‘Dragnet’ was straight up LAPD propaganda, on national TV for years
The show created the idea of the American cop, but racial rebellions shattered that image
When we see a cop on TV, we’re seeing the legacy of Dragnet. Everything we think we know about crime and law enforcement — and everything we believe about the police — bears the imprint of the show. It did no less than fashion the idea of modern policing in our cultural imagination. And, as viewers were reminded each week, all of it was true. But what most of us don’t know is that Dragnet was also calculated propaganda: the Los Angeles Police Department did far more than provide technical assistance, essentially co-producing the show.
In the 1950s and 1960s, no television drama so fully saturated American popular culture as Dragnet. What began in 1949 as a radio show ultimately blossomed into a sprawling franchise that included a television series (1951–1959 and 1967–1969); a comic; a movie; pulp novels; and toys and cereal box prizes. Jack Webb, the show’s creator, producer, and lead actor, was profiled in dozens of magazines and newspapers. The clipped, “just the facts” demeanor Webb adopted as protagonist Sergeant Joe Friday became a meme before we knew what memes were and the show’s weekly case file format almost single-handedly laid the foundation for the next 60 years of procedurals.
In 1955, a decade before the Watts riot, 75 percent of American households — nearly 37 million strong — owned at least one television. Dragnet averaged 16.5 million viewers and 6 million radio listeners a week, who all eagerly absorbed the show’s heavy-handed message: police officers were courteous, clear-headed, and efficient, responsible executors of justice. These men only wanted the facts.
But in the summer of 1965, reality intruded on LA’s vision of itself. On Wednesday, August 11, a traffic stop in the South LA neighborhood of Watts quickly escalated as angry residents, tired of years of police brutality, confronted state highway patrolmen, one of whom pulled a rifle on the crowd. A second riot erupted the following evening and into Friday, when a delay in bringing in the California National Guard further destabilized the situation. A wave of arson damaged or destroyed nearly a thousand buildings. When the melee finally ended on Monday, 34 people were dead, most killed by law enforcement. (This included two patrolmen, both killed by their partners accidentally.) There were also 1,032 people injured, and nearly 6,000 National Guardsmen, LAPD officers, and county sheriff’s officers had swarmed the neighborhood. And 3,483 Watts residents were arrested, most on curfew violations.
To everyone except black Angelenos, the uprising came as a total surprise. Just one year earlier, Los Angeles Mayor Samuel Rorty had claimed that his town enjoyed “the best race relations” of any large U.S. city. But there was no shortage of signs. In the two years preceding the riot, Los Angeles patrolmen shot and killed 60 black men, 27 in the back. Dozens of youth protests, skirmishes with police, and civil rights demonstrations rippled through the city in these years. In the summer of 1964, the governor’s office was apprised of growing tensions in South Los Angeles by Assistant Attorney General Howard Jewell, who warned, “soon the ‘long hot summer’ will be upon us. The evidence from L.A. is ominous” — and Chief Parker’s police department was contributing to the problem. And yet many white people, including Angelenos, were shocked by the violence and brutality of the LAPD. It was nothing like they’d seen or heard on Dragnet.
For nearly twenty years, Dragnet had portrayed an efficient, professional, and respectful LAPD. Fictional Sergeant Joe Friday, the cream of the crop, was honest, dogged, and stoic (but, when appropriate, moved by the vicissitudes of the human scene). The show was the result of an extraordinarily close collaboration between Webb and LAPD Chief William H. Parker, who had quickly built a reputation for eliminating corruption and transforming the LAPD into the most professional police force in the country. Dragnet helped conceal the LAPD’s police brutality problem for all but the last year of Parker’s 16-year tenure, when televised images of the Watts riots cracked the facade. But the show he’d helped build also helped restore the LAPD’s reputation. In the aftermath of the uprising, Parker was roundly criticized for having described the rioters as “monkeys in a zoo.” Nevertheless, by the time he died the following year, Dragnet had already been airing in syndication for over a decade on a contract that stretched through the mid-1980s. It was “we just want the facts, ma’am” that stuck.
Dragnet debuted as a radio drama in 1949, given the green light by then-Chief Clemence Horrall in the waning days of his scandal-ridden tenure. Parker wasn’t initially thrilled to inherit the hassle of checking scripts and providing technical advice; he hated Hollywood’s depictions of buffoon-like Keystone Cops. But upon his return from a national law enforcement convention where his colleagues called him “Friday,” he was sold — if Webb would grant him nearly total oversight of the show. Webb promised Parker the last word. Together, they brought Dragnet to television.
