A man in Tampa says he was threatened with a trumped-up charge of felony trespassing if he did not sign the release. A woman in Missouri filed a lawsuit after she was repeatedly harassed by producers, who showed up at her residence and her court appearances with the release forms in hand after she refused to sign. A woman in Gwinnett County, Ga., claims she was denied bail bond until she signed, after being arrested on the show for cocaine possession. A state test later proved the substance found in her car was not cocaine or a drug of any kind. “Cops” aired the episode anyway, and it continues to air in reruns.

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.

Our data analysis of the show’s racial portrayals also revealed that “Cops” front-loads footage of alleged crimes by members of minorities. On the show, 46 percent of violent-crime arrests of African-Americans (and 50 percent of those arrests of Latinos) appear before the first commercial break, compared with only 29 percent of violent-crime arrests of white people before that first break.

“Cops” producers told us their strategy is simply to put the most action-packed scenes in that first segment of the show, so that viewers stick around through the commercials. And sure, that makes sense. But it doesn’t explain away the top-heavy racial disparity. Given the show’s primarily white viewership, it’s not a stretch to think “Cops” producers were confirming racial narratives of criminality in America that they think their viewers want to see.

Finally, it’s no small matter that “Cops” also consistently, and casually, presents textbook bad policing as good policing. In one disturbing segment, a white officer in Wichita, Kan., pries a black man’s mouth open with the butt end of his flashlight, leaving it inserted in his mouth while the officer searches for drugs. Another segment shows an officer in Arizona tasing a fleeing man in the back, in violation of his department’s use-of-force policy. The man was suspected merely of loitering. This type of behavior is never presented as either questionable or unconstitutional. Body-cam footage also recently captured that same officer in a separate incident tasing another suspect 10 times during a routine traffic stop, then pulling down the man’s shorts and tasing him an 11th time in the testicles.