Warning, this podcast contains explicit language and details acts of violence.

Listener discretion is advised.

When you put on a television show, there's a high chance that it's about the cops.

Television shows about the police have been some of the most popular since the 1950s,

when TVs were first introduced to American households. Police officers and departments

collaborate with production teams to give them an up-close look at things from their point of

view. People hurt by the police are rarely given the same opportunity. Over 70 years of crime

dramas has had an impact on how we view the institution of policing

and how we look at each other.

And some of these shows have highlighted things like deputy gangs and given them a positive spin.

This is a tradition of violence, a history of deputy gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Over the years, police dramas have mirrored the fears and ideals of the people writing the stories, which are overwhelmingly white men.

Columnist Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about this extensively for the Washington Post in 2016.

In the 1950s, these programs encourage the public to put their faith in so-called law and order-style

governance. In the 1960s, police procedurals, also called crime dramas,

inflated fear about increasing rates of crime.

In the 1980s, Bruce Willis saved a skyscraper full of office workers from a radical East German,

and Sean Penn battled the Crips and the Bloods.

A century ago, the International Association of Chiefs of Police

adopted a resolution condemning the movie business

because, according to the group's president,

quote, the police are sometimes made to appear ridiculous.

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