Law and disorder
Today’s TV police dramas are obsessed with fighting political correctness — and ignoring reality
In ABC’s new show The Rookie, John Nolan, a 40-yearold white Los Angeles Police Department trainee, must prove himself to skeptical higher-ups — his training officer, a black woman; his sergeant, a black man; and his captain, a Latina woman.
While the brass try to humiliate him into submission, his natural-born crime-fighting abilities will force his doubters to eat their words: While a terrified African-American rookie cowers behind a police car, Nolan heroically runs toward gunfire to save his fellow officers, even though it’s against protocol.
The Rookie joins other police procedurals that position straight white men as heroic outsiders battling short-sighted women and minorities in leadership roles.
In Chicago P.D., Bosch and Training Day, to name a few, white men with a willingness to use off-the-books tactics to protect the city’s most vulnerable are discounted by a system hamstrung by “political correctness.”
Even the comedy Brooklyn 99, highly praised for its diverse casting, started its run with a storyline about the charming white detective Jake Peralta locking horns with his uptight superior, Capt. Raymond Holt, a gay black man. Holt must begrudgingly admit Peralta is a gifted detective, even though — and perhaps because — he doesn’t always stick to the rules.
In these shows, “political correctness” and prioritizing diversity are depicted as eroding American institutions and endangering our cities. As Training Day’s white protagonist quips, “Political correctness doesn’t stop bullets.” (CBS cancelled Training Day in 2017 after a lead actor died.)
Shows premised on white cops besting diverse higher-ups represent half the crime shows slated for the 2018 season, and they have been some of the most popular. Last season, Chicago P.D. averaged seven million viewers per episode and claimed the highest ranking among network television for its time slot. An Amazon original, Bosch is ranked among the Top 10 most-streamed shows on the site. The Rookie is the most-watched ABC show in its time slot and the network has just ordered a new season. On CTV in Canada, the Rookie ranks in the Top 10.
The focus on a single heroic officer in a police drama isn’t new — it recalls the early days of cop shows. But yesterday’s fictional cops, in Dragnet, Adam-12 and Columbo, were morally impeccable, unlike today’s rule breakers. And today’s crop of white, heroic men have new problems: Now they must battle both crime and women and people of colour in supervisory roles. These higher-ups are so blinded by “political correctness” that they are more concerned with destroying white men’s careers than with the safety of the city. They also tend to be motivated by personal greed.
In this season’s première of Chicago P.D., a batch of bad heroin is claiming lives all over the city. Cmdr. Hank Voight, head of the intelligence unit, shows up to the scene of a mass overdose only to be stopped by Deputy Supt. Katherine Brennan. She wants to sideline Voight because he is being investigated for shooting an unarmed suspect. He dismisses her concerns that he did anything wrong and accuses her of trying “to bury an old-school white cop” for the sake of optics. He also argues that keeping him off the case will cost lives. Voight defies her orders and investigates off the books, coercing information from a drug dealer by terrorizing his family.
This ill-begotten information gets the bad dope off the streets, saves the city and forces Brennan to apologize to Voight. Instead of disciplining him for defying her, she praises him for “saving lives” and decides to drop the investigation into the shooting. On these shows, “old-school white cops” have special skills, innate knowledge and bravery that their superiors lack. Investigations into their extrajudicial executions, violent interrogations and bribery are threats — not only to these men’s careers but to the safety of the entire city.
Treating white men as outsiders in police departments run by people of colour is at odds with reality. In truth, in the U.S. and elsewhere, law enforcement faces a diversity crisis — especially at the leadership level. According to a 2016 report from the Department of Justice, police forces consistently fail to recruit and retain people of colour, which could be contributing to a lack of trust between police and the communities they work in.
In another odd break with reality, cop shows today regularly show police acting violently — they actually depict civil rights violations in far greater numbers than reported in actual police encounters — and justifying it. This is a departure from earlier police dramas, which tended to use police violence to show the emotional toll of the job.
A 2015 study published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior catalogued police violence on crime dramas and found that 80 per cent of instances of bodily force are depicted as justified.
No one expects television to perfectly reflect reality, but these shows have turned reality inside out, creating a world in which diverse hiring is somehow a bigger problem than police brutality, which is suddenly an asset. As of this writing, more than 800 people have been killed by U.S. police in real life this year, a quarter of them black. These shows urge us to ignore those statistics and let the white guys figure it out.