TV cops break down how police dramas need to change

Cops on television have a duty. Yes, actors report to dressing rooms and not crime scenes — and sure, they stop protecting and serving the moment their directors yell “cut.” But for hundreds of millions of viewers around the globe, these “officers” are trusted guides to understanding American justice, which they roll out as an action-packed, morally-right freight train night after night. Only now, it might be coming off the rails.

As protests against police brutality and systemic racism continue across the United States, TV cops and their fictional precincts have come under fire. From half-joking cries to to serious reflections on , entertainment fans and professionals are using their platforms to amplify the Black Lives Matter movement. But they’re also raising serious questions about how they have depicted their real-world source material.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent lead Kathryn Erbe, who played NYPD detective Alex Eames for the show’s 10-year run and later reprised her part for a season of SVU, isn’t pulling any punches.

“Fuck it,” Erbe tells Mashable over the phone. “I now feel even more strongly that the people I will offend by speaking out — well, so be it. I’d rather offend them than stay silent and not add my voice to these cries of rage.” 

“I’d rather offend them than stay silent and not add my voice to these cries of rage.”

Growing up in the 1970s, Erbe remembers thinking of police officers in an unflattering light befitting her age and the times. But when she was cast to play an NYPD detective for a show that would air its first episode just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, she couldn’t have been more eager to play a woman in blue. That was then. 

How cops are portrayed on television plays a sizable role in the way audiences regard policing, a fact activists and media theorists have known all too well for all too long.  

In a from St. John Fisher College, researchers found “viewers of crime dramas are more likely to believe the police are successful at lowering crime, use force only when necessary, and that misconduct does not typically lead to false confessions.” Considering cop-centric narratives make up a , that means a whole lot of people routinely witness glorified police portrayals, and researchers found such viewers tend to believe what they see. 

The civil rights advocacy organization has been lobbying for more nuanced on-screen police representation for years. Vice President and Chief of Campaigns Arisha Hatch, who was behind the group’s extended efforts to end the reality program Cops which was after 31 years on-air, says that this whitewashing allows viewers (particularly white viewers) to enjoy law enforcement narratives while turning a blind eye to its racist, real-world inspirations.

“We know that the public has a skewed perception of police and crime generally,” Hatch tells Mashable over the phone. “I think lots of folks who watch [these shows] aren’t living the type of policing reality that Black folks and other people of color are living. So they’re able to disassociate from it. They’re able to view it as entertainment, even despite these shows not recognizing that police officers have terrorized poor communities for decades.”

Color of Change’s “Normalizing Injustice” study, released earlier this year after surveying 26 different scripted series from the 2017-2018 TV season, identifies contributing to glorified police portrayals on prime-time drama: (1) “good cops” are regularly seen using illegal tactics in their pursuit of justice; (2) cop show narratives routinely erase the racially-motivated realities of policing; and (3) despite Black actors frequently holding starring roles in these series, leadership behind the camera continues to lack diversity.

“Only 9% of the writers across 26 shows were Black, and 20 of the 26 series either had no Black writers or just one Black writer,” Hatch says. At the time of the study’s publication, Color of Change reported NCIS, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Blue Bloods, The Blacklist, and Blindspot all had entirely white writing staffs.

“I think lots of folks who watch [these shows] aren’t living the type of policing reality that Black folks and other people of color are living.”

Playing Detective Eames for Criminal Intent, Erbe took pride in representing an organization she trusted deeply, and says keeping up with the show’s demanding schedule and her personal life left her “doggy paddling” mentally. It wasn’t until Criminal Intent was ending that she remembers questioning the implications of the role she’d played for so many years.

Attending a Sweet Honey in the Rock benefit concert for JusticeWorks with Law & Order actors Tamara Tunie and S. Epatha Merkerson, Erbe says it hit her. The conversations she had that night with Black actors and activists forced her to see just how much work there was to be done, from arrest to prosecution to incarceration, and what a powerful position she held as a white woman who played a cop on TV.

“That was my gateway. It blew my mind that as a privileged white person living in Park Slope [Brooklyn], who considered herself non-racist, just how small-minded I was, how small my purview was, how small my consciousness was.” 

Since that revelation, Erbe has marched repeatedly on behalf of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York and lent her support to other efforts to end systemic racism. Though the role of Detective Eames had positioned Erbe to be an “ally” to real NYPD officers — or a part in the “justice system’s PR machine,” as the activists at Color of Change might see it — Erbe felt it was essential to pick a side. In re-examining the stories Criminal Intent told, she admits they were idealized, “watered-down” versions of policing she suspects were designed to be palatable for larger audiences. 

Referencing Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us as an example of TV that can tell the whole story of policing impactfully and truthfully, Erbe calls for entertainment that makes a difference even if that’s not “easy” for networks.

“It is in everybody’s best interest to get on board, because if you don’t, you are going to be left behind.”

