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Cops: Packing and Policing the Real
by Chen-ou Liu (劉鎮歐)
Abstract
Nowadays it is undeniable that reality TV has moved to the center of
television culture. Various criminologists also note that western society is
fascinated with crime and justice. The extent of programming on television
that has content dealing with some aspect of crime is overwhelming, and the
number of reality crime shows has increased over the past decade.
Cops, debuting in 1989 and flourishing in the early 1990s and still
remaining on the schedule, is one of the most popular and long-running
reality-based crime shows. Moreover, numerous copies of it have been
created. It has been called the "prototype" for the new reality-based genre of
programming.
Cops consists of "real-life" crime events, and is filmed in ride-along
fashion with law enforcement officials, providing rather a voyeuristic, video-
cam perspective on police work. It uses a variety of mechanisms to
naturalize its footage as "reality": "unpredictable and unscripted" reality to
ready-to-air "stories" with "thematic unity." This "reality" is constructed
from the viewpoint of frontline officers immersed in cop culture, which
resonates well with "law and order ideology." Cops represents the illusion
that viewers get from its program instead of an objective slice of reality.
Thus, getting a critical understanding of how Cops constructs mediated
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reality and reinforces "law and order ideology" are the main foci of this
paper.
Methodologically based on the cultural studies approach and Fiske’s
concept of codes of televison, this paper will first explain the conception of
reality TV, the popularity of the reality-based crime program Cops, and
Fiske’s concept of codes of televison; then closely look at its new program
format, blurring the distinction between informational and entertainment
programming, to understand how it represents "raw reality", its own version
of "the real"; then focus on exploring how, while Cops purports to present
"raw reality", it reinforces "law and order ideology" through various
techniques that prompt viewers to identify with and share the point-of-view
of the police; finally conclude by engaging in a struggle for meaning, which
fights against the values of the dominant ideology and of the social system.
Keywords: Reality TV, reality-based crime programming, observational
documentary, Cops, mediated reality, infotainment, media logic, fear of
crime, codes of television, law and order ideology, intertextuality, polysemy.
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Introduction to Reality TV
Whether or not one is an avid fan of Temptation Island or a
compulsive viewer of Big Brother or a loyal supporter of Survivor, there is
no denying the impact that reality TV has had on us as a television watching
society. This "reality- based" programming has rapidly increased over the
past ten years, and is still very much a part of the daily line-ups from which
we as viewers have to choose. Reality TV is a compelling mix of apparently
"raw", "authentic" material with the news magazine package or
informational program, combining the commercial success of tabloid content
within a public service mode of address. At the level of construction, reality
TV is characterized by (Dovey, 2001:135):
camcorder, surveillance or observational actuality
footage;
first-person participant or eye-witness testimony;
reconstructions that rely upon narrative fiction styles;
studio or to-camera links and commentary from
authoritative presenters;
expert statements from emergency services personnel,
police sources or psychologists.
Dovey (2001:135) notes that these elements are often framed by a
magazine, melodrama-like or game show format. Popular use of the term
"reality TV" may also refer to programs that use "ordinary people" framed
within a variety of "first-person" or confessional modes of speech, such as
talk shows and docusoaps1.
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Despite its current popularity, a closer look reveals that reality TV is
not something new. The idea of capturing and televising the behaviour of
ordinary individuals in various situations has been around since the late
1940s. The forefather of reality-based programming is Candid Camera,
which has been on television on and off since 1948, almost since the dawn
of the medium itself. In 1973, PBS debuted An American Family, an
unsettling, yet fascinating documentary series. The members of the Loud
family opened up their home and lives for seven months to producer Craig
Gilbert, who shot 300 hours of footage. Only 12 of those hours made it to
television. An astonishing 10 million viewers watched the marital breakup of
Bill and Pat Loud and the coming-out of their gay son Lance. In the late
1980s, the Fox network gradually cornered the market, and perennially
relied on reality crime programming to lure viewers. The network's bread-
and-butter was the likes of Cops, which followed cops on the beat and the
staking out suspects (Rowen, 2002).
