Hacker Cinema
Cops
1989 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 38 seasons
Created by John Langley, Malcolm Barbour
Follow real-life law enforcement officers from various regions and departments of the United States armed with nothing but with cameras to capture their actions, performing their daily duty to serve and protect the public.
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50 comments on Hacker News
Haha have you never watched COPS? I’ve seen tamer UFC fights than some COPS episodes.
Two interpretations: either it's pure pattern-completion landing on the same trough, or whatever's underneath has a stable shape that the explanation tracks. Both are interesting. The "users don't understand the system" frame doesn't really pick between them.
Go watch an episode of COPS. Humans giving post-hoc explanations of their own behavior do the exact same thing.
I've seen those empathy circles, where liberals care more about people on the fringe of society, and conservatives care more about people in the middle of society (apologies, if I'm butchering the explanation.)
I'm curious, has anyone done schadenfreude circles, where they measure how much people enjoy watching someone else suffer? I mean, of course they have, that's why we have TV shows like Cops and Jerry Springer, right?
I recall an old episode of "COPS" from years ago where they showed an ongoing sting they had where they called people with warrants and told them they'd won a big screen TV and to come down to the warehouse to get it.
>were adamant that your second amendment was there to protect free speech
I've gotten into arguments with people (usually non Americans who tend to have an American tinge to their accents from consuming so much U.S. media) who are very pro 2nd amendment and wish their country had similar.
I always ask "How do you destroy an M1 Abrams or F-35 with a licenced hunting rifle?". They usually say "Well at least they have that" then quickly move the discussion on to something else.
Anyone who's seen an episode of Cops knows how much protection a firearm provides you against law enforcement. Zero.
How would you resolve the issues with the police? The police are not and should not be judges. The man had “child pornography” on his phone, it was reported and the police did their job given the evidence they had.
Watch the TV show COPS to see how many times criminals lie to police officers during an arrest.
It’s unfortunate this man got caught up in this but the police did exactly their job. Commit a crime, have evidence, press charges. Arrest if is procedure.
CSI: $LOCALE, NYPD Blue, Brooklin 99, Law & Order, Homicide: Life in the Streets, COPS, etc are basically "copaganda". This shit goes all the way back to Dragnet and FBI-glorifying movies like The Untouchables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda
> Copaganda, a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, is a phenomenon described by critics of law enforcement in which news media and other social institutions promote celebratory portrayals of police officers with the intent of swaying public opinion for the benefit of police departments and law enforcement...
Movies like Top Gun: Maverick that are made with the cooperation of the DOD should be called what they are: propaganda. When Hollywood makes movies that glorify the military, they are part of the military-industrial complex. When they make movies critical of the military, they are part of capitalism commodifying resistance and selling it to people.
Wealthy people also do less violent crime, and use the many loopholes instead of directly stealing or doing other crime. Even if they get caught, they usually just get summoned to court by mail, and most of them don't need a swat team because they're not violent.
There was an interview with the Cops (tv show) producers, where they asked them why they show mostly black and poor white guys on the show, and not some white collar workers... and they said something along the lines of "get me a middle manager, that'll tear his shirt off and start fighting the police, and we'll record that"... Arrest of rich people usually go along the lines of the rich person saying "i want my lawyer" and pecefully following the police to the station.
RoboCop comes to mind, which is ironic since the movie was obviously a parody. Also, isn't this what reality shows like Cops were about?
There is a large market for morbidity.
The TV show 'COPS' would demonstrate very vividly how insane some people can be and of course they are 'selected clips' - but when they film in Canada ... almost nothing happens.
In LA, there used to be (still are?) news items on the 'Helicoptor following the chase' which, as a Canadian, was dumbfounding to me.
Youtube vides of 2 police arresting a man, 4 hands on him, they're putting on the cuffs and them bam he goes for his gun (!!!) - literally right has 2 officers have him under control, the assailant tries to kill the cops.
Traffic cops have people 'take off' on them far too often.
So combine this with the very real availability of guns, and you have quite dangerous situations.
Again, I would repeat that the cops are still overzealous, but unless you're antagonizing you have little to worry about other than maybe a cop in a bad mood.
