Today’s images of law enforcement are worlds away from an episode of ‘Dragnet.’
NEW YORK — Gary Phillips, a prize-winning crime novelist from Los Angeles, grew up on TV shows that showed a world nothing like the one he lived in.
“I watched them all, ‘Dragnet,’ ‘Adam 12,’ ‘The Wild, Wild West,’ ‘Mannix,’ ‘Cannon,’ ‘Peter Gunn’ reruns and on and on. Now these were white guys and they were tough but fair and even-handed,” he told The Associated Press in a recent email, referring to popular programs mostly from the 1960s and 1970s.
“I remember a ‘Dragnet’ episode where tight-ass Joe Friday solved racism among black and white officers in a weekend retreat. But I was a kid growing up in South Central and even then some part of me knew a lot of this was jive. We knew the cops out of Newton and 77th Division policed the ’hood a lot different than shown on TV.”
The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck, has set off protests worldwide and transmitted images of law enforcement that long remained far outside the narratives of crime stories — beatings and lethal chokeholds of handcuffed suspects, firing mace and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters, harassing and cursing at journalists.
Police stories have evolved far from the prime of Sgt. Friday. But the idealized crime fighter remains a cultural touchstone even when countered by such recent narratives as Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series “When They See Us,” about the wrongfully convicted Central Park Five, and Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give,” a best-selling novel about a black teen murdered by police that was adapted into a feature film of the same name.
“Hopefully what we’re seeing on TV now, and on social media, is that bubble being popped,” Thomas told the AP.
Protests have already changed television. “Cops,” which for 33 seasons helped shape an authorized narrative that allowed viewers to sympathize and identify with real police on patrol, was dropped this week by the Paramount Network. A&E did the same with a similar show, “Live PD,” one of its mostly highly rated programs. Earlier this year, five police procedurals were consistently in the Nielsen company’s top 20 ratings, including NBC’s “Chicago PD” and CBS’s “FBI.