Nowadays it is undeniable that reality TV has moved from the
margins of television culture to the center, and its program format has
become much more elaborate and sophisticated. Based on Webb’s (2002)
classification, reality TV can be categorized into the following sub-genres:
Situation and Domestic Spying – Survivor, Temptation
Island, The Real World, and Big Brother.
Spying on people in a given situation of island survival
or sexual temptation, and domestic spying on people
living together in a house observing how they interact
with one another.
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Quiz Shows – The More, Dog Eat Dog, and Who Wants
to be a Millionaire.
Competitive quiz shows full of real human dilemmas and
tense decision-making.
Set Up Comedy Shows – Candid Camera and Trigger
Happy TV.
Set up comedy shows making entertainment from
ordinary unwary people’s real reactions to strange
situations.
Non Set Up Comedy Shows – You’ve Been Framed and
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Presenting funny real life accidents caught on home
video.
Talent Shows – American Idol, Pop Stars, and Pop Idol.
Talent shows following people’s experiences and
fortunes while auditioning to become famous. Including
personal insults and judgmental putdowns bringing out
real emotions and feelings.
Documentary Soap Shows – Airport and Animal
Hospital.
Based in the workplace showing everyday experiences of
a group of workers produced as a type of documentary.
Crime Shows – Cops, America’s Most Wanted, and Top
Cops.
Consisting of "real-life" crime events, and following cops
on the beat and the staking out suspects.
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The different kinds of programs described as reality TV are unified by
the attempt to package particular aspects of everyday life as entertainment.
Most importantly, it may reveal the degree to which we have become
comfortable in society with the blurring of reality and fiction -- comfortable
with the fact of simulation in our lives.
Popularity of Reality-based Crime Programming Cops
As criminologist Kenneth Dowler (2003:109) notes, Western society
is fascinated with crime and justice. From films, books, newspapers,
magazines, television broadcasts, to everyday conversations, the public are
constantly engaging in crime "talk". The extent of programming on
television that has content dealing with some aspect of crime is also
overwhelming. Almost one-third of all prime time entertainment shows
since 1958 have been concerned with law enforcement and crime (McNeil,
1980), and nearly a third of all the characters on prime time television are
involved in either the enforcement or violation of the law (Dominick, 1973).
Programs that feature fictional cops have been popular since the early
days of television and continue today with shows like NYPD Blue, Law and
Order, Diagnosis Murder, and Brooklyn South. Older shows continue to
appear as reruns and include sitcoms dealing with law enforcement such as
Andy Griffith and Barney Miller, and the number of reality crime shows has
increased over the past decade (Munro, 2003).
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One groundbreaking reality crime show is Cops. Cops debuted in
1989 and still remains on the schedule. This show has aired over several
hundred episodes and regularly wins its time slot on Saturday evening.
Syndicated on the Fox network, Cops is one of the most popular of reality-
based crime shows. In addition to its regular timeslot, the show has often
been used as filler programming when Fox cancels other series. Another
indicator of this show's success and popularity is the numerous copies of it
that have been created, such as Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, Top
Cops, Emergency Call, and Rescue 911. It has been called the "prototype"
for the new "reality-based" genre of programming (Littleton, 1996:24).
The making and popularity of Cops is partly tied to the new
advancement of electronic technologies. Several years earlier than the
emergence of Cops, new technology has developed new kinds of coverage
of events in the world. Smaller, cheaper, more portable video cameras made
electronic newsgathering more cost effective and more immediate. By the
mid-1980s camcorders became commonplace in the general population, as
did surveillance cameras in private businesses and small stores. Cops would
not exist if there were no portable camcorder (Cavender and Fishman,
1998:13). Moreover, new consumer electronic devices also have increased
the likelihood that someone would catch crime on videotape, and the
television industry surely loves to incorporate it into programs because of its
authenticity and low cost.