It's not populist for people to have to deal with the fact that Americans themselves are statistically poorly behaved when confronting cops.
Americans often see a funny bit of behaviour on the news and think 'Oh, that's so Florida' - but for people outside the US the entire country looks like 'Florida'.
This would be a awesome time for Cops tv show to go get them.
>We don’t need to see the officers’ unblurred faces to confirm that these were successfully extracted from a random eBay purchase
This feels like bootlicking. Officers are legally allowed to be filmed while doing their job. It may not be relevant to the story, but its irrelevant to blur them at all.
>We don’t need to see the exterior shot of someone random person’s house, because that could result in their location being identified and the press mobbing them pointlessly.
Sorry but this too is considered public photography. photos of a persons house exist on google maps and generally across the internet as a whole.
>We do need to see the safe interior shot of someone’s house, that doesn’t reveal any identifying information, since that protects their identity while supporting the story at hand.
Nope, not at all. You generally cannot just film a private home or business, and police filming a home is a pretty shady area for anything but the purportedly advertised use for a bodycam. the TV show COPS learned the hard way that just because the police can enter a home, doesnt mean you get to film it without permission or consent. places like Disneyland and concert halls routinely have legal standing to enforce a restriction on flash photography as it is again, private property.
I'm well aware of the nuance of 'COPS' but those issues don't remotely rise to the need for cancellation. There is quite a lot of 'reality' that comes through even the producers lens, and that's worth something. It's the original 'reality TV'.
And as for 30 Rock: they were obviously not doing 'Blackface' - they were using the notion of Blackface as a comedic device.
'Blackface' is a vaudevillian concept of dressing up as Black people in order to mock them. In 30 Rock, the device was used only by idiotic characters doing stupid and embarrassing things. If anything, they were embellishing the obvious social principle that 'Blackface is bad'.
That people misconstrue 'doing Blackface' with 'mocking Blackface' is quite literally at the heart of the problem of the 'mob mentality' - and that's not even getting into the more complicated issue of whether 'dressing up as someone of possibly another race' is even wrong or immoral in the first place.
And of course, sometimes jokes are a little off - that's comedy and it's ok. In what world do we start banning gags for this reason?
Blackface was obviously wrong 10 years ago and nothing has changed. It's still wrong.
What has changed is the fascism and power of the Twitter mob's ability to deny any kind of context.
Edit: I should add that 'Banning 30 Rock' is not 'catching up with popular interest' - this is misconstruing the opinion of the mob (or your opinion) with the opinion of 'most people'.
Nobody cares about 30 Rocks antics but a few people on the fringes with outsized voices. Network and Ad execs are fearful of said voices - and that's mostly it.
We all live in 'thought bubbles', it's worth walking down the street and looking around, because it's immediately clear that 'most people' are not 'like us'.
If you were to show 100 random episodes of comedy, with a few 30 Rocks sprinkled in, to a 100 Americans, I don't believe a single person would initiate an objection to any of it, let alone 30 Rock.
I'll go further: not even those people who even noticed the cheekiness of the comedy thought to themselves that they ought not to publish it. Not even most of the press writing about it - they're just following the themes and narratives of the hour because that's what they do. It's being pulled because some people (a very small group) are looking for reasons to be outraged and in a hyper-sensitive moment, nobody, but nobody wants to 'disagree' with said outraged person.
> What purpose does interviewing a family whose home got destroyed in a tornado serve?
Fostering empathy, ginning up public support for emergency response. Whereas COPS etc were more effective at ginning up public support for brutal policing.
Also there's a key difference: film crews don't influence tornadoes.
Feels like you either missed the point of some of those specific recent examples, or you're oversimplifying them.
With the show, Cops (Live PD as well), the overriding concern was that the film crew and the process had turned law enforcement work into voyeuristic spectacle, literally profiting off the pain of others (some may believe those people deserve that pain, but that's a separate issue), and possibly even influenced the officers being filmed to engage in their duties differently than they might have otherwise.
