The Social History ofCrime and Punishment

in AmericaAN ENCYCLOPEDIA

Wilbur R. Miller. EDITORState University of New York at Stony Brook

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The social history of crime and punishment in America: anencyclopedia /Wilbur R. Miller, general editor.

v.cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4129-8876-6 (cloth)

1. Crime--United States--History--Encyclopedias. 2.Punishment--UnitedStates--History--Encyclopedias. I. Miller, Wilbur R., 1944-HV6779.S63 2012364.97303--dc23

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Television, Police in 1767

Television, Police inPolice officers have maintained a high-profilepresence on television since the earliest days ofcommercial network broadcasting in the 1940sand 1950s. From police procedurals such asDragnet and Adam-12 to early 21st centurycrime dramas such as The Shield and The Wire,police programs have proven to be among themost durable and popular of all television genres.In their hundreds of iterations, cop shows havesought to depict law enforcement in a "realistic"manner, striving to capture the "true" nature ofpolice work with gritty authenticity. At the sametime, cop shows have also tended to emphasizethe most visually sensational aspects of policework-gunplay, car chases, physical action, andthe like-in order to satisfy the desire of a massaudience to experience the illicit thrills of crimeand violence while remaining safely within theparameters of the law.

The long-standing popularity of television copshows has enabled them to playa pivotal role inshaping the American public's perceptions of thepolice. Approaching the social problem of crimefrom the point of view of law enforcement, copshows have traditionally valorized police officersas heroic guardians of the public welfare, taskedwith protecting ordinary citizens from criminals.Television has also familiarized audiences with

1768 Television, Police in

the minutiae of police work, from the propertechnique for handcuffing suspects to the exactlanguage of the Miranda warning ("You have thetight to remain silent ... "), a staple on nearly allcop shows.

In their more mature incarnations, however,police dramas have explored the most urgent com-plications attending the role of law enforcementin a democratic society. Cop shows have traineda critical gaze on police authority by depictingcorruption and the limits and abuses of policepower, as well the substantial personal and emo-tional costs of working in law enforcement for theofficers themselves. As agents of the state, copshave the ability to arrest citizens and compel themto obey commands ("pull over!" "freeze!"), butthey are also public servants required to upholdthe law as it exists. Police shows frequently figurethis relationship as a tension between the institu-tional constraints of the "system" and the cops'own personal pursuit of justice, presenting policeofficers as rule-breaking individualists whoseown private moral code potentially supersedestheir devotion to the law or their tolerance for thebureaucracy of the justice process. In many cases,this intolerance is presented as a justified form ofanger against a system hamstrung by regulationsthat favor criminals over victims.

The American cop show's emphasis on out-law individualism has, paradoxically, tended toreinforce the conservative political bent of policeprograms; because cop shows have tradition-ally seen crime as a problem of law enforcementrather than of social justice, they devote moreattention to the contact point between cops andcriminals rather than to the underlying socialconditions that help to produce crime in the firstplace. Cop shows have also exhibited evolvingsocial attitudes on race, gender, and authority.Traditionally white and male, police officers ontelevision have diversified significantly over theyears, as evidenced by the multiracial ensemblecasts of countless TV cop dramas. Because policeofficers, due in part to television's influence,hold such a prominent position in the Americancultural imaginary, the question of who gets tocarry a badge and a gun on TV is also, in somesense, the question of who gets to be consid-ered an "American." Thanks to their pervasivepresence in U.S. popular culture, television cop

shows offer a revealing window into the waythat America understands itself and its complexrelationship to authority, crime, and justice.

Early Cop ShowsWhile short-lived crime dramas such as Stand Byfor Crime (1949), Photocrime (1949), and Chi-cagoland Mystery Players (1949-50) technicallycount as television's first cop shows, the mostseminal police program of the medium's earlyyears was Dragnet (1952-59; 1967-70). Createdand produced by actor Jack Webb, who starred asLos Angeles Police Department (LAPD) SergeantJoe Friday and directed several of the show's epi-sodes, Dragnet defined the conventions of thepolice "procedural" by envisioning police workas a set of routines carried out by detectives com-mitted to preserving establishment values andserving the public good. A typical Dragnet epi-sode, shot in semidocumentary style and narratedby Webb in a terse monotone, followed Fridayand his partner through the city of Los Angeles asthey interrogated suspects and witnesses, pursuedleads, and foiled crimes, all within the show'stightly constructed half-hour format. In con-trast to earlier radio police serials that tended toemphasize shoot-outs and melodrama, Dragnetfocused on the details of crime-solving with littleaction or gunplay; one of Webb's "rules" for theshow was that no more than one bullet could befired every four weeks. "Just the facts, ma'am,"Friday's familiar admonition to witnesses, wasalso an unofficial mantra for the show's no-frillsdepiction of law enforcement.

