Transcript

Announcer:

Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

BOB GARFIELD:

2019 marks some stark anniversaries. 500 years since Hernán Cortés began the brutal conquest of Mexico. A 100 years since the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote. 75 years since D-Day. 50 years since Stonewall, and 30 years since the first episode of Cops.

[CLIP COPS THEME]

(singing).

BOB GARFIELD:

Meaning there have been three decades of traffic stops, foot chases, drug busts, shirtless, drunken ravings on porches, dazed suspects sitting on curbs and a lot, a lot, a lot of sirens.

[CLIP COPS THEME]

(singing).

BOB GARFIELD:

Not to mention a whole menu of similar, copsy-cat shows, which you could look at as a 30-year-old ride along allowing the public to see what police work is really like, or if you are Dan Tyburski, BOB GARFIELD of the podcast Running From Cops, you could look at it as a highly conflicted, highly distorted, and highly exploitative genre that has warped our understanding of law enforcement and of the law itself. Dan, welcome to OTM.

Dan Tyburski:

Oh, thanks for having me.

BOB GARFIELD:

First of all, even before you undertook this podcasting project, you watched a lot of COPS. How much exactly?

Dan Tyburski:

Oh my gosh. I had been watching it for years. My best guesstimate is like 500 episodes. It's very often on 15, sometimes 20 times a day, so it's perfect for somebody who watches television as background noise, which is how I grew up, and I've always just found it really compelling. It's hugely problematic, but it's still a look at a world that you don't see much of anywhere else on television. So yeah, I watched a lot of it. Sorry.

BOB GARFIELD:

Having seen so many episodes, you've defined the formula, a pretty rigid formula that's made the show and the genre so popular from the beginning. Can you take us through what a typical episode looks like?

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah, it's super simple. An episode is three segments, three different interactions between the police and real citizens. So each interaction is about seven minutes long. The producers have told me that usually it breaks down a little bit more specifically, that the first segment is usually the most exciting one, like a chase.

Officer on show:

Get on the ground, get on the ground, get on the ground.

Dan Tyburski:

The second one is usually something that might be a little more comedic or interesting.

Speaker 5:

I'm sorry, I might have a knife, but that's it.

Officer on show:

Don't reach for your knife. Is it in your bra?

Speaker 5:

I'm not sure where it is to be completely honest with you.

Dan Tyburski:

You're supposed to potentially laugh at the people that they're arresting and the things that they're doing. The third is the one that that they say is the thinkiest, it's supposed to make you think.

Officer on show:

It's an eerie feeling when you hear the call come out, officer shot, officer shot. But luckily I think he's going to be alright and we got the suspect in custody and he'll never do this again.

BOB GARFIELD:

There's certain tropes, certain standard elements that you can just count on. You'd know that but because you've amassed the data.

Dan Tyburski:

Yes. We watched 846 episodes of the show and broke it down by type of crime, gender, race to see what sort of patterns you might see in a show like Cops. Not by watching it once or twice, but over the course of 30 years. It presents a world that is much more scary than the real world. It has three times the amount of drug arrests than the real world. Four times the amount of violent crime, 10 times the amount of prostitution. Those things together make up 58% of what's on the show. It's basically on the show at the core of what police do, but in real life it's barely 17%.

BOB GARFIELD:

So the notion that the show somehow represents routine police work or anything like routine police work is flawed from the get go. You've calculated among other things that 92% of traffic stops on Cops end in an arrest. So what's the average in the untelevised real-world?

Dan Tyburski:

2%.

BOB GARFIELD:

Then you mentioned drugs.

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah, drugs. 35% of arrests on Cops are for drugs, which makes sense. It started when the war on drugs basically ramped up and so they really exploited this certain type of policing that went with the war on drugs.

BOB GARFIELD:

How does that compare to overall drug arrests in real life?

Dan Tyburski:

In real life, it's three times less. So overall, a drug arrests are about 12% of all arrests made and they've been steadily declining since 2006 in this country. But on Cops they only get greater, so in the last season, 44% of all arrests on the show were for drugs.

BOB GARFIELD:

All right, so the producers manipulate reality, they generate storylines and they amplify drama. So does The Bachelorette. So does Survivor. But I guess The Bachelorette doesn't document encounters between actual police in the actual public.

