The ‘good cop’ narrative dominates American culture but the truth is there is no such thing
Police kneeling in solidarity implies there isn’t a problem with the system – just ‘a few bad apples’. But officers cling to this myth and use it as an excuse not to engage with deep-rooted racism, writes Holly Baxter
A lot of white people in the southern states will tell you that the Confederate flag is misunderstood: that it stands for pride and independence, rather than racism, and that it commemorates their states’ fallen soldiers in the Civil War. But most Americans still understand that there’s a high chance the person who’s flying it is, quite frankly, a racist. Like displaying the flag of St George in England, you can plausibly argue away accusations that it represents white supremacy or anti-immigrant sentiments – but there certainly does seem to be a correlation between the people who choose that flag for their front window and people who think it’s better if the races don’t mix.
In the case of the Confederate flag, it should be very clear: had the Confederate states rather than the Union won the Civil war over 150 years ago, slavery would have continued. To display something with that kind of a history takes either a bold-faced racism or a huge effort of cognitive dissonance. As Dan Rodricks wrote in his “letter to those who raise the Confederate flag” in 2017: “A person who hoists a Confederate flag on his front lawn might not be as angry and as aggressive as the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville. But you never know, and that's a problem.”
As Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests traversed the nation and then exploded internationally, it became clear that the world wouldn’t just have to reckon with acts of physical violence perpetrated against black people every day – the arrests, the murders, the overstuffed prisons, the mass shootings, the racist attacks on the streets – but also the cultural products which allowed that violence to go unchecked.
“White saviour” narratives in Hollywood films is a good example, and a surprisingly pervasive trope. The Help (2011), which began trending on Twitter over the last week, is the only film Viola Davis says she regrets working on, despite winning a supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of black maid Aibileen Clark. In explaining her reasoning for that during an interview, Davis was careful to say that she “had a great experience” on set with colleagues who were “extraordinary human beings”, but that “at the end of the day… it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard.”
Some films have aged badly in an even shorter timeframe. Green Book, which won best picture at the Oscars in 2019, was described thus by Emmanuel Ocbagzhi: “The film is about Don Shirley, a black, queer musical genius with multiple doctorates, told through the lens of his… driver?” When you put it like that, it does make you wonder why the Academy ever thought it was a work of genius.
As Ocbagzhi also points out, there are films which take the “white saviour” trope so far that they begin to rewrite history: in Hidden Figures, fictional head of the Space Task group at Nasa, Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner, allows Taraji P Henson’s character access to the control room so she can watch a launch she made possible through her work. Henson plays the real Katherine Johnson, who said while she was still alive that this touching movie moment never happened; she remained excluded from the launch room, and watched it take place from her desk.
There has been much hand-wringing from white cultural commentators since BLM protesters plunged statues of slave owners into harbours and town squares and then started questioning film and TV. In the UK, Matt Lucas and David Walliams’ comedy sketch show Little Britain was pulled from Netflix and BBC iPlayer; The Mighty Boosh and The League of Gentlemen, both of which featured characters in blackface, disappeared from Netflix soon after, though the latter remains on iPlayer at the time of writing. Channel 4 took Bo Selecta off its streaming service and Disney announced that its “idyllic” depiction of life on a plantation, Song of the South, would not be included in its new Disney+ offering. Gone With the Wind was taken off HBO Max with a promise to bring it back once an introduction could be done by a black scholar providing some context to its problematic content.
“It’s an arbitrary gesture that means they don’t have to put any real work into combatting actual instances of racial discrimination and comedy history is getting smashed in the process. Glad I kept hold of my DVDs,” tweeted comedian Jack Carroll when The League of Gentlemen was removed.
“It is believed that slaves made up around 40 per cent of the population of ancient Greece,” wrote one Twitter user. “Should I expect schools to stop teaching Pythagoras and Euclidian geometry and movies like Hercules and Clash of the Titans to face the same fate as Gone With the Wind?” Others didn’t mince their words so much, which one self-identifying MAGA campaigner declaring: “President Trump should set up a projector and huge screen on the front lawn of the White House and do a double feature of Gone With the Wind and Blazing Saddles until all the protesters leave.”
