“Whenever there’s trouble, just yelp for help”: Crime, conservation, and corporatization in Paw Patrol

Abstract

With few exceptions, cultural criminologists have yet to investigate how crime, criminalized individuals, and punishment are depicted in children’s television programming. Undertaking the case study of the popular animated children’s series PAW Patrol, I find that crime is committed predominantly by literal outsiders and that wrongdoers are temporarily warehoused or forced to engage in hard labor. In this world, politicians are presented as incompetent or unethical and the state, either incapable of delivering or unwilling to provide basic social services to citizens, relies on the PAW Patrol corporation to investigate crime, rescue non-human animals in states of distress, and recycle. I argue that the series suggests to audiences that we can and should rely on corporations and technological advancements to combat crime and conserve, with responsibilized individuals assisting in this endeavor. Ultimately, PAW Patrol echoes core tenets of neoliberalism and encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.