The unreality of "Cops"

But Cops wasn’t really portraying reality. It was propaganda, crystallized and edited into addictive portions, served up without any of the local context or personal information or historical detail that might slow down the rush of seeing so-called criminals taken off the streets. It was the longest-running prime-time show in the United States, and it was always filmed in partnership with local police forces. For every minute of action that made it to air, 100 were reportedly filmed, meaning that what viewers saw each week was an aggressively purified vision of police work, approved by the same departments that had invited Cops to accompany them in the first place. As the writer and producer Dan Taberski lays out in his six-part 2019 podcast, Running From Cops, the show helped usher in an age of comity between police and the media. Before Cops premiered in 1989, public confidence in the police was at historic lows, while crime rates were surging nationwide. But the series enabled the transformation of officers into stolid, crew-cutted avatars of order. And even more than that, it turned police into protagonists, whose point of view became quietly aligned with that of the viewers watching at home…

In its early seasons, Cops did feel more real, for better and worse. In the pilot, officers show their biases, dragging cuffed black suspects down the street while later letting white ones go with a warning. “If your license is good, I’ll give you a little slap on the wrist, tell you to be on your way,” Deputy Wurms tells one guy who’s been stopped while buying drugs. “I’m just trying to get these white boys to stop coming in here,” he explains to the camera. They “don’t belong here.” Another episode emphasized how wrenching police work can be, showing a female officer crying as she left a 2-year-old with Child Protective Services, in less than favorable conditions. But Running From Cops computes some of the ways in which the series tweaked itself to make for grabbier entertainment. Two percent of traffic stops in the real world, Taberski explains, end in arrest. On the show, it’s 92 percent. Cops portrays almost four times as much violent crime as occurs in reality, three times as much drug crime, and 10 times as much prostitution. In later seasons, producers started editing clips together into “best of” compilations with grabby names, such as a “Ho Ho Ho” series focusing on sex workers arrested over the holidays. Recent seasons of Cops have seemed even less like documentary than straight sideshow, served up online for YouTube clicks under questionable titles such as “Grandma, Chicken, and Meth.”