Beyond Bad Cops: Urban Warfare Policing and the Emotional Entanglements of The Shield

• In Event: Public Perception and the Crime Genre

Abstract

Criminologists have become increasingly interested in exploring popular representations of crime and social control. While the analytical objectives of such inquiries are various, in this paper we interrogate simplistic representations of "bad" cops that are so pervasive in the contemporary popular imagination. Focusing on the award winning TV program The Shield—a show influenced greatly by the notoriously corrupt Community Resources Against Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit of the LAPD’s Rampart Division—we highlight here how the actions of often brutal and even corrupt characters take place in complex emotional worlds of anger, mistrust, and empathy. Perhaps most strikingly, The Shield illustrates how the warfare imperatives of urban policing practices makes officer brutality and corruption unsurprising and perhaps even expected. In this way, The Shield provides a robust organizational critique of contemporary urban warfare policing practices more broadly.

Authors

• Ben Fleury-Steiner, University of Delaware

• Joshua Page, University of Minnesota