By Rocket Belden
Since the dawn of television, cop dramas have littered TV programming. Police officers have been the stars of television since the 1950s, but the way they have been depicted has evolved over time. Despite the evolution of the genre, one thing has stayed the same: the utilization of television to reflect the police in a positive light.
This effort, referred to as “copaganda,” a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, has been largely effective in making viewers place their trust in police agencies, yet has come under criticism in recent years. Dragnet, one the pioneering shows of the genre, set the standard for the integration of copaganda into the genre, as The Atlantic reports that the showrunners worked closely with the LAPD to make sure their police officers were represented in a positive light at all times and ignoring many of the real challenges that come up in police work, such as “racism, brutality, and decades of scandals.”
Cop dramas have often ignored or glossed over these issues in favor of easy to digest entertainment, overwhelmingly being used as an avenue to develop a sense of public safety due to their positive promotion of the presence of police in society. However, the influence of copaganda in media has finally been waning over the decades due to the increase in criticism from the public.
One way that cop dramas have influenced their audiences is the desensitization of violence in the media. Raymond Ruble, author of the book Round up the Usual Suspects: Criminal Investigation in Law and Order, Cold Case, and CSI identifies two main formats of the cop drama: the police procedural, and the puzzle. The police procedural focuses on the kinds of cases that are routinely handled by the justice system, whereas the puzzle focuses on cases that defy solution by routine procedure.
The puzzle presents new and interesting ways for cases to be solved on television, often getting more and more complex in order to keep viewers interested. The police procedural, however, has to find other methods to remain entertaining. One of the ways they achieve this is by introducing increasingly violent crimes into the series.
For example, the first episode of Law & Order is likely the mildest crime of the entire series. “Prescription for Death” showcases the murder of a woman by medical malpractice. She is administered a drug that ultimately kills her, due to the doctor in charge of the ER being an alcoholic. In this episode, there is no blood, no violence, no guns, and only one dead body, which is on screen for a grand total of two seconds as they cover her with a blanket.
In comparison, a randomly selected episode from season 24, the most recent season, depicts a much more violent crime. Season 24 episode 13, “In God We Trust,” features a man having his skull bashed in, due to the fact he was sleeping with the killer’s fiancé and urging her to leave the cult-like church she resides in. In this episode, the body is shown covered in blood from three different camera angles, for a total of 21 seconds. In this and other later episodes, the bodies get more screen time, as do the fake blood and guns. Audiences grow bored of a “typical” murder, and need something more shocking, more wowing to keep their attention.
This can impact audience perceptions of the cops in a number of ways. For one, audiences perceive cops as dealing exclusively with extraordinarily violent cases, many of which happen to normal, innocent people. This increases the fear that viewers feel surrounding everyday life. Viewers of cop dramas believed they were “100 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than they actually were,” according to The Daily Wildcat. Fear is induced in audiences to emphasize the role of the police as society’s protectors. Without the investigative work of the police, the menaces of society – those who rape and kill and steal – would face no punishment. There would be no justice. The police alone, with the cooperation of the courts and the prosecution, save society from its villains.
Part of the reason why cop dramas have gotten more violent is the presence of shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) on the scene. CSI takes an impersonal approach to crime fighting; instead of the detective being the main crime fighter like in Law & Order, the forensics team gets to shine. By prioritizing forensics, the lives of the victims and the criminals, as well as the nuances that come with crime, are all ignored. Instead, the answers will all be derived from the bodies themselves.
Where Law & Order is relatively mild when it comes to blood and guts, CSI loves it. The pilot episode of CSI opens on a gun and is very quick to get the viewer to the bodies. Guns and blood run rampant in the show as a forensic team races to solve multiple murders. Bodies get more screen time, and they get graphic autopsies. When discussing the trajectory of the bullet that killed a man to determine whether or not it was a suicide, the camera follows the path of the supposed bullet from outside the body to inside the guts of the man who lies on the autopsy table. Twice.
With the amount of guts and grime depicted in CSI, which audiences simply loved, other shows were left scrambling to catch up. Without diving into the world of forensic science themselves, they reflected some of the amount of blood and guts without the impersonal approach. Law & Order remains focused on two crime-busting detectives who are personable and easy to love, but the blood gets more and more screen time as viewers begin to expect more and more gore.
To function as an appealing form of entertainment beyond the gory visuals, cop dramas must mix reality with a number of lies and fictions. Law & Order achieves this by creating an environment that seems real but ultimately relies on fiction to work. However, viewers would not care for a show that is entirely fictive, which is why the show presents itself as realistically as possible.