Erbe also backs fellow actor Griffin Newman, who appears in The Tick and briefly played a police officer on the CBS hit Blue Bloods, in his efforts to encourage donations from TV cops to organizations supporting racial equality. Erbe says she sees these charitable efforts as overdue “reparations” for the often false narrative promoted by police shows. She joins Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Stephanie Beatriz, Monk head writer Tom Scharpling, The Closer lead Kyra Sedgwick, and others in that effort.

“Television is such a powerful medium for change,” she says. “And I don’t care if people are shamed into getting on this train. I don’t care. Whatever it takes. It’s time. Time is up, the tides are turning. It is in everybody’s best interest to get on board, because if you don’t, you are going to be left behind. You’re going to be canceled. You’re going to be publicly shamed. This is the reckoning.”

We’ve seen countless powerful people make statements of solidarity on that front. And yet, many of the actors playing TV’s most prominent fictional police have remained silent. Yes, they may have posted a black square on , shared links and resources in their bios, or participated in a — but a lot of them remain quiet, taking the backseat their courageous characters never would. 

“This has to be a moment where people make themselves uncomfortable, where people in power have to make themselves uncomfortable.”

After all her work dissecting the crime genre, Hatch understands why being a bystander is tempting, particularly for performers who have built their careers on playing police officers. “We’re in a very dynamic moment in the world, a transformational moment in the world,” she says. “I would imagine that there are actors that don’t want to call attention to themselves at this moment.”

Of the 76 actors Mashable contacted in the past week via email, Twitter DM, and Instagram DM, 41 did not respond, 24 declined to speak through their spokespeople, and 9 expressed interest but stopped replying after initial introductions. Erbe was one of only two willing to speak on the record about the ways police shows need to change to better represent racial injustices. (Publicists for Terry Crews, who appears as Sergeant Terry Jeffords in the Fox sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, directed us to which addresses the same themes as well as Crews’ about “Black supremacy.”) 

The other TV cop who answered our call was Law & Order newcomer Jamie Gray Hyder, who joined the SVU cast in 2018 in the recurring role of Detective Kat Azar Tamin before being promoted to series regular. Over the past decade, SVU has more frequently taken a ripped-from-the-headlines approach to its episode arcs. Hyder says that awareness and the writers’ willingness to tackle difficult, relevant subject matter should make their platform an avenue for positive change.

“I don’t think this show shies away from expressing frustrations through its characters when it comes to the justice system not providing justice,” Hyder says — adding that the work longtime SVU lead and executive producer Mariska Hargitay does with the , an organization dedicated to supporting victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse, has helped many cast members understand the reach of their platform. 

“I think that we recognize that there are problems in the system, and I think that the show is smart to be honest about that and show these police officers’ frustration with their inability to do their job.” Hyder says her character is a particularly good candidate for telling the story of a law enforcement official disenchanted with the judicial system, adding via a tweet on Thursday she thought “Kat would be marching right alongside” her at New York City Black Lives Matters protests if she weren’t fictional. 

Still, Hyder thinks there is more than enough room for other characters to tackle the problems her cop counterpart is facing. Echoing sentiments made by multiple advocates for police defunding, Hyder notes: “I think it would be a very positive thing to start showing other groups of professionals solving problems that are typically handed over to police. I think we need to start seeing the way that medical professionals might deal with a situation the cops are normally called for. It’d be great to see more mental health professionals represented on TV, dealing with criminals and dealing with criminal behavior that ties to mental health disorders. We have to do a better job of showing more than the police as our only option for fixing the problems in our society.” 

Representatives at Color of Change say that’s exactly the sort of thing prime-time needs. 

“As we try to reimagine what law enforcement looks like in a way that actually promotes safety and justice, one of the biggest demands by organizers across the country is that, for example, if someone is having a mental health episode or is struggling with an addiction, that a social worker is the first person sent, not someone with a gun,” says Hatch. “When civil liberties are trounced on, we need to see condemnation of that, not a normalization of that. We need the stories to say that ‘This is wrong’ or ‘This is racist’ — not just glorified, hero cops.”

“Those eight minutes and forty-six seconds have to mean something.”

“It’s hard as an actor because you want to identify with the people that you represent as characters and you want to do them justice,” adds Hyder. “But when what you’re representing on TV is no longer congruent with that role in real life, you have to pick a side. And who I am on television is never going to compromise who I am as a human.”

As for viewers, Hatch says you can boycott shows and networks that don’t represent the racial injustices of our system adequately, and participate in organizations that take action in other ways. “We at Color of Change will be continuing this fight for years to come, even after the protests dissipate and Twitter moves onto the next thing.” 

For now, Erbe is not ready to move on — not from the controversy, not from the need for change, and certainly not from the agonizing death of George Floyd after he was pinned to the pavement pleading for his life. “Those eight minutes and forty-six seconds have to mean something,” Erbe says through tears, the kind Detective Eames rarely shed. “They just have to mean something.”