Go, Do a Crime

Origin

‘Go, Do a Crime’ is a photograph of an off-camera person handing a gun to a raccoon, captioned with the instruction to go and commit a crime. The original was posted by the Twitter user @sweetraccoons on September 5th, 2021, and took over 211,000 likes and 35,000 retweets in its first year.

The joke is the mismatch: a small, endearing animal is handed something entirely unsuited to it, and the caption eggs it on instead of stopping it. That raccoons already carry a reputation as bin-raiding troublemakers only helps.

Spread

The decisive moment came three days later. On September 8th, 2021, the Minecraft creator TommyInnit tweeted a screenshot of a Discord conversation with fellow creator Wilbur Soot in which Soot had sent him the raccoon image. That tweet drew 289,000 likes and 8,300 retweets over the following year, putting the meme in front of the entire Minecraft YouTube audience.

From there it settled into a redraw format, with artists replacing the raccoon with characters of their own — from anime, games and VTuber circles — so that every fandom ended up with its own version.

Usage

• Egging on something small and cute to cause trouble
• Expressing encouragement where discouragement is called for
• The redraw challenge of putting a favourite character in the same frame

It is not advocacy of actual crime but something closer to affection: I will cheer for this small creature even if it misbehaves. Because a gun is in frame, though, it is easy to misread without the context.

Sources

• Know Your Meme, ‘Go, Do a Crime’ — @sweetraccoons’s original post of September 5th, 2021 (211,000 likes, 35,000 retweets in its first year); TommyInnit’s Discord screenshot tweet of September 8th, 2021 (289,000 likes, 8,300 retweets) and Wilbur Soot; the spread of the character redraw format
• Know Your Meme, ‘Go, Do a Crime’ image entry — examples of character redraws
• Danbooru Wiki, ‘Go Do A Crime (meme)’ — the format as defined and tagged in fan-art circles