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COMU 1120 Representation & Power

UC Davis and Pepper Spray Cop: Using memes as weapons against police injustices

Images of ‘pepper-spraying cop’ from the University of California-Davis’ Occupy Wall

State movement became an Internet meme hours after they were posted online. The
angry public manipulated the key symbols of the famous image, creating hundreds of
digital derivatives and providing new insights into what happened (Mielczarek, 2018).
According to Carah and Louw (2015), this is a process of representation that achieved
through interactive media, where anyone can freely and effectively create and
disseminate Internet content through social media platforms. The development of
this event unfolds not only provides a vivid interpretation of the role that Internet
memes play in the framework of public discourse, but also the relationship between
representations and power. To further explore this point, this research analyses
various memes appeared in this case, and link their background, creation and
dissemination to the features of visual memes in online protests. Firstly, the
emergence and development of the ‘pepper-spray cop’ memes during the case will
be analysed basing on the impact of pictures as cultural texts on encoding and
decoding. Secondly, it will investigate a specific example, an Internet meme that
superimposes Pike’s image on the painting of John Trumbull, ‘The Declaration of
Independence’. And it will give us an in-depth understanding of how representation
is produced and spread to the wider public to promote critical thinking.

The development and circulation of Internet memes can be regarded as a kind of

resistance that not only shapes public discourses on the Internet but also creates
influence in the real world (Bayerl & Stoynov, 2014). Going back to the first photo
that uploaded to Reddit the day after the pepper-spraying incident. As campus police
failed to disperse the gathered students, John Pike in the photo sprayed pepper on
the protest students in sit-in movement without any violence or aggression.
Following Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding models, such a photo like this as a
particular cultural text may be encoded with certain meanings; however, not
everyone will decode it in the same way. Some people may read Pike’s action with
the authority of the law and police while others may condemn Pike for questioning
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the police and their authority. Then, continue to move on to the related memes that
emerged after this original photo. The diversity of the ‘pepper-spray cop’ memes is
reflected not only in the variety of content but also in the multiplicity of visited
destinations (Mielczarek, 2018). After a day, a variety of the ‘pepper-spray cop’
memes began appearing on large social media sites such as Facebook and Reddit,
which served as incubators and centres for memetic mutation, as well as traditional
websites such as the Washington Posts, which acted as commentators to explain the
causes and significance of memes to the audience (2018). Connecting with the
previous incidents in which police also used pepper spray against ‘occupy’ protesters,
the national US media made the incident more popular by reporting it with the
headlines of ‘pepper-spray cop’ memes. With the continue escalating news of the
‘pepper-spray cop,’ these memes had further circulated elements of the original text
of the photo as new texts through the spread of the media. They encoded a new set
of meanings and changed the view of the original text and the event it represents.
The incident at UC Davis became a focus of the public and media attention with the
assistance of the iconic ‘pepper-spray cop’ meme, severely damaging the public
impression of the university police and government and triggering more discussion of
police injustice under a broader context of the occupation movements. During the
process of representation of this case, the rapid spread of the ‘pepper-spray cop’
meme occurred may due to the general consciousness of police injustice in public
and media (Bayerl & Stoynov, 2014), which shows that the moments of encoding and
decoding memes are a process of exercising and disrupting the power.

