The clip portrayed a police encounter that couldn’t have been more different than the viral cop videos Americans have become accustomed to seeing over the past several years—the ones where an officer fires a burst of bullets into the back of a fleeing, unarmed black man, or puts a chokehold on another man as he gasps for breath. But just like the cell phone–captured deaths of Walter Scott and Eric Garner, the “Cops” clip seemed to expose a set of deeply personal beliefs about our frontline guardians of law and order. In one set of videos, they are the ruthless agents of a racist justice system; in another, they are unflinching heroes conquering the forces of depravity.
This is, of course, a rough approximation of the present debate over policing. So how much has the country’s most durable portrayal of American law enforcement shaped that debate? The long answer is this: Since 1989, “Cops” has delivered the officer’s view of crime and punishment every week, first on Fox, now on Paramount Network (formerly Spike), where new episodes from the show’s 30th season air every Monday night. “Cops” gained instant popularity in a genre it helped pioneer—reality television—and in the decades since, the show has remained a powerful and divisive force in American life. Civil rights activists, criminologists, and other observers have described it as a racist and classist depiction of the country, one in which crime is a relentless threat and officers are often in pitched battle against the poor black and brown perpetrators of that crime. They’re the plain-clothes narcotics detectives barreling through a suspected crack house, for instance, or the patrol officers racing after a suspect who’s bailed on a traffic stop. As Rashad Robinson, the racial justice activist and executive director of Color of Change, puts it: “It represented for us what was the very worst of the way poverty and crime and communities of color are shown on TV.”
Criminologists who have studied the show say you can’t draw a straight line between the screen and, say, juries repeatedly refusing to convict police officers charged in use-of-force cases, or people believing President Donald Trump when he says that America is in the throes of a sustained and uncontrolled violent crime wave. And yet, social scientists have consistently found that fans of “Cops” and shows like it have a clutch of distorted beliefs about crime, including this: They think that black people commit more of it than they actually do.
Within the pro-“Cops” camp, the view is quite different. To the show’s co-creator—and Morgan’s father—John Langley, it simply conveys the “raw” reality of police work. And the stuff about race always seemed off-target, Morgan tells me. His father long ago decided he didn’t want to perpetuate stereotypes, so he insisted that the show feature as many white people being apprehended as people of color. “He did that forever,” Morgan says. “And he still does it.”
To Stephen Chao, the former Fox executive who helped launch the show, its unvarnished simplicity remains one of the most radical things he’s ever seen on television. To Steve Dye, the police chief of the Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas, where the show was recently filmed, “Cops” is a powerful marketing and recruitment tool amid historically challenging times for law enforcement.
“Cops,” of course, is no longer the Fox behemoth it was in the ’90s, when it topped more than 8 million viewers an episode and was often the most watched reality show. Robinson proudly attributes this to Color of Change: In May 2013, a few months after the group launched a campaign to oust “Cops" from Fox, the show moved to Spike. There, it flourished, becoming one of the channel’s most watched shows with an average of 1.1 million viewers per episode last year. This season featured its 1,000th episode, while a Hollywood adaptation, possibly directed by Ruben Fleischer, of “Zombieland” and “Gangster Squad,” is expected to be released this year.
And yet, “Cops” almost never happened. This is the story of how it did—and the polarizing, influential thing it became.