Painting police power: The transnational semiotics of legitimation and pacification in police murals

Police around the world sponsor and paint murals to physically and socially engage the communities they police. Drawing from a transnational semiotic analysis, this study reveals how police murals materialize deeply affective landscapes. Despite local variation, police murals consistently reproduce paternalist, racialized, and colonial narratives that obscure direct, indirect, and pacifying forms of state violence. As benevolent markers of territory, police murals fabricate authority and seek acceptance through spatial esthetics that—subtly or overtly—reinforce the architectures and ideologies of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy.