Recently, Color of Change (COC) published a report, Normalizing Injustice: The Dangerous Misrepresentations that Define Television’s Scripted Crime Genre about how the crime genre glamorizes policing to the detriment of the entire country, but Black people, the victim of police violence, specifically.
The Civil Rights was a whole other thing but when those White kids got killed at Kent State, the average American thought that they could not trust law enforcement.
“Bonanza” and “Adam 12” weren’t more popular than “Mary Tyler Moore” or “The Brady Bunch” Now, if you look at the cable guide, 90 percent of those shows are cop shows, police procedurals.
On the Black side of things, we had a very radical movement that was deeply critical of the police with the Black Panthers.
You take a city like New York where 51 percent of the city budget is spent on policing even though this is a city that had a decline in crime for the past ten years, in the past four years there’s been a 22 percent increase on spending on police.