Why COPS is Quintessential American Television
COPS. Image courtesy of 20th Television.
COPS has been on the air since 1989. With its iconic theme song the show has become a venerable institution of American pop culture, its handheld cinema verite style being successfully aped by other hit shows like Live PD. The premise is pretty irresistible - what could be more exciting than watching our public servants raw and uncut in the execution of their duties, enforcing the law and serving the public? The fact that production costs are extremely low has probably also contributed to the show’s longevity. And every episode begins with the following voice-over, intoned in a rich and reassuring baritone: “All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.”
But in the action that follows this is gradually revealed to be an empty, boilerplate disclaimer - a meaningless concession to the ideals of our system of justice, immediately ignored in practice. What follows in virtually every episode of COPS are three vignettes featuring police officers interacting with various criminals, usually routine traffic stops with low-level delinquents, in which the police start from a presumption of guilt and then escalate from there.
They frequently pull over vehicles on the thinnest of pretenses - such as the rear license plate not being properly illuminated. They then coerce people who likely don’t know any better into waiving their constitutional rights and consenting to searches. The fruit of this labor typically amounts to the discovery of a meth pipe or a bag of heroin. I am always struck by the effort exerted by these beat cops to locate a meth pipe, which seems like a misallocation of resources but that is a discussion for another day. Sometimes, the suspect will run and COPS is famous for its cameramen pounding the pavement and jumping fences right behind police officers in hot pursuit of a runner.
These usually end in a tackle and scrum where a bunch of police pile onto some guy and shout “Stop resisting” as they man-handle him. In the tussle, it’s never quite clear if the person on the ground is actually resisting, or if they simply cannot put their hands behind their back because there are three cops sitting on top of them. This confusion, and the current Supreme Court’s willingness to tolerate virtually limitless use of force in the execution of law enforcement duties, allows police officers wide latitude in doing whatever they feel is necessary to ensure their safety. After they have thrown some poor junkie all over the ground because he was acting squirrelly, they always explain themselves afterward by saying “Well, I didn’t know if you had a gun or something so that was for my own safety.” For a large portion of Americans, as well as a majority of the Supreme Court, this explanation is perfectly acceptable.
Of course, part of this stems from the ubiquity of guns in America. Sometimes police do get killed during routine traffic stops precisely because lots of people are armed, which perversely helps to justify things like qualified immunity, excessive use of force, the militarization of police departments and so on. If a police officer in London said “Well, I had to take this guy to the ground and beat the shit out of him because I didn’t know if he had a gun or not” that wouldn’t fly, because it would be very unlikely that a person would have a gun in the first place.
The fact that police start from a presumption of guilt is also in part, and you can see this in the interactions on COPS, because they are lied to constantly. A certain amount of skepticism is necessary when you are a law enforcement officer, because people will lie and prevaricate and run and make things up because they don’t want to go to jail. Balancing professional skepticism against peoples’ constitutional rights and the enforcement of the law is of course a very grey area indeed. Perhaps people would act different with police if they were less aggressive and the criminal justice system more equitable and police didn’t approach every interaction with the underlying belief that you have committed a crime, but that is an altogether different, and more complicated, discussion.
The main thing that you see if you watch enough episodes of COPS is that a lot of police officers in the United States are just bullies. They enjoy holding and exercising power over other people (this just makes logical sense though - what other type of person would pursue a career where you regularly deprive your fellow citizens of their freedom?). There are of course patient and decent cops who work to de-escalate situations and uphold public safety in responsible ways.
But there are also many examples on COPS of police officers who arrest people simply because they won’t listen to orders, and they stop people because they think that person shouldn’t be driving that kind of car or be in a certain neighborhood. They often say things like “You are acting really nervous” as if this is self-evident of guilt, rather than a perfectly normal reaction when you are stopped by a police officer in America. “Why would you be nervous?” thinks the police officer. “It’s not like I am here to do everything in my power to prove you have committed a crime and deprive you of your freedom.”
Police like to be obeyed. That is one of the main benefits of becoming a police officer, the legal power it gives you to exert authority over others. You can see this in the violence being displayed right now by police departments all around the country. They will of course blame the protestors for provoking them, but the fact is police do not like having their authority challenged and it’s causing some of them to react very violently. We have tried to erect institutional and legal barriers to contain abuses of this prerogative - but they appear to be eroding, if they ever worked to begin with. Donald Trump’s America did not create this situation, but it has made it worse, and emboldened the worst impulses of the worst kinds of cops.
COPS captures so many quintessential aspects of American society and its relationship with the police. The footage shows how police operate on a daily basis - coercing people to consent to searches, using force while yelling “Stop resisting” so as to maintain a veneer of justification, enforcing draconian drug laws without question, stopping vehicles and even pedestrians on the thinnest of pretenses, starting from a presumption of guilt from which subsequent actions flow. It shows how certain officers revel in the power disparity between themselves and other citizens. It also shows how police develop some of this callous behavior and adversarial disposition, as they are constantly lied to and occasionally attacked in the course of their duties.
COPS has been capturing all of this complexity on tape for over 3 decades. Of course, these are just the visible effects of deeper structural issues - the ease of obtaining guns in America; racial inequality and poverty; bad drug laws; an unequal system of justice; the violence embedded in our society; the militarization of police departments; qualified immunity, etc. COPS has uncritically captured all of this on film for over thirty years, but not because the show wants to provoke any meaningful discourse on these issues.
No, it takes the footage and then packages it as entertainment to be consumed by the very people who are being policed by this apparatus. This is the perverse nature of American-style capitalism - people are out there being subjected to the whims of the police and the legal system (sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly), and then this is filmed and converted into just another revenue stream by a network of television producers, distributors and advertisers.
And it has been immensely popular for almost as long as I have been alive. Part of the genius, if you want to call it that, of American society is that it can create a system of policing like this and then feed off the profits derived from simply documenting it. Eventually, though, such a system risks cannibalizing itself, by for instance fatally conflating entertainment with actual governance and electing a reality TV game-show host to serve as President. I don’t know where all of this leaves us, or what will happen - but I know that COPS tells us a lot more about ourselves as a society than you might think at first glance.
