Are Cop TV Shows Just Harmful Copaganda?
By: Tali Cherry
Tags: Police, Brooklyn 99, Copaganda, TV

In light of the George Floyd murder and the current emphasis on police brutality against black people, I was explaining to my family over lunch about how much I hate cops. To which my dad replies, “but Tali, two of your favourite shows are Criminal Minds and Brooklyn 99?”. To which I shut up.

It had me thinking though, was I at fault for always rooting for the cops on those shows but standing by ACAB in real life? I have grown to love characters like Spencer Reid, Aaron Hotchner, Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago. Yet I frequently forget that they are part of a system which is inherently racist. Maybe not exactly, after all, they are simply fictional characters created lightheartedly to enthral watchers around the globe. But isn’t that the problem? Could tv shows about cops be considered positive propaganda, or ‘copaganda’? I mean, Lego have recently removed advertisement for their police sets in order to limit the hero agenda affiliated with the profession; I wonder whether it should be the same for cop shows.

A video from the New York BLM protests surfaced showing a police car driving into a crowd of people exercising their right to protest. In the same day, President Trump tweeted about how New York police are “New York’s finest”. I, like many others, was utterly disgusted not only at the actions of the police, but as to how the president praised such actions. However, I, again like many others, tune into NBC to watch “New York’s finest” every week on Brooklyn 99. Can we still separate the two? The phrase that has been spray painted everywhere recently, “ACAB”, argues different. ACAB stands for All Cops Are Bastards; it matters not if one cop is a good person with morals and against blue brutality, they are still a complicit part of a system which does not care about the lives of black men, women and children. It is a system which was, specifically in the South, built in order to preserve slavery. In this way, slavery was never truly abolished, just transformed into the police. The police was born of racism and bred by a constant abuse of racial power; those adhering to this system are all, as the saying goes, bastards.

But surely, Jake Peralta is no bastard, right? Brooklyn 99 is often heralded for its inclusivity and, for lack of a better word, ‘wokeness’. It’s one of the few shows where the ratio of white main characters to black and poc main characters isn’t overwhelmingly uneven. Similarly, the story of Captain Holt’s discrimination against his sexuality and colour and Rosa’s difficulty in coming out were highly praised by members of the lgbtq+ community for being honest and well-written representation. They also included an episode in which Terry, a black man, was racially profiled by another policeman for being ‘suspicious’, an excuse often manipulated by racist cops. In the episode, there is a sketch where white privilege is explained simply and clearly. We see Jake, a white man, wearing a mask and holding a bat as he breaks into his friends house in order to ‘pull a prank’. A policeman sees him, asks him what he was doing from across the street, and then promptly moves on after deeming it innocent. It is comical in a way, because… surely not? But this clip explains it perfectly. It may seem exaggerated for a media purpose, but it is the same institution which bought Dylann Roof a free cheeseburger after he massacred 9 people at the Charleston shooting in 2015. Both of those instances, one scripted, one real, could easily be interchanged. Brooklyn 99 actor, Terry Crews, recently said that the next season of the show would be centred around the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m not quite sure how this will go, but I’m for sure interested to see it.

Criminal Minds is a slightly different case, as it focuses on the FBI, but they bleed the same blood. When I first started watching the show in 2016, I was not at all shocked when the law enforcement characters would shoot at the ‘unsub’ (unidentified subject/the ‘bad guy’). When I rewatch it now, yes… I have watched all 15 seasons twice, I find myself questioning the actions of those law enforcement characters. Even if it’s just a slight ‘wait a second… he shouldn’t just be shooting that guy’ before I remember they have solid evidence he’s a serial killer, it’s still a questioning. And I think that’s important. I think we should not be afraid of questioning law enforcement, both fictional and real. I think that it’s necessary to watch cop shows with a more critical eye, to not make the characters on cop shows your only understanding of what the police are.

Now I don’t think that all cop shows should be immediately cancelled. I just think that they have a responsibility to not present cops as ALWAYS being the ‘good guys’. When they do that, when they present it as a common fact that cops are the good guys and just doing their jobs, viewers, particularly young viewers, are left with not much wiggle room to think elsewhere unless they choose to educate themselves and unlearn what these tv shows have taught them.

To answer the question in the title; are cop shows harmful ‘copaganda’? I think that, ultimately, yes. They are. In all cop shows, with maybe once or twice an exception of a ‘dirty cop’, the cops are inevitably the ‘good guys’. When, in reality, they are all the ‘dirty cop’. (If you believe that cops should not be generalised in this way, take a read of this: confessions of a former bastard cop, where a former cop tells firsthand what the system is like, and how the system needs to be changed).

But not all of them are monstrously ‘harmful’. I think that Brooklyn 99 specifically does a good job of not glossing over all systemic problems, with characters like John Kelly (a white, powerful police Commissioner who unfairly and illegally torments the 99th precinct) showing such corruption. Yet I would love to see the new series of Brooklyn 99 teach, with unabashed honesty, the problem of racism within the system. It would present millions of people with a necessary education, and start a new generation off on a better foot, especially if it became a consistent occurrence in television. I would also love to see other cop shows follow suit; I do not think that they are ‘just tv shows’, I think that they are more important than that.