LEGO lists its police officer mini-figures under the “Real-Life Heroes” category on its website, alongside firefighters and doctors. “A police officer that helped a child cross the street in the morning spends the afternoon in hot pursuit of villainous crooks,” the website says. “Mixing heroic deeds with everyday acts is what makes these real-life heroes both relatable and special to kids.”
Last week, LEGO paused marketing for all police-related mini-figures and playsets (including, hilariously, a donut shop playset) and announced that they were donating $4 million to racial justice organizations.
Alongside schools and families, media has always been an institution that teaches people how to behave in society, for better or worse, whether we realize it or not. For decades, entertainment media taught us how to think about police and policing. According to a 2020 report by the nonprofit organization Color of Change, police procedurals and other crime-related shows are “the most effective PR arm for defending the system, especially the police.” When crime shows took up more space on the list of the 100 most-watched shows of 2018-2019 than any other genre, it’s not hard to understand why.
Just the facts, ma’am
The granddaddy of all police dramas is Dragnet, a radio, TV, and film franchise dating back to the 1940s that wanted to paint an authentic portrait of the Los Angeles Police Department. To make that happen, showrunner and star Jack Webb traded story ideas and access to real cop cars for censorship by the LAPD’s Public Information Division — if the LAPD didn’t like something, an entire episode could be scrapped.
Before Dragnet, the popular perception was that American police acted like an organized crime ring — a belief confirmed by the Lexow Commission, which uncovered rampant extortion and harassment by the NYPD in the 1890s. Resulting reform efforts helped improve the public image of the police, but films of the early 20th century routinely portrayed cops as incompetent bumblers who make The Simpsons’ Chief Wiggum look good.
Jack Webb’s character, Joe Friday, hunted down heroin dealers and investigated murders, but he also provided reassurance and social services to Angelenos in distress. This set a template for the cop shows that followed, pushing the idea that police were there to bring recovery to crime victims and prevent tragedies from happening in the first place. “Dragnet presented the police to the public the way the police wanted to be seen,” Constance Grady wrote for Vox, “as aspirational heroes.”
Truly mixing heroic deeds with everyday acts.
Dragnet and other early police procedurals occasionally showed police officers using deadly force and then showed them expressing regret and concern about whether they did the right thing — suggesting that if exemplar cops like Joe Friday couldn’t find a better way to deal with violent criminals, then shooting to kill was both justified and inevitable. A tragic inevitability that takes a toll on the officer as well as the community, but an inevitability nevertheless.
It’s a stark contrast to recent comments by the head of the Minneapolis police union, who said in an interview “I’ve been involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me. Maybe I’m different” and “Certainly getting shot at and shooting people takes a different toll, but if you’re in this job and you’ve seen too much blood and gore and dead people then you’ve signed up for the wrong job.”
The end of policing?
When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals. (C. Wright Mills)
Part of the problem with the TV portrayal of policing is that cop shows present police intervention as the only response to community problems. Even when shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine deal with problems in the criminal justice system, they ultimately reinforce the idea that the system is worth fixing — the cops are the protagonists, after all, so if they can’t find a better way to deal with crime, it doesn’t exist.
That narrative chafes against the reality that law enforcement exists to maintain order and control through violence. As Alex S. Vitale, the author of The End of Policing, told NPR earlier this month, “When we turn a problem over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests.”
Anti-racism and anti-police brutality protests have spread across the world like wildfire in the last couple of weeks, and participants have faced terrible violence. In the past, it was easier to write off clashes between police and protesters, but this time — as people keep saying — is different. On Twitter and Google Drive, activists have been cataloguing and archiving videos of police brutality against protesters, already numbered in the hundreds.
Vitale argues for abolition of policing in society by questioning the roles that police are expected to perform, especially when it comes to handling problems like homelessness and drug addiction that are ultimately caused by inequality. Even punishing minor infractions, like violations of traffic laws, inherently results in the arrests of low-income people who can’t afford to pay fines.
No amount of reform can change the fact that policing exists to maintain the status quo, and even lawful arrests and convictions that happen without violence have a devastating effect on real people’s lives and don’t address issues at the root of our society.
Part of why cop shows are so popular and compelling is that they offer a clean, black-and-white interpretation of morality — heroic cops versus villainous crooks. Fixing those root issues will require a complete recalibration of how we deal with conflict in society, and it won’t be easy or pretty.
Offline Sources
Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty by Alex Carey
The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
Other, deeper looks at policing in pop culture (that I cribbed a lot of this essay from)
Dragnets, Dirty Harrys, and Dying Hard: 100 years of the police in pop culture from the Washington Post
Running from COPS: a podcast by Dan Taberski and Topic investigating the long-running reality series
Normalizing Injustice: The dangerous misrepresentations that define television’s scripted crime genre by Color of Change Hollywood and the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center
Header collage images by LEGO and Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash.