authority over discourses about police work without changing policing practices.

Redditors on Donut connect the discourses they produce with practices of cop-watching, what Bock (2016) has described as the routinization of recording video of police conduct and distributing that video via traditional and new media for the purposes of holding police accountable for their actions. Donut’s moderators have included a guide for community members interested in cop-watching on the subreddit’s front page, titled “Know Your Rights” (Bad_Cop_No_Donut, 2017). This bulleted list includes legal advice—“It is 100% legal to openly record police in all 50 states as long as you do not physically interfere with the officer”—interpretations of probable reactions from the police—“If an officer says it’s illegal to record him, that officer is lying to try and trick you into shutting off the camera”—and instructions for sharing videos as they are being recorded—“Use a livestreaming app to record your videos. If your phone is seized, the police cannot delete the video because the video was never on the phone to begin with.” Discussions about specific videos also contain similar statements from community members. Potential cop-watchers are urged to “send the video to the relevant police department and just to be sure send it [to] the television stations that broadcast in that area to ensure that some action is taken.” Another in the same thread suggests, “Maybe talk to a lawyer as well, in case they end up arresting you for something, you never know” (Po1Sonator, 2017). Other Redditors implicitly suggest the adoption of cop-watching as a community practice to mobilize social change when they argue for the effectiveness of video in changing policy. In the discussion about The Atlantic article, one Redditor writes, ‘Cell phone cameras mainly are having an impact. There are apps to upload video automatically. Get them. If you can afford to, record every police interaction you are part of or that you witness’ (hockeyboi, 2017). In a thread about ICE raids in Oregon, a Redditor argues that amateur video can be used as a tool to pressure government officials to review law enforcement policies (HumboldtBlue, 2017). The usefulness of cop-watching videos is contrasted with dashcam and bodycam videos, which, in many jurisdictions, the police do not have to share with the public (phungus_mungus, 2017). Video evidence, for this community, is most valuable when it is produced by the community itself; therefore, the production of such videos is a community practice that can only originate in physical spaces even if it is prompted by the community’s discursive practices on Reddit.

Redditors on PnS, on the other hand, translate their interpretations of these videos into community practices of professional development which further empower police officers by justifying their tactics and conduct. For instance, in a discussion of a video where one officer gets in the firing line of another officer during a traffic stop, a Redditor writes, “the bald officer did a great job of maintaining gun safety there. …I agree with the fact that the other officer deserves a slap” (StachedSheepLion, 2017). In another discussion thread regarding a video of a police officer shooting someone with a pepperball gun, a Redditor responds to a question about the effectiveness of such guns, writing, “Not trained on them but from the few videos I’ve seen you want to aim center mass so the pepper powder gets in their respiratory system” (Nuclearfenix, 2017). In a thread about another video showing a traffic stop in which an officer draws his gun on a motorist, one Redditor narrates what their own actions would have been in the same situation, which are more invasive than the behavior shown:

I think I would have asked the driver to step out of the car, asked him to quiet down a little so I could explain the ticket and offense, and if he continued behaving this way, frisked him for my safety (and if he kept acting crazy, maybe even cuffed him). I am guessing the officer on scene simply waited for backup, and used that as his insurance policy while writing a citation and/or identifying the screaming driver. Probably the cop on scene did the right thing there. I do not see in any way how this video makes law enforcement look bad. (medical_bacon, 2017)

The engagement with these videos is tactical and professional. The community practices which they suggest are ways of reiterating and amplifying a narrative of the good-faith conduct PnS community members observe in these videos: good cops can be made into better cops. Rather than engaging with the problems of policing, and acknowledge any need for systemic change, these interpretive practices reiterate and justify existing practices.

Conclusion

Tthough scholars have dismissed much online discourse as a merely phatic form of identity signaling (e.g. Miller, 2017), acknowledging that these conversations have value to the people participating in them or even just reading them—even if they are not producing a discourse that fits some definition of democracy or political participation—allows us to better understand them in terms of what Papacharissi (2014: 135) calls “the longue durée or the long haul of history.” The argument could be made that the discourses in Donut, in particular, are part of the longue durée of social justice activism (Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). Though the interpretations community members produce do not necessarily translate immediately into offline activism, movements for social justice have often started as discursive phenomenon, with people in a room, communicating and, eventually, starting to plan to engage in political practices outside of that room. Reddit provides a digital room and digital tools that can potentially be used to develop such discourses. Furthermore, by reclaiming contexts which have been constrained on broader, more popular platforms, these interpretive communities do not function in isolation; rather, they articulate their positionality in relation to other “institutions and subcultures” which make up online and offline networks of power (Robinson and DeShano, 2011: 3). By positioning themselves in this broader context as an alternative discursive formation, these communities try to push back against the “moribund public” (Miller, 2017) scholars bemoan in other online and offline spaces. Though Reddit may foster “toxic technocultures,” (Massanari, 2017: 329), it may also foster spaces for motivated collective engagement with practices that drive social change.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Michael Buozis

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