It will probably come as no surprise to my readers that I’ve never liked cop glorification shows. Even before I was old enough to understand why glorifying state enforcers was wrong, and before I was wise enough to recognize that such shows constitute propaganda for a stage-four “might makes right” weltanschauung, they made me uneasy for reasons I could not adequately express. So while one my little sisters was glued to Adam-12 (and later ChiPs), and another never missed an episode of Starsky and Hutch, I went off to my room to read. When one of my university boyfriends told me about the now-infamous Dirty Harry “make my day” sequence, I feigned polite disinterest to cloak not-so-polite disgust, but a decade later, when I came home once to find Jack watching Cops, I flew into a barely-articulate rage whose character you can probably guess without any further elaboration on my part. Such shows, going back at least to Dragnet, Highway Patrol and The Untouchables, have always put lipstick on pigs and presented cops as heroic and principled defenders of the weak from villainous “criminals” with less character development than Snidely Whiplash, incorruptible white knights who would never ever ever rob or frame people, lie under oath, stalk or even rape women, or brutalize, maim and murder people, sometimes by literally shooting them in the back. But while other popular ’50s genres such as westerns, family sitcoms, anthology shows and science fiction have either largely vanished or dramatically changed, cop glorification shows have only proliferated; it seems like every second or third time I run into a television set somewhere, it’s showing an episode of either C.S.I. or Law & Order: SVU (usually with a storyline involving a dead hooker). And every time that has happened since the advent of ubiquitous video recording a few years ago, I’ve idly wondered how the hell such shows, even in the deeply-authoritarian US, could have developed so little since Jack Webb’s Joe Friday deadpanned, “Just the facts, ma’am” (except for the cops becoming even more unbelievably competent via magical “forensics”). Well, recently I read an article on just that subject which interviewed a number of writers, directors, and other staff from such shows, and…well, it’s not pretty. Here are a few short passages to whet your appetite:
No one has done more to propagate the myth of the hero cop than the writers of network-television police procedurals.
“I was told pretty early on to avoid dirty cops as story points.”
“We are in the hero business. There have been times when I’ve felt complicit in what is, essentially, a police department’s PR campaign…If we show B-roll footage, you’re going to see a cop doing a hero walk and getting into his car like a cowboy; we’re not going to show him swinging a baton at some kid on the sidewalk.”
“…we reinforce the idea that police are good so that the world is exactly the way the people in our audience want to believe it is…we rationalize it because this is our job. Even if we know it’s wrong.”
“…we have a police technical consultant…and if the director doesn’t know how to block a certain scene, our consultant becomes the arbiter of what is realistic…he always makes sure we manufacture a reason why the cop would have…the right to get violent. We always have to make sure we show the guy reaching toward his pocket for a gun.”
“For the sake of storytelling, we create myths.”
“The truth is, the day-to-day work of a police officer isn’t exciting enough for television, so we dramatize it.”
The common yokel considers my job degrading, but I’m not the one getting paid to lie about violent thugs so the public stays asleep while a vast police state is constructed around them.
I used to like the cartoon [Cyber] C.O.P.S. growing up in the late ’80s-early ’90s, but aside from the character designs/settings; that show has aged badly. (I was born in 1985, the same year that Clarence Nash, Bill Scott, and Joe Oriolo died.) Fun fact: When Chase Craig became Dell Comics’ editor-in-chief in 1955, one of the new rules he imposed was “don’t criticize the cops.”
City cops can be a bit twitchy. Very political as they are often run by mayors. That’s one reason I avoid cities.
If you’ve ever lived rural, we have sheriff’s, who are elected and much more likely to cater to the people. They’re not nearly as twitchy.
I’d never live in a city. Only in unincorporated areas with a sheriff I voted for. America is the only country in the where you can elect your law enforcement.
Great topic.
Our ages are not too far apart and I grew up on a lot of that procedural cop garbage you were smart to avoid. OK, not even I watched pure garbage like “Cops,” “Law and Order,” or “CSI,” but as a kid I did watch “Kojak” and later “The Commish” which is hardly much better (although with Stephen Cannell I would argue the writing was sure a lot better). What happened to all the popular non-cop shows?
We can argue over the quality of these, but Perry Mason was once a thing. There was Matlock and Milos Foreman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” There was the remake of “The Outer Limit” from the 1990’s that was extremely anti-authoritarian and constantly warned against the dangers of State power in its narratives. There was “The Twilight Zone” informed by Rod Serling’s time in the Pacific (nothing will make you distrust authority quite like serving in the military during a war). I even watched an early 1990’s movie where Tom Selleck of “Blue Bloods” of all people is falsely sent to prison by a couple dirty cops who framed him. What about the anti-heroes like Jim Rockford from “The Rockford Files” where the main character had been falsely imprisoned and ran into his share of dirty and blindingly arrogant cops. There was “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times” that both managed to take a skeptical view of policing.
There have always been and will always be boot licking authoritarian shows and movies because the eternally afraid with always be drawn to police dramas that offer them a false sense of security. The lowest and least evolved among these will even go on to become cops or prosecutors themselves. but what became of the Hollywood and TV counter-culture? I think the death of Cold War Eastern Europeans like Milos certainly hasn’t helped, but it must be more than just that. Any ideas?
I think that the Hollywood and TV countercultures either got driven off to indie films due to politically correct pussies, or compromised their artistic integrity to appeal to the broadest audience possible, and made money as a result. The likes of The Rockford Files would never be made today for fears that it would result in E Pete Adams and Mike Ranatza losing their shit and threatening the producers of such with jail time.
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I have noticed as well that there seem to be more and more of these. Whether that is increased propaganda or too many people just like them, this is a pretty bad sign.
I agree completely. One thing I noticed about the cop show my wife watched for a while is that the ONLY people who stick up for their rights (“sorry, you can’t come in without a search warrant”, etc.) are criminals who before the end of the show get raided and hauled off to jail, as the audience cheers wildly. Anyone in the show who is not a bad guy always gladly lets the cops roll all over them. Not very subtle, but apparently quite effective, as most Americans seem to find it impossible to conceive of cops as criminal shitheads who are a far greater threat to life, liberty, and property than any non-uniformed thug they’re ever likely to encounter.