Police portrayals are quick to shift
Pop culture can’t ignore nation in flux
NEW YORK — Gary Phillips, a prize-winning crime novelist from Los Angeles, grew up on TV shows that showed a world nothing like the one he lived in.
“I watched them all, Dragnet, Adam 12, The Wild, Wild West, Mannix, Cannon, Peter Gunn reruns and on and on. Now these were white guys and they were tough but fair and even-handed,” he told The Associated Press in a recent email, referring to popular programs mostly from the 1960s and ’70s.
“I remember a Dragnet episode where tight-a** Joe Friday solved racism among black and white officers in a weekend retreat. But I was a kid growing up in South Central and even then some part of me knew a lot of this was jive. We knew the cops out of Newton and 77th Division policed the ’hood a lot different than shown on TV.”
The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck, has set off protests worldwide and transmitted images of law enforcement that long remained far outside the narratives of crime stories.
Protests have already changed television. Cops, which for 33 seasons helped shape an authorized narrative that allowed viewers to sympathize and identify with real police on patrol, was dropped this week by the Paramount Network. A&E did the same with a similar show, Live PD, one of its mostly highly rated programs.
Earlier this year, five police procedurals were consistently in the Nielsen company’s top 20 ratings, including NBC’s Chicago PD and CBS’ FBI.
Now, even those portraying law enforcement officials are pulling back: Griffin Newman, who appeared as a detective on the CBS series Blue Bloods, announced he was donating his earnings from the show to help raise bail for arrested protesters.
The divide between crime fiction and real life dates back to the genre’s origins, more than 200 years ago. Law enforcement violence and corruption were extreme in the mid-19th century and some police forces were rooted in the patrols that used to chase down runaway slaves. Meanwhile, “The police in early crime fiction were depicted as good, courageous, and brilliant,” says Otto Penzler, the crime fiction publisher and bookseller.
In the 20th century, shows such as Dragnet and Highway Patrol were collaborations between law enforcement and the entertainment business, to the point where J. Edgar Hoover was permitted to vet the politics of the actors appearing in The FBI, the long-running series starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
Cops, which allowed the departments it covered significant control over its content, has been contrasted by the tougher perspective of Lena Waithe’s Showtime series The Chi. But even shows like The Wire and The Shield that take frank looks at police abuses can end up making the audience identify with officers.
“At first it’s ‘police are dirty bums’ and it’s ‘look at the awful thing they did,’” says Miki Turner, a professor at the University of Southern California. “And then there’s something in the script that makes you flip your mentality, and sympathize.”