Running From Cops podcasters react to Cops' cancelation, say Live PD was similarly egregious

Vulture

Host Dan Taberski, producer Henry Molofsky and their team spent 18 months reviewing 876 Cops episodes for their Running From Cops podcast that was released last year. Taberski tells the Los Angeles Times Cops "consistently presents bad policing as good policing." In an extensive interview he and Molofsky did with Vulture, Taberski adds that they found that Cops "presents a world that’s much more violent than it actually is. It presents police departments to be much more successful than they really are. It misrepresents crime by people of color. We also found that it coerces the people to be on the show by either forcing them to sign releases when they didn’t want to or by getting them to sign releases when they are drunk or high, which are states by which they have no business signing a legal document. There are also instances of the show putting people on the air without any sign-off whatsoever, which is what several people told us. But perhaps the biggest problem is that the cops control the message. With Cops, it’s contractually stipulated that the police departments can change anything they want in the show. It’s literally propaganda when it gets to that level. It’s a similar situation with Live PD. The success of Live PD depends 100 percent on the participation of the police departments that are on it. This is not a situation where the show goes to the police for information and then leaves and says whatever they want about it. They’re making the police officers in these departments celebrities. And you can’t piss off the celebrities on your show. They can’t present anything potentially bad at these police departments, because then they won’t want to participate. So it becomes this endless cycle of having to present the police in a certain way for financial and ratings reasons, even if it’s not true." Taberski says of Cops' cancelation: "It’s enormous. Cops has been around for 31 years. It’s the longest-running reality TV show ever, and it’s arguably the first reality show ever. The show launched in 1989, right when the War on Drugs began and kicked off a whole era of policing. Really violent tactics, overmilitarized policing, busting people for low-level drug offenses, and filling prisons with black and brown people along with poor white people: Cops helped sell all that to the American people. The fact it’s now canceled is huge." Of A&E's Live PD cancelation, Taberski adds: "It’s a huge moneymaker for the network. That network is built around Live PD. That one show is on six hours a week, but at last count — and you have to keep count because the number keeps going up — Live PD has six spin-offs. For A&E, this situation is so much more than about policing. It’s about an ATM that’s been shooting money out at them. So the bar’s a lot higher to get them to cancel it."

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• Cops normalized racist behavior and police brutality: "Perhaps the most insidious takeaway we had from watching hundreds of hours of the show was not quantitative, but qualitative," says Running From Cops producer Henry Molofsky. "Over and over, Cops shows officers acting in violent, abusive, racist and potentially unconstitutional ways. This can include anything from repeatedly tasing suspects who are in custody, to prying open a suspect’s mouth with a flashlight in search of drugs. Rather than critiquing this sort of behavior, or even presenting it neutrally, Cops portrays it as good policing. The police departments featured on the show have no problem with this portrayal. In fact, in exchange for access, the producers would give every department they work with 'final cut' – the right to edit out any actions caught on camera that might portray them in a bad light. Those departments chose to leave all of those incidents in."
• "Bad Boys" songwriter says Cops' theme didn't give the song its full context: “Thirty years. How many groups in the world can say they have a song that the world knows, but what is not understood is the essence of the song,” Inner Circle's Ian Lewis tells Rolling Stone from Miami. “It was used in the context of Cops, but if they listen to the song, everybody just knows the hook. They don’t listen to the words of the song where it’s talking about a person who was coming into crime and adversarial towards their parents. The song is about growing up (as a teenager) who wants to be a man but doesn’t understand that it’s the family that you should springboard from. I think it was slightly misunderstood, but worldwide, we never got a negative connotation.”
• Pluto TV defends continuing to air Cops because it believes “it is critical to represent a diversity of viewpoints": Pluto TV, which like Paramount Network is owned by ViacomCBS, has a dedicated channel devoted to Cops reruns.
• Jimmy Kimmel presents Mail, a postal worker alternative to Cops