"Reality" TV and criminal justice.

So-called reality-based or "docu-cop" programming has been extremely successful with television audiences and producers over the past decade. Shows like "Night Beat," "Cops," "Top Cops," "American Detective," and "America's Most Wanted" are cheap to make, easy to syndicate, and wildly successful with viewers reared on the jump-cut style of MTV. Such shows, with their manufactured atmospheres of immediacy and close attention to the grittier details of street life, also cross a thin line between entertainment and information. This has had serious ramifications for public policy, especially on matters relating to drugs and crime.

Debasing Reality

The claim that shows like "Cops" are "real" hinges on several formatting strategies: live action shots with extensive use of hand-held cameras, the absence of reenactments or dramatizations, and the lack of a narrative voice. However, these nightly representations of cops pursuing drug dealers and other "criminals" are social constructions. Masquerading as reality, these selected sequences drawn from the immediacy of live events form nothing more than stories.

But the plotting of these stories is always bare-boned, without the richer and fuller devices of, say, fiction or cinema. We are relieved of the burden of knowing what has come before, or what will come after, the incidents which race on in front of us. Our limited camera perspective does not provide a complete panorama of the scene, as self-admittedly fictional compositions do.

We are not, for instance, privy to prior events, interior thoughts, or motivations; there are no second-or third-person perspectives offered to provide a context for the action at hand. We are simply chauffeured from one unidentified locale to another, in cities which are barely identified. A one-or two-word description of the incident is run at the bottom of the screen. All cities--like all crimes--are made to look alike.

The breathtaking verite of such real-life programming also denies enormous gaps in time and space--gaps that do not register consciously. While the "crime" is condensed into mere minutes of soundbites, the cops and camera have actually been on the scene for a much longer time. Docu-cop programs exclude boredom, an integral component of everyday life. The excitement of video realism is, therefore, created through a taping and editing process in which time itself is contracted into jerky abbreviations, context is denied, and boredom is obscured. The "reality" is a contrivance, an appearance. So, while everything appears to be happening here and now, in real time it is not.

Official Versions

Instead of providing details, a contrived order provides plot progression and a seeming sense of resolution, even while the events themselves are usually left unresolved. The narrative is structured to provide a definite beginning and end, always opening with "us" riding as passengers in a police patrol car and finishing with "us" in the same position. This simple arrangement is the skeletal frame upon which the on-the-scene chaos can be hung.

As "we" drive away with the beat cop in the police car, he or she makes sense of the incident for us. In articulating the story's resolution, the officer assumes a multiple role as social worker, therapist, prosecutor, judge, and jury. Allknowing, the cop tells us what the people at the scene felt, what motivated them, and how the dangerous world of the streets actually works. Video realism convinces us that we have seen with our own eyes, and yet we in fact depend upon the police officer's sources, opinions, and perspective to make sense of a world he or she defines as criminal. Similarly, at the "scene" of the crime, we hear only the cops speaking in a one-way dialogue that obscures most of the other voices.

These programs, and the many other shows which now follow the lurid, reality-based formula for crime "reporting," are actually little more than products of the media's overreliance on the entertainment value of the law enforcement establishment. This extends to the uncritical use of police officers as sources and the "mean streets" as settings. Most importantly, though, the police have increasingly come to define crime and to identify themes and issues relating to law enforcement through the media.

This particular alliance of governmental policy and media representation is one of mutual convenience, because the police allow cameras to follow them in the line of duty in return for the valuable public relations provided by the favorable portrayals one sees on reality-based television. The crowd-pleasing drama of this raw formula, combined with the ever-increasing demand for cheap programming, makes such shows irresistible to an industry brought to its knees by the bottom-line concerns of the 1980s.

In fact, the increasingly profitable alliance between law enforcement and television may soon rival the disastrous period in television history that led to the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Cheap and highly rated in their day, quiz shows like the "$64,000 Question" proliferated. And like docu-cop programs of today, TV quiz shows were promulgated as real--until it was discovered that ratings-obsessed producers were coaching contestants and rigging questions to keep the most popular contenders on the air.

Producers of reality-based programming, like their earlier quiz show counterparts, are similarly concerned that their ratings remain high. Now, producers coach cops rather than contestants. As one reporter learned while working on the set of "American Detective," producers were more than willing to prod police officers to repeat certain choice lines, to play to the camera, or to recap events in a televisually appealing "tone."