The Los Angeles Police Department was deeply involved in every stage of Dragnet’s production, from start to finish. A team of officers culled potential cases, and patrolmen and detectives wrote up their own cases in the hopes of inspiring an episode and pocketing a $100 payment. Parker gave Webb extraordinary access to the department and his officers, including, one magazine suggested, crime scene visits. Scripts, which were studded with real jargon and the names of actual LAPD staff, were submitted to Parker or his surrogates twice, once to check for technical accuracy and once for final approval. In 1953, he ordered Webb to stop using the word “cop,” which he (and J. Edgar Hoover) found disrespectful. For several years, Dragnet was actually filmed inside police headquarters. When the department moved to a new building in 1955, Webb built a $40,000 set that replicated the Police Administration Building down to the doorknobs and even used photographs to recreate the views in every office. Webb always used a genuine LAPD badge — a retired style at first, and then a replica detective’s badge — and, when gunplay was required, a technical adviser brought a service revolver to the set each morning. Webb paid the off-duty officers who were on set during filming and gave six percent of the show’s profits to the LAPD, usually in the form of donations to the police academy and the like.
Dragnet looked like the real deal. It was a huge hit, piled with Emmys and law enforcement awards; some departments used episodes as training films. Webb himself called Dragnet “entertainment with an ulterior motive” that aimed “to get away from the ‘dumb cop’ idea.” Cops loved the notion wholeheartedly. Finally, they were getting the respect they deserved. When the show debuted, recent state and federal investigation uncovered serious brutality and corruption problems in agencies across the country (including the LAPD). But alongside this public criticism, Dragnet offered a powerful alternative view. As one reviewer noted in 1954, “The U.S. completely forgets that it is a nation of incipient cop haters when its eyes are glued on Webb’s show.” The department further blurred the lines between Friday’s world and their own by treating entertainer Webb like an actual cop; one year, Webb interviewed officer candidates on a civilian panel. Such publicity persuaded viewers that there was little difference between Webb’s LAPD and the agency. Children regularly called headquarters asking to speak with Friday.
But accuracy is not truth. From the beginning, the contrast between the show’s depiction and the LAPD’s internal scandals was, to put it mildly, striking. On December 23, 1951, a mob of at least 50 officers, mostly drunk, severely beat seven young Latino men brought into the city jail for booking during an unauthorized Christmas party. The fallout from “Bloody Christmas” led to the first excessive force convictions in department history. The local press covered the scandal extensively. But it received scant attention in the national press, aside from a small handful of wire stories, which were no match for the enormous publicity about Dragnet. The show had made its television debut just nine days earlier. In the pilot, Joe Friday saves City Hall from a disgruntled would-be bomber.
Dragnet’s patrolmen and their politics were unimpeachable. Webb was reportedly “careful not to dramatize too many cases in which the culprits are from the same racial group,” but in reality the LAPD disproportionately targeted people of color. In 1957–1958, the department arrested 1,200 whites for gambling — and 10 times as many blacks. And while fans embraced Webb’s mania for detail approvingly, the LAPD had a far heavier hand than publicity suggested: Chief Parker freely used the show as a platform for his law-and-order doctrine. A 1956 episode reflected his belief that new civil rights were “[making] life easier for criminals.” In 1955, the California Supreme Court overturned a conviction based on an illegal wiretap Parker had personally authorized, declaring illegally obtained evidence inadmissible. Parker immediately took to any venue available to him. Early in the New Year, he testified before a state committee that the Cahan v. California verdict had measurably increased felony crime. On the basis of stats that were, to put it charitably, juked, he insisted, “December 1955 reflected the worst crime experience in the history of Los Angeles.”
One week later, Dragnet parroted his claims. In “The Big Ruling,” also aired as a radio episode months earlier, Friday and his partner bust a major drug ring that sells heroin to young children. When they return to the station, however, the District Attorney breaks the news: the evidence was obtained through an illegal search. In disbelief, Friday asks, “How much more stuff is this guy gonna peddle?” before they can get him on new evidence. The full extent to which Parker shaped the show’s political agenda is unknown. In this case, complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union and the head of the California Democratic Party brought it to light.
By 1965, Chief Parker’s Hollywood vision had made the LAPD the most famous police department in the country. Despite signs of trouble — protesters in the streets, warnings from the city’s black councilmen — the Watts uprising took Dragnet nation by surprise. All of a sudden, or so it seemed, the civil rights crisis was no longer a southern problem, but its impact was felt in cities and towns all across America. And another even longer, even hotter summer was to come. Watts challenged the LAPD’s image. Nonetheless, confidence in the police remained high nationally. A 1967 Gallup poll found that 77 percent of Americans had “a great deal of confidence in the police” — an increase from a 70 percent approval rating prior to the Watts riot in 1965.
Clearly, Joe Friday, still on duty when Webb died in 1982, came out of the battle unscathed. The LAPD gave the actor a funeral with honors typically reserved for officers killed in the line of duty. Chief Daryl Gates — who later presided over the department during the Rodney King era — eulogized Webb as “a partner” who, at least as much as Bill Parker, “helped us become what we are — a professional law enforcement agency.”