Left out, also, is that 30 Rock's "censored" episodes featured blackface, which at this point, the issues with the practice have been covered exhaustively, and large corporations are only now deciding to care as they see public opinion shift, but it wasn't a great idea when they produced those episodes at the time, either.
I find this odd. I grew up in the 90's where there was a television show called COPS. They filmed police officers routinely cashing down and having physical altercations with people.
The difference today is there is no context of what led up to it. Only the act itself which can be spun and edited however anyone likes.
Do police go to far, sometimes yes. Is every encounter where violence occurs to far, probably not. I do agree that when it is too far they need to be held accountable.
"It sounds like your perspective is formed form viewing the TV show "Cops". This is not representative of reality."
That's a poor and unnecessary assumption. Just in the last handful of years there has been a proliferation of good quality bodycam footage that gives unprecedented insight into police encounters. It would be more charitable to ask where the commenter's perspective is coming from.
"Situations where police are able to survive only because they were able to quickdraw and shoot a criminal first like some sort of cowboy are vanishingly rare and possibly purely fantasy."
It sounds like you may be the one who needs some experience watching body cam footage and reading about incidents. Just off the top, here is a quick refutation of your "fantasy" statement (and there are many more like it):
https://www.bitchute.com/video/obyWX8Wojk6l/
> Watch some episodes of actual police incidents.
It sounds like your perspective is formed form viewing the TV show "Cops". This is not representative of reality.
106 police officers died while on duty in 2018 (of all causes, not just violence from public - 55 officers were feloniously killed while 51 died accidentally). 986 citizens were fatally shot by police in the same year.
Situations where police are able to survive only because they were able to quickdraw and shoot a criminal first like some sort of cowboy are vanishingly rare and possibly purely fantasy. Is trading the lives of a few hundred citizens worth saving the 0-2 cops in these rare situations per year?
Call in the cavalry when needed, but most cops do not need to be armed all the time.
Lower violence rates period? Or lower gun violence rates?
Don't violence rates vary quite a bit from country to country?
For example, parts of Central America are terribly violent.
I'm also not saying that TV is the sole contributing cause.
But that, I just wonder if cops are inadvertently affected by growing up watching how cops in TV shows routinely handle cases.
For example, a few months ago in Florida, cops got in a shoot out on a busy freeway and used bystander vehicles for cover.
Many were horrified, suggesting the cops should have let the criminals flee, rather than engaging in a shootout using civilian vehicles as cover.
But, how many TV shows and movies show cops ignoring bystanders.
Could it be that some inexperienced cops inadvertently slip into doing what they've grown up seeing in movies and TV shows?
I can't prove it, but I've just wondered if that's what's happening.
Won't they have to prove in court that the payment was indeed for the purchase of weed and not payment for something legal?
It could be a loan/gift or whatever made to the individual by someone who is not knowledgeable about their criminal behaviour like a cousin or uncle.
I don't live in the US but it seems from what the police say on the tv series cops that all are to be treated as innocents until proven otherwise..
But then again, me and my friends here in Norway has always reworded that to "All blacks are considered guilty until proven white" so it might not really mean anything in practice.
You only need to watch one episode of cops to know people are willing to recklessly endanger the life of innocent people/bystanders just to catch a guy with half a gram of weed.
>How a decades-old reality TV show distorted America's view of policing
This article doesn't even attempt to support its thesis. "COPS" presents a distorted view and does it in shady ways, true, but the article made zero effort to show that it actually had an effect on the opinions of the American public. COPS airs in over thirteen countries including Canada and there's no information or data referencing "America's view" in the article, so the title would be baffling if it weren't exactly the kind of "Criticize Americans to make ourselves feel better" hit piece I expect from Canadian news outlets.
It's a particularly lazy one, too, since I'm fairly sure the claim is in fact correct and it probably wouldn't be difficult to back it up, but they didn't bother.
This is out of an abundance of caution, not necessarily because the law requires it. This explains it: https://www.quora.com/Does-the-Cops-TV-show-need-to-get-signed-releases-from-arrestees
I'm sure the attorneys at Ring have already been through this discussion to decide whether similar actions were warranted, and concluded otherwise.