Combine this with the widespread popularity of shows like "Night Beat" about drugs and drug-related crime, where cameras follow cops as they engage in steet-level narcotics enforcement, and you have a potent recipe for public opinion-making. Local news broadcasts have also made extensive use of these cheap and exciting images, taking their cue from the success of docu-cop shows.

Therefore, the union between cops and television has meant that the media has failed to negotiate an independent position reflecting the complexities of drug consumptio and drug-related crime. Instead, dependent as they are upon police departments and emphasizing market priorities, the image-makers are merely reproducing (almost verbatim) already existing governmental policies on crime and drugs--even while these failed policies have come under increased criticism from policy analysts, politicians, lawyers, judges, and many law enforcement officials themselves.

With their eerie visuals of the night-time urban drug trade and electrifying images of cops as they hunt down dealers, these TV "documents" celebrate the war on drugs begun in the 1980s. They air nightly in order to affirm that public funds are being spent in the most productive ways to rid the streets of drugs and crime. They serve to confirm the essential rightness of police actions taken in inner-city communities, including the use of excessive force and questionable search-and-seizure tactics. But most of all, they define drugs and dealers as the sole causes of crime, obscuring much deeper social, economic, and political failures which, if left unexamined, guarantee that these problems will never be solved.

Tele-revising the Drug War

Drug consumers and dealers are overwhelmingly white and middle class. But you wouldn't know this from watching reality cop shows. Even the 1989 National Drug Control Strategy--dubbed the Bennett Plan after George Bush's "drug czar," William Bennett--was forced to conclude that the "typical cocaine user is white, male, a high-school graduate employed full time and living in a small metropolitan area or suburb." Presidential spin doctor David Gergen, writing in the conservative U.S. News and World Report, openly admitted in 1989 that "76 percent of those who use illegal drugs are white." Indeed, separate studies by the FBI and the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported similar findings--namely, that black men make up only 12 percent of the nation's drug users. In fact, studies of drug consumers show slightly lower percentages of African Americans and Latinos than whites in every age category.

Still, Bennett's plan continued a policy begun in the early 1980s: to fight this mythical "war" not against white men in small cities and suburbs but against blacks and Latinos in the most densely populated urban centers in the country, communities characterized by high levels of unemployment and poverty. The Bennett Plan directed over 70 percent of total resources to law enforcement, focusing on support for inner-city, street-level narcotics operations such as New York City's Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT), Operation Invincible in Memphis, Operation Clean Sweep in Chicago, Operation Hammer in Los Angeles, and the Red Dog Squad in Atlanta.

The rationale behind this urban war strategy was the assertion that hard-core drug use among white suburbanites was declining. This is not the case. As analysts like New York public defender Michael Letwin have argued, affluent addicts are just "more likely to deny their addiction and better able to hide its devastating effects." And while numerous reports documented the prevalence of crack addiction throughout the country (including the white middle class), it was nevertheless urban and minority neighborhoods which were viewed as the strategic targets of Bennett's war.

As TV cameras brought viewers dark surveillance images of black street dealers and raw video footage of police sweeps in poor neighborhoods, the drug crisis came to be defined as a black, urban problem--even though white drug use continued to predominate. The official televisual icon of the war on drugs became the young, black, steet-dealer "thug."

The prime-time news special "Night Beat" features (predominantly white) cops cruising city streets in search of such dealers. The typical "Night Beat" scenario involves cops and camera crew suddenly charging out of a police van or cruiser in hot pursuit of young, black thugs. The daring foot chase usually ends with a flying leap as one of the pursuing cops tackles the young suspect to the ground, where his hands are wrestled behind his back and manacled. One or more young men lie cuffed on the street while the cop, panting heavily, begins to work off a little of the adrenaline accumulated from the chase.

In one instance, a cop pulled one of the young men to his feet. The suspect leaned forward, his head touching the officer's chest. "Don't put your nasty head on me!" screamed the arresting officer. "You ain't my brother and you ain't my friend," continued the cop, "so don't lean against me. My shoulder ain't for you!" Seconds later, the cop, presenting his young trophy to the camera, was shown with his arm around the suspect's neck, pulled so close that the young man could barely keep from leaning against the arresting officer. Still, the exchange--clearly played to the camera--made for good television.

Two vials of cocaine with a street value of $20 were found on the youth, who was taken to jail. Roving host Penny Crone and the cop exchanged cheerful banter about high school football and the officer's superb tackling abilities. Passing testimonies about an officer's physical prowess are a leitmotif of the docu-cop genre. The cop closes the conversation by saying something reassuring about the streets being a little safer (at least until the cameras are turned off). If only it were that easy.

