Brooklyn Nine-Nine As Copaganda : A Critical Analysis
The recent outbreak of Black men & women being killed by police, the resulting wave of protests, and the movement to defund the police have all put a spotlight on police-related media. One of the TV shows that has been most talked-about in this context is Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s been called copaganda, which has been troubling for some people — after all, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a widely-beloved show. It’s smart, funny, and deals with tough issues. Could it really be advancing regressive ideals?
First, let’s define “copaganda”. In a broader sense, it’s any kind of media that intentionally skews its portrayal of the police in a positive manner. When a beat cop in full uniform plays basketball with kids on the street and photos of the event “just happen” to released to newspapers a day later, that’s copaganda. But for our purposes, we’re talking about copaganda as it applies to TV shows. To fully understand the way copaganda alters our perceptions of police, we have to understand the police force itself.
Consider the New York Police Department, which is both one of the largest police forces in the world and one of the most frequent subjects of copaganda. My go-to example to demonstrate the nature of the NYPD is Adrian Schoolcraft. He was an NYPD officer who became concerned about the orders he & his fellow officers were getting. They were told to make unjustified arrests and to enforce quotas, both of which are illegal. When he voiced his concern about this within the NYPD, he started getting harassed. Fortunately, he had recordings of everything. The NYPD responded by breaking into his home, threatening him, and locking him a mental hospital.
Schoolcraft was later vindicated, thanks to his audio recordings, but his case shows exactly what the NYPD is all about — his concerns weren’t just ignored by a single high ranking officer, and it wasn’t just a rogue commander who had him locked up. More than a dozen senior officers, including a Deputy Chief, directly participated in harassing him, all because he had raised some fairly minor internal complaints. And that’s just what the NYPD does to a fellow officer — when it comes to Black civilians, they’re all too happy to shoot first and ask questions never. Just ask Eric Garner or Amadou Diallo. You could write an entire book about the brutality that’s inherent in the NYPD, but I think the point has been made.
Now, am I saying that the New York Police Department doesn’t do any good? Of course not. I’m saying that they are both an oppressive force that brutalizes minorities AND a force that solves & prevents crimes. Those are both fundamental aspects of the NYPD. However, even when they’re just doing the old “protect & serve”, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good guys. Like all police forces, the NYPD exists primarily to protect the social, economic, and racial status quo. Crimes against people of colour, poor people, or LGBT+ people are a much lower priority than crimes against rich white people, or (worst of all) corporations.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Many of us were raised to believe that the police are good guys — they exist to stop people from doing bad things, to catch people who’ve done bad things, and to help us when we’re in trouble. To be confronted with the stark reality of the police is to realize that the invisible shield we’ve always counted on isn’t there, and that the nice, friendly officer on the corner might help us if we need them, but could also be busy beating up someone because their skin was the wrong colour. It’s no wonder that a lot of people recoil from this harsh truth, and choose to believe what they were taught rather than what they’ve seen countless times on every front page.
So if that’s what the NYPD is like, how are they depicted on television? Unfortunately, I don’t watch shows like Law & Order, so let’s use Castle as an example. Castle was a fairly standard police procedural/quirky consultant show, along the lines of Monk or Lucifer. It featured an author who worked alongside the NYPD’s Homicide department to solve murders. While Castle occasionally featured crooked or violent cops, those were rare events — the NYPD itself was almost always shown in a positive light. It was a noble organization that existed to “protect and serve”, and all the regular police characters on the show were unambiguously good guys who only cared about locking up murderers. The NYPD was unquestionably a noble force for good.
Obviously, Castle was way off-base. How did that happen? Where does copaganda come from? First, let’s consider writing. TV shows don’t write themselves, so who does write them? The TV writing business is surprisingly regimented — there are defined titles that almost serve as ranks, with their own pay grades and perks. While entry-level writers are an increasingly diverse group, higher-level writers are overwhelmingly white, a point that Kirk Moore has worked hard to make clear. Similarly, the best way to get a job as a TV writer is to start as an assistant, a job that features low pay and long hours, which is hard to sustain without family money. That means that the people who actually decide what gets written tend to be white & from upper middle class backgrounds — not only were they likely raised to respect the police, they probably haven’t had any negative experiences with them.
Sadly, TV writing is a business, and that means the writers themselves aren’t always the final word. TV shows are made by corporations and sold to other corporations, and they always have a say. Those media corporations tend to frown on negative depictions of the police, no matter how accurate they are. Why? Well, these are giant corporations — the police are, almost by definition, on their side. If a giant group of armed people are protecting your interests, you aren’t going to badmouth them. Even if you decide to go against those interests, you might still be deterred by the prospect of a backlash — the police & their supporters are loud & organized, and they can cause a lot of bad publicity. Finally, even the big corporations have to listen to their customers — in general, they tend to be pretty risk-averse. If you come to an executive with a plan for a show about police brutality, you’re likely to hear “If it were up to me, we’d make it, but I just don’t think it would go over well in Middle America.”