The most important reason for the continued appearance of Cops is
the low production cost. Broadcast television has been in a long-term
decline, steadily losing viewers to cable television and other sources of
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entertainment such as home computers and the Internet. This has led the
networks to focus on smaller, more specific audience segments to appeal to
advertisers, and has also led them to invest in low-cost programs (Consalvo,
1999). Typically, prime time dramas or action adventure shows are quite
expensive. They cost approximately $900,000 to $1 million per episode. In
contrast, Cops shows spend $150,000 to $250,000 one episode (Turner and
Jeffords, 2003). Television executives also found that, unlike news
magazines, which dated quickly, Cops had a timeless quality. Episodes
retained immediacy for years. This makes Cops suitable for countless
syndicated reruns, even as new episodes continue to air in prime time on the
Fox network (Doyle, 1998:96) Thus, syndication revenues are very high.
In addition to its low-cost production and high revenue, Cops is
valuable to broadcasters for other reasons. It can also fill broadcast station
owners' needs to provide their viewing audience with public service
programming – a requirement for maintaining their FCC2 license. Because
Cops is a somewhat ambiguous mix of news and documentary, station
owners can claim that by showing it, they are fulfilling their obligation to air
public service shows. So, for a host of reasons beyond simply high ratings,
Cops remains on the air, and increases in frequency (Consalvo, 1999).
Codes of Television
The symbolic interactionist tradition3 informs us that actively engaged
people participate in the viewing process. In his examination of Television
Culture, John Fiske (1987) extends this tradition by holding that people are
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readers, reactors, and re-interpreters who bring their individual social
residual factors to the television screen. Fiske (1987:4-13) offers a well-
received approach to codes of television:
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An event to be televised is already encoded
by social codes such as those of:
Level one:
"REALITY"
appearance, dress, make-up, environment, behaviour, speech,
gesture, expression, sound, etc.
these are encoded electronically by
technical codes such as those of:
Level two:
REPRESENTATION
camera, lighting, editing, music, sound
which transmit the
conventional representational codes, which shape
the representations of, for example:
narrative, conflict, character, action, dialogue, setting, casting, etc.
Level three:
IDEOLOGY
which are organized into coherence and social acceptability by
the ideological codes, such as those of:
Individualism, patriarchy, race, class, materialism, capitalism, etc.
Figure 1 The codes of television
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Figure 1 shows the main codes that television uses and their
relationship. According to Fiske (1987:4-5), a code is a rule-governed
system of signs, whose rules and conventions are shared among the
members of a culture, and which is used to generate and circulate meanings
in and for that culture. Codes are links between producers, texts, and
audiences. The key point is that "reality" is already encoded, or rather the
only way we can perceive and make sense of reality is by the codes of our
culture. It is never "raw." If this piece of encoded reality is televised, the
technical codes and representational conventions of the medium are brought
to bear upon it so as to make it (a) transmittable technologically and (b) an
appropriate cultural text for its audiences.
Cops creator and producer John Langley claimed that “We were
certainly the first, and we are still the only reality show that has no actors, no
script and no host. That’s as pure as you can get in documentary film-
making.” (Doyle, 1998:98) Cops consists of "real-life" crime events, and it
is filmed in ride-along fashion with law enforcement officials, providing a
rather voyeuristic, video-cam perspective on police work. Due to the "you
see it as it happens" quality of the show and its popularity, one can use
Fiske’s concept of codes of television to get a critical understanding of how
Cops represents "raw reality", its own version of "the real", which is one of
the main foci of this paper.
Packing the Real: Mediated Reality Constructed by Cops
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Cops shows are often broadcast before the nightly news, and they
feature a single American city each time. At the beginning of each program,
a voice-over, the only one heard during the program, announces that Cops
shows "the real men and women of law enforcement." This is heard while
one views shots of both upcoming and unused scenes. These scenes differ
nightly because each show features a different police department in a
different American city, and each night's crimes are new (Consalvo, 1998).
Cops’ montage title sequence uses the most dramatic footage already
gathered in that city with a reggae-like theme song (Bad Boys, bad Boys –
what’s chu gonna do? what’s chu gonna do? when they come for you?).
