BadBys
Feature | Filed 6:00 a.m. 01.22.2018
This story was produced in collaboration with Longreads
Morgan Langley leans toward a large computer screen. He isn’t sure if the video clip is still there, posted to a random YouTube channel named after a ’90s punk-ska act, but after a few moments, he finds it. Out of a black screen flashes a white Ford Mustang with blacked-out windows and chrome rims. Langley, who is an executive producer of one of America’s longest-running reality shows, “Cops,” narrates. “This kid here is actually selling a thousand pills of ecstasy to an undercover cop,” he says excitedly.
On the screen, a skinny white kid with a straight-brim baseball cap and a collection of painful-looking face piercings has plunked down on the Mustang’s passenger seat. Next to him is a woman whose blurred face is framed by sandy blonde hair. They briefly discuss logistics, and a second guy with dark skin and wrap-around sunglasses hops in. He asks if she has the cash; she asks if he has the goods. He asks if she’s a cop; she laughs.
“Okay, we’re just gonna do it like this,” he says, grabbing a pistol from his waistband. “Just give me your money.” Seconds later, officers in green tactical gear swarm the car, and he’s nose-down on the pavement, handcuffed and delivering a tear-streaked explanation: “Sir, they gave me a gun and told me they were gonna kill me.”
Langley, who is 43 and has the doughy look of an aging skater, interrupts. “I think this is why it went viral,” he says. Langley is showing me the video in his cluttered office on the third floor of his production company’s mud-colored building in Santa Monica. Since the clip appeared in an episode of “Cops” in 2011, it’s racked up 13.6 million views and almost 11,000 comments, many of which mock the drug-dealing purse snatcher’s apparent about-face. “He thought he was a tough boy to rob a woman gun point,” one says. “THEN CRIES LIKE A BABY.”
The clip portrayed a police encounter that couldn’t have been more different than the viral cop videos Americans have become accustomed to seeing over the past several years—the ones where an officer fires a burst of bullets into the back of a fleeing, unarmed black man, or puts a chokehold on another man as he gasps for breath. But just like the cell phone–captured deaths of Walter Scott and Eric Garner, the “Cops” clip seemed to expose a set of deeply personal beliefs about our frontline guardians of law and order. In one set of videos, they are the ruthless agents of a racist justice system; in another, they are unflinching heroes conquering the forces of depravity.
This is, of course, a rough approximation of the present debate over policing. So how much has the country’s most durable portrayal of American law enforcement shaped that debate? The long answer is this: Since 1989, “Cops” has delivered the officer’s view of crime and punishment every week, first on Fox, now on Paramount Network (formerly Spike), where new episodes from the show’s 30th season air every Monday night. “Cops” gained instant popularity in a genre it helped pioneer—reality television—and in the decades since, the show has remained a powerful and divisive force in American life. Civil rights activists, criminologists, and other observers have described it as a racist and classist depiction of the country, one in which crime is a relentless threat and officers are often in pitched battle against the poor black and brown perpetrators of that crime. They’re the plain-clothes narcotics detectives barreling through a suspected crack house, for instance, or the patrol officers racing after a suspect who’s bailed on a traffic stop. As Rashad Robinson, the racial justice activist and executive, puts it: “It represented for us what was the very worst of the way poverty and crime and communities of color are shown on TV.”