Dan Tyburski:

I've been a reality show producer, so I've made reality shows for a living. So I understand that reality shows aren't in fact completely real, that the drama is often trumped up. But usually the people who are participating in those shows understand that. In a show like Cops, we're not talking about housewives, we're not talking about duck hunters. We're talking about something that's actually real, policing, and how the way you portray it, if it doesn't actually represent what's really happening, it can really skew, not just the way citizens see policing and what they believe the police can actually do, but what police themselves believe that they can actually do. You hear it on Cops all the time. The cops on Cops are becoming cops because of Cops. It's been on for 30 years. They see the show, they get inspiration from it, they want to be a part of that action and they become cops. But part of how they see policing is because of what they've seen on the show.

BOB GARFIELD:

So it's like why major league baseball players spit in the batter's box. Nobody's chewed tobacco for 25 years, or 45, but they grew up watching their heroes spit, who grew up watching tobacco chewers spit, so now it's like a ritual.

Dan Tyburski:

It's part of the way you act. It's part of the way you interact with citizens. For a lot of the people who are becoming police officers is because of what they have seen on Cops year after year after year.

BOB GARFIELD:

The distortion that you're describing manifests in a number of ways. One is, as you said, the world is portrayed as endless mayhem, which it actually isn't, and the cameras and the producers there on the scene to develop storylines as they're playing out, also distorts the very nature of police public interactions. You interview on your show an ex cop named Joe Petrocelli.

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah, Joe Petrocelli was a cop in New Jersey and he was on the show maybe about 10 years ago. He was working in the projects doing a lot of drug busts, low-level users. The type of manipulation that he witnessed was basically he would effectuate an arrest.

Joe Petrocelli:

I was making my arrest in two or three minutes.

Dan Tyburski:

A Cops segment is seven minutes long.

Joe Petrocelli:

So they told me basically, Joe, you have to get this guy out of the car. Talk to him a little bit. See if you could maybe drag this out a little bit so we could use this episode.

Joe Petrocelli:

Step out bud. Look nervous as hell, man. You crying? What's your name?

Joe Petrocelli:

Which is extremely rare, sir. I would never do that. I would never take, for the safety of myself and the safety of the criminal actor, I would never remove him at the scene, but they wanted it done. So we took him out and I talked to him about his drug problem.

Dan Tyburski:

There are these little storytelling things that you would do in a normal reality show along the way, that when you're dealing with real people and real police officers, it becomes a whole different game.

BOB GARFIELD:

Now this is ostensibly a win, win, win. The audience gets its gritty police action. The producers get some irresistible video and the cops, the police departments, that are participating get favorable portrayals. But that, as you observe more than once in your series, is a transaction. How explicit is the cooperation between police departments and the producers? Do those departments, for example, have veto power on segments if they don't like the way that the cops involved come off?

Dan Tyburski:

Contractually, the police department sign a contract with the producers of Cops and the producers of Cops are obligated to give the police departments rough cuts of the show of what's going to air a couple of weeks before and the police departments can say yay or nay to whatever they see on the show. So in effect, they're not just the subjects of this reality show. They're partly producing.

BOB GARFIELD:

Which begins to raise the question of are you watching reality or are you watching propaganda?

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah, propaganda is a strong word, but I think after 18 months of looking into this show, I would absolutely use it. The police departments who participated in the show are doing it because they want to be portrayed a certain way and the show never fails to portray them in that way.

BOB GARFIELD:

Well, that solves one mystery. In 30 years, I know of no case in which something truly disturbing was broadcast on a police reality show. Is this just an amazing coincidence? Is it just because everybody knows there's cameras there and they're on their best behavior or do you think that the producers are actually colluding in the the so-called blue wall of silence?

Dan Tyburski:

I think there's a few things going on here. I think the producers know that, A, the police departments get final cut. They get veto power, so they're not going to even try to put anything in the show that the police departments don't want them to put in because it's just going to get taken out anyway by the police, and they need to maintain these relationships with the police departments who they're shooting with. Cops is shot with over 150 police departments around the country in the past 30 years and some many, many, many times. Palm beach, Florida has been on 15 times. Vegas has been on 21 seasons of the show. They need to maintain these relationships with the officers.

Dan Tyburski:

I will also say that there is police malfeasance, there is bad behavior by police on the show all the time to a lesser scale that the police choose to leave in.