One way this is achieved is through the signature location cards that appear on screen when the main characters change location. These cards display potentially real locations, although they rarely line up with a real location in New York to corroborate the card. They create a sense of realism to draw in viewers, and in exchange, they help to make the entirety of the events of the show seem accurate to the real world of police work.
This way, a number of fictions are promoted. For instance, white women and wealthy people are the victims of a great deal of the crimes in the early seasons of Law & Order. The Daily Wildcat reports that, realistically, Black Americans are more likely to be the victims of violent crime, and Native American women are more likely to be victims of rape.
In the show, crime is not depicted as a nuanced concept; bad people kill innocent people. People may die or come under harm because someone, who is viewed as a villain, is seeking money, power, drugs, sex, or some other vice. This dominates early Law & Order, and can be seen across many episodes, such as “The Violence of Summer,” where an innocent white woman is raped, “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman,” where a politician is murdered, and “Prescription for Death,” where an innocent woman is killed as a result of medical malpractice.
This changes over the course of the series, however. Over the decades, as the public has become more and more aware of the nuances of crime and policing, such as through the exposure of police brutality against Black men surrounding the murder of (and protests of the murder of) George Floyd, these shows have had to change their tune. The nature of crime becomes more nuanced as the show develops, which in turn works to keep the repetitive nature of each episode from boring audiences as new ideas are introduced. Just as violence brings entertainment to the screen, so do ethical dilemmas of murder, who gets justice, and how. In season 24, Black men are killed alongside white women; while “Catch and Kill” depicts an innocent white woman killed (again), “Report Card” depicts an innocent Black man being killed.
Another example would be the cooperation between police officers and prosecutors; in order to emphasize this cooperation, the amount of detective work is rather brief, which is also unrealistic to real murder cases. The detectives work quickly and efficiently, typically choosing the correct suspect to pin the crime on rather early on in the episode. Then, when court proceedings take focus, they will occasionally help to find further evidence for the prosecutors, their interests always aligning with those of the prosecutors.
In many real life cases, however, this may not be true. In rape cases, prosecutors often fail to cooperate with police agencies by tossing cases they don’t think they can win, or police officers will put off cases that they think won’t bring them prestige, according to UMass Lowell News. Either way, the ease and efficiency of these cases is exaggerated, and real victims may find themselves stuck in weeks or months of waiting before a case goes to trial. These falsehoods are occasionally recognized and criticized by the public, but some ways in which the shows are truthful are also subjects of critique.
Television is occasionally truthful to some aspects of police work, including how officers can be aggressive towards suspects and criminals. Although their aggression can be unlawful, such as by coercing suspects into confessions wrongfully, many instances of aggressive behavior or interrogation tactics are indeed lawful, as viewers will begin to realize that morality doesn’t necessarily line up with legality. In Law & Order, they frequently make subtle threats to urge suspects into giving them information, especially without lawyers present, or will straight up lie to manipulate the suspects into giving up information.
In season 1 episode 6, “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman,” officers Greevey and Logan threaten to report a suspect for building and fire violations when he asks for a lawyer. The threat of these reports loosens his lips, and he gives them the information they need without his lawyer present. Pointing out the fire and building violations is not illegal, nor is forgetting to report them after the fact; however, in practice they ignored his request to speak with his lawyer present. This is an example of how cops may undermine laws protecting civilians’ rights in real life.
Another way they may act out of line is by lying to suspects. In “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman,” the detectives lie to two of the suspects that the man they robbed had died when he was in fact alive in the hospital. These two boys did not stab the victim, they only robbed him after the fact, which the detectives already knew. However, they lie to them to make them believe they’ll go to jail for homicide, which previously would have only been assault, to make them give up information regarding who they saw commit the stabbing.
Legally, cops are allowed to lie to suspects, and oftentimes the intent of showing them doing so is to demonstrate the cunningness of the officers; however, this portrayal may prompt viewers to question the morals of lying to elicit a confession. Some may believe that lying in any instance is wrong, especially for someone like a police officer who has a great deal more power than a suspect in police custody has.
In the later seasons of Law & Order, these kinds of tactics are left behind; if early seasons of Law & Order made viewers question why the police could behave in that way, then the later seasons respond by making you forget it ever happened. The ethics behind lying to elicit a confession are dubious at best, and your favorite cop show doesn’t want to make you doubt the police in any way, even if it is more realistic to depict them acting in ways the public disagrees with.
