Cops: Packing and Policing the Real

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/

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