Also, a big difference between COPS and the instant case is that in the TV shows, law enforcement have already identified the suspect, while here, the suspect is at large. I think it would be difficult to convince a court that you were the intentional target of defamation when the defendant hasn't identified you yet.
>I haven't seen an episode of COPS in almost two decades, when I was a kid, but if I recall correctly, a lot of suspects faces on the show were blurred out so that they wouldn't be identified
Yup. Faces of suspects were often blurred. Victim/witnesses would also have their faces blurred sometimes, I assume they were offered some compensation in exchange for showing their face.
>If others similarly situated could prevail on similar theories, TV shows like "COPS" and the like wouldn't be possible. The fact that they've been successfully running for over 20 years suggests that this is not the case.
I haven't seen an episode of COPS in almost two decades, when I was a kid, but if I recall correctly, a lot of suspects faces on the show were blurred out so that they wouldn't be identified. I don't know if that is because they didn't sign a consent form from the show (or if the show even needed that), or what, but a lot of faces we're definitely censored.
If others similarly situated could prevail on similar theories, TV shows like "COPS" and the like wouldn't be possible. The fact that they've been successfully running for over 20 years suggests that this is not the case.
Second, there's no "false light" if the recording shows the plaintiff plainly performing a criminal act.
Finally, a disclaimer of innocence until proven guilty would likely tend to negate such a defamation claim.
COPS like any TV show blurs people's faces unless they sign a release.
What's the practical difference between a TV show like "COPS" (or any of its various descendants), which features police recordings of its interactions in public with possibly-innocent suspects, and what's happening here? Is it merely the association with a commercial product?
There is a new podcast called Running from Cops. It is about the TV show COPS (the "bad boys, bad boys, what you going to do" theme show)
It goes in to how the show make viewers think there is a lot more crime going on than there actually is. The show producers profit off this
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/missing-richard-simmons/running-from-cops-headlong-season-3
Reminds me of an episode of Cops I once saw where a man beat the shit out of another man for stealing the baloney from his sandwich.
> found the rover is capable of driving around on the titanium support struts
Anyone who has watched enough of the COPS television show could have told ya that you can go quite far on just the rims.
Heck, check out what some normal people do on /r/justrolledintotheshop...
It's miserable and I hate the experience, I have to figure out what I want and I always leave with multiple things I don't need while forgetting multiple things I do need. Also I live in New York so getting the stuff home sucks.
The problem for me is that ordering online is even worse. It fixes the part where I have to lug the bags home and up stairs, but I don't know how to browse for groceries effectively online. At least wandering the aisles is a mentally tractable concept.
So it just all sucks. I mostly settle for listlessly watching episodes of COPS on my Apple TV and ordering one Seamless meal at a time. Oh well.
I don't think its that much of "help their buddies in power by discrediting the protesters." as it is simply more entertainment. I remember someone asking from Cops tv-show maker why there is always African-American suspect and not a crooked banker. Where the guy simply answers if you can get crooked banker to take his shirt of and run down to street cops behind and we will film it.
Thought the same thing when I watched a bit of the Cops tv show, if they had no problem with what was being filmed, what would they do without cameras? (off the top of my head: grabbing by the hair and insulting a drunk who was already in a cell, shoot a guy in the back who was walking with a knife)
I remember as a young (not black) teen I loved that show; there was no moral or social dimension to me. In my early twenties I broke my ankle and ended up diving into daytime TV for a couple of weeks, and it was unwatchable. The same episodes were not harmless fun, it was somewhere between grotesque and absurd.
I think the time has come for a "COPS" show with footage only from bystanders, and which focuses on average citizen-LEO interactions. We need that perspective to be popularized.
> Assuming tasers are effective, do US police forces carry them?
I remember watching the Cops documentary/show [1]. You can see cops regularly using their tasers. Actually, it's amazing to see how easily they may "tase" non violent people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cops_(TV_series)
"Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detectives.html
It may be an unpopular opinion to express, but these "horror stories of TSA incompetence" are somewhat entertaining to those who cannot afford to fly. It's like that "Cops" TV show, on location in the airports of America, with the men and women of law enforcement - the TSA in this case.
