Is the TV show COPS bad for the image of cops?

[Joey_P]

@Mean_Mr.Mustard

(zombie alert)

What makes me a little uneasy while watching cops is when they have the perp on the ground and well restrained and they repeatedly scream at him, “stop resisting!” (often followed with, “or you’re gonna get tazed!”).

The guy is on the ground, his face in the gravel, a knee on the side of his head, and 3 or 4 cops sitting on him or pulling at his extremities. And he’s in handcuffs.

More often than not it looks to me like the guy who is ‘resisting’ is merely trying to avoid pain and injury.
mmm

I’ve wondered about that plenty of times as well. What I think may be the case is that when you have a 175# rock solid cop on top of a 100 meth head, the cop can hold him pretty steady and on TV he doesn’t look like he’s resisting, but because of the cop’s strength and/or the way the cop has his arms held or his knee in his back we don’t see how much he’s twisting his arms trying to break free or squirming around trying to roll up on his side to get something out of his pocket.

Anyways, regarding how it makes the cops look, it’s TV. Each episode shows only three arrests. They send a few crews out to a major city for I don’t know how long (two weeks or so has always been my guess) and of all that time they only show three arrests. It would be kind of silly of them to just show the cops driving around and writing tickets for minor traffic infractions all night even though that’s probably the case most nights.

Just like any other TV show, you compress it down to just the exciting parts. Everyone know that working in an office isn’t like The Office and in real life a group of friends don’t spend every waking moment either at each other’s apartments on in the coffee shop.

[GrumpyBunny]

@Neurotik

If you run a stop sign here in the US, and a police officer sees it then he’ll flash his lights, you pull over (you keep your hands on the top of the steering wheel), he’ll saunter on up to your window and say, “You know you just ran a stop sign?”, you say “Did I? I’m sorry, I didn’t see it.”, he says, “OK, I’m gonna have to give you a ticket, let me see license and registration,” you hand over said documents, officer writes ticket, you’re on your merry way again.

Which is not very interesting TV. Hence the shows focusing on cops chasing fleeing naked drug dealers.

Also, and this is very important, check the social class of the people being “hassled”. Working class to welfare class. The vibe changes immensely when the interaction is between a middle- or upper-middle-class person and the police. The police treat a middle class person wearing nice clothes from Macy’s in a model SUV very differently than someone with neck tattoos and meth mouth in a beater.

[Me_Billy]

Keep in mind that cops encounter EVERYBODY including criminals who intend to stab or shoot the officer so they can get away. Some criminals may be facing long prison terms if they are apprehended, so they will do anything to get away.

With that said, cops have procedures in place to protect themselves from these worst criminals. Unfortunately they must use these procedures on everyone they pull over - even “nice” people. (They don’t know if that nice person intends to kill them!)

So just give them a bit of leeway and understanding so they can have a bit of job safety.

[GrumpyBunny]

Me_Billy, you don’t see a lot of “nice” people on the show Cops.

[medstar]

What I’d like to know is if the TV show Reno 911 bad for the image of cops?

::d&r::

[herman_and_bill]

Hmmm, 13 year old thread gets revived. I don’t think they make that show anymore.

[Asimovian]

I think this one might be a little too far gone. If anyone wishes to start anew, please feel free, though the topic would be best suited to Cafe Society (which I don’t think existed when this thread was first born). I’m closing this one.