To date, such steet-level narcotics operations have been unsuccessful. For the most part, apprehending street dealers and "buy and bust" operations have served only to disperse steet corner drug trade temporarily. After the police sweep through the neighborhood, drug dealers move their operations from the high visibility of the streets to indoor locations. If drug operations are permanently "broken up," they simply relocate to another part of town.

The ineffectiveness of street-level drug enforcement is most clearly illustrated in the continued availability of crack and cocaine. Reports have shown that "brazen" street dealing resumes when tactical narcotics teams leave the sites. Despite the vast amounts of public money invested in such urbancentered police saturation techniques, no one has been heard to claim that these operations have led to a decline in drug abuse. If anything, abuse and availability rates have risen. A 1988 Senate report on national drug availability confirmed "a greater influx of cocaine than when the war on drugs was declared in 1983, and a cheaper, higher quality product."

Despite these and other drug-related realities, the fast and furious street arrests typical of docu-cop shows convey the false sense that the war on drugs is having an effect. Those taken into custody are, however, low-level retailers. Arresting suppliers, on the other hand, requires long-term police work--the kind of "boring" legwork that is rarely portrayed in trun-cated reality-based shows. However, rather than providing for the kind of foot chases and mass arrests that make for spectacular media images, a supplier bust usually turns up only one or two, often white, suspects. As Atlanta police investigator Ed Brown has noted, two suburban arrests may "shut down five or six crack houses." Such busts do not make for exciting television, however.

Law-enforcement officials around the country are beginning to understand that street-level enforcement does not solve the wider problem. In Memphis, for example, County Sheriff Jack Owen uncovered a drug-dealing ring in an upper-income white community, much to his and everyone else's surprise. His conclusion? "The worst offender is the functional user," observed Owen, "the BMW guy, the guy who goes to work every day. That's who's fueling the drug industry. It's not the people in the projects."

A World Apart

"Reality" TV specifically, and the media in general, have depicted urban crime as incomprehensible, a world apart that makes less and less sense to the public it engages--so heinous a crime, so senseless a death. The dark, stark urban images present drugs, violence, and criminality at the level of a deep, associational subtext, while the causal links among them have been broken. A broader narrative discourse examining the multiple components of the drug problem--one intended to explain the socio-economic dynamics involved--is forestalled and replaced by waves of images designed to elicit only fascinated revulsion.

In one episode of "Night Beat," our host Penny Crone informs us that Newark, New Jersey, is a place of "decaying neighborhoods and record-breaking car thefts." Then an unidentified official explains that drugs "are at the core of a lot of these things. A lot of these young people are getting high and they're stealing the cars and vice versa ... stealing the cars first, getting high during and after...." Drugs cause crime. Period. End of story.

The "post-explanation" cut takes us, conveniently, to the scene of an auto theft. As the two young black men arrested for the crime stand up from a prone position (having been kept on the ground until the arrival of the cameras), we see that they are neighter young nor intoxicated. Still, the preferred and general explanation for both crime and urban decay is the intoxicating power of drug use in and of itself. Crone repeats this assertion again and again, even when "Night Beat" visuals fail to support--or even openly contradict--the argument that drug intoxication is the sole cause of urban crime.

There are, however, essential connections between and among poverty, drugs, and violence which can be understood. Despite the mantra-like messages of reality-based media presentations, the situation is comprehensible once the social and economic conditions are made evident. Writing in the Hofstra Law Review, Michael Letwin correctly observes that the drug trade can only be understood within "the context of the interaction between drug prohibition and oppressive social conditions."

Over the last decade the conditions of inner-city life have become increasingly unbearable. As urban communities were faced with the flight of stable blue-collar jobs, federal funding for social services was cut dramatically. Between 1981 and 1987, the federal government cut $57 billion in aid nationally, including $6.8 billion from the food stamps program and $5.2 billion from child nutritional services. Many sociologists agree that the economic and social gains made by the black community in the 1960s were effectively rolled back through unemployment, assault on affirmative action, and the fiscal austerity programs of the 1980s.

As economic opportunity was thwarted in the inner city, many young people turned to drug dealing as a vialbe means of supporting themselves and their families. As Michael Letwin points out, "The retail street trade is conducted largely by teenagers, some of whom earn up to several thousand dollars a week and are thereby the primary source of income for many poor families."

