2019 marks some stark anniversaries.

500 years since Ernan Cortez began the brutal conquest of Mexico.

100 years since the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.

75 years since D-Day, 50 years since Stonewall.

And 30 years since the first episode of Cops.

Meaning there have been three decades of traffic stops, foot chases, drug busts, shirtless, drunken ravings on porches, dazed suspects sitting on curbs, and a lot, a lot, a lot of sirens.

Bad boys, bad boys.

What's you gonna do?

What's you gonna do when they come for you?

Not to mention a whole menu of similar Copsie cat shows, which you could look at as a 30-year-old ride-along,

allowing the public to see what police work is really like.

Or if you're Dan Tiberski, host of the podcast Running from Cops, you could look at it

as a highly conflicted, highly distorted, and highly exploitative genre that has warped our understanding of law enforcement and of the law itself.

Dan, welcome to O'TEM.

Oh, thanks for having me.

First of all, even before you undertook this podcasting project, you watched a lot of cops.

How much exactly? Oh, my gosh. I've been watching it for years.

My best guesstimate is like 500 episodes. It's very often on 15, sometimes 20 times a day.

So it's perfect for somebody who watches television as background noise, which is how I grew up.

And I've always just found it really compelling.

You know, it's hugely problematic, but it's still a look at a world that you don't see much of anywhere else on television. So yeah, I watched a lot of it. Sorry. And having seen so many episodes,

you've divined the formula, a pretty rigid formula that's made the show and the genre so popular from the

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