Canceled “Cops” part of George Floyd’s legacy. Pierce deputies may miss it. We won’t
Goodbye, “Cops,” or perhaps we should say good riddance. After 32 seasons of gritty crime-bust mayhem, it was definitely time for you to go.
Someday when historians measure the impact of the current wave of social unrest, last week’s cancelation of “Cops” won’t rank with the toppling of century-old Confederate statues. But it’s worth marking the end of America’s original reality-television series, if only because South Sound law enforcers were regularly featured on it.
“Cops” debuted on the Fox Network in 1989 and later moved to cable, totaling more than 1,000 episodes. Its cancelation is a small part of a massive cultural shakeup since George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was choked to death by a Minneapolis police officer.
Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said “Cops” was good for his department; deputies will miss getting to “showcase” their work on national TV, he added.
“Our guys like doing it, it’s been very good for recruiting,” Troyer, a candidate in this year’s sheriff election, told us via email this week. “We have done well over 100 episodes dating back in excess of 20 years. We are transparent, and yes, it was a positive depiction of what we do.”
Maybe, maybe not. The show didn’t age particularly well, in our view. It glorified violence, typecast people of color as crime suspects and normalized heavy-handed police tactics, which are rightly under intense scrutiny right now.
You could also argue that “Cops,” despite enduring popularity that will sustain it for years in syndication, had become redundant. Public appetite for high-adrenaline police action can be satisfied today with the proliferation of amateur cellphone videos and officer body-camera footage.
The barrage of viral images from incidents that ended tragically — including the death of Tacoma’s Manuel Ellis — have left many of us feeling burnt out on the whole phenomenon.
The City of Lakewood tired of “Cops” long ago. In 2005, shortly after separating from the sheriff’s department and starting an independent police force, Lakewood ended a 12-year relationship with the show’s producers.
“It doesn’t really capture what’s going on in Lakewood,” Larry Saunders, the city’s first police chief, told a TNT reporter at the time. He said it gave the false impression that Lakewood isn’t a safe place to live.
The city never looked back, a spokeswoman said this week.
That was a smart call, we say.
From the earliest years of “Cops,” when the “bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?” theme music was as well known as “The Macarena,” criminologists were concerned about the show’s sensationalism.
A content analysis in 1994 found that “Cops” associated people of color with violent crime three times more than white people. And accurate portrayal of young Black men as some of society’s hardest-hit crime victims? Forget about it.
In 2012, the killing of Black teenager Trayvon Martin helped launch a grassroots “Drop Cops” movement. Ultimately, Fox did drop the show, in 2013.
Fast forward to this year, and reaction to Floyd’s killing moved at relative hyperspeed. Paramount Network (formerly Spike) canceled “Cops” within a few weeks.
Among the refinements during “Cops” long run was a more even-handed treatment of people of color, according to its producers and supporters. In recent years, “the show became more about interactions with people and story driven, not so much of the pursuits and action stuff,” Troyer said.
Even so, a podcast last year called “Running from Cops,” based on an 18-month investigation, found that “Cops” manipulates suspects to participate, presents a distorted picture of crime in America and misrepresents the nature of police work.
At a time like this, what law enforcers really need is for the community to see them doing everyday, not-made-for-TV acts of public service. People need to see National Night Out neighborhood barbecues, and Shop with a Cop outreach to needy families. They need to see school resource officers interacting positively with kids.
Though it can’t be quantified in television ratings, rebuilding public trust is every bit as important as taking down bad guys.