The basic format for Cops is that the TV camera "rides with" the
police and films a story as it unfolds. There is actual footage of the police in
action – breaking down a door in a drug bust, or chasing and wrestling a
suspect to the ground. Viewers see and hear what the police see and hear.
While this approach is touted as "the real thing," the programs are edited to
air the most action-packed sequences. Typically, hundreds of hours of
footage are edited each week to produce a single half-hour episode
(Cavender and Fishman, 1998:4).
Each thirty-minute episode is divided into three segments of equal
length, separated by commercials. Each segment deals with one specific
crime, although if the problem is wrapped up quickly, another may be
included before the commercial break. There is no narration to the show
except by the police officers, who explain things to each other and viewers.
At the beginning of each segment a superimposition appears on the screen
that lists the time and type of problem. These graphics are often ambiguous,
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using terms such as "fight," "domestic disturbance," "man with gun," and
"shots fired." (Consalvo, 1998)
Each segment opens with a focus on a specific cop. The host officer’s
name, rank, and department are flashed on the screen as an introduction.
Noncops remain nameless. He, or rarely she, usually describes his/her
motives for joining the force; then he answers a radio call. This leads to a
pursuit and usually the capture of a suspect. The segment concludes with the
officer’s commenting on the events that just unfolded (Turner and Jeffords,
2003).
Debuting in 1989, Cops was the first reality TV program to use actual
video footage as opposed to reenactment, and it put a new spin on the
observational documentary form4. Offered by the police voluntarily and with
massive cooperation, as part of a strong trend toward increasing self-
promotion in the media (Ericson et al., 1989), the Cops video and sound
team can "ride with" police officers in action in dozens of American cities,
and it films a story as it unfolds. Program producer John Langley calls Cops
an "unfiltered television program", and he describes it simply as "raw
reality" (Doyle, 1998:98).
However, the "raw reality" of the video footage undergoes
considerable processing before it airs. As Langley states (Doyle, 1998:98):
… All the material comes back to Los Angels, with
the field staff tagging what looks like potential stories
[emphasis added]. Then our editorial staff cuts
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together the most interesting material, whereupon I
determine what goes in the shows after recutting or
refinessing if needed. Basically we try to put together
interesting combinations. For example, an action
piece (which hooks the audience), a lyrical piece
(which develops more emotion), and a think piece
(which provokes thought on the part of the
audience)…
Based on Langley’s words and the narrative structure of Cops as
discussed above, we can firmly conclude that Cops uses a variety of
mechanisms to naturalize its footage as "reality": "unpredictable and
unscripted" reality to ready-to-air "stories" with "thematic unity". It employs
reality-claims largely rooted in the pervasive cultural understanding ("seeing
is believing"), the veracity of firsthand experience, and emotional
authenticity (it "feels real"). Cops, this media text, constructs a mediated
reality, which is a selection from, a processing of, the real world. As media
critic Ang (1989:37) claims, there can never be any question of an
unproblematic mirror relation between text and social reality: at most it can
be said that a text constructs its own version of "the real".
Cops blends information and entertainment. It is about actual events
and real people, but it often emphasizes action, sets events to music,
compresses time, speeds up action, and uses camera angles typical of action
movies. The entertaining aspects of Cops are concentrated in the arrest
vignette, which takes one of three forms (Turner and Jeffords, 2003):
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group of cops burst into a house, guns drawn, tackling an
often half-naked suspect and throwing him to the ground;
or
group of officers point their pistols at a suspect from
some feet away, forcing him to lie on the ground, face
down, and then creeping closer until they loom over the
suspect’s prone figure; or
officers finger their weapons while suspect is forced to
bend forward over the hood of a police cruiser, legs
spread in preparation for a frisk
These arrest vignettes are the genre’s equivalent of the "money shot"
in pornography, and they draw upon traditions of crime fiction. They are
designed to make Cops more exciting and to increase its ratings.