As the cop drama grows to reflect ways the viewer thinks, such as the nuanced reasons a crime may happen, or the demographics crime happens to, or even protests against the police themselves, these shows are still acting in the police’s best interest, and the police’s best interest is not to prompt audiences to form their own opinions regarding how the police should behave. Perhaps they allow the audience to question how each criminal should be prosecuted by the court and penalized, or who is realistically targeted by crime, but the police themselves should not become the target or audience criticism.
Another way that Law & Order promotes audience reassurance in the police is by exaggerating success rates. For television, a case going cold hardly makes for good entertainment. Although there are many real unsolved cases, they are infrequently shown on television because audiences don’t want to hear about them. While showing primarily solved cases makes sense from an entertainment standpoint, as every episode can be given a rather straightforward plot and conclusion, it also perpetuates the idea that the police will be able to solve most of the cases they get.
This is an unrealistic idea. The Knoxville police department alone has reported 137 total homicide cases since 2020, and 50 of those cases have gone unsolved. That’s over a third of the total homicide cases. The statistics for rape are even more dire. According to UMass Lowell News, out of every 100 cases reported, only 18 lead to an arrest. Rape victims are generally wary of going to the police in the first place, so the number of reported rapes does not account for the large number of unreported rapes that also will never end in arrest.
In shows such as Law & Order and the spinoff Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), the majority of cases they receive end up solved. SVU has perpetuated the idea that many rape cases end in conviction, or simply that many will be taken seriously enough to be investigated. In reality, many rape kits end up going untested, and cases are never addressed. Without evidence, it is impossible to convict a rapist, and rape kits are a large factor in many arrests.
The City of Albuquerque police department identified 5,000 untested rape kits across the state of New Mexico in 2018. With an executive order by Mayor Keller to clear the backlog, the City of Albuquerque anticipated it would take two years to do so. There’s no telling how old some of the backlogged rape kits were to begin with. Without an order to clear the backlog, it could have taken years for any of the backlogged kits to be addressed. Within the time it takes for a potential rape kit to be tested, a victim may have moved on from the crime and may not want to relive their trauma by going on the stand potentially years after the rape occurred.
Besides rape kits and evidence, prosecutors and police officers often don’t cooperate well when solving and prosecuting a sex crime. UMass Lowell News cites a number of ways that police officers and prosecutors stop rapes from being convicted. When prosecutors feel they cannot win a trial, they often do not take the risk. Even when there was sufficient evidence collected by investigators, “prosecutors declined to go forward.” Sex crimes are assignments that take time and money, and departments may simply lack the budget and manpower. Some view sex crimes as low prestige assignments, so there are high rates of turnovers of cases within the police and prosecution, which helps to slow cases down as well.
The fiction perpetuated by SVU that cases will be taken by both the police and prosecution, who will cooperate efficiently and solve cases within a matter of days is harmful to real rape victims who may be retraumatized by the legal process surrounding reporting their rape. These success rates stay stagnant throughout the entire series. Nearly every single episode ends with the criminal being convicted of their crime. To go through all the trouble it takes to get the criminal in court with enough evidence to convict, it would be bad payoff to let them walk free, no matter the progress the show itself has made over the years to be more accurate to real life scenarios.
Cop television has effectively changed the public’s perception of police work. Television is the avenue through which most people interact with law enforcement, and it is how people’s minds are made regarding how they should feel about law enforcement. Overall, viewers of cop shows feel more unsafe in their daily lives due to perceptions of violent crimes and put more trust than the police have actually earned into their local police departments. Viewers have grown distrustful of the cop drama as time goes on; however, as they’ve watched them grow more violent and gruesome. Public opinion of the police has changed enough that the shows are now reflecting more nuanced ideas surrounding how the American justice system works, such as having college students rebel against having one of their fellow students arrested in an episode of SVU.
The shows must adapt as viewers become more reluctant to continue watching the same police tropes over and over again. Police have repeatedly been shown as the protectors of society, but only from the sidelines and only as a response to a crime, never as a force to prevent it.
So what are viewers meant to expect will happen to the rest of them, the non-white, the poor, the unhoused, the typical people who experience a crime? Are they supposed to trust the police? Or are the police the ones who the audience should really fear? Despite the efforts of the cop drama, people are still learning to distrust the police. Murderers and rapists still walk free in our society, and many men and women live knowing they could be murdered or raped and the police may not care. Ultimately, television is a conversation between those with authority who control what we see, and those without who consume. That conversation may favor the police over the audience, but with viewers picking up on Hollywood’s slack, changes might yet come to the small screen.
