Another small green shoot of hope: TV's "Cops" cancelled

For over thirty years, ever since it first aired on March of 1989, the television show Cops has been glorifying the armed response, militarized approach to policing, bringing guns-drawn drug busts and other armed confrontations into white American living rooms for 1,100 episodes. If you're looking for one single contributor to the bedrock assumption on the part of white America, and white people across North America, that heavily-armed cops approaching every situation as if it was a shoot-out waiting to happen was the way to approach enforcement of the law, the pop-culture influence of Cops would be high on the list.

Note, though, that I said 1,100 episodes, flat, and not 1,100 episodes and counting. That's because tonight, literally just minutes ago, we learned that Cops will not have an 1,101st episode. The long-running television institution has been cancelled by its network.

As reported by The Huffington Post:

Paramount Network has canceled “Cops,” the long-running show that followed real police officers on the job, amid nationwide protests over racism, police brutality and general alarm over systemic law enforcement abuses in the U.S.

[...]

Last week, the network said it was temporarily pulling “Cops” from its lineup, delaying this week’s start of the show’s 33rd season “out of respect for the families of George Floyd and others who have lost their lives,” a spokesperson said, citing the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis last month.

Now they’re pulling the plug altogether. The unscripted show has repeatedly come under fire for the one-sided perspective it offers on policing by embedding camera crews with cops as they pursue and arrest suspects, sometimes in humiliating fashion.

There's been plenty of criticism of Cops over the years, including a 2004 study which found that the show, "featured cops arresting Black and Latinx suspects for violent crimes at rates disproportionately higher than in reality," painting a racially-skewed picture which panders to the worst instincts and racist stereotypes of black and latinx people, and people of colour generally. The podcast Running From the Cops found, "found that officers followed on the show would sometimes coerce subjects into signing filming releases and that the show’s producers let police departments have the final say on what aired, thus letting the police dictate how they were portrayed on screen," ensuring that their version of the story was the only one that America at large ever heard.

The smartphone changed all of that; the Cops alternate version of reality has been shown, beyond any doubt at all, to be so sharply divergent from the reality of law enforcement in America that it may as well be a work of fiction. And tonight, the Paramount Network finally acknowledged that reality, and removed the blight of Cops from their schedule. Good for them.