There’s no doubt that Gone With the Wind is a beloved film for many (mostly white) people, just as To Kill a Mockingbird – another book which presents the black experience through the lens of a white saviour – is a beloved book and an important seminal text. Contextualising such works, with new forewords or filmed introductions from black academics, is hardly the communist book-burning some conservatives (disingenuously) describe on social media. Like placing statues of slave owners in museums rather than on plinths in the centre of towns and cities, it seems a no-brainer when you imagine for just one second what it’s like to live as a black person in a society where such artefacts go unquestioned. When I asked one black woman how she coped with living in the shadow of so many Confederate flags in Alabama, she shrugged: “It’s not nice.”
The unchallenged “slavery porn” and “white saviour” stories so popular with Hollywood are like tiny little Confederate flags hoisted up on international lawns, the ones white liberals only sometimes see and would certainly prefer not to admit were there, the ones which often don’t bother us enough to discuss them even if, every so often, we do a double-take before getting on with our day.
In a country where “plantation weddings” – that is, ceremonies and marital celebrations on the sprawling land of former slave plantations – are the norm, and where many southerners will still tell you they don’t consider the administration sitting in Washington DC “our government”, there is a lot of work to do. But where that work is focused nowadays simply isn’t the same as it is in Britain. Conversations about statues flared in the US after Charlottesville; they are ongoing – Nancy Pelosi called for the removal of 11 Confederate statues earlier this week, for example – but they’re not at the forefront of discussions about promoting anti-racism right now. Instead, the most urgent conversations among Americans centre round the police force, and the deconstruction of the “good cop” narrative. But to understand why that is, we have to look into how the US police force came into existence in the first place.
The modern American police force is a tree with two roots: firstly, a model adopted by colonists from their native countries in Europe, which mainly instituted local sheriffs to sort out disputes between neighbours in the northern states; and secondly, an entirely new model dreamed up in the southern states to protect their slave-driven economies. In the south, slave patrols were pretty much the only kind of police force which operated up to the Civil war.
They were staffed by patrollers who took an oath which read: “I [patroller’s name], do swear, that I will as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God.” Southerners knew that a slave rebellion was a distinct possibility on a plantation, and they felt a distinct personal and financial fear about that possibility. Because of this, they didn’t just rely on slave patrollers to return runaway slaves and punish slaves who had stepped out of line; they had a much more significant purpose, which was, according to the historian Gary Potter, “to provide a form of organised terror to deter slave revolts”.
Cultivating an atmosphere of “organised terror” takes effort. It means legitimising racial profiling, punishing black people disproportionately when they break the law, and viewing black people first and foremost as potential criminals or “escapees”. Little wonder that many BLM demonstrators have called to abolish the American police force entirely, or to defund it so that it cannot afford the military weapons it now regularly acquires from the military’s leftovers. Little wonder also that many black activists argue prison is the new slavery.
The US represents 5 per cent of the world’s population, but 21 per cent of its prisoners – and African Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white people. African American women are imprisoned at twice the rate of white women, and African American children make up over half of those whose cases are taken to a criminal court. One particularly notorious prison, known colloquially as “Angola” rather than its official name of Louisiana State Penitentiary, is larger than the entirety of Manhattan and houses a disproportionate amount of black prisoners on land that used to be slave plantations.
A sadder representation of the legacy of slave patrols would be hard to find. Many of those convicted to life inside Angola fell victim to the “three strikes” system in Louisiana, the lawyer Bryan Stevenson wrote last year for the New York Times, adding: “I’ve found myself representing clients sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana.” In nine states, a convicted felon can lose their right to vote for their entire lives; that means around 6 million disenfranchised adults in America, functionally disenfranchised long after they have left prison life behind.
In this environment, it seems almost counterintuitive that the narrative of “the good cop” would come to dominate American cultural output. Think about the love interests in Bridesmaids and Stranger Things, or the “buddy cop” comedy action flicks like The Heat, Lethal Weapon, Turner and Hootch or The Nice Guys. Serious takes on where the police stand in American society – such as in Crash – are not uncommon, though they rarely out the cops within them as bad, and never come to the conclusion that the system they work within is fatally flawed.