Intertextuality is an ’internal reference system between texts’ that allows the

decoding information has its connotative meaning in the process of merging one text
into another (Turner, 2003). And the attraction of most memes lies largely in their
intertextuality as they take pictures from mainstream media constructions,
juxtaposing and remixing them to produce new layers of significance (Huntington,
2015). Looking at this example, the ‘Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop’ meme as
a new text mixed up with the university police Pike’s image from the initial photo
(one text) and John Trumbull’s painting ‘The Declaration of Independence’ (another
text), and intended to change the original meaning of the two texts it incorporates.
The Declaration of Independence of America was adopted on July 4th, 1776,
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announcing the United States of America’s official creation. People generally think
that the American Dream myth is rooted in the Declaration of Independence
(Huntington, 2015), which means Trumbull’s painting can be seen as a signifier of
democracy of America. In the meme, Pike’s figure places in the role of institutional
synecdoche as the embodiment of institutional forces abusing power with the
existing user knowledge surrounding the event at UC Davis (Peck, 2014). Then, the
painting of ‘The Declaration of Independence’ as background in the meme becomes
a metaphor that stands for the students being pepper-sprayed. Besides, the
intertextuality of this meme metaphorically suggests that Pike as a representative of
the police and power is misruling and oppressing its people. He is not simply pepper-
spraying the students who are using their rights to protest but defacing and
disrespecting American values (Milner, 2013), and every American citizen committed
to the founding ideals of the nation should oppose him. The achievement of this
meme in framing the public discourse about police injustice is because it represents
the original event and the composition itself through the inflammatory visual
rhetoric (Mielczarek, 2018). And Pike’s image as a key element also successfully
transforms the public’s visual argument from a comment on a particular event to the
public discourse on the state violations of civil rights throughout the creation system
(2018).

The ‘pepper-spraying cop’ incident at UC Davis became an infamous event through

the circulation of its Internet memes online has caused a long-lasting and damaging
reaction (Mielczarek, 2018). It not only sparked several investigations accusing Pike’s
excessive uses of hegemony, eventually leading him to be fired, also caused damage
to the university and its principal, so that UC Davis spent more than $175000 to
launch an ‘online reputation management campaign’ in the following years (2018).
‘The pepper-spray cop’ meme addressed a board issue of police violence, state
injustice and threats to democratic values and free societies in its expanded forms
during the event (Bayerl & Stoynov, 2014). That is, these memes used intertextuality
and synecdoche efficiently to encode the arguments about the nature of human
freedom (Huntington, 2015), and the issues they represented are decoded by a wide
and different audience in their social background. According to Mielczarek (2018),
the Internet memes retain some elements of the original text it copied (pepper-
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spraying Pike) but also mutate from it into new content (Pike’s pepper-spraying
character in the painting of ‘The Declaration of Independence’). The combination of
two unique cultural texts into the ‘Casually Pepper Spraying Everything Cop’ meme
mentioned above is such a kind of typical example that highlights the ability of
memes to destroy institutional symbols and hegemonic information (Peck, 2014).
Nevertheless, the cultural texts of the ‘Casually Pepper Spraying Everything Cop’
meme use only provide the basis for readers to interpret memes better, which means
the person who created it has his own encoded meaning while a different
interpretation may decode the information differently. Therefore, memes are new
texts that recycled every aspect of their original texts, creating and spreading a new
way of understanding and doing judgment of events themselves during the process
of representation. They try to control the way people decoded them to serve the
interests of one particular group (students be sprayed with pepper) and harm the
interests of another group (the police and their authority).
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Reference

Bayerl, P. S., & Stoynov, L. (2014). Revenge by photoshop: Memefying police acts in
the public dialogue about injustice. New Media & Society,18(6), 1006-1026.
doi:10.1177/1461444814554747

Carah, N., & Louw, E. (2015). Media and Society: Production, Content and
Participation. London: SAGE Publications.

Huntington, H. E. (2015). Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using
Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political
Rhetoric. Communication Studies,67(1), 77-93. doi:10.1080/10510974.2015.1087414

Mielczarek, N. (2018). The “Pepper-Spraying Cop” Icon and Its Internet Memes:
Social Justice and Public Shaming Through Rhetorical Transformation in Digital
Culture. Visual Communication Quarterly,25(2), 67-81.
doi:10.1080/15551393.2018.1456929

Milner, R. M. (2013). Pop polyvocality: Internet memes, public participation, and the

Occupy Wall Street movement. International Journal of Communication, 7, 34.

Peck, A. M. (2014). A laugh riot: Photoshopping as vernacular discursive

practice. International Journal of Communication, 8, 25. Retrieved from
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2692

Turner, G. (2003). British cultural studies: An introduction. Routledge: London.