There are currently few economic alternatives to this underground economy in the most depressed urban areas. Minimum-wage service jobs at fast-food restaurants do not constitute economic hope for the future, much less provide a living wage. Sociologist Terry Williams, writing in Cocaine Kids, points out that the culturally conditioned desire for status and privilege, elsewhere acquired through high-paying jobs or the promise of upward social mobility, can only be had in the inner cities through the underground economy.

And the most ambitious, energetic, and aspiring individuals are drawn to the drug trade because, in the words of anthropologist Phillipe Bourgois, "They believe in the American dream." In fact, as Bourgois notes, these young people follow the traditional model for upward mobility, "aggressively setting themselves up as private entrepreneurs."

But the social and economic conditions which prople the drug trade are lost in the contextual void that surrounds crime stories. There is just no narrative space available to include any examination of contingencies when such "stories" consist of fast-paced, catch-the-kid scenarios.

Such depictions also grossly misrepresent the nature of drug-related violence. The simple use of drugs does not necessarily lead to mayhem and loss of life. Violence is, rather, a consequence of their prohibition. The potential for huge profits keep the trade alive, and the money, power, and prestige associated with drug sales make the life of a dealer all the more alluring where there is such a dearth of alternatives.

A dealer's life is also made all the more dangerous by virtue of the highly competitive nature of the narcotics market. Ethan Natalmann of Princeton University has argued that the dramatic increase in inner-city murder rates during the past few years can be explained almost entirely by the rise in drug dealer killings, mostly of one another. As Natalmann points out, the connection between drugs and violence is not difficult to explain, because "illegal markets tend to breed violence."

In addition to spiralling rates of violence, one must contend with the alarming rate of arrest and incarceration among young black men. Hundreds of thousands of arrests are made each year for violation of drug laws--not for sales, distribution, or production but, rather, for simple possession, typically of marijuana. These are just the kinds of arrests which receive the greatest play in reality-based programming. In the 1980s, the number of federal prisoners convicted of a drug offense more than doubled, to 59 percent of all inmates in 1992. Such arrests are hopelessly ineffective in stopping drug use and represent only about 2 percent of the estimated 35 million to 40 million people who use illegal drugs in the United States.

Criminal Distractions

The "Night Beat" segment demonstrates, if nothing else, just how easy it is to make a drug arrest. Cops have only to drive past street corners in inner-city neighborhoods, run down a few of those hanging around, and display their "catch" for the cameras. These visuals assure viewers that the police are doing their jobs. In fact, by focusing so much time, money, and resources on what usually turns out to be nothing more than a case of drug possession, criminals committing more serious offenses--such as robbery, property crimes, and assault--go unpursued.

In 1993, the American Bar Association issued a report analyzing the criminal justice system for the years 1986 to 1991. They discovered that drug arrests had increased by 327 percent, and that the rate of arrest was 10 times greater for minorities than for whites--57 percent compared to 6 percent. Meanwhile, the number of juveniles taken into custody for serious property offenses decreased from 33 percent to 27 percent during that same period. Serious and often violent offenders are being given early release to make way for incoming prisoners from the war on drugs--more often than not, nonviolent offenders convicted of simple possession.

Buy-and-bust operations are notoriously difficult to accomplish with any degree of accuracy. Done at night, they are dangerous procedures. The officers involved do not want to appear suspicious by scrutinizing sellers too much. Under these conditions, identification is very difficult. Back-up teams often move in and make arrests with little more to go on than "young black, wearing jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers." Descriptions are often recorded after the arrests have taken place, with suspects seated before officers in the precinct house. Michael Letwin has identified the inherent problem in such methods: "Precinct identifications are inherently suggestive and unmonitored and an identification may occur hours after the transaction, during which interval the officer will have made numerous buys from other sellers."

According to Letwin, one buy-and-bust operation, later litigated by a defendant, led the court to conclude from the evidence that "the back-up team...swept through the block and lined up, against the wall, any male who happened to be in the vicinity and since the defendant was in the vicinity he too was ordered out of his van." Such sweeps are standard fare on "Night Beat." Police are regularly shown ordering anyone on the street to line up with their hands against a wall. In one episode, the voice of Penny Crone breaks in with an admission: "This attempt to buy and bust was a bust. Despite a search outside and inside this apartment building, no drugs were found."