Similarly, many “buddy cop” narratives pair a black and a white police officer, but any racial issues they come across are seen as their own individual problems to work through. Cops appear a lot in American TV shows as well – Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one particularly popular example of when they take centre-stage – but beyond the gentle ribbing about doughnut-eating on the job that you might see in Chief Wiggum in The Simpsons, seriously critical portrayals are rare. Like it’s expected that you’ll stand and clap for the “local hero” from the military at a football or basketball game, it’s expected in the US that you revere law enforcement without question; that the system has been reformed since its genesis; and that cops from many diverse backgrounds work together for the good of the country behind closed doors, despite the occasional personality clash.
It’s a nice idea, and it’s one all of us would like to believe in. Indeed, during the early days of the protests following George Floyd’s death, social media was awash with examples of “good cops” kneeling beside protesters or even walking with them through the streets. In Coral Gables, Florida, an entire police force was pictured kneeling together outside their precinct, eyes downcast respectfully and surgical masks on their faces.
In Flint, Michigan, a sheriff took off his helmet and baton and marched with peaceful protesters, even stopping to take a couple of thumbs-up selfies. In Portland, Oregon, a line of police officers knelt before the crowd they had been obstructing; in Washington DC and New York City, cops surrounded by protesters were pictured doing the same. In a video from Los Angeles that went viral, actress Keke Palmer was shown addressing the National Guard and asking them to walk alongside them (they didn’t, but did also take a knee.) In Houston, Texas, another police officer was pictured comforting a crying little girl in the midst of a crowded protest.
But then came the complications. An NYPD lieutenant in Manhattan, Robert Cattani of the Midtown South precinct, sent an email round his colleagues after being pictured kneeling at a particularly well-attended protest. Decrying his own “horrible decision to give into a crowd of protesters’ demands”, Cattani explained, according to the New York Post, that “the conditions prior to the decision to take a knee were very difficult as we were put centre-stage with the entire crowd chanting. I know I made the wrong decision. We didn’t know how the protesters would have reacted if we didn’t and were attempting to reduce any extra violence.”
He added: “I know that it was wrong and something I will be ashamed and humiliated about for the rest of my life,” while explaining that although he felt what had happened to George Floyd was wrong, he didn’t mean to imply that there was a systemic problem with the police force. His apology suggested that “the asshole in Minneapolis” — that is to say, Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died — was one bad apple.
“We don’t want anybody to take a knee, a knee doesn’t help me heal the wounds. They shot me [with pepper balls] seven times on Saturday,” said Kendrick Sampson, an actor on HBO’s Insecure. A BLM demonstrator said on ABC News during a discussion about the LAPD: ”It does not help my boy who has two broken bones in his skull right now because they aimed a cannon at his head with rubber bullets.” Similarly, “they beat the living shit out of us one hour after this was taken,” wrote one Twitter user in response to a viral video of NYPD officers taking a knee.
I found it difficult to square the photos of cops kneeling in solidarity with BLM activists a mile or so from my apartment when, closer to home, I was barricaded into my street by NYPD officers in Brooklyn. Friends a short walk away told me officers had paraded aggressively down their road, shouting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” and flipping off residents inside their houses.
It does not help my boy who has two broken bones in his skull right now because they aimed a cannon at his head with rubber bullets ... and they beat the living shit out of us one hour after this was taken
“Continually promoting narratives of individuals rising above only serves to collectively lull the (white) public into a sense of complacency around the scale of this problem,” wrote Shannon Keatings, in a recent Buzzfeed article titled: “Stop sharing viral photos of cops kneeling with protesters.” These moments of individual connection, touching as they are, can come together to imply that there isn’t a problem with the system, Keatings argued. In effect, they back up the “few bad apples” idea, and that’s a damaging thing to believe; as we’ve learnt from the leaked apology of Robert Cattani, police officers cling to this myth and use it as an excuse not to properly engage with an anti-racist cause — or to backtrack even after they appear to have engaged with it. With 69 per cent of Americans now reporting that they believe George Floyd’s death “points to a larger problem within America’s policing system”, that “bad apples” theory is also looking increasingly out-of-date.
