Police in Television
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The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America AN ENCYCLOPEDIA Wilbur R. Miller. EDITOR State University of New York at Stony Brook ($)SAGE reference Los Angeles I London I New Delhi Singapore IWashington DC 'SAGE Los Angeles I London I New Delhi Singapore I Washington DC FOR INFORMATION: SAGE Publications, Inc. Copyright © 2012 by SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/11 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1 Oliver's Yard 55 City Road The social history of crime and punishment in America: an London EC1Y 1SP encyclopedia / United Kingdom Wilbur R. Miller, general editor. v.cm. SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. Includes bibliographical references and index. 3 Church Street ISBN 978-1-4129-8876-6 (cloth) #10-04 Samsung Hub 1. Crime--United States--History--Encyclopedias. 2. Singapore 049483 Punishment--United States--History--Encyclopedias. I. Miller, Wilbur R., 1944- HV6779.S63 2012 Vice President and Publisher: Rolf A. Janke 364.97303--dc23 Senior Editor: Jim Brace-Thompson 2012012418 Project Editor: Tracy Buyan Cover Designer: Bryan Fishman Editorial Assistant: Michele Thompson Reference Systems Manager: Leticia Gutierrez Reference Systems Coordinators: Laura Notton, Anna Villasenor Marketing Manager: Kristi Ward Golson Media President and Editor: J. Geoffrey Golson Director, Author Management: Susan Moskowitz · Certified Sourcing Production Director: Mary Jo Scibetta SF I www.sfiprogram.org • SFI-004S3 Layout Editors: Kenneth Heller, Stephanie Larson, ~ Oona Patrick, Lois Rainwater Copy Editors: Mary Le Rouge, Holli Fort 121314151610987654321 Proofreader: Barbara Paris Indexer: J S Editorial Television, Police in 1767 Television, Police in Police officers have maintained a high-profile presence on television since the earliest days of commercial network broadcasting in the 1940s and 1950s. From police procedurals such as Dragnet and Adam-12 to early 21st century crime dramas such as The Shield and The Wire, police programs have proven to be among the most durable and popular of all television genres. In their hundreds of iterations, cop shows have sought to depict law enforcement in a "realistic" manner, striving to capture the "true" nature of police work with gritty authenticity. At the same time, cop shows have also tended to emphasize the most visually sensational aspects of police work-gunplay, car chases, physical action, and the like-in order to satisfy the desire of a mass audience to experience the illicit thrills of crime and violence while remaining safely within the parameters of the law. The long-standing popularity of television cop shows has enabled them to playa pivotal role in shaping the American public's perceptions of the police. Approaching the social problem of crime from the point of view of law enforcement, cop shows have traditionally valorized police officers as heroic guardians of the public welfare, tasked with protecting ordinary citizens from criminals. Television has also familiarized audiences with 1768 Television, Police in the minutiae of police work, from the proper shows offer a revealing window into the way technique for handcuffing suspects to the exact that America understands itself and its complex language of the Miranda warning ("You have the relationship to authority, crime, and justice. tight to remain silent ... "), a staple on nearly all cop shows. Early Cop Shows In their more mature incarnations, however, While short-lived crime dramas such as Stand By police dramas have explored the most urgent com- for Crime (1949), Photocrime (1949), and Chi- plications attending the role of law enforcement cagoland Mystery Players (1949-50) technically in a democratic society. Cop shows have trained count as television's first cop shows, the most a critical gaze on police authority by depicting seminal police program of the medium's early corruption and the limits and abuses of police years was Dragnet (1952-59; 1967-70). Created power, as well the substantial personal and emo- and produced by actor Jack Webb, who starred as tional costs of working in law enforcement for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Sergeant officers themselves. As agents of the state, cops Joe Friday and directed several of the show's epi- have the ability to arrest citizens and compel them sodes, Dragnet defined the conventions of the to obey commands ("pull over!" "freeze!"), but police "procedural" by envisioning police work they are also public servants required to uphold as a set of routines carried out by detectives com- the law as it exists. Police shows frequently figure mitted to preserving establishment values and this relationship as a tension between the institu- serving the public good. A typical Dragnet epi- tional constraints of the "system" and the cops' sode, shot in semidocumentary style and narrated own personal pursuit of justice, presenting police by Webb in a terse monotone, followed Friday