Your having LEOs violate your rights and go thru your belongings - for someone thinking your box is a bomb - is no different than a cop stopping a driver for thinking the driver's Coke can is a Budweiser and searching their car.
Most police are not the kind of police you see on COPS. If COPS imitated real life, most of the episode would be spent filling out paperwork or giving citations.
I feel like it's worth distinguishing between reality TV with a consistent cast like Real World, and those without like Cops, which is almost more like a documentary in that sense.
I'm not sure how I'd make the distinction clear though, because stuff like "Ghost Hunters" feels a lot more like the Real World kind, despite being (ostensibly) more like a documentary.
If you answer directly, it should be to say "I only know what my speedometer displays." And then politely decline to mention the number it had been displaying. If you say a number, in the cops eyes, you are either lying or confessing. If you just say "yes", you cut off certain affirmative defenses you could otherwise raise. If you say "no", the cop may charge you with reckless or inattentive driving rather than speeding. There is literally no way to answer that question that can help you, the best you can do is say the thing that hurts you least.
The answer that you should train yourself to give is "I do not consent to searches, seizures, or questioning without the assistance of legal counsel. Am I free to go? If not, why am I being detained?"
The same response covers all police questions in the US. You can repeat the entire thing on subsequent questions, or you can shorten it to "I don't consent to questioning without the assistance of legal counsel." You have to train yourself. Your natural instinct will be to present as nonthreatening and cooperative. You need to be nonthreatening and unimaginably stubborn. If you have ever seen the television show "COPS", very nearly every "guest star" just talks himself right into a trip to jail. Almost every episode is a variation on this:
COP: Sir, can you think of any reason why I should arrest you tonight? Dumb-Assed Suspect: I have drugs in my pocket. COP (to DAS): Put your hands behind your back. [COP handcuffs DAS and performs a search.] COP (to camera): He just gave us reasonable suspicion, so I searched him and found drugs. He's going to jail now.
Don't be that guy. After you give your canned response, one of several things should happen. The cop realizes you're going to be actual work, and releases you with a stern warning, so he can pursue easier marks. The cop realizes that he gets overtime pay for appearing in court to testify, and you might go to trial, so he issues the summons. The cop gets personally offended at your "constitutional bullshit" and actually arrests you on a "contempt of cop" pretext charge, which will vary by jurisdiction. This is a punitive inconvenience for you, but you can then launch a civil suit that will probably pay out, after you consult with a civil rights attorney.
If you have any inkling it might go down the third way, it would be wise to record the entire encounter and make public records requests for any recordings the police may have in their possession as soon as you possibly can. And you should have such an inkling. So record every police encounter, always. If it's a routine encounter, you can always delete the video, but if it goes bad, you can't magic up a recording out of thin air.
We need cops to record video of their interactions with the public, for everybody's protection.
Also, it's not true that if you cooperate cops won't be violent with you, just see some episodes of the tv show "cops", if that's what they do on camera, what do they do off camera?
(from what I remember: hitting and laughing at a drunk while he was already in the cell, bringing down a guy because he had priors, hitting a guy because he looked back when he was told not to etc)
> Should the LEO disclose he's wearing a camera? "Hey, I notice you just fell in the shower and are naked, soaking wet, and in an awkward position. Just FYI... I'm wearing a camera."
All good concerns, but we have to remember that the TV show Cops has been doing this for what? 20 years now?
I assume they have to get releases from everyone to put videos on the show, but they sure aren't getting releases when they walk into a house.
If police-cams are mandated the footage should be put into a case file and only released under court order.
> Honestly, have you never in you life watched a single episode of a police procedural TV show? Even an episode of Cops?
Haha, c'mon. Your supporting evidence is Law & Order?
When there are judges being sent to prison because they themselves were found sending boys to private prisons for money, do you expect people to have confidence in the justice system? Yes, fabulous, the judges were eventually caught. But in the meantime their corruption inflicted serious harm on all involved.
I'm pretty sure you're trolling. I need to believe you are.
There was a serious change in the nature of TV after the late 90's.
Just after TV realized that O.J. Simpson, and Amy Fisher, and Nancy Kerrigan could feed a news cycle for months, if not years, TV lost a lot of charm. It was the popularity of the O.J. Simpson case that spawned the Court TV channel.
Right around the time when the constantly scrolling, but nigh-unreadable news ticker showed up on all of the news channels, TV mutated into this hideous disease that vomited itself into my living room.
Somewhere amidst the election ads and the telephone ads, the Big Pharma ads came along, with Montel Williams and Rikki Lake and Jerry Springer, and then Realty TV exploded for beyond the already intolerable spectacle of MTV's The Real World. Vapid scummy channels like E! spewed forth with shallow, narcissistic tabloid hopelessness. MTV itself devolved into TRL and Britney Spears and then 9/11 and Iraq blew all the gaskets open.
With every celebrity fearing for their pathetic career, at the very premise of disagreeing with a "Wartime President", that very chilling effect of self censorship attenuated all intelligence on TV.
The internet, meanwhile, was uncensored, unfiltered virgin wilderness to explore. Hard core pornography and gore sites were immediately available, and you didn't have to skulk around the adult section of the video store for Faces Of Death or Debbie Does Dallas. You also didn't have to pay extra to get a glipse of tits or hear some curse words on HBO. TV knows this, and has grown even creepier still, in an attempt to compete with the total lack of boundries found on the internet, to the point where it feels disturbingly questionable that Cialis ads are directly juxtaposed with Honey Boo Boo episodes.
The rationale for Court TV finally died about a decade and a half after the O.J. Simpson case, and by then it had transformed itself into a dumping ground for re-runs of To Catch A Predator and COPS, and then rebranded as TRU TV, and now also includes shows about repo men harassing irresponsible poor people.
At these times scales of ten to fifteen years for a complete life cycle of a trend like the one caused by O.J. Simpson, I shudder to think what TV will be like when the 9/11, Iraq War, Fox News trend cycle wraps up. The current trend feels like it still needs about ten more years to fully play itself out.
I wouldn't be sure, I'm pretty sure legal entities are allowed to employ entrapment in a lot of cases. Watch episodes of Cops, for example, they will attempt to buy drugs and arrest the dealer, or attempt to get people to solicit prostitution from an undercover (female) officer.
Basically, people should stick to the law; dealing drugs or soliciting paid sex are both crimes, no matter who you do it to/with.
> How can you be so blind? How can you have this weird view? This is batshit insane and completely mystifying.
:-)
> display size = diagonal [...] works if the aspect ratio is unchanging
I get that.
> It works less well with variant aspect ratios,
I get that too.
> if you explicitly write that some screen is larger than another one while it very obviously isn’t – using the diagonal as a justification – you are just insane. Nothing else.
I'm imagining a movie where the cops bust through the door to a suspect's apartment to find the walls completely papered with newspaper and magazine clippings of ads for televisions and computer monitors ... all oriented diagonally.
One detective deadpans to the other "Well, I think we've found our killer".
> Plus: You are confused about the actual content of the document you linked.
I only claimed that the document contained "an interesting summary of the US Federal Trade Commission 'Picture Tube Rule' (from 1966)" and "discussion of the merits of horizontal vs. diagonal measurements".
I think those are defensible claims.
If we learned anything from the TV show Cops, this is it.
Well duh, the TV show Cops has been filming cops for 20 years.
I agree that the disparity is frightening, but I think that the timespan for this problem is way too short to judge. These cases are popping up frequently in the news, most likely because of the sudden ubiquity of digital cameras. The law needs some time to catch up to this sudden shift. Also, we're not hearing of all the times when people are allowed to film the police, but I have watched many videos of just the Seattle police in the past year with no legal repercussion to the videographers.
I think it's pretty clear that nearly everyone (except the police (except when being glorified on "Cops")) agree that citizens have the right to observe law enforcement. The law is just ambiguous about this filming right now because it wasn't a consideration in the past. Some police officers are abusing this situation, but as more and more of these cases pop up, the law will have to be clarified.