If films like Gone With the Wind are the cultural equivalent of miniature Confederate flags – historically important, but demanding of context – then films and TV shows which promote the “good cop” narrative are the flag-poles. They’re not as obviously racist as the content of a book or a movie which was “of its time”. They don’t actively perpetuate ideas about black people which we would never accept today (and should never have accepted in the first place.) Instead, they are part of the infrastructure of racism; they offer up tropes and ideas which can, eventually, lead to oppression.
The police are inherently virtuous; the people they chase are bad guys; people are in prison because they deserve it – these are all ideas which need to be reckoned with in the US, with its staggeringly high incarcerated population and its descendants of slave patrols armed to the hilt. One of the strangest examples of this reckoning happened over Twitter when Paw Patrol, a children’s TV show about cartoon dogs, tweeted they would be “muted and listening” to black voices during the protests on 2 June.
“Chase is not only a class traitor but a species traitor as well. F**k Chase,” responded one tweeter, referencing Chase the friendly German Shepherd police dog who features in the series. “You’ve already brainwashed a bunch of kids into thinking law enforcement is a noble and just profession. Better to scrap production forever if you want to make lasting change,” wrote another. “Euthanise the police dog,” said someone else; “Defund Chase and make Rubble [the construction worker dog] the boss,” added someone else. “GUYS I KNOW FOR A FACT CHASE WOULD TURN IN HIS BADGE,” replied one user in defence of their favourite cartoon.
It should go without saying that Chase the police dog is not our biggest enemy in the fight for equal rights, and indeed not a real enemy at all. Those who tweeted about him were clearly being tongue-in-cheek, but they were also questioning the “good cop” narrative which allowed for the creation of Chase with good reason. What we teach our children matters. Do we want portrayals of Chase the friendly German Shepherd beating a Pomeranian with a baton or killing a horrified puppy’s father by kneeling on their neck? Of course not. But do we desperately need to discuss the limitations of the police as a society? Indisputably.
It might seem a little dark to have a conversation with a child about police brutality, but the truth is that black American parents are having to have those conversations with their children already. Remember the black teenage girl in Texas who was slammed to the ground repeatedly on video by a white cop when someone reported a “disturbance” at a pool party? In 2018, three years after the incident, she settled a lawsuit against the officer and the city – but money can’t buy a cure for psychological trauma. Rewatching that video of 15-year-old Dajerria Becton’s arrest in the town of McKinney this week, I thought again of those southern slave patrols and the “organised terror” they conspired to create.
When you teach kids like this, it gains roots – just as when you create a police force out of a slave patrol, its legacy looms large a century and a half later. As strange a target as Paw Patrol might seem, that’s why it’s now a small part of a political storm which rages across culture. The prime targets, however – the ones which are not tongue-in-cheek, or cartoons with primarily innocuous content – are the reality TV shows so beloved of Americans.
![‘Chase [the dog in Paw Patrol] is not only a class traitor but a species traitor as well’ claimed one tweet](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2020/06/15/16/10cops-fictional1-articlelarge.jpg)
Cops, the unscripted show that followed law enforcement through the streets and ostensibly showed how difficult their lives were made by a carousel of nefarious criminals, was due to begin its 33rd season on 15 June, but was abruptly cancelled when BLM campaigners began elevating a conversation which had been started a long time ago. In 2013, civil rights group Color of Change urged Fox – the network which hosted Cops, before it moved to Paramount – not to renew the show, saying that the producers “have built a profit model around distorted and dehumanising portrayals of black Americans and the criminal justice system.” In 2020, a full seven years later, Paramount officials finally listened.
Days after Cops was cancelled, another reality TV show called Live PD, which aired on A&E Network, suffered a similar fate. Like Cops, Live PD followed police officers on the job and showed dramatic scenes of arrests, scuffles and stop-and-search incidents, with little concern for anonymity. One long-time viewer of the series described it to me as a “guilty pleasure – emphasis on guilty. On the one hand, you can’t look away. From a purely technical point of view, it’s compelling television. It keeps you watching through what I suspect are simple production techniques, probably well-known to people in the industry.
"They follow several officers at the same time and constantly cut from one scene to the other so you're always wondering at the back of your mind what's going to happen to the people in earlier scenes. The idea that is live makes it even more suspenseful. But you're also very aware of the fact that only law enforcement's side is being presented. You're in cars with the cops, and expertise in the studio is also being provided by people who are from law enforcement. So it's not really a thorough outlook on policing. And most of all, I could never get past the fact that they showed people's faces while they were being stopped or apprehended. It always made me feel uneasy, and I worried about the consequences it would have on these people's lives."
