Study probes why crime shows don’t reflect race reality
For more than a week now, our screens have been flooded with footage of cops shooting rubber bullets at reporters, driving police vehicles into crowds of protesters, detaining essential workers exempt from curfews, macing a nine-year-old child, shoving elderly people to the ground and, of course, kneeling on the neck of George Floyd until he died.
But such horrifying real-life images are at odds with the fictional portrayal of police we’ve consumed on TV for decades. Amid nationwide protests of police brutality against black people and other marginalized groups, that dissonance has spurred an industry-wide reexamination of the role pop culture plays in shaping our perception of both the police and the people they deem a threat. Nonprofit civil rights advocacy organization Colour of Change released a study on the topic this year.
“[These shows] create a world where we have cities, police officers, political officials, poverty, different races, and yet racism doesn’t seem to exist — a fictional world that is often quite diverse but without racism,” Rashad Robinson, president of Colour of Change, told The Times this week. “As a result, that normalizes injustice. It makes it seem like the changes that we are fighting for are changes that are not necessary.”
Titled Normalizing Injustice: The Dangerous Misrepresentations That Define Television’s Scripted Crime Genre, the study includes the following findings.
Real-life crime rates have generally decreased since the early 1990s, but the number of crime series on TV has increased, which may be why most people don’t think crime has decreased at all.
Of the 26 series from 2017-18 examined in the study, 21 had showrunners who were white men. At least 81 per cent of these shows’ writers were white, compared to the nine per cent who were black. A whopping 20 of 26 series had either no black writers or just one black writer.
CBS and NBC aired seven of the nine series that were the least diverse with respect to race and gender:
On CBS:
• NCIS was 100 per cent white and 80 per cent male.
• Blue Bloods was 100 per cent white and 75 per cent male.
• Elementary was 90 per cent white and 70 per cent male.
• NCIS: Los Angeles was 82 per cent white and 82 per cent male.
On NBC:
• The Blacklist was 93 per cent white and 80 per cent male.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was 93 per cent to 100 per cent white and 57 per cent male.
• Blindspot was 92 per cent white and 58 per cent male.
• Chicago P.D. was 80 per cent to 90 per cent white and 60 per cent male.
Relying on white writers to craft characters of colour can perpetuate “distorted and harmful” depictions of those characters — “their realities, behaviours, relationships, motivations, thoughts, feelings and more,” according to the study. Of the 26 series considered, Netflix’s Narcos had the worst ratio of characters of colour to white writers, followed by Fox’s 9-1-1, NBC’s Chicago P.D. and CBS’s Hawaii Five-0.