BOB GARFIELD:

You're actually anticipating my very next question. Let's, as you said, put aside actual cover up and just discuss plain misleading information. How does it get in there and what's the consequence of reality TV showing cops actually being cops in the wrong way?

Dan Tyburski:

In Wichita, Kansas, there is a segment of Cops where a police officer pulls somebody over.

Officer on show:

Yeah, he's got a cracked windshield, so we're going to be able to stop him here.

Dan Tyburski:

Because he thinks he has drugs and he thinks the guy is hiding the drugs in his mouth. He then uses the butt end of his flashlight to pry the man's mouth open.

Officer on show:

Spit it out. I'm telling you right now, you're going to spit it out. Okay? Okay. Stick out your tongue, stick out your tongue.

Dan Tyburski:

This isn't just a tiny little flashlight. It's a big flashlight and the officer is jamming a good three inches of it into this man's mouth.

Officer on show:

If you bite me, we're going to have some serious problems. You understand me? Do you understand me?

Dan Tyburski:

To get the drugs out of his mouth, which when you bring to a use of force expert, which we did, he'll tell you that you can't do that.

Speaker 6:

Totally unconstitutional. That's completely bad policing. There's even a Supreme Court case, Rochin versus California, which almost deal with the same specific thing, and the courts have said that obtaining evidence in a manner that shocks the conscious is inadmissible in court. To do that to an individual, you haven't even arrested him. He's not even under arrest. He's not even completely under your control. You are detaining this individual and to do that, to put something in his mouth in order to get suspected drugs from under his tongue is just completely wrong.

Dan Tyburski:

But it remains in the show. Another example in Glendale, Arizona, an officer is chasing a man who was accused of loitering, just loitering. The guy runs. There's no sign that he has any weapons or anything like that and the officer tries to tase him in the back. That in itself, tasing a man in the back to effectuate an arrest, is a violation of that police department's own use of force policies. It stays in the show anyway. What happens is that they don't say, we shouldn't have done that. In the flashlight case, that segment ends with the Sergeant saying ...

Officer on show:

If that's what he's going to swallow, you probably saved his life.

Dan Tyburski:

So it has a way of normalizing behavior that you assume because you're seeing it on Cops is legal and very often it's not.

BOB GARFIELD:

All right. Dan, I have at this stage asked you about 800 questions about Cops, but I'm actually more interested in a fairly new show your podcast also covers called Live PD, which makes Cops look like a video Yule log.

Officer on show:

We just got word from the other crime scene that two individuals are dead, subject's ex-girlfriend and her father. We're waiting for detectives to come determine if the subject died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound or from the collision of the accident.

Dan Tyburski:

If you sit down at seven o'clock on Friday morning with a cup of coffee and put yourself in front of that television, 39 of the next 48 hours are going to be the show Live PD or one of it's spin-offs on the network A&E. It is on all the time. It's basically like Cops meets ESPN.

Officer on show:

Right here what he's doing is that hand on the shoulder. That's a controlling technique that he's trying to use in trying to keep the suspect up against the car.

Officer on show:

Now the guy tries to run.

Officer on show:

Exactly. Right away, he tries to run.

Dan Tyburski:

It's a studio based show, but what they do is they follow six to eight police departments around the country live and they basically cut to the different police departments showing what's going on in that precinct.

Officer on show:

Let's see what's happening in Spokane, Washington.

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah, it's crazy. It's super intense. And what's actually really interesting about it is that only half the country is watching it. So for example, the El Paso Times has written about Live PD 27 times in the past two years. The New York Times has written about it once and it was just in the listing section, just to basically say this is on. It's very pro-police and it is reaching the audience that wants to hear that message. They fill arenas with fan clubs of the officers on Live PD because people want to get their autographs. There are trading cards for the canine officers and the officers who are on Live PD and kids buy them because they're fans of those officers. I think that's really an appealing thing for the police who are participating. Is it appropriate? Is it what we should be wanting from our police?

Dan Tyburski:

I don't think so, but I think there's an appetite out there for pro-policing narrative and shows like Live PD are delivering.

BOB GARFIELD:

The show is hosted by Dan Abrams who I think I can say is a serial casher-in on audience's appetite for seeing villains made an example of. I talked about Spokane, Washington. Tell me about Spokane, Washington.

