Now that the show Cops has been pulled and people are analyzing the accuracy of police representation on ultra-popular shows such as the Law and Order and NCIS franchises, I have a question. What took so long?
It's strange. For a decade, I've been meaning to write a really nasty monograph about Law and Order. My personal concerns actually have little to do with these shows' inaccuracies regarding the number and severity of bad police behaviors. On television, a superior officer saying "I'll have your badge" is a cliché that occurs on a handful of networks about as often as it does during all real-world oversight of roughly a million federal, state, and local American police. We'll get to my particular gripes later.
Television has always misrepresented not just police behavior, but virtually all of the probabilities of life in these United States. Usually, the disparity between television and reality is most obvious from a socioeconomic perspective. The characters on Friends could not have afforded their apartments or lifestyles. Even classic working class families like The Conners outspend their likely income. In addition, considering that the majority of Americans are overweight and close to 40% are obese, American television characters simply don't reflect the demographics and physical attributes of reality.
If the socioeconomics and weight of television characters don't mirror America, is it any surprise that shows involving the police may venture even further afield from reality? What if these shows adhered more closely to real life? Imagine if Law and Order featured abuses of police power every other episode. Imagine stories that reflected actual stats of cops killing 1000 U.S. citizens a year versus roughly 50 police a year dying because of citizens. Consider if Cops episodes were edited to make police look bad.
The rose-colored lenses through which both reality shows and scripted television present police does civilians a disservice. They portray a fiction that is very, very different from the real world. The problem is twofold. First, American television shows feature statistical relationships that are simply incorrect, whether income/lifestyle or habits/weight. In the case of police, the fictions involve the percentage of bad police behavior and the ratio of police killing others versus others killing police. Second, this would not be much of a problem except for the fact that police television shows purport to show our real world, not some alternate universe where things are acknowledged as being different. Faking a representation of reality is more of a problem than, for example, an unreal Star Wars police procedural.
My Problems with American Police Shows
American police shows almost always overemphasize the role of the individual as a cause of events. And they also overemphasize the vague but automatically accepted concepts of choice and individual responsibility. Societal structure is inviolate in American television. To wrap up a show in a satisfying way in an hour requires that ultimate responsibility for every bad outcome or illegal event be heavily yoked to an individual rather than a context or a milieu or the culture's rules and regulations. Responsibility for behaviors is pinned to people rather than experiences of those people or other aspects of context.
These are, admittedly, rather banal statements. Banal but still unsettling. What's most frightening is the sheer popularity of these television mythologies. Law and Order, the old CSI franchise, and NCIS, for example, are not just any television shows. They were and are enormously successful. This speaks, I think, to the American public's blatant insecurities and need to feel safe and protected by technologically super-equipped and pristinely behaved police. The ubiquity of these shows and others such as Bones and Criminal Minds suggests a public craving to believe in some paternalistic but heavily armed troop of boy scouts, and a separate craving to deeply believe that crime and evil itself are caused by corrupt individuals rather than the inevitable outcome of context. To me, the most egregious misrepresentation is the assigning of the ultimate cause of society's ills to people rather than institutions.
Institutions, however, are difficult to change in hour-long dramas. It's much easier to put individuals behind bars for relief-generating conclusions than to commit attempts at institutional change to a television screen. The latter would get lousy ratings and leave a radically different show backdrop for ensuing episodes. Bad ratings and a continually changing show make for short-lived episodic television.
The Individual as Arbiter of his Fate
A hundred years from now, when AI is able to predict highly accurate life paths based on contextual data, people may look back at these "I take full responsibility" days as a naïve Middle Ages.
Police shows usually wrap up with everything reverting to "the way things ought to be" in an hour. Bad events are depicted as the doings and responsibilities of individual people. Structure and context, which may provide the bulk of the cause-and-effect for these bad events, are never behind bars at episode's end. In truth, they don't even wind up on probation. If they get a mention, it's a rarity.
The individual as arbiter of his own fate and as the driving force behind all things bad is the police procedurals' primary fairy tale. If only some elements of the upcoming Dr. Strange: Multiverse of Madness film made their way into cop shows. Maybe some flash-sideways between alternate universes demonstrating that heroes in one dimension are villains in another. Occasional nods to the crucial aspects of context would be refreshing.
Adopting social psychological language, American police procedurals assume wholesale internal locus of control for all human behavior as opposed to external locus of control. This undoubtedly makes for easier writing and more satisfying conclusions.
Fiction Masquerading as Non-Fiction
Circling back to the current protests and public spotlight on disparate life experiences for different ethnicities, we can put it all together. Police shows statistically misrepresent how often cops behave badly and the severity of the bad behavior. Television procedurals feature a fiction overly favorable to law enforcement. Perhaps more important is television's willful ignoring of institutional cause-and-effects. In real life, context runs the show. In television police shows, individuals are presented as if they are knifepoint, blade, handle, and the muscular arm driving home the weapon. In the real world, however, individuals are usually just the tip of the knife, at best.
People believe what they prefer to believe. When it comes to television, people watch what they prefer to believe. Rogue individuals as the cause of bad outcomes is a lesson hammered home by all police shows. The solution to bad outcomes lying in the hands of credentialed "good guys" is another American myth promulgated by the genre. Unlike comic books or Star Wars, where the fictional worlds can easily be delineated from reality, television police procedurals masquerade as days-in-the-life of the real world. The myth of easily defining good from bad and the myth of the ease with which problems can be solved are themes jammed into the American psyche primetime after primetime and rerun after rerun. Narcotics to put us at ease.
At some point, perhaps it's now, Americans must grow up and get off the televised police-procedural drug. Withdrawal from this propaganda could shake the culture to its core.
Bob Dietz
June 16, 2020
