Valencia Gunder knows the inaccuracies of television crime dramas all too well. As a criminal justice activist, she’s often the only voice in the room representing women or people of color.

Known by her Miami community as the “Modern Day Fannie Lou Hamer” after the civil rights activist, Gunder shares her own story of incarceration in 2010 to advocate for inmate and gender rights. Part of the work, she said, is combatting preconceived notions based on stereotypes perpetuated by the media.

“I usually get the shock factor,” she says as she describes her experience bouncing from detention facility to detention facility and being denied feminine products. “Television doesn’t show you when we’re treated like animals and denied basic necessities.”

The distorted reality portrayed on the small screen promotes dangerous tropes about criminal justice, according to Color of Change, a progressive not-for-profit civil rights organization. In the group’s latest study, researchers looked into 26 scripted series focused on crime from the 2017–2018 season, on broadcast networks and streaming platforms.

The study analyzed the role crime dramas play in “advancing distorted representations of crime, justice, race and gender in media and culture” and their “real societal consequences”.

The crime genre glorifies, justifies and normalizes the systematic violence and injustice meted out by police Color of Change

“The crime genre glorifies, justifies and normalizes the systematic violence and injustice meted out by police, making heroes out of police and prosecutors who engage in abuse, particularly against people of color,” the report finds.

Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, said the consequences of these inaccurate portrayals “create a culture and system where people think the justice system is fair and is working”. That goes against the data and the realities on the ground, he added.

“Imagine if medical shows were giving out bad facts about cancer or HIV or diabetes,” Robinson said. “These shows, for years, have been perpetuating myths about how the system works. And those myths educate people who serve on our juries.”

Distorting reality: crime shows misrepresent justice

According to the study, television and streaming shows almost always ignore racial disparities in the criminal justice system, from who’s committing crimes to how prosecutors are treated.

“Attorneys of color get way less respect, even by clients,” said Brittany Gail Thomas, an attorney and former public defender in Brooklyn and Baltimore. “You have to fight against the grain for being black or Latina.”



Misrepresentations often skew public perception of how the criminal justice system works. The study says shows are so far behind real-life conversations of police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct that it results in portrayals of injustice associated with racial bias – including profiling, excessive force, coerced plea bargains, and over-sentencing – being dismissed as part of the status quo.

Data collected on the number of wrongful actions committed by black and POC criminal justice professionals from the 2017-2018 season, arranged by series. Photograph: Color of Change

Most shows consistently “depicted the standard, day-to-day practices of criminal procedures (and their outcomes) as race neutral”, the study says, when the reality is race is almost always a factor in even mundane law enforcement operations.

Normalizing injustice and racism

Criminal justice shows include law enforcement officials who are bad apples. But most audiences wouldn’t know it. That’s because the study found that misconduct is often presented on screen in a way that normalizes it, making problematic characters seem good and their wrongful actions justified.

Slamming a suspect against the wall during an illegal search isn’t a harmless, routine part of the pursuit of justice. But in 18 of 26 programs, the study found that when the “good guy” commits offenses like these, the officer is seldom considered “bad”.

Instead, anything a law enforcement or justice system official does “is inherently ‘right’ and ‘good’ by virtue of it being done by ‘a beloved main character’,” according to the report. Thomas admits to yelling at her own television when characters commit known violations.

“I’d be interested in a program about prosecutors who mishandle their power, or a black man being treated poorly by a court staff and how he handles it,” she said. “[Audiences] need that juxtaposition.”

Of 35o total episodes, only six included scenes depicting discussions of reforms to the criminal justice system Color of Change

According to Color of Change, only six discussions about possible solutions and reforms to the criminal justice system occurred in more than 350 episodes of the 26 television and streaming programs. Framing wrongful actions as relatable, forgivable, acceptable and ultimately good is what Robinson calls the promotion of injustice.

“Crime exists because of a whole set of root causes and these shows paint a very different picture of that under the guise of imitating reality,” Robinson said. “Because we are educated by TV, it incentivizes folks wanting a type of law and order that doesn’t protect the victims or keep us safe.”

Excluding women and people of color behind the camera perpetuates stereotypes

Robinson points to what he says is the most critical component of how justice and morality are portrayed on-screen: the writer’s room. Of these series’ 27 show runners, 81% were white men. That’s 21 out of 26 shows, with the only exceptions being Criminal Minds, Shades of Blue, Orange is the New Black, Seven Seconds and Luke Cage.

20 out of 26 crime shows had only one or no black writer at all Color of Change

Of 275 writers, more than 75% were white and 9% were black. Of the 26 programs, 20 had only one or no black writer at all. When factoring in shows that have been cancelled, such as Seven Seconds and Luke Cage, the median ratio of white writers to writers of color was 6 to 1.

The CBS and NBC networks lead in terms of the number crime shows and their ratings. But the study notes they perpetuate a “pattern of exclusion across the genre”. Of the nine shows that were ranked the least racially diverse, together CBS and NBC produced seven.

The disparities apply to gender as well. Even though the population of incarcerated women has increased by 700% in the United States over the decade, only 37% of writers across law and order programming were women, and just 11% were women of color.

Orange is the New Black, Bull, Mindhunter, How to Get Away with Murder and Criminal Minds are the only shows with 50% or more female writers.

That lack of diversity behind the scenes has consequences in how communities of color are portrayed on screen. The study found that women of color are the least likely to be portrayed as victims.

A demand for solutions

Similar reports document prejudices in local and national news media coverage. Robinson notes these are often where white writers, already underexposed to diverse communities, source their material.

“When you have a writer’s room full of people whose relationships with these communities comes from a news media [that] is not telling a full and accurate story,” he said, “what you get is folks making more ‘Hollywood’ the stories that are already designed to sell newspapers or build ratings.”

Robinson is calling on networks to get their house in order.

“If Hollywood is going to spend time at award shows or red carpets railing against Trump, what are they going to do about the ways in which ‘Trumpism’ has been fueled by the narratives that they’ve pushed out in the world?”

Gunder said networks must diversify from the top down and added that inclusion behind the scenes affected the storytelling on screen.

“Most of these folks don’t know or understand what’s happening in these facilities,” she said. “Imagine how much more compelling, yet accurate, an episode could be if it was created by someone who could say: ‘It’s happened to me,’ ‘it’s happened to my daughter, my sister, my mother.’”