officers as rule-breaking individualists whose and his partner through the city of Los Angeles as own private moral code potentially supersedes they interrogated suspects and witnesses, pursued their devotion to the law or their tolerance for the leads, and foiled crimes, all within the show's bureaucracy of the justice process. In many cases, tightly constructed half-hour format. In con- this intolerance is presented as a justified form of trast to earlier radio police serials that tended to anger against a system hamstrung by regulations emphasize shoot-outs and melodrama, Dragnet that favor criminals over victims. focused on the details of crime-solving with little The American cop show's emphasis on out- action or gunplay; one of Webb's "rules" for the law individualism has, paradoxically, tended to show was that no more than one bullet could be reinforce the conservative political bent of police fired every four weeks. "Just the facts, ma'am," programs; because cop shows have tradition- Friday's familiar admonition to witnesses, was ally seen crime as a problem of law enforcement also an unofficial mantra for the show's no-frills rather than of social justice, they devote more depiction of law enforcement. attention to the contact point between cops and Unlike many subsequent cop shows, Drag- criminals rather than to the underlying social net also displayed an unshakable faith in the conditions that help to produce crime in the first efficacy of the justice system; each episode con- place. Cop shows have also exhibited evolving cluded with a summary of the arrested criminal's social attitudes on race, gender, and authority. successful prosecution and incarceration. The Traditionally white and male, police officers on show's positive portrayal of police professional- television have diversified significantly over the ism made it a virtual promotional vehicle for the years, as evidenced by the multiracial ensemble real-life LAPD in the Eisenhower era. Not only casts of countless TV cop dramas. Because police did Dragnet draw many of its story lines from officers, due in part to television's influence, actual LAPD case files, but it also represented the hold such a prominent position in the American police as moral, rational agents of the law. Webb cultural imaginary, the question of who gets to followed his Dragnet success by creating another carry a badge and a gun on TV is also, in some long-running police procedural, Adam-12 (1968- sense, the question of who gets to be consid- 75), this time centering on two uniformed patrol ered an "American." Thanks to their pervasive officers who cruised the streets of Los Angeles in presence in U.S. popular culture, television cop a black-and-white squad car. Television, Police in 1769 These changes became apparent in such disparate cop shows as The Mod Squad (1968-73), which centered on three former juvenile delinquents- "one black, one white, one blonde"-who worked undercover to fight crime in the southern California "beat scene"; Ironside (1967-75), which starred Raymond Burr as a wheelchair-bound ex-San Fran- cisco police detective who combated crime outside the conventional channels of the police department with the help of male and female deputies and an African American bodyguard; and Hawaii Five- o (1968-80), a long-running procedural starring Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, a liberal-minded detective whose Hawai'i state police unit includes both a trusted white deputy and Asian and Polyne- sian officers. The show's exploitation of Hawai'i's colorful tropical locations, like The Mod Squad's appropriation of the youth culture or Ironside's inclusion of women and people of color on the side of law enforcement, demonstrated how television police shows attempted to leaven traditional police authority with nontraditional elements. The 1970s Jack Webb (left) and Harry Morgan from the popular 1950s These strategies became increasingly standard- television program Dragnet. Webb created and produced the ized as the cop show genre proliferated in the show and starred as no-nonsense Sergeant Joe Friday. 1970s, a decade in which over 40 police-themed series hit the airwaves. The sheer abundance of cop shows on TV during this era suggested pub- lic ambivalence toward law enforcement. On Though Dragnet established an early bench- the one hand, the cop show's ubiquity signaled mark for "realism" in televisual depictions of the a reassertion of law and order after the anarchic police, its staid tone and establishment values put decade of the 1960s; on the other hand, television it at odds with the social and political transfor- cops of the 1970s, though overwhelmingly white mations taking place in American society in the and male, tended to be streetwise, ethnically spe- late 1960s. As U.S. television audiences became cific individualists who adhered as much to their increasingly exposed to images of real-life police own personal codes as to the exigencies of law officers turning dogs and fire hoses on black civil enforcement.