So LIVE PD has been cancelled by A&E and COPS has been cancelled by FOX.
Dan Abrams, the host of LIVE PD, had a bit of a contentious interview with CNN. I think both sides made some good arguments. I personally like the Dan Abrams show, but not COPS.
Here’s one story:
So I would like to continue to watch the show. I enjoy “getting to know” the officers that they follow. Dan argues that the show aids in transparency and I think I agree with that.
But I know others feel differently and I’d like to hear some other opinions. I started this thread mostly to listen and learn so please forgive me if I don’t contribute too much.
There was something in the Times about this today, and the thought was that these shows make the cops always the good guys. I never watch them, but I bet they don’t show cops randomly hassling people the way black people get hassled regularly today and I got hassled when I was in college.
It applied to fiction also. How many police shows have the cops bending the rules, all in the purpose of justice, of course.
They distinguished today’s shows from those of the past, where Perry Mason always got the innocent defendant charged by the cops and DA off.
I loved that show. Watched it everytime I saw it on.
I do think it was wrong of them to erase the video of the shooting. They should have known better. Dan Abrams is a lawyer.
Regardless of the shows policies. They should have preserved that film.
I saw the CNN interview, as well.
Mr.Abrams tried to equate the show with news.
No. It was reality TV. No other way to categorize it.
It’s been years since I’ve watched COPS, and I only saw two episodes, but it struck me as being heavily edited, as all “reality” shows are. And, of course, producers select which incidents to edit and air. So how would such shows further transparency? (I really want to know.)
I’ll admit that I’ve been a long-time fan of these shows. Part of it is the same thing that makes rubbernecking at highway accident happen, a kind of hideous prurient curiosity, but part of it is also that even through the staged falseness and selective editing, I think I’ve had moments watching them where the reality behind the “reality tv” is evident and fascinating.
Then I listened to the podcast series “Running from Cops”, specifically about that show. It made me stop watching the show. But I still have questions about the reality of cops’ lives and I think all the outsider reports (and completely valid critiques and attacks on the police and police culture) often miss the point. Looking from the outside always warps your view.
In college I remember reading Jerome Skolnick’s Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society and his ideas about the police as a “total institution.” (If I remember correctly. It was a long time ago. I see that he’s written a lot more since then, and I think it’s time to take another look.
Never liked Cops. It was always either “Look at the funny white trash! Gawd, at least I’m better than them” or “These dumb colords can’t function in our society”. No thanks. I don’t need to watch that to feel better about myself.
Didn’t overly care for PD Live, even though some of what they showed was actually in our area (one was literally 2 blocks from my house). It certainly was better than “Cops” in its attitude. The one think I actually appreciated about it was that it showed the boredom - a lot of time was spent checking in with the officers going “Just driving around to see what’s happening”, or once the initial “stop”, a lot of time on questions with repetitive answers trying to assay the situation. It didn’t glorify the police as “MEN OF ACTION”; it showed how little time was spent on actual action. I appreciated the boring stuff, but it didn’t make good television.
It certainly happened. Probably not to the same extent or same ratio as it does in real life, but they showed it.
A notable example was a few months back when an officer stopped someone (that was black) that was walking down the street with a crowbar. They hassled him for probably 45 minutes before they let him go. From a purely objective POV, the stop may have made sense, but I have to assume if the person was white, the cop wouldn’t have even noticed them.
Other examples I can think of, I have no idea if that jurisdiction’s demographics come into play.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if it stays cancelled. They have a very large, very vocal fan base. I could see giving it a few months and playing some reruns to see what the general reaction is and then bringing it back.
I’m kinda surprised they picked right now to cancel it. Only because with the pandemic they could have simply announced that all this remote filming/editing/producing was getting too difficult so they would go on hiatus for X weeks/months. At that point, if they wanted to cancel the show, they could have done so with a lot less people getting all worked up about it.
On the other hand, it was also recently learned that the producers destroyed a never aired clip of the cops killing someone a few years back…that likely played into their decision.
Regarding Cops being heavily edited, it is. But Cops vs Live PD is like watching a highlight reel vs an entire game.
I’m kind of surprised they outright canceled them instead of just postponing them like every other show has for covid anyway. But I’m also kind of glad, if it means that reform is being seriously considered by the collective mindset or whatever.
I only first even heard of the idea of replacing police with other more suitable services two years ago on the documentary series Problem Areas. It seemed both completely alien and completely obvious at the same time.
There’s just something so narratively satisfying and imprinted in us about framing everything in terms of good guys and bad guys. But it’s not real, and it just perpetuates the fundamental attribution error.
It will be cool to have a show about creative alternatives and replacements. Maybe the lack of artificial drama won’t be sexy enough for ratings. Maybe we should measure ratings differently…
A&E. Here’s the community section of their facebook page. Even if you were to scroll down a few weeks, that page still lights up while the show is airing. Same with twitter.
And they [the hosts/producers] keep a close eye on it during the show. They’ll read some of the comments that get made or address concerns (ie ‘let us know if the puppy is okay’). A few times twitter/facebook have caught things the officers missed. The biggest example being during a pursuit, the suspect threw something out the window. The officers didn’t see it, but people on twitter did. The comments on twitter made their way to the cops on the scene who went back and retrieved whatever it was (gun? drugs?).
The answer I was looking for was tons. We watch lots of British police shows and the good guys always seem to be entering the property of suspects without warrants. And these guys are not nearly as multi-dimensional as in The Wire. It’s all for a good cause and they very rarely get into any sort of trouble for doing it.
In The Wire their action had consequences, at least.
I have to assume Live Rescue will go on. A lot of people that support defunding the police, as part of trying to get people on board with that idea will show a lot of support for fire/rescue. I think it’s, at least in part, to say ‘see, we don’t hate all those guys, just the police’.
The question is, can it hold it’s own? Often times, I don’t make it through an entire episode if there’s nothing exciting going on.
Now, an even better show, in my mind, was Nightwatch. It was Dan from Live Rescue along with the rest of the EMTs and FFs in NOLA. It wasn’t live but it essentially tracked them throughout the course of the night. It had very much the same feel as Live PD with a hint of Cops (as far as the editing). Nightwatch turned into Nightwatch Nation. Same show, but followed multiple stations around the country. The quality was still fine, but it’s hard to get invested in specific people when there’s so many, as opposed to just 10 or so.
Eventually, Nightwatch Nation sort of melded into Live Rescue.
If you watch Live Rescue, Dan often mentions being a nurse. He finished up nursing school and became a nurse while on Nightwatch, he talked about it a lot then as well.