The third leg of copaganda is the police themselves. When you’re watching a police show, odds are that actual police had a hand in it. Either the show was based on a book by a retired cop, or it has a couple of detectives working as consultants, or it uses resources provided by the local force. That allows for a lot of unconscious, unintended bias, but there are also more overt elements of bias that creep in. Consider The Shield, a series that presented a fairly balanced (if over-the-top) look at policing in Los Angeles. Because the main character was corrupt & violent, the series was never allowed to use the words “Los Angeles Police Department” or “LAPD”, lest they be sued for copyright infringement. If they’d decided to paint the LAPD in a more positive light, they would have almost certainly received a lot more co-operation.
Alright, we’ve laid a pretty solid foundation for copaganda, so let’s get to the issue at hand : is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, in fact, copaganda? The answer is surprisingly complex. First, consider how the show depicts the New York Police Department’s top brass — it’s almost uniformly negative. Virtually all of the individual senior officers, Captain Holt excluded, are shown to be incompetent, soulless careerists, malicious, or even outright criminals. The administration as a whole is constantly portrayed as racist, sexist, and homophobic. None of that is background, either. Many of the major story-lines are based entirely on the people in charge of the NYPD being inherently evil.
The rank and file don’t get off much easier. Detective Peralta’s former partner & best friend is revealed to be a crooked cop who frames criminals. Sergeant Terry is racially profiled by a beat cop who then refuses to learn, change, or even admit wrong-doing. An officer in the Ninety-Ninth Precinct steals a fortune worth of drugs & guns from the evidence locker. The entire force, and even the Nine-Nine itself, are repeatedly said to be filled with cops on the payroll of organized crime. The prison guards that Peralta runs into while wrongfully imprisoned are all exceptionally abusive, up to and including the warden.
As far as Brooklyn Nine-Nine is concerned, not every cop in the NYPD is awful, but almost all of the ones who get screen time are, and the institution itself is deeply troubled. Does that exonerate the series? As a fan, I really wish it did, but it’s not even close. See, the show may depict 99% of the NYPD as bad guys, but 99% of the screen time is devoted to the main characters, and they’re depicted as good guys. If you take an eagle-eye view of the show, maybe you come off with the impression that the NYPD is irredeemable, but if you’re watching it for fun rather than academic purposes, almost all of what you see is NYPD detectives solving crimes and helping people. That alone makes Brooklyn Nine-Nine copaganda.
The attitudes of the characters just make things worse. Both they and the show itself are on the same page — they look at the NYPD as flawed, but redeemable. It’s an institution that’s seriously trouble, but worth fighting for. I know that might seem idealistic, but it’s like saying the CIA’s secret prisons should be staffed by a gender-balanced group of torturers. At best, it’s re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There’s a point where idealism becomes harmful.
There’s another troubling element. While the series always depicts the main characters as good guys, that doesn’t mean they always are good guys. In fact, there have been several occasions where they violate a suspect’s rights. That’s somewhat problematic on its own, but what makes it a real issue is that the other characters & the show itself treat these violations as minor mistakes at worst, if they even acknowledge them at all.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to laugh at people doing bad things — hell, I’m a huge fan of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and that’s pretty much all that show is about — but presenting those bad things as acceptable, at a time when society is starting to take them more seriously in real life, is in questionable taste at best.
So where do we go from here? How can Brooklyn Nine-Nine weather this storm? They’ve already scrapped the scripts they’d written for next season, which is an encouraging sign, but what can they replace them with? Some, most notably Marc Bernardin, have suggested that the show should pivot to Firehouse Nine-Nine, taking the exact same characters & dynamic, but moving it to the fire department. They could even pretend that the show was always about a crew of lovably misfit firefighters.
Personally, I think that’s an admirable and creative suggestion, but I disagree with it. That would let the show move forward uninterrupted, but it wouldn’t let them confront the reality of police brutality, or its own history of being copaganda. Instead, I would recommend that they take the bull by the horns — move the team off the police force entirely, and have them work to expose the NYPD’s many crimes. That would let them keep their characters and most of their crime-solving dynamic, while forcing them to deal with the issue head-on. Obviously there are specific ways and plots that could be used, but I don’t want to get too detailed — nothing I could come up with would equal what we’d get from the show’s writing staff, who have always delivered spectacular results.
I sincerely hope that they pull it off. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one of the few ongoing live action sitcoms that I watch, and I know they have it in them to deliver something that’s both funny and morally hard-hitting. Going against the grain & tackling the NYPD won’t be easy, but this may be the best time to do it. Nine Nine!
