Television Copaganda: An Account of Police Representation on ABC’s “The Rookie”

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

Police departments and Hollywood producers have long worked together to construct narratives that portray the police in a positive light in an effort to improve police-community relations and increase police legitimacy. To unpack the narratives told in contemporary police dramas, we utilize data gathered from an inductive content analysis of all twenty episodes of season one of ABC’s “The Rookie,” one of the top-rated crime dramas that centers on ordinary patrol officers (both rookies and training officers) in the Los Angeles Police Department. Aligned with previous research on police socialization, we find that “The Rookie” socializes the general public into what Sierra-Arevalo (2021) describes as policing’s “danger imperative.” Threats and violence are highlighted as an everyday reality, thus cultivating inaccurate narratives of policing as inherently dangerous and making it appear that police require expanded power and protections. We provide insight into our initial findings and a discussion of the potential implications of such dramatized crime media.

Authors

• Jordan Grasso, University of California, Irvine

• Kariar Al-Naiem, University of California, Irvine