Although Cops claims to present a newslike reality, in many ways, it
resembles crime fiction, thus gradually blurring the distinction between
information and entertainment programming: infotainment. Doyle (1998)
argues that Cops is part of a cultural trend toward "hyperreality." It is
implicated in the blurring of different ways of representing the real, and the
blurring of mediated representations and the "real" world itself.
Cops shows present crime as rampant, violent, and easy to spot,
suspects as criminals, and the police as America's best line of defense
against these challenges to decent society. Turner argues that those arrest
vignettes are the moments when the full masculine potency of the leading
character is revealed. The camera in the arrest vignette "draws the viewer
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toward the suspect along the trajectory of an imaginary bullet" – in this way,
the viewer isn’t just watching but he/she is directed to experience personally
the power of penetration embodied in the weapons of the police officers
(Turner and Jeffords, 2003). Viewing may thus be an act of domination and
of the assurance of an illusion that everything is under the control of law
enforcement officers.
According to Fiske (1987:4-12), these conventional representational
codes and the televisual codes brought to viewers are deeply embedded in
the ideological codes of which they are themselves bearers. Ideological
codes work to organize the other two codes into producing a congruent and
coherent set of meanings that constitute the "common sense" of a society.
The process of making sense involves a constant movement up and down
through the levels of Figure 1, for sense can only be produced when
"reality", representations, and ideology merge into a coherent, seemingly
natural unity. Another focus of this paper is to explore how Cops reinforces
"law and order ideology" through various techniques that prompt viewers to
identify with and share the point of view of the police.
Policing the Real: Law and Order Ideology Reinforced by Cops
In his study of ideology and modern culture, sociologist John
Thompson (1990) looks at the mediazation of modern culture. In his
reformulation of the concept of ideology, he focuses on problems concerning
the interrelations of meaning and power. He uses the term ideology to refer
to the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of
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power which are systematically asymmetrical and are called relations of
domination. Ideology is an important means in the service of power. Law
and order ideology displaces a different set of meanings that links crime
with structural causes such as poverty and unemployment.
According to Aaron Doyle (1998:96-7), in "law and order ideology,"
society is seen to be in decline or crisis because of spiraling crime. The
answer is tougher crime control. Intertwined with the notion of a soft system
is an "us and them" mentality: crime is a problem of evil or pathological
individuals who are less human than us. Police are the thin blue line between
them and us, and they need to get tougher to protect us. An overt profession
that crime control is efficient and utilitarian is bound up with less conscious,
more affectively charged undercurrents of fear and anger, identification with
powerful authority, and punitiveness and retribution. Various analysts argue
that this punitiveness involves the displacement of anxiety and anger from
other sources (Sparks, 1992). Law and order ideology is seen to touch a
chord with audiences that seek for a focus for their anger, and thus it has
been a key political tool of the Reagan-Bush governments declaring War on
Drugs and Crime since the 1980s, of the Conservatives in Britain and of
Canada’s Reform party.
In the late 1980s, public polls consistently reported that Americans
identified drugs as the primary domestic scourge. At almost precisely the
same time that crime rates started the first decline in about twenty-five years,
the polls unequivocally showed that crime had replaced drugs and the
economy as a primary preoccupation among Americans. A kind of panic
about crime and punishment emerged in the early 1990s that engaged the
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attention of politicians and the mass media, despite stable rates and recent
declines (Donovan, 1998:121).
Law and order ideology has become publicly more pervasive since
1980s, particularly in the U.S., but also elsewhere in modern society. In
Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), in their 1970s study of the moral panic
over mugging in England the authors see the media as playing a key role in
developing and maintaining the pressure for law and order measures. The
media take their information from the primary definers – the police – of
social reality. The mass media – secondary definers – amplify the perceived
threat to the existing social order and the police and the courts then act to
eliminate the threat.
In his Creating Fear (2002), Altheide argues that the recent discourse
about fear of crime results primarily from the growing power of the media
and popular culture as sources of social understanding and identity. Fear
discourse represents the way that "media logic" is increasingly dependent on
an "entertainment format" to attract audiences and generate profits. The
entertainment format stresses visual over linguistic communication, the
evocation of emotions over referential information, and the accentuation of
the drama and excitement of events over their social and historical context.
