#looking for him specifically actually juxtaposed him w other heroes and how his poltical activism and anti-cop rhetoric is non negotiable t

[littledead-ridinghood]

Yes sorry Ollie is a cop. He is a cop in the way nearly every DC hero is a cop and part of copaganda. We have multiple articles on how all super heroes are cops but that you can enjoy them and find catharsis anyway. Ollie gives people justice who are ignored by the system and Ollie is a cop are both true that's ok. You can look up super heroes and copaganda on youtube and find multiple nuanced videos.

okay, I wasn't going to respond to this at first, but this is my opinion on cops in the dc universe. It's not fully fleshed out yet, I feel, but I've been mulling it over in my head for months, and is something I've wanted to talk about for a while now.

Plainly speaking, I think cops who work with vigilantes are inherently bad cops. Vigilantism is illegal and when cops team up with vigilantes, they are adhering to their moral code rather than the law ie copaganda.

It's a play on dramatic irony where we as the audience know more than the characters in the story. We can see Detective Jim Gordan, for example, working with Batman (who were told is a good guy) because he knows the GCPD is corrupted and he can't trust his fellow officers. Therefore, because Batman is headlined as "the good guy" in these storylines that reflects on Jim Gordan making him, in turn, "a good guy." We're told to view him as such because Jim's morals are "clean," "see he also wants to clean up Gotham City, so he's partnering with the people who are actually trying to do that."

The problem is that in these instances, Gordan is adhering to his morals over the law where his morals are to protect the people where the law says to protect property. We can say that it's for the greater good, but that doesn't change the fact that it's illegal, argo, making him "dirty". And that is copaganda! Upholding Gordan for breaking the law because "he knows better than the institute" is literally some of the most common copaganda in media. It's right next to writing cops as if they're your friends so that people will instill trust in the institution (think B99).

Cops and vigilantes should inherently not get along because vigilantes would not exist if the system--if cops--worked. But the system doesn't work, so these individuals take justice into their own hands via criminal action. Now, we look at these heroes and say "yes, they're criminals on a legal basis, but we understand that morally speaking, they're doing good work." Jim Gordan doesn't have the luxury of that grayness. He can try to clean up Gotham, but once he starts doing so outside the law, he, himself, is also a criminal and an accomplice.

Personally, I don't think your moral compass should start and stop with the law because the law isn't always morally correct. Many laws throughout history have been created by those in power to stay in power. And if you can't recognize how the law can be used to impede on others' natural rights then you have an unholy amount of privilege. Having said that, most fiction where cops are allowed to uphold their morals over the law is written as them protecting the people (as stated with Jim) rather than the real-world equivalent where upholding "morals" is usually off-the-rail abuse of power. This is where cops use the excuse "I thought they had a gun!" and jump straight to brutality rather than assessing the situation and attempting to talk a person down. Because it's not actually about morals like portrayed on t.v. but, again, that idea that laws exist to keep the top on top.

I disagree with your statement: "[Ollie] is a cop in the way nearly every DC hero is a cop and part of copaganda." Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but this is a very "a square is a rectangle, so a rectangle should also be a square" kind of argument.

I think characters can have instances of copaganda (any story that has cops in it is inherently copaganda, even if portrayed in the worst light possible, for the simple fact that cops are present) but, that doesn't make them a cop.

By saying Oliver is a cop, I presume you mean because he goes after criminals, which completely undermines what a cop is. That's like saying an attorney of law is a cop because they work in the legal system to prosecute the accused i.e. going after criminals. Cops exist to protect property, uphold the law (but they have no legal obligation to protect the public a la DeShaney vs. Winnebago(1989), Town of Castle Rock vs. Gonzales(2005) and re-enforced after Uvalde in spring '22), and was created to control weaker groups of people.

That's just not how Ollie's portrayed. Oliver is portrayed as an anti-fascist, social justice, cop-hating, criminal. He's literally juxtaposed with cops. Holding himself accountable in law is not an endorsement of the legal system but rather a stance in his morals that no one is above accountability which is how the law should work. You can say all of his writing, just by including cops, makes his comics copaganda, but that doesn't reflect on Ollie as a character endorsing the police nor does it "make him a cop". Copaganda reflects on cops as an institution and how writers want us to view them. Oliver is literally one of the characters whose stories actively revolve around him sticking up for those who are victimized by the police. You said it yourself, anon, "Nearly every DC hero is a cop." You just happened to pick one of the ones who falls into the small minority of non-cop abiding.

Furthermore, though I assume you mean Oliver metaphorically embodies what role cops fill, in the literal sense as well, your claim is fundamentally wrong because Oliver Queen has never been an actual cop before either. Someone who would fit your sentiment would be Dick Grayson who has been written in the role of an officer before (literal) as well as upholds the system as best he can (metaphorical).

The difference between Bruce, Oliver, and Dick in their inherent "all stories that have cops are" copaganda is that Dick and Bruce both constantly get aligned with cops by others including the police whereas the Police actively hunt Ollie down because they see him as a threat to their power. Ollie actively hates cops. Bruce and Dick (usually) actively don't. Ollie works against the Police whereas the other two work with the police so much so that, again, citizens relate their brutality to that of cops.

I was reading Hal and Ollie's road trip arc a good handful of months ago (of which is about the dichotomized relationship between Ollie "loud and proud leftist" Queen and Hal "before his rebellious phase" Jordan), and one of the issues was made up of two stories. The second one is of Hal and Ollie at odds over the best way to solve something via the authorities or good ol' fashion revolution, but I want to focus on the first half of the issue. It takes place in Gotham where Officer Bullocks literally commits an act of heavy Police Brutality against a gang of older teens and young adults who wronged him(they trashed his entire apartment) and he gets away with it because he "felt bad." It was horrifying to read; there was no accountability.

So I agree with you, there is a wild amount of copaganda in comic books both because of writers' political beliefs and views on the world (bullocks getting away with it because the writer thought it was fine) but also in the context of the stories. An example of in-story writing would be the first thing Jason ever said to Bruce in rebirth: "You want to beat up on a kid, go enlist in the G.C.P.D. like every other bully in this city." So in the context of the batman universe, Jason and people like Jason (i.e. the weak and vulnerable) do relate vigilantes to cops because they constantly see them working with each other. Dick Grayson was a cop for a period of time joining the Blud. police department because "those were the morals his father instilled in him." And I could go on and on about the faith comic characters constantly put in law and order.

Oliver holding himself accountable under the law, though, is not endorsing the system like Bruce and Dick do, he does not place his faith in law and order. That is him actively taking a stance saying he is not above the law. Where on most cases, Bruce does view himself as being above. And even when Bruce admits to going too far, he will never fess up to the public that he, Bruce Wayne, did it, whereas Ollie doesn't allow himself to hide behind his persona. A big difference between the two men is that Oliver being Green Arrow is very public knowledge and Bruce tries to hide his life as batman as best as he can. It all comes down to accountability.

Now, you sent this about Ollie, so why am I talking so much about him in relation to Bruce. That's because Ollie and Bruce are constantly being related to as the same, usually in the vein of "well, they're both hella rich with no powers who play dress up, right?" But this is a complete misunderstanding of Ollie's character (for one, he's not rich, or at least he's not supposed to be).

I think this constant water-downed view of Ollie is what allows people to project Bruce's less-than-iron beliefs onto Ollie.

There are decades worth of canon where a core of Ollie's is the fact that he can't stand cops and doesn't believe the system that's used now can be saved, only mitigated as something better replaces it. He holds himself accountable for his actions as Green Arrow because he knows that just complaining isn't enough. He needs to step up as a leader and not just help overthrow a discriminatory institution but actually actively help rebuild it. Whereas Bruce actively believes the system can be saved. Most notable that comes to mind right now is the new Batman movie where Bruce, in his final monologue, just saw how the cops failed to protect Gotham from the riddler, but states how, just like the bat symbol is now established with hope, he now has hope that the police can do the right thing. He doesn't learn that the current system will never truly work and instead now believes that it could work (when we know it can't).

If you want to focus on copaganda in DC comics, Arrows just aren't going to be your strongest contestants. Because Copaganda does exist, but your best bet is going to lie within most bat-adjacent characters who literally try to uphold that system. Or you can look at lanterns whose stories not only are about literal space cops but have also deviated from Hal Jordan rebuilding his moral compass and calling out the guardians for their fascist tendencies to turning Guy Gardener, a man previously written as to be a notorious cop hater, into working in the Baltimore P.D. as an actual cop. Those groups have the basis for talking how police are glorified. Arrows just don't have that historical canon for a strong argument.