Unlike many subsequent cop shows, Drag-net also displayed an unshakable faith in theefficacy of the justice system; each episode con-cluded with a summary of the arrested criminal'ssuccessful prosecution and incarceration. Theshow's positive portrayal of police professional-ism made it a virtual promotional vehicle for thereal-life LAPD in the Eisenhower era. Not onlydid Dragnet draw many of its story lines fromactual LAPD case files, but it also represented thepolice as moral, rational agents of the law. Webbfollowed his Dragnet success by creating anotherlong-running police procedural, Adam-12 (1968-75), this time centering on two uniformed patrolofficers who cruised the streets of Los Angeles ina black-and-white squad car.

Television, Police in 1769

Jack Webb (left) and Harry Morgan from the popular 1950stelevision program Dragnet. Webb created and produced theshow and starred as no-nonsense Sergeant Joe Friday.

Though Dragnet established an early bench-mark for "realism" in televisual depictions of thepolice, its staid tone and establishment values putit at odds with the social and political transfor-mations taking place in American society in thelate 1960s. As U.S. television audiences becameincreasingly exposed to images of real-life policeofficers turning dogs and fire hoses on black civilrights demonstrators, predominantly white policeforces repressing distressed black communities innorthern inner cities, and even America's vexedrole as "global policeman" during the cold warand Vietnam, the received notion that the policeautomatically stood for peace and justice began toseem outmoded and simplistic. In part as a resultof these changes, cop shows in the late 1960s andearly 1970s began to move away from Dragnet'semphasis on unquestioned white male authorityand to absorb, if not wholly endorse, the energiesand ideologies of the counterculture.

These changes became apparent in such disparatecop shows as The Mod Squad (1968-73), whichcentered on three former juvenile delinquents-"one black, one white, one blonde"-who workedundercover to fight crime in the southern California"beat scene"; Ironside (1967-75), which starredRaymond Burr as a wheelchair-bound ex-San Fran-cisco police detective who combated crime outsidethe conventional channels of the police departmentwith the help of male and female deputies and anAfrican American bodyguard; and Hawaii Five-o (1968-80), a long-running procedural starringJack Lord as Steve McGarrett, a liberal-mindeddetective whose Hawai'i state police unit includesboth a trusted white deputy and Asian and Polyne-sian officers. The show's exploitation of Hawai'i'scolorful tropical locations, like The Mod Squad'sappropriation of the youth culture or Ironside'sinclusion of women and people of color on the sideof law enforcement, demonstrated how televisionpolice shows attempted to leaven traditional policeauthority with nontraditional elements.

The 1970sThese strategies became increasingly standard-ized as the cop show genre proliferated in the1970s, a decade in which over 40 police-themedseries hit the airwaves. The sheer abundance ofcop shows on TV during this era suggested pub-lic ambivalence toward law enforcement. Onthe one hand, the cop show's ubiquity signaleda reassertion of law and order after the anarchicdecade of the 1960s; on the other hand, televisioncops of the 1970s, though overwhelmingly whiteand male, tended to be streetwise, ethnically spe-cific individualists who adhered as much to theirown personal codes as to the exigencies of lawenforcement. Representative examples includedColumbo (1971-77), which starred Peter Falk asa trench coat-clad LAPD detective whose poseas a polite bumbler masked his skill at solvingmurders; Kojak (1973-78), which featured GreekAmerican actor Telly Savalas as a tough, bald, lol-lipop-sucking New York police lieutenant whosehardscrabble upbringing gave him special knowl-edge of the streets; and Baretta (1975-78), star-ring Robert Blake as an Italian American under-cover cop who lived in a dilapidated hotel andused his mastery of disguise to infiltrate variouscriminal organizations.