The media rely on fear discourse because it resonates with audiences by
representing social problems in terms of simplistic victim and villain
stereotypes that are conducive to the personalization of blame and the
promotion of coercive forms of social control as the solution to social
threats. In this way, fear discourse also benefits elite interests in the
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intensification of control, and it legitimates the unequal distribution of social
power (Knight, 2003).
In fact, there is wide recognition among criminal justice professionals
that a simple "get tougher" approach does not achieve its purported aims.
However, law and order ideology does fit media logic well because of its
simplicity, drama, emotiveness, violence, and easily identifiable villains
(Doyle, 1998:97). Based upon their own organizational needs, the Cops
production team and the police have collaborated in constructing mediated
images to legitimatize their discourses on crimes and criminals.
Donovan’s (1998) five-year content analysis of reality crime
programming including Cops as an expanding genre suggests that its appeal
is precisely its synthetic attention to real-world evil and less openly
articulated ills. Reality crime programming offers a way for viewers to meld
their skepticism and their necessary trust in public servants in an
increasingly privatized world. The public wants to believe that the police are
still in control and reestablish the social and moral order. In his seven-year
study of Cops, Doyle (1998) got similar results from randomly reviewing
episodes of Cops, some data about audience experiences drawn from
discussion with Cops viewers, information downloaded from the official
Cops website5, and transcripts of interviews with two Cops producers. Cops
and similar reality crime programs form part of a context for increasingly
punitive law and order policies, and Cops stresses law and order ideology
through various techniques that prompt viewers to identify with and share
the point-of-view of the police.
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First of all, as aforementioned, Cops skillfully introduces narrative
devices such as the host cops as heroes with whom viewers can identify,
unambiguous story lines with resolution or closure, and often with a moral
theme. Usually, there is a closing comment or "last word" from a cop,
voiced-over a black screen featuring only the Cops logo. Some last words
simply sum up events to create closure. Others provide a moral theme for the
story. These morals, interpretations of the events by frontline cops, often
strengthen aspects of law and order ideology (Doyle, 1998:98,104).
Secondly, one important aspect of Cops’ realism is based more on the
inner or emotional realism6 of characters. This first television version of the
"ride-with" allows viewers to share a cop’s point of view in real time during
the course of his or her duties. This resembles the point-of-view shot used in
fiction films to simulate the view of a particular character. Viewers get a
cops-eye view through the cruiser window during the hunt for fleeing
suspects, and sometimes they even accompany the host cop through his off-
duty daily routine. Thus, while viewers get up close and personal with the
host cop, they are also positioned on the scene as if they themselves were
cops. Therefore, the "raw reality" the producers talk about is a "reality"
generated from a particular point of view – the viewpoint of the police
(Doyle, 1998:99,101).
The officers shown often describe the sensations and satisfactions of
their work, saying something like “My job is like Disneyland,” “I enjoyed
that,” and “I don’t like thieves…. I’ve had two cars stolen over the last ten
years. When I pop a car thief and get to chase him and catch him, that’s a
good high there.” These beliefs encourage viewers to share in them. Thus,
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viewers can identify with authorized power and its pleasures. In contrast,
civilians or suspects shown are stripped of their human backgrounds, and
the program does not provide any social context for the noncops portrayed
or the alleged crimes. When any context is given, it is likely to be the
suspect’s criminal record. When suspects have their faces blurred, this
further depersonalizes them. In short, Cops consciously encourages viewers
to identify with police officers, while distancing them from the other
characters who are shown. This provides protagonists for the story, but it
also fortifies the us-them dichotomy characteristic of law and order ideology
(Doyle, 100-1).
