Wikipedia entry here is a good starting point, despite the multiple issues. Copaganda - Wikipedia
Now, some examples are more egregious than others. Blue Bloods, for example, has been dinged for some pretty clear pro-police “of course the cops are as a group good people who just want to enforce the law completely fairly” storylines. But does, say, Law and Order do the same, simply by virtue of main characters being cops, and therefore rarely if ever wrong? (One notable way it might, common in cop shows, is their contemptuous treatment of Internal Affairs.) I understand that Brooklyn 99, which has generally liberal writers and actors, has taken a hard look at its scripts since last year, leading to some pretty heavy revamping.
So where do you draw the line? The crime/mystery genre depend a lot on casting law enforcement as the good guys; when does that get to the point of “teaching” viewers that the police are a righteous force that shouldn’t be examined or questioned, and anyone opposed to them are just dirty criminals we shouldn’t take seriously? What do we do about it, given current political atmospheres?
This is like the warning that any war film will tend to glorify war. A statement to take seriously and something to watch out for, but it does not have to be absolute. Did anyone watch Apocalypse Now or Hacksaw Ridge and come out wanting to be a soldier, or Serpico and want to be a cop?
ETA it’s also an instance of the rule that any portrayal of any profession in fiction, whether it be tennis pro, airplane mechanic, theoretical physicist, lawyer, bounty hunter, or cop, will tend to be laughably inaccurate. Writers often take such liberties on purpose. Not sure what we can “do about it” except point such things out…
That Wikipedia article seems to be conflating two different things: real-life feel-good news stories about cops doing good things, and fiction (e.g. TV shows) about cops as the good guys.
It’s hard for a cop show to not make people sympathize to some extent unless you purposefully try to show and focus on the wrong side of cops, i.e,., a TV show specifically about Derek Chauvin or something like that. People will naturally sympathize with the main depicted subjects most of the time, just like how someone said upthread that war films naturally, albeit often unintentionally, glorify war.
I never quite understood that one and always wondered if it was getting caught up in the hate. I’ve always just viewed it as a workplace comedy. Plus, that I can think of off the top of my head, the only time anyone’s ever had a racially charged encounter with the police, it was Terry and it had the makings of a ‘very special episode’. They even dealt with things like Terry knowing he could ruin his career by reporting the offending officer.
Having said that, I saw a video* about how ‘good’ cops on TV shows/movies tend to be the ones that break the rules. That is, forcing a confession out of someone by punching them or threatening them with something unless they ratted out another person. I can understand where that can be problematic. But Brooklyn 99, I don’t know.
Like, I could see a kid growing up to be a cop and having some of that violent cop vs suspect imagery always in the back of their mind, but there’s not a whole lot of takeaways from B99. It would be like a kid growing up to be a doctor because he thought he could act like JD from Scrubs all day.
*I believe this is the video I’m thinking of, if not, these Cracked After Hours videos are still really good if you like picking apart TV shows and movies.
A modern show like L&O isn’t copaganda. There’s enough corruption (Profaci? Say it ain’t so, Tony!) and generally lazy or inept cops portrayed to still make me hate the NYPD. Now Blue Bloods, maybe. None of the Regans seem to notice they are part of the problem, or that there is a problem (honestly, I quit watching years ago. If it changed, good!)
Now Dragnet and Adam-12, sure! If there is a bad cop shown, it’s the story for the week, and he is dealt with. Joe Friday is more honest than humanly possible, and Pete Malloy would probably resign before he’d take a free donut.
There was a several-episode arc of the show “Prodigal Son” in which a black detective had a gun pulled on him by a uniformed beat cop and was put in a chokehold, and was not released when the detective identified himself, or even for awhile after his fellow detectives showed up and also IDed him. Then he agonized over reporting the cop to Internal Affairs because it was likely to damage his career, even though the cop was clearly in the wrong.
The plotline had a ham-fisted, shoehorned-in feel to it, especially since the show is not an especially realistic portrayal of cops in the first place. I don’t know know if cop show entertainments like that really need to or should take on the responsibility of fighting “copaganda” in that way.
Yeah, but Dragnet and Adam-12 are also the poster children for the, “Cops are not to be questioned. Anyone who does is by definition a bad guy.” school of law enforcement.
I’m just finishing up a 1.5 year stint of re-watching all of Law & Order (the original series). I’d say they do a pretty damn good job of balancing out the “copaganda” by always splitting their cops up into two sides of an issue. They also throw in the Lieutenant’s POV sometimes. It has never really seemed to me like we don’t have someone to side with or against. Same goes for the DA’s office.
It’s hard to describe them any other way. In all of Jack Webbs shows, a dominant theme is, “Civilians aren’t qualified to do anything. Let the trained professionals do their job.” this was a lot more palatable in Emergency!, where the danger required technical knowledge and skills to handle. But even as a kid I had a hard time swallowing a cop saying, “you aren’t qualified to judge an officers actions. Report his conduct to his supervisor and let the police make a fair, impartial decision.” And Webb would always contrive the plot to show the cops were always in the right, even if it was to handle a bad apple.
Since we’re apparently struggling for examples, I’m going to nominate season 1 of Bosch.
Bosch shoots a suspect who he thought was pulling a gun on him, and we’re clearly meant to sympathize with Bosch and understand that cops need to make split second decisions.
Bosch is cleared of wrongdoing, and then there are BLM-style protests, where the protesters are depicted as aggressive, ignorant and advocating for changes that would actually make the community less safe.
For me, watching this a few years after it initially aired, it made me uncomfortable about the message it was sending.
However, it is a show that otherwise tries to have a lot of gray area, so I accept the possibility that there are other interpretations (eg we aren’t supposed to completely side with Bosch)
The original Robocop was meant to be satirical, even if, as is common with Verhoven’s work, not everyone got the message at the time. The cops, the private company running the police, and (maybe to a lesser extent) the government, are all depicted negatively, as well as obviously the perps.
Robocop himself goes on something of a revenge mission and then struggles with the conflict between that desire and the duty he had always felt to uphold the law.
Admittedly, it’s also hyper-violent, but in general modern movies could learn a lot from it.
I’ve been binge-watching Red Rock, a cop show set in Ireland. There have been corrupt cops, overly aggressive cops (even without guns), and a pedophile (paedophile) cop. There are some good cops as well. And loads of craic.
Yeah, there have been some fairly disturbing moments of corner-cutting by the Reagan clan from time to time, particularly Donnie Wahlberg’s* character. They seem to be dialling him back a little of late but there’s still some “IOKI < insert main cop character names here > DI” going on.
*I’ve just discovered he’s married to Jenny McCarthy. As if being a founding member of NKOTB wasn’t enough reason to question his judgement…