1770 Television,Police in

Perhaps the decade's signature cop show wasStarsky & Hutch (1975-79), which blended anapparent glorification of police brutality with atongue-in-cheek emphasis on the homoerotic malebonding between its two odd-couple detective-buddies, Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) andKen "Hutch" Hutchinson (David Soul). Taking itscue from movie cops like Dirty Harry and Pop eyeDoyle, Starsky & Hutch depicted its two heroesroutinely intimidating, browbeating, and assault-ing an array of suspects, often chasing them downin Starsky's tomato-red Gran Torino. The cops'streetwise credibility also hinged on their bondwith their loyal black informant, Huggy Bear(Antonio Fargas).

The 1980sThe cop show's tendency toward either cartoon-ish action or rigid proceduralism made the genreripe for reinvention by the early 1980s. WhilePolice Story (1973-77), an anthology series cre-ated by crime novelist and former LAPD officerJoseph Wambaugh, had sought to bring renewedrealism to the police drama, the series that bestexploited this opportunity was the criticallyacclaimed Hill Street Blues (1981-87). Cocre-ated by Steven Bochco, Hill Street Blues sought toreinvigorate the police drama by taking a human-ist, documentary-like approach that balancedprocedural elements with a nuanced explorationof the cops' private lives and personal travails.Set in a chaotic police precinct in a crime-riddensection of an unnamed eastern city that seemedto symbolize the decline of America's inner citiesduring the Reagan era, the show's "tele-verite"style involved the kind of overlapping dialogueand distracted camera work characteristic of aRobert Altman film. Moreover, its writers delib-erately avoided the cop-show tradition of wrap-ping up cases neatly at the end of each hour,instead stretching them out across multiple epi-sodes or even leaving them unsolved altogether.

At the heart of the series was the intense butstoic Captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti),a recovering alcoholic whose supervision of thedilapidated Hill Street station required him todeal with overworked cops, dangerous criminals,and a tangled city bureaucracy while also cop-ing with a combative ex-wife and carrying on asecret romance with liberal public defender Joyce

Davenport (Veronica Hamel). Picturing the policeprecinct as a quotidian American workplace, eachepisode began with an early-morning "roll call"in which Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Con-rad) briefed a roomful of weary cops on the day'simportant cases. Esterhaus's memorable catch-phrase, "Let's be careful out there," captured theshow's empathy for police officers who, thoughneither invulnerable action heroes nor roboticcivil servants, found themselves on the front-lines of urban chaos. Hill Street Blues was alsonotable for its effort to challenge at least someof the conservative assumptions of the traditionalcop show. In addition to its matter-of-fact depic-tion of a diverse police force that included womenand people of color, the show addressed issues ofpolice corruption and tensions between the policeand ghettoized minorities.

If Hill Street Blues redefined the cop show's com-mitment to "realism" in a way that would provehugely influential on later police dramas such asLaw & Order and NYPD Blue, another 1980scop show, Miami Vice (1984-89), sought to movebeyond realism altogether by wedding the policedrama to the visual and aural innovations of thethen-new Music Television (MTV). Executive pro-duced by feature film director Michael Mann andstarring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomasas undercover vice detectives Sonny Crockett andRicardo Tubbs, the show reportedly had its gen-esis as "MTV cops," two words scrawled on thenotepad of an NBC entertainment executive.

In addition to a contemporary rock soundtrack,rapid-fire editing, and stylized camera angles thatmade the cop show akin to a music video, theseries also exploited the seedy tropical glamourof Miami in a way that recalled but far surpassedHawaii Five-a's use of Hawai'i. Crucially, Crock-ett and Tubbs were "hip" cops, clad in expensivedesigner clothing and driving flashy cars designedto maximize their undercover image as drug deal-ers. That the show's two leads were also inter-racial male buddies-a staple of countless copshows from CHiPs to Hill Street Blues to TheWire-made the implicit argument that differ-ences in race, background, and culture could beelided through a shared commitment to policework-and, of course, a shared aura of "cool."

Though the show tended to glamorize the vari-ous forms of "vice"-drug use, arms dealing, and

Television, Police in 1771

prostitution-suggested by its title, it also exam-ined the personal cost of prolonged undercoverwork; in one story line, Crockett sustained a headinjury that made him believe that he was his crim-inal alter-ego. Miami Vice was equally notable forits critical, even despairing, attitude toward theReagan-era "war on drugs," an outlook that latershows, such as The Wire, would echo. Numer-ous episodes ended with Crockett and Tubbs find-ing their own quest for local justice hamstrungby federal agencies (such as the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation [FBI] or Drug Enforcement Agency)whose skewed priorities exposed politically moti-vated u.s. complicity in drug trafficking in LatinAmerica and Southeast Asia.

While Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice fea-tured female police officers in their ensemble casts,neither show challenged the cop show's essentiallymasculine point of view. Cagney and Lacey (1982-88) was ground breaking for doing just that; in itsdepiction of two female New York City policedetectives, recovering alcoholic Christine Cagney(Sharon Gless) and married mother of three MaryBeth Lacey (Tyne Daly), the show represented aserious effort to examine the complexities of lawenforcement from a female, even feminist, pointof view. While women had occupied starring rolesin cop shows before-notably Angie Dickinson inPolice Woman (1974-78) and Teresa Graves inGet Christie Love! (1974-75)-those programstended to treat the female star primarily as a sexobject. In contrast, Cagney & Lacey presented itsfemale cops as tough, compassionate, and highlycompetent, and the show melded traditional pro-cedural plots with story lines involving date rape,abortion, domestic abuse, and the workplace sex-ism of the police precinct.

The show itself was forced to contend withthe conservative gender politics of the TV indus-try. Though actress Meg Foster played Cagneyin early episodes, she was replaced by Gless, a"softer" presence on screen, after TV executivesnoted "lesbian overtones" between Foster andDaly. In pushing past these hurdles and showingwomen who succeeded in a traditionally male lineof work, the series laid important groundwork forlater cop shows that featured women in ensemblecasts (NYPD Blue) or as the stars of their ownshows (The Closer, 2005-11; and Saving Grace,2007-10).

The 1990sThe innovations in storytelling, style, and gen-der politics that emerged in TV cop shows ofthe 1980s were further extended and compli-cated in the 1990s. Steven Bochco, cocreator ofHill Street Blues, teamed with Hill Street writerand producer David Milch to create NYPD Blue(1993-2005), billed as an "adult" police dramathat brought R-rated language, partial nudity,and a renewed sense of gritty urban realism tothe genre. Set in Manhattan's lower east side andfilmed in a jittery, handheld style, NYPD Bluewas most notable for its mature, complex han-dling of the personal drama of cops' lives-vari-ously involving office romance, marriage, infi-delity, alcoholism, cancer, and racism-and forinterweaving these serial elements with grippingprocedural plotting.

The long-running NYPD Blue was also nota-ble for its valorization of the Angry White Malecop. In part because of its countless cast changesover 12 seasons, the show's moral core increas-ingly became the portly, bald, alcoholic, rage-prone Detective Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz),who routinely beat up suspects, spouted racistepithets, and derided "perps" who opted to "law-yer up" rather than confess to their crimes. Theshow arguably excused Sipowicz's compulsivepolice brutality as the righteous fury of a cop whosuffered mightily for the job; though he trampledon the civil rights of his suspects, those suspectswere usually shown to be guilty, and Sipowiczwas further ennobled by a series Job-like personaltrials, including alcoholism, prostate cancer, themurders of his older son and second wife, and thetragic deaths of two of his partners.

The impact of the job on the lives of cops wasalso a central theme in Homicide: Life on theStreet (1993-99), another ensemble police dramafrequently compared to NYPD Blue but whicheschewed the latter's soap-opera-like melodrama.Set in inner-city Baltimore and based on formerpolice reporter David Simon's book Homicide:Life on the Killing Streets (1991), a gritty nonfic-tion expose that detailed 12 months in the life ofa Baltimore homicide unit, Homicide was a visu-ally stylized, cerebral, character-driven cop showthat focused not so much on acts of murder them-selves but on the impact of those murders on thedetectives who investigated them.

1772 Television,Police in

A scene being filmed for Law & Order: Criminal Intent in November 2007. Law & Order premiered in September 1990 andcompleted its 20th and final season in May 2010, making it the longest-running police show in the history of television. It alsotied with Gunsmoke for the longest-running prime-time drama series of all time.

Unlike the flawed-but-valorous cops of NYPDBlue, Homicide's detectives were eccentric andchatty, and the show, under the guidance of execu-tive producer Barry Levinson, used cinematic inno-vations of the French New Wave, including jumpcuts, roving handheld camera work, and philo-sophical dialogue. This approach was particu-larly evident in the show's acclaimed first-seasonepisode "Three Men and Adena," in which eru-dite African American detective Frank Pembleton(Andre Braugher) and his white rookie partnerTim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) spend the entire episodetrying unsuccessfully to wring a confession out ofa suspected child murderer. Perhaps the signatureimage of the series was the homicide squad's "mur-der board," a white chart that tracked the progressof the detectives' cases in red marker (for unsolved)and black marker (for solved); the board seemed tosymbolize both the fleeting victories and perpetu-ally unfinished nature of urban police work.

