By 1975, New York City was $11 billion dollars in debt. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the city could no longer afford to maintain basic municipal services. Enraged about proposed budget cuts, unions representing the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the New York Fire Department (FDNY) created a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” which they passed out at local airports and hotels. On the cover, a black hooded skull smiled menacingly; inside were a list of nine “safety” tips for tourists such as “Stay off the streets after 6 P.M.” and “Remain in Manhattan.”
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Unsuspecting recipients had no idea they were caught in a propaganda war waged against Mayor Abe Beame, who took the battle to court and secured a temporary restraining order to protect the “economic well-being of the city”. But the image of New York had already taken a nosedive as Hollywood and the media capitalized on the gritty glamour of a city struggling to survive.
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Taking a page from the new wave of neo-realist Hollywood films, including The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the Fear City pamphlet cast New York as a den of sin, doomed but for the heroism of the boys in blue. Copaganda, as it is popularly known, is a long-standing American trope, one which found increasing popularity with the arrival of television in the 1950s with shows like Dragnet, Naked City and Peter Gunn.
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By the 1970s, copaganda was everywhere, slickly produced to package violence to the masses. American photographer Jill Freedman (1939–2019) was not impressed. “I hate the violence you see on TV and in the movies. I wanted to show it straight, violence without commercial interruption, sleazy and not so pretty without its make-up,” she wrote in the introduction to her 1982 monograph Street Cops, which is being republished and exhibited this month.
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