Dan Tyburski:

We went to Spokane because both Cops and Live PD had been shooting in that city and they basically had had it up to here with it. We went to watch and see whether or not they were going to pass a law to effectively kick both shows out of town.

BOB GARFIELD:

There was one local politician in particular, I think he was a city councilman, who was trying to push this legislation through council, right?

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah. The council president's name is Ben Stuckart and he was trying to make sure that Live PD and Cops couldn't shoot in his city anymore.

Dan Tyburski:

On the one hand he was doing it, because as people often say about shows like this, you're filming people on the worst day of their life, in the case of Live PD, very often without their permission, and he wants to protect the people in his community, but he also wants to protect their efforts to attract big business to a town like Spokane that's looking to increase their tax base. They have pro Spokane commercials and they're trying to get people to come to this place and a show like Live PD just is constantly portraying them as drug addled, violent, scary, dark, weird people without shirts on getting arrested over and over on Cops and Live PD.

BOB GARFIELD:

On the other hand, you interview the local sheriff who insists that the public should see the Grand Theft Auto aspects of the community, what his deputies have to deal with every day out there on the street. He sees it not only as civic transparency but as a way for the police to counter what he sees as a narrative, an unfair narrative, of brutality, racism, and impunity that he thinks further makes targets of officers and the very people we depend on to keep us safe.

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD:

Do you have any sympathy for that?

Dan Tyburski:

100%. yeah. Regardless of what you think about policing or police officers right now, it cannot be easy to be a police officer, especially an honest one, and feel under attack by the people that you see yourself as helping. I'm not saying I agree with his policies. I'm not saying that I agree with the way he views police, but I do think that after talking to the many, many police officers that we talked to, you have been on the show and not been on the show, Cops and Live PD, I think that one universal theme is that they feel under attack and it's challenging to do your job in that environment. That being said, it doesn't mean you make citizens' props in the propaganda that's supposed to turn that image around.

BOB GARFIELD:

Not 30 years ago, but 60 years ago on The Dick van Dyke Show, there are a couple episodes where Dick van Dyke playing Rob Petrie finds himself in proximity to police and he is completely transfixed. He says, can I see your gun? And the cops shows him his gun.

Dick Van Dyke:

Oh, it's a mean baby, isn't it?

BOB GARFIELD:

Rob says, .45.

Dick Van Dyke:

.45, huh?

Officer on show:

No, that's a .38.

BOB GARFIELD:

Rob says ...

Dick Van Dyke:

Oh yeah, better heft for your purpose.

Host:

Which is both meaningless and hilarious, but there's something going on in that moment.

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD:

What is happening there and what is happening on America's sofas when we see those people getting put in handcuffs?

Dan Tyburski:

It's access to the exercise of power. I think Cops gives you access to a world that is incredibly visceral, that promises or threatens to feel like a life and death matter every time you turn it on. So to have access to that rawness, I think regardless of how you think they frame policing, regardless of the effect it has on the people who are being policed, regardless of all of that, whether or not you think it's propaganda, I think that sort of visceral television is incredibly compelling to a huge portion of people, myself included.

BOB GARFIELD:

Yeah, you spent a lot of time on your sofa.

Dan Tyburski:

I won't be doing it anymore.

BOB GARFIELD:

Now most podcasting just goes out and we never see any return signal, but you are already finding out that Running From Cops has had an impact.

Dan Tyburski:

Yeah. So far, Cops was scheduled to in Ingham county, Michigan in July and since the podcast came out, people spoke up and they canceled their contract with Cops. A similar thing happened in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Cops is not going to be shooting there anymore because of the podcast and I'm glad people are listening and make informed choices.

BOB GARFIELD:

Dan, thank you.

Dan Tyburski:

Thanks so much. My pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD:

Dan Tyburski is the host of the podcast Running From Cops, the third season of the Headlong series. Here's something that we don't necessarily say a lot, but you should listen to this because it's pretty great and there's way more highlights than we've given you here.

BOB GARFIELD:

While we've got you here, please do not forget to sign up for the On The Media newsletter, which our producers put together every week. It manages to be both bizarre and actually informative, and if that sounds appealing, and it should, head over right now to on the media.org/newsletter to sign up. That's on the media.org/newsletter.