In a YouTube compilation of Live PD’s “most viewed moments”, cops are shown kneeling on the backs of suspects who are already lying down during arrests and participating in high-stakes car chases; all of what transpires is edited to make the officers’ actions seem reasonable and proportionate and the job exhilarating, even fun.
In one of its most controversial moments, Live PD had a crew present and filming during the death of Javier Ambler, a black man who died in custody in Austin, Texas after being Tasered multiple times by police and who repeatedly stated, “I can’t breathe” and, “Please save me” according to bodycam footage from the arresting officers.
Live PD chose not to release the footage they’d taken themselves, much to the chagrin of civil rights advocates and Ambler’s family, and then destroyed it. It’s something the show’s former host Dan Abrams recently said he regrets. “I am frustrated and sad because I truly believed in the mission of the show to provide transparency in policing,” he told Deadline, when asked about the series’ cancellation.
“It seems to me that the antidote to bad policing and officers is transparency and that means more bodycams and more shows like Live PD. It’s important to distinguish Live PD from a show like Cops that just presented a highlight reel of crazy moments. Live PD was totally different — following the officers in real time, in their real environments showing the nerves, the adrenaline, the bad, the good, and often the mundane and boring. I will miss it all.”
Abrams may have entered into hosting Live PD for the right reasons, but it was first and foremost television entertainment. If chronicling the “real environment” of the police force increased transparency and held officers to account, it’s hard to imagine Javier Ambler would have died in custody while the cameras rolled. And though deaths such as Ambler’s happen across the US without a TV crew present, the framing of arrests on Live PD and Cops allowed viewers to believe a simplistic idea about those who are injured, killed or treated violently by officers: they probably resisted; they probably deserved it; they probably had a record; the police were probably scared.
The aftermath of those arrests was rarely if ever shown: the court cases that collapsed; the arrests which came to nothing; the people who ran because they were scared, rather than because they had a criminal reason to run, and never got to explain. Like Jeremy Kyle claiming that his show was beneficial to those who appeared on it because they got access to free counselling, the argument that an entertainment show about cops on the job would meaningfully contribute to police transparency in the same way that bodycams do is a little hard to swallow.
The social harm done seems to vastly outweigh the small, theoretical benefits. When the heroes of your TV show end up killing a man in custody – a man who said, when he was apprehended for a minor traffic violation, that he had congestive heart failure and was “not resisting” – it should be time to do some soul-searching. But Ambler died over a year ago, and A&E Network only cancelled Live PD this month.
Can the cancellation of cop shows, a move away from Hollywood “heroes” in blue and a few minutes of dialogue before a long film depicting racist stereotypes prevent deaths like George Floyd’s in future? When you take them each in turn, it’s easy to dismiss the idea. But when you interrogate America’s obsession with the people who patrol their streets, weapons strapped to their belts, you realise these deaths don’t come from nowhere.
The impunity with which cops act when they get handed the badge and the gun is fed by a culture of “good guys” and “bad guys”, a fictional narrative about who they are and what they should be able to do. When we don’t see police as people – people with flaws, prejudices, fatal mistakes – then we start making excuses for our heroes rather than holding them responsible for their errors. And when we don’t accept that the system is corrupting – that its roots are twisted, its military-style training is problematic and its weaponry taken from war zones is disproportionate – then we can’t imagine a future where black people aren’t killed, maimed and incarcerated at rates far higher than their white counterparts, rates seen in no other country in the world.
Knocking the “good cop” off his pedestal like so many statues of slave owners is one small constituent part of making things better, but it’s an important part. No longer can we afford to peddle the “one bad apple” theory whenever a Javier Ambler, a Breonna Taylor, a Philando Castile or a Dajerria Becton appears on our screens. Like a black Nasa employee being invited into the control room to watch the launch of the rocket she worked tirelessly to make fly, that “good cop” narrative is one many of us might desperately wish was true – but if we rewrite history rather than reckon with it, we betray the people whose stories we doctored.
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