Thirdly, because it depends on the voluntary, massive, and ongoing
police cooperation, Cops is highly unlikely to air footage that makes the
police look bad or incompetent. Oliver’s (1994) content analysis indicates
that Cops and four other reality shows overpresent both violent crime and
the proportion of crime that the police solve. Cops tends to show cases
where police apparently deal effectively with situations, swiftly diagnosing
trouble and resolving it. Cops also rarely airs material that would reflect
negatively on the police. A Kansas City officer who had a Cops crew on his
midnight shift for two weeks told Time magazine (Zoglin, 1992):
Most officers would be apprehensive to have the
media ride with them….But these guys proved
themselves to us. They said that they wouldn’t do
anything to undermine us, and that we’d have final
discretion about what ran.
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Time reported that “each episode of Cops is reviewed by the police
before airing, in part to make sure no investigations are compromised.”
Another reason to explain Cops’ positive attitudes toward the police
is that the producers themselves internalize pro-police ideology. Langley
once said (Doyle, 1998:105):
If you had asked me…in the 60s, I would have
laughed and said that I would never do a show called
Cops. Maybe "Pigs" but not "Cops". Of course I was
brash and immature back then. … I have developed a
profound respect for police officers. … They put their
lives at risk for others, and I think that’s both
admirable and inspirational.
The Cops production crew acts and thinks like inner-circle reporters,
who are friendly with police officers and who internalize police ideology.
Moreover, the content of Cops is shaped by the interpretations of frontline
officers who are immersed in cop culture, which resonates well with law and
order ideology.
Fourth, Cops is selective in its portrayal of race. Oliver (1994)
demonstrated that reality crime programs including Cops underrepresent
African-Americans and Hispanics and overrepresent whites as police
officers, while overrepresenting minorities and underrepresenting whites as
criminals. Doyle (1998) also found that Cops focused exclusively on street
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crime, most often in poorer neighborhoods. This focus was confirmed by a
Cops coproducer (Bernstein 1992):
Most often, it’s poor neighborhoods where Cops goes
for its stories. … Traditionally, we don’t go and ride
in those areas [wealthy areas]. Things that happen in
places like Beverly Hills aren’t the kind of things that
are stories for us on the show.
As explained earlier, ideology is an important means in the service of
power. Law and order ideology displaces a different set of meanings that
links crime with structural causes such as poverty and unemployment. It is
often tied with other systems of meaning that construct people as "us and
them", notably race. Fear and loathing of criminals often means nonwhite
criminals. Class is another key dimension along which law and order
ideology works. It focuses on crimes of the lower classes, not white-collar
and corporate crime. Cops is indeed selective in its portrayal of race and
class, thus reinforcing law and order ideology (Doyle, 1998:97).
Finally, it is very important to understand that Cops does not work in
isolation from other media products. The codes of television, according to
Fiske (1987:108-27), are agents of intertextuality through which texts
interrelate in a network of meanings that constitutes our cultural world.
Media products help shape the meanings viewers make of other media
products. As Doyle (1998:108-10) points out, Cops is repeatedly situated as
part of a broader television package related to fear and loathing of street
crime. Ads during Cops said viewers could stay tuned afterward to “help the
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cops catch a killer on America’s Most Wanted because it’s a night of nonstop
action on Q13.” Cops is often broadcast right after the six o’clock news,
bridging the gap between the news and prime time crime programs. Thus,
Cops and other media versions of crime together make a package, more than
the sum of its parts, to help shape viewers’ perception of crimes and
criminals.
Conclusions
Parenti (1992) noted that the media help legitimate our society’s
current ideological system with images and themes that propagate private
enterprise, personal affluence, individual acquisitiveness, consumerism, and
racial and gender stereotyping. They tend to sensationalize street crime and
crime fighting, to the exclusion of much meaningful consideration of other
crimes, especially corporate crime, wife and child abuse, and other crimes
committed against oppressed groups. Moreover, police interests operate
simultaneously with those of the media. The police have recognized the fact
that they will grow and be nurtured if they are perceived as crime fighters,
but not if the public recognizes their inability to protect people against crime
(Kasinsky,1994:227). Ericson et al. (1989) also found that the police were
most concerned with whether the media positively reflected the force’s
image rather than with providing an accurate understanding of crime, police
organization, and their occupation. Distortions of police based on their
"crime-fighting" role served their organizational image and therefore did not
seem to upset them. These arguments seem to be confirmed by their
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mutually supported relationships between the Cops production team and
police organizations.
