In 1972, Laura Nader published an essay in Reinventing Anthropology challenging anthropologists to “study up” or to shift the traditional gaze of scholarly inquiry: “Instead of asking why some people are poor, we would ask why other people are so affluent?” (p. 289). Historian Max Felker-Kantor makes an energizing contribution to this “studying up” in DARE to Say No by meticulously documenting the history of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, which originated in Los Angeles in 1983 amid Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs. His work engages the powerful subfields of critical police and educational studies as well as histories of the carceral state.

Felker-Kantor’s book studies up by analyzing DARE as a “police project” (as opposed to solely a drug prevention program) and by scrutinizing what Amanda M. Peterson refers to in a 2024 article for Crime, Media, Culture as “community-oriented copaganda” (p. 2)—police efforts to legitimize compliance with coercive state power. In particular, Felker-Kantor argues that DARE’s stakeholders sought to (re)legitimize police during a period of increased militarization, racialized state violence, and social movement struggles over urban police departments. While policing and schooling had long overlapped in Los Angeles, DARE’s novelty was its deployment of police as teachers responsible for imparting a standard curriculum focused on the prevention of adolescent drug use (p. 21). “[A]t its height police officers taught DARE to fifth- and sixth-grade students in more than 75 & of American school districts as well as in dozens of countries,” he writes, “[and] at the end of the 1990s, altogether, DARE reached an estimated 50 million students globally” (p. 2).

As we organize in the wake of the predictable backlash to the uprisings of 2020, which led many to question policing (particularly in schools), Felker-Kantor reminds readers of the conditions that made schools such fertile sites for policing. Dare to Say No presents a striking account of how the carceral state’s buildup depended on a multiplicity of state and non-state actors, a politically favorable policy environment, and networks of organizations sharing resources, funding, and marketing, in addition to affective political-cultural work.

Chapter 1 lays out the conditions of DARE’s emergence in Los Angeles as a collaboration between the Los Angeles United School District and the Los Angeles Police Department. Police officials developed the program in part to address their failure to stem rampant drug use through a militarized ‘War on Drugs” that focused on supply reduction and on the heels of urban rebellions in the city. Following the 1960s and 1970s—as Felker-Kantor deftly describes in his 2018 monograph, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD—liberal policymakers’ attempts to reign in police abuse ultimately “enabled the broadening of police authority into social institutions where it had never been before” (p. 8).

The book’s second chapter centers on the DARE officer as the integral component of DARE’s widespread adoption in the nation’s school districts. DARE officers were officially full-time faculty members of the school and “quite literally, embodied the reciprocity of the school-police nexus” (p. 36). Felker-Kantor’s research shows how—through a vast training apparatus, professional organizations, and attempts to humanize the police officer as a mentor and teacher—DARE aimed to replace negative representations of the police at the height of a brutally punitive and racialized War on Drugs by recasting the officer as a friendly, positive presence, particularly towards youth of color.

Chapter 3 charts the national and global spread of DARE. Savvy marketing made powerful stakeholders “feel good” about the purported “drug crisis” (p. 68), complete with mascots and a city regulation change to permit DARE bumper stickers on city vehicles. As Felker-Kantor notes, DARE surged beyond Los Angeles, and by the program’s 10th anniversary, it had reached “4.5 million students in more than 70 & of the nation’s school districts” (p. 67). Chapter 4 unpacks the thicket of corporate interests that surrounded DARE as many profit-centered private entities backed the public program largely to create a veneer of “responsible corporate citizenship” and to market their wares more effectively (p. 110). Corporate sponsors including Coca-Cola, NBC, Standard Oil, and Chevron were much more comfortable co-signing a message calling for individualized forms of “moral responsibility,” more policing, and tougher sentences for drug-related crimes than they were supporting any affirmative and non-carceral investments in social services and communities.

Chapter 5 focuses on the ways that DARE responded to broader moral panics and cultural crises mobilized by the Christian Right and the Reagan administration. The program echoed a renewed neoliberal focus on personal responsibility and on the (heterosexual, white) nuclear family. Felker-Kantor shows how DARE elided the structural and political-economic aspects of Reagan’s War on Drugs and instead portrayed drug use as an individual moral failure, invoking racist conceptions of a ‘culture of poverty’ that simultaneously targeted the Black family and social welfare recipients while also reflecting the consensus of “conservative cultural warriors and third-way Democrats…[who sought to] devolv[e] the social costs of the drug problem to families” (p. 140).

In Chapter 6, Felker-Kantor summarizes the steady stream of research on DARE. While some studies, particularly those contracted by organizations connected to DARE, were flattering and positive, the overwhelming majority of independent scholarly research highlighted how DARE unequivocally failed to steer young people away from drug use. For example, one of the earliest studies of DARE referenced by Felker-Kantor, published in 1991, “found that DARE had little effect on student drug use” (p. 145–146). But DARE advocates, personnel, and police repeatedly worked to undercut this growing body of critical research by platforming positive findings or responded with lukewarm reforms in an attempt to preserve the program (p. 176).

We often struggle to believe that academic research in the realms of the criminal-legal and educational systems actually have an impact, given that so many laws and policies often run afoul of existing evidence. We were energized to read that academic scholars repeatedly critiqued DARE, which had siphoned upwards of $700 million in taxpayer dollars by the early 1990s (p. 145) despite claims that it was funded by drug bust-related asset forfeiture and property seizure. As Felker-Kantor notes, the “research community continued to hold DARE’s feet to the fire,” ensuring its end in 2009 when it was replaced by a new program, “Keepin’ it REAL” (p. 144). However, this same academic community was less willing to question the role of the police in creating community safety—or to excavate, name, and critique the copaganda component of DARE.

Given the positive testimonies that the book includes from young people involved in DARE, we were surprised not to read more about any student or youth resistance. In our experience working with young people and marginalized populations in institutional settings, ventriloquism, and subversion are often survival strategies. Individuals in coercive contexts may feel compelled to say or do things to protect themselves or navigate harmful institutions that do not accurately reflect their own views or experiences. We are privileged to be surrounded by young people who are leading the charge against the carceral state in Chicago, where BIPOC public high school students organized a powerful campaign to push back on a new proposed $95 million police academy.

After the summer 2020 uprisings, “copaganda” re-emerged in U.S. schools, aimed at improving police-community relations and reshaping perceptions of law enforcement. Programs like “Coffee with a Cop”, which started in 2011, and the K-12 school-based program, Officer Friendly, which started in 1966, has recently relaunched in many jurisdictions, including New Orleans. They are part of this effort to re-humanize police and present them as community allies, as Kaitlin Landry noted in a 2024 post on the New Orleans Police Department News. These copaganda initiatives seek to build trust through informal interactions, presenting officers as approachable rather than as enforcers of punitive measures. Reviewing Felker-Kantor’s careful history reminds us that the project of policing has always required ideological and affective work, which is often most visible in a perceived or actual crisis and particularly in moments when racial capitalism feels or is threatened. After the Watts uprising in Los Angeles in 1965, LAPD officers were placed as educators in classes in majority Black schools in an explicit attempt to ensure an “attitude adjustment” about policing and governance among Black students, as Damien Sojoyner noted in his 2013 article for the Berkeley Review of Education (p. 252).

In many ways the script that Felker-Kantor offers is too familiar: Harmful public policies—which purport to promote a social good but in fact coerce, regulate, and recycle familiar racist ideologies—are implanted in schools through partnerships between the nation-state and like-minded philanthropic entities. His “studying up” approach provides a valuable model for analyzing the complex policy and affective assemblages that form and sustain carceral projects, which must continue to be sites of struggle and contestation.