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.