Based upon their own organizational needs, the Cops production team
and the police have collaborated in constructing mediated images to
legitimatize their discourses on crimes and criminals. The "reality" Cops
represents is constructed from the viewpoint of frontline officers who are
immersed in cop culture, which resonates well with law and order ideology.
Based on "law and order ideology" commonly shared by the police and
through its use of filtering devices and procedures such as overdependence
upon police cooperation and sources, the reality crime show Cops has
become part of the policing apparatus of our society.
Clearly not all viewers will simply accept that Cops is reality.
However, Oliver and Armstrong (1995) showed that audiences perceive
Cops and four similar programs as significantly more realistic than crime
fiction, and also indicated that viewers, already inclined toward law and
order ideology, are the people to whom Cops would most likely appeal and
by whom Cops are most enjoyed. Their study indicated that viewer interest
and satisfaction with on-the-scene police work packaged into a half hour
television series might be significantly related to viewers’ a priori thoughts
about crime and social control.
In spite of its polysemic potential, meanings of Cops as interpreted by
viewers are neither boundless nor structureless: the text delineates the terrain
within which meanings may be made and proffers some meanings more
vigorously than others. This paper has shown how the conventional use of
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televisual codes that Cops employs has preferred a set of meanings that fits
well the values of the dominant ideology. But other meanings could be
made: the text’s polysemy or meaning potential may be realized differently.
The television text is the site of a struggle for meaning.
In order to create different meanings than those of the dominant
ideology, it is necessary that there is a critical interrogation of the dominant
ideology and of the social system which it has produced and underpins. This
entails anawareness of the inequalities and of the arbitrariness of late
capitalism, which, in turn, produces the desire to hasten social change and
the willingness to work for it.
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Endnotes
1. Docusoaps were the television documentary form of the 1990s. The term
docusoap itself was coined by journalists keen to dismiss this new brand
of factual television that, in their estimation, contaminated the
seriousness of documentary with the frivolity of soap operas (Bruzzi,
2001:132).
2. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent
United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The
FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged
with regulating interstate and international communications by radio,
television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50
states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions. For further
information, see its official website, http://www.fcc.gov
3. The symbolic interactionist approach to human communication focused
on the core principles of meaning, language and thought. These thinkers
focused on how and in what ways cultural meanings are created by
humans in interaction with their environments.
4. Stephen Mamber described the American observational documentary
movement of 1960s as "real people in undirected situation. "
Observational documentary tends to deal with current events, events that
are unfolding in front of the cinema and to which the makers of the
program do not know the outcome (Bruzzi, 2001:129-30).
5. http://www.tvcops.com
6. Inner or emotional realism stresses that the audience "knows" the
character and identifies with him or her because the character behaves in
27
a "realistic" way or says the "right" thing, or shows an identifiable
response or emotion.
28
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31
Short Biography
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Chen-ou Liu (劉鎮歐) was a college teacher,
essayist, editor, and two-time winner of the national Best Book Review
Radio Program Award. In 2002, he emigrated to Canada and settled in Ajax,
a suburb of Toronto. There, he continues to struggle with a life in transition
and translation. Featured in New Resonance 7: Emerging Voices in English-
Language Haiku, and listed as one of the top ten haiku poets for 2011
(Simply Haiku, 9:3&4, Autumn/Winter 2011), Chen-ou Liu is the author of
Ripples from a Splash: A Collection of Haiku Essays with Award-Winning
Haiku and Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize Winner of the
2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest). His tanka and haiku have been honored
with 29 awards, including First Prize in the 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook
Contest, Tanka First and Third Places in the 2011 San Francisco
International Competition Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay. Read more of
his poems at Poetry in the Moment, http://chenouliu.blogspot.com/
32