Don't look for "reality" on TV cop shows

 

In a Rolling Stone piece entitled “A History of Violence: Why I Loved Cop Shows, and Why They Must Change,” Alan Sepinwall opined, somewhat fitfully, that “cop shows” do not reflect the reality of the streets, and have gone too far in “glamorizing” or “normalizing” abusive behavior by police. To be certain, no one can honestly say that cop shows come anywhere near the “truth.” 95 percent of a typical police officer’s time is “looking” for something to do, and maybe 5 percent of it is actually “finding” something to do, and maybe one percent actually necessitating some kind of physical restraint. But those rare times when a police officer does something “newsworthy,” it tends to overshadow the mundane.

Thus there seems to be a never-ending storyline these days of police shooting black people, and the outrage that these incidents excite. To be honest, most (but not all) of these cases police used “excessive force” on suspects who either did not comply with police commands, tried to escape or physically altercated with police. Few were “law-biding” citizens, and many had outstanding warrants for their arrests—and some, like Michael Brown, had just committed a crime. But we live in an age now where everything is politicized; because there have been cases where police acted on “impulse” and killed innocent or unarmed people, the outrage from such incidents creates “suspicion” of the motives of police in all such incidents, or at least those involving black people.  

Yesterday, the “accidental” shooting of a black man, Daunte Wright, by a white female police officer, Kim Potter, in Minnesota has led to the usual widespread protests. Wright was no “innocent”; he was found to have warrants for his arrest and was in the process of being handcuffed outside his car. But bodycam footage appears to show Potter interfering with the handcuffing process, which apparently gave Wright an “opening” to escape back into his car in an attempt to drive away. There were calls to “tase” him, and Potter pulled out what she claims she thought was a Taser, but instead was a gun, which she fired off a round, striking Wright. Wright was apparently still conscious long enough to drive the car away, but soon crashed and died.

Police and city officials are calling it a “terrible accident,” but it is way too late for that, given the history of the state for police shootings and almost no police officer being held accountable. It doesn’t help that out of over 200 recorded cases of Minnesota police shootings in the past two decades, the only officer who has been convicted to date of homicide was a black officer, Muhammad Noor, who claimed to have heard a gunshot, and felt threatened by the victim, a white woman named Justine Ruszcyk Damond, who apparently made a bogus 911 call that led to the incident; Noor was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Damond’s family received $20 million in compensation. Was the shooting unjustified and worthy of punishment? Yes, but the question of why a white woman’s life “mattered” more than all the other victims of police shootings in the state remains—as well as if there may have been a different result if the officer who did the shooting was white.

That’s “real life.” But back in the “old” days, police and detective television shows and films tended to have more fisticuffs and one-on-one shootouts, or were dependent on the deduction skills of one’s own brainpower. In the first instance, Western town “marshals” were one-man depopulators, taking out the “trash” every week. In the second, the first season of Mannix—rarely shown in syndication—had our man Joe working for some “crime scene investigation” private detective firm that always seemed to a few steps behind Mannix’s own analytical, common sense detection know-how. Season 2 dispensed with the computerized nonsense as Mannix on his own had to occasionally take a beating or two (and dish some out himself) before all the pieces came together to solve a crime or mystery.

Yet the portrayal of police was always somewhat sanitized; TV shows like Dragnet and Adam 12 almost never showed cops engaging in violence, while Barney Miller and company never left the station house. In Sepinwall’s RS piece, he notes that police are generally “presented as infallible heroes who are professionally and temperamentally equipped to handle any delicate situation. Then, eventually, it began depicting less admirable cop behavior, but in ways that tended to explain it—and, after a while, to normalize it. These fictional stories have rewired many of us to assume cops are always acting in good faith, and to ignore or away those moments when they’re clearly not.”

Some beloved television shows were particularly egregious in retrospect in this regard. Take for instance “The Andy Griffith Show.” Sheriff Andy Taylor is just an “aw-shucks” kind of Southern guy, and his deputy Barney Fife was just a harmless, bumbling fool. But as Sepinwall notes, this was in direct contrast to what people were seeing on the evening news: “You might occasionally see a person of color as a background extra in the Mayberry town square, but they were almost never granted speaking parts, given all the questions that might be raised at a moment when other Southern sheriffs were turning dogs and firehoses on black citizens. The evening news provided one harsh image, and then primetime soothed us into thinking that all was well.”

While noting that victims and the falsely accused were “afterthoughts” on the show, Sepinwall was somewhat more forgiving of a cop show I hate immensely, the forever-running “Law & Order” which did attempt to provide some form of “reality” when Sam Waterston was present, but since then it has become populated by arrogant, pompous, self-righteous types who are never “wrong,” and unlike in real life where they are the demographic least likely to be a victim of a crime, white women are almost always the “victim.” This is not “reality,” it is presenting a patently false notion that white women are more “victims” than any other demographic—including black people, and mocking the “Black Lives Matter” movement. And you’ll never know by watching “Law & Order” that the vast majority of black men who spent years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit were there based on the testimony of white women for whom black people all look “the same.”

But even when television tried to put an element of “reality” into cop shows, there was always a “catch” to it. Sepinwall notes that “NYPD Blues” Det. Andy Sipowicz may have been “a fat, drunk, violent foulmouthed bigot” who “in an earlier era would have been a cautionary tale at best, but more likely a pure villain,” but “he quickly became the show’s hero, and one of America’s.” When evidence of horrific police brutality in New York, such as in the Abner Louima case in Brooklyn, television producers and actors tended to admit that there might be a few “bad apples,” but in general cops were “heroes” in a “noble system.”

More recently, cop shows like “The Shield” and “Justified” portrayed its law enforcers as “anti-heroes,” much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic character “Dirty Harry,” with cops who were “judge, jury and executioner.” Yet even in the case of “The Shields” Vic Mackey, he is clearly a worse character than many of the criminals he killed, yet the audience is still meant to “identify” with him—because what he did was “justified.” In this way, such cop shows are actually closer to reality for some demographics, like conservative white audiences. But there is still that disconnect between the way police are portrayed on television and in films for other demographics, particularly minorities who are not fooled by the fact that police forces are often portrayed as “integrated,” but which is just a way of avoiding the reality of what is really happening on the street.