As the police drama increasingly became a vehi-cle for exploring the human costs of both crimeand police work, the old-fashioned police proce-dural reinvented itself as well, as evinced by twocrime shows that wrung fresh ideas from technicalaspects of the investigative process. Law & Order(1990-2010), the longest-running cop show inthe history of television, combined the policeprocedural and the courtroom drama, while CSI:Crime Scene Investigation (2000-present) focusedon forensic detectives who solved crimes throughscientific analysis of physical evidence. That bothseries became enormously successful "franchises"comprising numerous spin-offs (including CSI:Miami, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, andmany more) reaffirmed the durability-and prof-itability-of "stand-alone" episodes in whichcops crack cases in under an hour.

Episodes of Law & Order were split into twohalves: the first tracked the police investigation of

Television, Police in 1773

a crime, and the second followed the district attor-neys' prosecution of that crime. Backgrounding thecharacters' private lives in favor of ripped-from-the-headlines cases, Law & Order nonetheless man-aged to provide an unusually nuanced view of theantagonistic and symbiotic relationship betweencops and district attorneys. While many cop showsportrayed the legal system as inert and attorneysas ethically suspect, Law & Order dramatized theintricate chess game that police and lawyers mustplay in order to convict criminals within the con-straints of the legal system. The show's ever-chang-ing cast also suggested the diversification of the copshow genre as a whole: In the series' early days, thecops and lawyers were mostly white and male; inlater seasons, African Americans and women tookover key roles.

CSI, by contrast, took the police series in amore scientific direction, focusing on forensic"criminalists" who work the night shift at a high-tech crime lab in the Las Vegas Police Depart-ment. Instead of familiar cop-show staples suchas interrogations, shoot-outs, and car chases,CSI immersed viewers in the minutiae of shoeetchings, anal swabs, torn hair follicles, bulletwounds, voice analysis, DNA evidence, and otherstate-of-the-art techniques that enabled the policeto re-create crimes in hypothetical, often gory,flashbacks. While CSI's appeal stemmed in partfrom its flashy visual style and emphasis on bloodand guts, the show's scientific bent also offeredviewers a reassuring vision of police work as anexact science in which catching a criminal wasoften a matter of analyzing evidence correctly.As the unit's brilliant leader, Gil Grissom (Wil-liam Petersen), admonished his team: "People lie.The evidence doesn't lie." This seductive premisegenerated what some called the "CSI effect," inwhich real-life families of crime victims expectedswifter resolutions to murder investigations andjuries required more direct, less circumstantialevidence to convict defendants.

Perhaps the most durable, though leastacclaimed, police procedural of this era wasCOPS (1989-present), a so-called "reality" showthat used handheld video cameras to track real-life patrol officers on the job. Familiar to Ameri-can TV audiences for its "Bad Boys" theme songand lowbrow sensibility, COPS offered an endlessparade of traffic stops, domestic disturbances, and

drug arrests in low-income neighborhoods whileproviding little if any context or social analysis-just the vicarious thrill of watching police appre-hend "criminals."

The 2000sWhile procedurals such as COPS, CSI, and Law& Order continued to thrive on traditional net-work television well into the 21st century, twocop shows that appeared on cable in the newcentury's first decade-The Shield (FX, 2002-08)and The Wire (HBO, 2002-08)-took the policedrama into deeper and darker territory than it hadever been before by offering sociologically grim,dramatically layered examinations of crime andcorruption in the urban ghetto. Shot in a grainy,handheld style in some of Los Angeles's grimiestlocations, The Shield centered on an experimen-tal LAPD "Strike Team" that used illegal meth-ods to combat gangs, drug dealers, and murdererswhile essentially operating as a gang unto itself.The Strike Team's leader, Vie Mackey, played bythe bald, charismatic Michael Chiklis, was theapotheosis of the cop as antihero, far exceedingNYPD Blue's comparatively tame Andy Sipowicz.Dubbed by one TV critic as "Tony Soprano witha badge," Mackey brutalized suspects, plantedevidence, stole drugs and money, and, in a shock-ing act whose consequences rippled throughoutthe show's seven seasons, shot and killed a mem-ber of his own unit.

