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We’ve Been Disinformed
Like many, I grew up watching crime investigation shows. The police procedural is the lifeblood of the television entertainment industry, consistently among the most watched television shows across the world, even more popular than sports. From dramas like Law & Order, comedies like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and reality television like Cops, at any given time, policing is the one profession you can consistently watch a fictionalized account of on television. The sheer amount of available fictional material to consume about the police has created a sense of familiarity within pop culture about what police do, what they accomplish, and how. The Law & Order franchise, for instance, has spawned a seemingly unending plethora of spin-offs, including Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, True Crime, Organized Crime, Hate Crimes, Conviction, Los Angeles, UK, and Toronto: Criminal Intent. On any random date in the United States, there are nearly twenty-four hours of the Law & Order franchise available to watch on television and far more available on streaming platforms.
Across these shows, the police behave similarly, and sometimes the shared elements reflect things that are true. Yes, police wear uniforms, engage in traffic stops, and respond to emergency calls. But these programs are ultimately meant to be entertainment—to excite us, make us emotionally invested, and keep us watching from week to week. Their purpose is not to depict the truth. And often, the how and the conclusion of these stories are largely fictionalized. Violence, harm, and threats to safety are complicated issues that cannot be explained, let alone resolved, in a television hour. As a lawyer, I can tell you that televised legal serials make practicing law seem far more thrilling than it actually is. The same is true for policing.
Because of how often we see the police on our screens, whether in fiction or on the news, we all feel knowledgeable about who they are and what they do—whether we have an expert level of knowledge or not. In some ways, the ownership we collectively feel over the police is a good thing. Like any public service, ordinary people should be able to contribute to the examination, critique, and transformation of community safety and security, much like we can with education, health care, or other public services. What makes public safety distinct from these other services is the level of interaction the population has with its primary providers—police officers. To understand what I mean, let’s consider another public service: education.
When I was a child, my parents were deeply involved in supporting my education. My mother would order the curricula set by the provincial government before the beginning of the school year so she was clear on the expectations for me and my siblings. She would buttress the curriculum with additional educational material she would find on her own, and both she and my father would stay in constant communication with our teachers to get updates on our progress and volunteer in our classrooms or on field trips, even challenging instructors they found inadequate.
While my parents might have been more intimately involved than your average parent, it’s simply a fact that most of us have had some sort of interaction with public schools: In the United States and Canada, 91 percent of children enrolled in elementary and secondary school attend public schools, while 93 percent do so in the U.K. As such, whether through our own experience or by way of our family members, we each have an experiential level of knowledge about how public schooling works. We have opinions about everything, from teaching strategies, curricula, and class sizes to how evaluation should work, extracurricular activities, and homework. The average person’s experiential knowledge can be a valuable contribution to the expert knowledge of service providers (teachers, principals, and other education workers), those working to analyze the education system (researchers and education scholars), direct service users (students and parents), and policy makers (politicians and bureaucrats). Collaboration among these groups creates the opportunity for meaningful conversations about the future of public education systems.
In contrast, most people have no exposure to police officers, our primary recourse for public safety. Only a targeted few—primarily Black, Indigenous, disabled, and poor populations—have consistent and repeated experiences with police in their day-to-day lives. In 2018, less than 25 percent of people in the United States had any contact with police. A 2003 study of people living in London, England, found that 80 percent of Londoners primarily got their information about the police from the news media. Word of mouth was the second-largest source of information about the police at 49 percent, and a staggering 29 percent cited media fiction as their primary source. Only 20 percent cited direct experience with police as their primary source of information. Similar data does not exist for Canada, but we do know that there are far fewer police per capita in Canada than in the United States, which suggests there would be less opportunity for police contact with people in Canada. This is not data over the lifetime of an individual, so it isn’t telling us how many of us will ever interact with police, and it’s not telling us what the level or nature of that interaction was. But what this data does tell us is that despite how strongly we may feel about the police one way or another, for the vast majority, our understanding of police is not born of experience or firsthand knowledge. For many, our understanding of police comes from what we have been told.
Television shows perpetuate a powerful pervading belief about the world we live in: Police officers are heroes. Characters on police procedurals are rarely complex, and the innocent victim, evil villain, and courageous heroes are quickly identifiable. The design of the shows leads viewers to relate most strongly with the histories and principles of the law enforcement characters. This is accomplished in several ways, but one of the most crucial is simply exposure. The police characters are limited in number but recur frequently on-screen. We get to know their complexities and motivations. The villainous criminals, in contrast, are rarely recurring and do not have complex storylines. They are one-dimensional bad guys. This framing is consistently presented in television shows, in blockbuster films, and even in elementary school assemblies, where children are taught about the dangers of crimes or drugs, typically by the “hero” police officers themselves. The story is repeated so many times it’s difficult to accept narratives that contradict it. That is why so many of us feel disturbed when we hear an idea like “defund” or “abolish” the police. It seems taboo; police are the “good guys,” the prevailing narrative tells us. Without them, the “bad guys” will harm us.
As a result of this programming, our public safety conversations are stunted—our opinions driven by assumptions rather than reality and our discussions starting and ending with policing. Rarely are we discussing the totality of tools available to create safer, more secure communities, or to prevent harm from happening. From a young age, we are told we need to remember only three numbers, and we will be provided with immediate, personalized, professional assistance. This information is so effectively and repeatedly drilled into our heads that for many of us it has become an impenetrable truth.
