Ain't That America? Part 463

When we think of the FOX Corporation Broadcasting Company today, the immediate images that come to mind are probably not the best ones. We think of incredibly explotative reality television; we think of Bill O'Reilly on the FOX News channel. FOX is a channel that is steeped, and seems to revel, in its own sub-standard quality and total bias. Better-versed television scholars (read: couch potatoes) will acknowledge that FOX did actually push the envelope in its time, with landmark programming like The Simpsons and In Living Color. Perhaps they pushed the envelope so far, FOX became a victim of its own crusade to bring crude humor to prime-time television. Now they are just one network in a sea of channels all lining up to be the first to use the word "bitch" before 7 PM. There is one show that FOX spawned, though, which often gets glossed over in retrospectives of the era, and yet it has remained one of the most popular, frugal, and varied programs in its history. The show I am talking about is COPS, perhaps the first reality show ever filmed.
I don't think a regularly-aired show like COPS could float most anywhere else in the world. In many countries, the police are the enemy--and not the enemy like in America, where they are often seen as power-tripping, racist douchebags that surpass their own authority, but an actual enemy where their word is law and their power is virtually limitness, and therefore cannot be abused. In many ways, COPS embodies everything American: driving around in cars, forcing people to submit to your armed superiority, rattling off the particulars of an incident over and over again until everyone is numb to the fact. "Uh, the alleged perp threw carbolic acid into the victim's face, a little got on her baby, and then the alleged perp shot a sawed-off gun into a puppy. I heard the shots from a block away before I got the call, so I whipped around and almost spun out, I was driving so reckless'!" These stories have sounded more like personal gossip and less like incident reports as the series has soldiered on. And it's a good thing, too! Who the hell wants to read a police incident report?
One of the greatest things about having cable television in the United States of America is that you can watch COPS almost twenty-four hours a day. In fact, if you tailored your eight-hour sleep schedule so that you napped for a few hours in the afternoon, then an hour here and there in the evening, I'm sure you could be watching nothing but COPS, or one of it's sister shows like World's Wildest Police Shootouts or Wackiest Arrests Caught on Tape. Only by watching hours and hours of the show can you get an idea of how difficult it is to do police work. And believe me, it is difficult! They make that point abundantly clear about twenty times an episode. I have watched more hours of COPS than I care to remember or admit, and from this program, I've learned some universal police tactics and truisms. Feel free to cite these if you find they will support your case in court:
1. The first thing to do when arriving to any scene of an alleged crime is handcuff all the black people present.
2. If there is a white guy with no shirt present, he is more dangerous than a barrel full of flares in a fireworks factory. No fewer than three officers will be required to subdue him.
3. Police work is "something different every day," and never requires hours of boring paperwork or bureaucratic red tape to get the job done.
4. No matter what his rank is within the police department, the officer with the COPS camera on him is in charge. He can order officers to take prisoners away in their squad card, to interview the witnesses, and just about any job that doesn't include standing around and telling the other officers about what we've just witnessed on the screen. He could probably give the Commissioner of Police a noogie, if he was so inclined.
5. The thicker and more indigenous the accent, the better cop you are.
I haven't seen an episode of COPS where the officers lose their perp, and I don't suppose I will. But I remember one very well from its early years. Some kid was running through backyards, scaling fences, and then Officer Lardass tries to hurdle a fence and brings the thing crashing to the ground. They lose the kid's trail and give up the hunt, closing the bit with something like "you win some, you lose some." I haven't seen this episode in re-runs for a long time, and I bet it was the only episode of its kind. Too bad, really, because it gives a more coherent and real look at what police work is actually like. Sometimes you catch your perp and "get another bad guy off the streets." Sometimes you lose the guy and get subject to ridicule back at the station, creating a personal vendetta that you exact with ferverous rage against the perp should you catch him jaywalking or littering ever again. And sometimes, just sometimes, you and your buddies shoot fifty rounds into a suspect (you know, the ones that are "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law"?), reloading your gun to do so, just because you don't feel like going through the proper procedures. That's probably the most human trait of all. There's many times I don't feel like submitting my paperwork in triplicate, either.