Like the film Training Day (2001), The Shieldwas inspired by the LAPD's Rampart corruptionscandal of the late 1990s, and the series argu-ably glorified, even as it critiqued, the figure ofthe outlaw cop. That Mackey was a doting fatherof three ensured audience sympathy, even as hisviolent acts made him repugnant. By presentingMackey as an extremely effective but extremelyimmoral cop, The Shield posited corruption as adistasteful but potentially necessary tool for effec-tive crime-fighting. Moreover, The Shield showedthat Mackey was far from alone in his manipula-tions; indeed, the series took a pitilessly Hobbes-ian view of the police as an institution irretriev-ably shaded by the self-interest of its personnel atall levels.

The Wire's take on the police drama was lesssensationalistic but no less unsettling. Created byDavid Simon and drawn, like Homicide, from

1774 Television, Punishment in

his years of crime reporting in Baltimore, TheWire was equal parts cop show and sociologicalexpose, examining not just police work but thepainful decline of the American inner city. In itsfirst season, the show focused on a single policedrug investigation in the blighted housing proj-ects of West Baltimore (the show's title came fromthe wiretapping technology used to monitor drugdealers) but distinguished itself from cop-shownorms by exploring the lives of the dealers andaddicts as fully as it did of the police officers. Insubsequent seasons, the show's scope expanded toexamine labor unions, city politics, public educa-tion, and the news media, implicitly arguing thatthe institution of law enforcement and the war ondrugs could not be understood without account-ing for the systemic rot in all of these institutions,as well as the human cost facing individuals wholive and work within them.

In articulating these critiques, The Wirerejected the tidy closure of the police proceduralas well as the often ahistorical, decontextualizedpicture of crime offered in even the most sophis-ticated police dramas. Moreover, in a genre oftenprone to glorifying white male heroes (and anti-heroes), The Wire was notable for featuring per-haps the richest and most varied cast of AfricanAmerican actors in the history of television; itsmaverick white cop, Jimmy McNulty (DominicWest), was often relegated to the periphery. Per-haps the central theme of The Wire's depiction oflaw enforcement was the way in which politicalopportunism and limited resources hamper cops'ability to conduct meaningful long-term investiga-tions; the show revealed how cops are pressuredto fudge crime statistics and engage in aggressivestreet-level arrests that look good in the eyes ofthe public but actually enable the drug trade tocontinue unabated and, worse, tend to alienateminority communities. The Wire's bleak positionon the drug war was perhaps best expressed byone officer's remark that the "war" on drugs is amisnomer, because "wars end."

Even as The Wire characterized police work asan exhausting war of attrition, the television copshow itself appeared to be anything but exhaust-ible in the early 21st century; indeed, police offi-cers on TV continued to become at once more out-landish and more familiar with each new show.The pay-cable series Dexter (2006-present), for

example, took the cop-as-antihero concept toa new extreme by focusing on a Miami police"blood-spatter" expert who is secretly a serialkiller of serial killers, while Southland (2009-present) used cinema-verite techniques to followflawed patrol officers and detectives through thesame sun-bleached LA-noir landscape featured inDragnet and The Shield. As these and other copshows attest, U.S. audiences remain fascinatedby the men and women who wear badges, carryguns, and make television their beat.

Andrew SargentWest Chester University of Pennsylvania

See Also: Film, Crime in; Film, Police in; Literatureand Theater, Police in; Television, Crime in.

Further ReadingsBuxton, David. From The Avengers to Miami Vice:

Form and Ideology in Television Series. New York:Manchester University Press, 1990.

Crew, B. Keith. "Acting Like Cops: The Social Realityof Crime and Law on TV Police Dramas." InMarginal Conventions: Popular Culture, MassMedia and Social Deviance, Clinton R. Sanders,ed. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Culture Press,1990.

Grant, Judith. "Prime Time Crime: TelevisionPortrayals of Law Enforcement." Journal ofAmerican Culture, v.lS/1 (1992).

Inciardi, James A. and Juliet L. Dee. "From theKeystone Cops to Miami Vice: Images of Policingin American Popular Culture." Journal of PopularCulture, v.21/2 (1987).

Lott, M. Ray. Police on Screen: Hollywood Cops,Detectives, Marshals, and Rangers. London:McFarland & Co., 2006.

Siegel, Lee. "Why Cop Shows Are Eternal." In NotRemotely Controlled: Notes on Television. NewYork: Basic Books, 2007.