What do sitcoms have in common? Brooklyn Nine-Nineseries NCIS or even the cartoon Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ? The first answer is obvious: each of their main characters is a police officer. The second is much less so: in the United States, these three works have been accused of being instruments of “copaganda”, a contraction of the words cop (“policeman” in English) and propaganda. Clearly, beyond simple distraction, your favorite cops from the small and big screens would aim to improve the image of American law enforcement. Since the death of George Floyd, an African-American killed by the police in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, the country’s television production has been examining its conscience. The suspicion is general: from the most parodic series to the most intense thriller, almost every story including police officers is concerned.
Yet the genre is sacred in the United States. Until 2019, the American population considered the police the most trustworthy profession, ahead of doctors or journalists. The detective series held up a mirror reflecting this feeling. Not surprisingly: since 1951 and the arrival of Badge 714 (Dragnet, in original version), the serials have often been the result of close collaboration between the institution and Hollywood screenwriters. In the case of Dragnet, the Los Angeles Police Department took care to proofread each of the scripts for the series. For the sake of veracity, of course, but also to better control one’s image. The public success of the series has led many police departments around the country to imitate them. “Take for example the series Blue Bloods, which tells the story of a family whose members all work in the police sector, explains Kenneth Dowler, associate professor of criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Canada. The narrative is inevitably uncritical of the police.” The only counter-example in this monolith landscape, the series The Shield from HBO which, in the early 2000s, depicted a corrupt Los Angeles cop.
“Defund the police”
The assassination of George Floyd came to shatter for a time the loves of screenwriters and police services. Series Cops, a reality TV show broadcast since March 1989 and following the daily life of police officers in the United States, has been canceled. The screenwriters of Brooklyn Nine-Nine have rewritten the final season to take an in-depth look at issues of police brutality. Projects for new series were put on hold, while the term “copaganda” and the expression “copaganda” flourished everywhere, on the Internet and in the media. “defund the police” (“cut police budgets”).
The Hollywood industry, however, could not deprive itself for long of a well-known formula that attracts Americans in large numbers in front of their small screen. End of 2023, Cops ended up being rescheduled. This hitch, however, left its mark. From now on, police series make sure to bring together a cast of actors with more diverse origins (African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, etc.) and to include stories linked to police violence in their storyline. “They had to reinvent themselves to be able to overcome what some thought was the end of police series,” continues Kenneth Dowler. “But without overdoing it, so as not to alienate their audience which has always been predominantly pro-police.”
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