Crime shows depict a 'false narrative' about law enforcement

Every so often, television shows bless us with morally ambiguous anti-heroes, like Tony Soprano and Walter White — protagonists who challenge viewers through pushing ethical boundaries. Usually, however, these characters face consequences for their actions. Watching characters who blur the lines between right and wrong without facing any recourse, however, is another thing, and is something that happens frequently in the crime show genre. Specifically, this behavior is disproportionately allowed of white law enforcement officials.

Color of Change, a progressive nonprofit civil rights advocacy organization in the United States, recently published a report titled “Normalizing Injustice,” which studied 353 episodes of 26 different scripted series in the crime genre between the years of 2017 and 2018, as well as information about the 275 writers, 41 creators, and 27 showrunners who worked on the programs. The report discovered that scripted crime television shows, which millions of viewers tune into on a regular basis, depict a false narrative about the unchecked heroism of law enforcement.

Crime shows, the study found, tend to present law enforcement professionals as inherently good. “One normalizing convention consistent across 18 of the 26 series examined was making wrongful actions seem right by depicting bad actions as being committed by ”Good Guy’ characters, thereby framing wrongful actions as relatable, forgivable, acceptable and ultimately good,” the study states. Criminal justice professionals committed 453 wrongful actions in the episodes studied, but only 13 of those acts were followed up with some kind of investigation; that’s just 3.7%.

These shows also often portray penance for these professionals in the form of internal strife or guilt. Just six criminal justice professionals were charged with crimes that related to their misconduct, one criminal justice professional dealt with legal punishment for their behavior, and none were fired. This erasure of abuses of power implies that the system is fine as is.

Police accountability is largely dismissed in this genre because, as the study concludes, the prevalent message of the genre is “that the pursuit of justice is hampered by the rules.” These shows prioritize the idea that justice must be pursued “by any means necessary,” overlooking the gross disparities that exist in the criminal justice system while also making police officers’ questionable methods for pursuing “justice” seem acceptable if not imperative. Seeing misconduct rationalized instead of reprimanded leads audiences to similarly sympathize with the police and fail to question their actions. "Exposure to consistent inaccurate portrayals may also serve to increase or decrease the empathy viewers have for different types of people and the different realities and experiences they face,” the study adds.

In addition to this problematic depiction of law enforcement officers, crime shows also fail to depict the racial tensions, discrimination, and profiling that law enforcement officials often impose on people of color in reality. The study finds that “neither women nor people of color were depicted disproportionately as the target of (or suffering the harm of) illegal or unethical CJP [criminal justice professional] behavior.” Depictions of racial biases were glaringly absent across the wide collection of shows and episodes. In “397 instances of depicting a Person of Interest character (POI) as a person of color, just 1% (4 instances) involved racial profiling,” according to the study. Of the 45 instances of excessive force used against suspects across all 353 episodes, they never proved to disproportionately affect people of color, and consequences for those actions were “rarely represented.” Standard criminal justice procedures like surveillance, plea bargaining, and incarceration — issues that also disproportionately affect these communities — were also rarely depicted.

In fact, despite actors of color being cast in these shows, these shows largely ignore race altogether — and, in few circumstances, depict people of color as nuisances and obstacles to justice. Across all 353 episodes, there were just 20 depictions of activists, none of whom proved to be important to the overall story. Across that same number of episodes there were only six instances of calls for criminal justice reform, and in each case a person of color was advocating for that reform. In these scenes, criminal justice protagonists were portrayed as reflexively defending the system in which they operate, both minimizing the corruption that exists in the criminal justice system and makes advocates of reform seem like troublemakers or obstacles in the way of the law.

These onscreen problems are likely a byproduct of racial homogeneity behind the camera. Of the 26 series studied, 21 had white male showrunners. Of the 275 writers on these shows, 81% were white, 37% were women, and only 11% were women of color. 20 of 26 series had either one or no Black writers. Debunked stereotypes and inadequate narratives are allowed to permeate the genre, therefore, because the people creating it don’t reflect the world these shows are trying to depict. The crime genre will never be able to adequately portray criminal justice reform, mass incarceration, or even stop-and-frisk until it employs creatives behind the camera who can authentically speak to and understand these issues.

The root of the problem in the crime genre, therefore, is the same root of the lack of diversity that plagues the entertainment industry generally; increasing diversity requires changing hiring practices to prioritize diversity. According to the study, some networks and shows have committed to portray law enforcement in a positive light in exchange for the use of specific logos or to be able to shoot in certain cities, thereby impeding the ability of shows to depict law enforcement impartially. In the same way that the genre needs to collectively improve its hiring practices, it needs to make deliberate choices with regard to law enforcement portrayal in order to make more challenging and compelling television.

It’s as simple as questioning authority. Viewers of the crime genre need to watch these shows with a healthy dose of skepticism, and compare onscreen narratives to the real-world narratives we see everyday. Maybe it’s improbable that people will be so dissatisfied with the falsified state of the crime genre that they tune out, but if they watch critically, perhaps these dramatizations won’t be so easily, incorrectly accepted as a sample of reality.