The problem is that these stories of heroism are mostly fiction. They don’t reflect the truth of policing. And the simple story structure of the good guy chasing the bad guy and vanquishing evil? Things are rarely that simple in real life. If you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you. Popular culture has invested decades of time and money ensuring that most of us believe police can do no wrong. But as you read this book, I invite you to suspend your own notions of policing, whether you have had experience with police or not.
The Origins and Impact of Copaganda
LEXOW COMMITTEE REPORT: New-York’s Police Described as Allies of Criminals. THE ENTIRE DEPARTMENT CORRUPT: Evidence of a Systematic Protection of Crime, with Blackmail for Its Only Object.
—New York Times front-page headline, January 18, 1895
In the early days of television, policing was vilified in popular culture. Those of us who remember Saturday-morning cartoons might recall the caricature of the bumbling police officer, often depicted as eating donuts and making a fool of himself. That comedic trope has deep historical roots in Western entertainment. Modern policing as a professional organization was just concretizing at the time early police narratives began to appear in film, and the public was aware of and engaged in vigorous debate about the role of police and widespread corruption in police organizations. Early police narratives in motion picture and radio serials in the West depicted police departments as rife with corruption and hostile to average people—especially workers. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the motion picture industry was in its infancy, were a time when workers’ movements were successfully unionizing in industries across the world and police were being used to violently crack down on these movements. Many workers lost their lives. And during the 1920s Prohibition era in the United States and Canada, police enforcement of Prohibition laws was seen as overzealous and corrupt, and underground efforts to thwart these laws created plenty of opportunity for officers to profit from participating in the organized crime that flourished during this time.
One of the most famous investigations into police corruption took place between 1894 and 1895 in New York City. In a more-than-10,000-page report, including testimony from hundreds of witnesses, the New York State Senate’s Lexow Committee revealed evidence of rape, child abuse, electoral interference, blackmail, extortion, and corruption within the New York Police Department (NYPD), the United States’ second professionally established police department. On January 18, 1895, upon completion of the hearings, the resulting front-page New York Times article reported that police officers were found to have engaged in “unprovoked assault,” stating in particular that “many members of the force, and even superior officers, have abused the resources of physical power which have been provided for them and their use only in cases of necessity in the making of arrests and the restraints of disorder, to gratify personal spite and brutal instincts, and to reduce their victims to a condition of servility.” Keep in mind that the NYPD was only founded in 1845. Organizing the widespread corruption to the scale described by the Lexow Committee likely took the better of those fifty short years between the NYPD’s founding and the publishing of the report. If there was ever a time in which the police were operating to keep us safer, it certainly wasn’t in its infancy.
Contemporary policing retains the character of its birth. The corruption and violence described by the Lexow Committee would be described again and again in report after report about police for decades. So, if the policing narratives of today’s police television serial are not depicting some sort of changed reality, where do these narratives come from?
Almost immediately after films began depicting police unfavorably, law enforcement fought back. In 1910, the International Association of Chiefs of Police—an organization still in existence today, with more than 32,000 members across more than 170 countries—condemned popular depictions of policing in film, with its president stating: “In moving pictures the police are sometimes made to appear ridiculous, and in view of the large number of young people, children, who attend these moving picture shows, it gives them an improper idea of the policeman.” In 1916, police in the U.K. recommended to the National Council for Morals that the government establish a central mechanism through which to censor films, blaming movies for an increase in youth involvement in crime. Similar measures were proposed in the United States, and in the 1930s Congress implemented the Hays Code to enforce several rules guiding the moral content of films. The Code strictly enforced how crime was depicted on-screen, setting the stage for policing to be depicted far more positively. It stated that
law, natural or divine, must not be belittled, ridiculed, nor must a sentiment be created against it.
The presentation of crimes against the law, human or divine, is often necessary for the carrying out of the plot. But the presentation must not throw sympathy with the criminal as against the law, nor with the crime as against those who must punish it.
By then, the infamous Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, who would later oversee the explicitly anti-Black policies that drove the harassment of civil rights activists, realized there was power in cooperating with Hollywood to directly influence how consumers felt about particular issues—including the police. Hollywood producers also saw benefits in shifting their approach to depicting law enforcement. Studios needed police to support required filming permits or to look the other way when their affiliated movie stars got into trouble with the law. The combination of the Hays Code and Hoover’s negotiations with Hollywood resulted in a dramatic shift in how police were portrayed on-screen.
The show often credited as being the first police procedural, Dragnet, was the first product of the collaboration between Hollywood and law enforcement, establishing a groundbreaking partnership with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In return for help from the LAPD in the form of story ideas, financial support, and logistical assistance, as well as access to near-unlimited shooting locations, props like police vehicles and equipment, and actual police officers to serve as extras, Dragnet’s creator, Jack Webb, gave the LAPD authority to censor, edit, and approve every script. The LAPD was so influential it had the power to demand that entire episodes be scrapped. Webb knew his portrayal of the police did not reflect reality, and though the LAPD’s edits to his scripts would at times frustrate him, the trade-off was ultimately worth it for his business interests.
Copyright © 2025 by Sandy Hudson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