To fill in air time, however, an officer plays to the camera and continues his search with detailed, "forensic" examinations of a "hollow" door and several hallway lighting fixtures. His fruitless jaunt is accompanied by a running color commentary. "They don't care where it is," the cop opines, continuing to implicate everyone being held. "They put it anywhere. They don't let their friends know about it 'cause their friends will rip them off. They trust no one but themselves." These remarks go unchallenged, even after the patrolman finds nothing.

Eventually, all of the "Night Beat" suspects are released, but they have already been criminalized--as unwilling actors in a "live" police drama--by the cops and cameras. The program has again made the point that, if the police suspect them of something, they must therefore be guilty of a crime. Constitutional assumptions about due process and civil liberties, such as protections against unwarranted search and seizure and the presumption of innocence, are antithetical to the crime-tabloid formula, which does not conceal its approval of the abuse of police power.

In addition to false arrests, buy-and-bust operations allow police tactical units to sweep up citizens on non-drug-related and often petty charges. Ron Harris has documented cases of widespread police harassment of inner-city residents across the country. During one anti-drug, anti-gang sweep in Atlanta, Georgia, for example, the police targeted public housing units which accommodate about 10 percent of that city's residents. Within a month from the start of the operation, the tenants had received over half the city's tickets for minor traffic violations. Likewise, drug sweeps aimed at Los Angeles public schools specifically singled out minority schools, despite federal studies showing higher rates of drug use among white youths than among both African American and Latino juveniles combined. According to Ron Harris, 97 percent of all students arrested in these raids were minorities.

The widespread and systemic abuse of police powers in minority communities has been well and widely documented. In Boston, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the police for randomly stopping young black men, threatening them with guns, pushing them to the ground, forcing them to remove their pants and underwear in public, and physically and verbally abusing them. One man was accidentally shot by a police officer, though no charges were ever filed against the victim.

Such indiscriminate harassment is regularly shown on "Night Beat," without comment or objection. Indeed, such behavior is routinely presented as though it were a part of legitimate police work. In one segment, two white undercover cops approach a black man and begin a body search while his girlfriend looks on. As one cop pats the young man down, we overhear him say in a threatening tone: "Touch my hand one more time, and you're going to the hospital. Understand me?" When the suspect informs the officer that he works in a local hospital, the officer replies, "Good, you'll be right there."

When the "suspect" asks to see the plainclothes officers' shields or some form of identification, one of them pulls his badge out from under his shirt, holds it up, and says, "Right here." He repeats himself twice, each time more loudly, finally shouting, "And stop getting cute, alright. Stop getting cute in front of everybody, alright!" The cop has been caught on film searching a suspect without properly identifying himself as a police officer, and then he becomes angry with the young man, suggesting that he is the one actually playing to the cameras.

All of the actual on-camera arrests made during one "Night Beat" program were for small amounts of powdered cocaine, and all of those arrested were black or Latino. But powdered cocaine is the drug of choice among middle-class and affluent whites, who would bristle and sue at the mere thought of being harassed, swept, and detained along the lines of the "Night Beat" formula--particularly in their own neighborhoods. But the tabloid-crime format of such reality shows simply reinforces the false impression that minorities are solely responsible for the drug trade and are therefore deserving, collectively, of the kind of treatment seen on "Night Beat."

Conclusion

The media's quest for such cheap, reality-based programming has only served to increase the public's misunderstanding of criminal-justice issues, especially as these relate to drug abuse and drug-related crimes. The use and sale of drugs must be understood from a social and public-health perspective, and not exclusively through the eyes of law enforcement as a matter of sheer surveillance and mass crack-downs. The media would better serve the common good if it sought to expose the forces which propel the drug trade, thereby broadening the public debate.

One cannot help thinking, too, that the prevalence of such reality-based, "real time" television has had an impact on the way people perceive crime levels. Indeed, the "Night Beat," "Cops," and "America's Most Wanted" formats, once restricted to the nether regions of syndication and the worse excesses of the Fox Network, have gone mainstream. Witness June's low-speed police chase of O.J. Simpson's Ford Bronco, done in best docu-cop fashion. So, while the overall crime rate has gone down, the public outcry over crime is at its highest volume in many years.

As it stands, though, docu-cop TV involves us--all of us--as police partners in an unwinnable war against the poor, seeing the "mean streets" of unnamed cities through the eyes of hero cops who are seemingly incapable of doing anything but good, because they always "get their man." Never mind that their "man" is always young and black and living in the poorest parts of the poorest cities in the country. This is an untenable script and equally untenable public policy.