Is the Show ‘Cops’ Committing Crimes Itself?
Along with the show’s history of coercion and complicity in abuse, Police Departments featured can effectively make “any changes they deem necessary.”
We also discovered alarming trends within the show’s structure, not just its production process. After screening 846 episodes — collecting over 68,000 data points on race, the type of alleged crime depicted and arrest rates — we found despite the great crime decline in America since the show premiered, over a third of all arrests on “Cops” are drug arrests, three times the percentage of drug arrests in real life, according to F.B.I. data.
“Cops” first aired at the height of the War on Drugs, and as that war raged, the show promoted it with such success that some of the officers who appeared in those early seasons were arguably the first to achieve reality-show fame. One officer, John Bunnell, who ran a Portland, Ore., drug unit, remembers suspects, in cuffs, asking for autographs. (He also remembers “Cops” cameramen carrying their own guns to raids, serving as, in Mr. Bunnell’s words, “special deputies.”)
But even as lawmakers have begun to rethink the efficacy and the societal costs of the drug war — even as a Republican-led Senate and a Republican president have passed criminal justice reforms into law — “Cops” still glorifies the drug war. In the show’s 2016-17 season, 44 percent of all arrests were drug arrests, mostly for low-level offenders.
amen
Cannabis is amazingly non-toxic and heals elder brains! But DON’T say I told you to use it! 
And me three…
