Prayer Of The Alt-Knight

Submission 2,753

Part of a series on Police Brutality Controversies. [View Related Entries]

About

Prayer Of The Alt-Knight refers to an image macro meme that reads a "prayer" regarding the suppressing of "dirty hippies," or protestors in general, by armed forces like the police or military. Although it was originally posted to a police-centric forum called Officer.com in 2011, it didn't receive viral attention until early 2022 when the Portland Police department was revealed to have used it within the last slide of a PowerPoint presentation, causing outrage over police brutality across platforms like Twitter. This subsequently caused controversy and a viral debate online.

Origin

The Prayer Of The Alt-Knight image macro was first uploaded to the police-centric internet forum Officer.com^[1] on November 9th, 2011, by user Mitchell_in_CT (shown below). He says in the post that he received the image in an email, subsequently sharing it to the website on the same day.

And the Lord said… Woe be unto you, dirty hippy: For thou stinketh of patchouli and B.O. For thou talk of Marx, yet know him not. For thou hast bills, yet have not paid. For thou hast dreadlocks and white skin. And so I shall send among you. My humble servants with hand, and with bat. That they may christen your head with hickory. And anoint your faces with pepper spray. And once thou hast been cuffed and stuffed. Once thou has been stitched and bandaged. Perhaps thou shall learn. I'm tired of your shit. Amen.

Spread

The image was shared again in 2011 to a different police-centric forum called Blue Line.^[2] It was posted on December 21st, 2011, by the user Sumo_CPO within a thread titled, "Awesome Pictures." The image, with a Photobucket watermark, was captioned, "Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen" (shown below).

The meme was shared to 4chan's /b/^[3] messageboard in November 2016, captioned with hateful rhetoric about Black Americans and the ominous sentence, "It's the circle of life."

However, it wasn't until January 2022 that the image macro received mainstream attention when it was revealed to have been included in a Portland Police Department Training PowerPoint from 2018. This was revealed to the public due to the PowerPoint's use as evidence in an ongoing lawsuit against the City of Portland, stemming from a 2020 case built against them by the organization Don't Shoot Portland.^[4] The lawsuit was sparked by protests in Portland that summer over the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement in general.

The PowerPoint slide (shown below) was the last one in the presentation, made available for download by the City of Portland on their website^[5] in January 2022 after it was lifted as classified evidence.

On January 14th, news publications like the Portland Mercury^[6] and Newsweek^[7] published articles about the Prayer of the Alt-Knight controversy. On the same day, Twitter^[8] user alex_zee raised awareness of the controversy on Twitter, receiving roughly 1,600 likes over one week (shown below).

More Twitter users talked about the controversy going into the rest of January, posting memes and tweets about it. For instance, on January 16th, 2022, Twitter^[9] account DivestSPD posted a meme that received over 70 likes in five days (shown below).