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Because of numerous recent incidents in which law-enforcement officers were involved in the deaths of citizens who may or may not have been engaging in unlawful activity, there is a renewed focus on cops and law-enforcement practices. The Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), John Crawford (Beavercreek, Ohio), Walter Scott (North Charleston, South Carolina), Tamir Rice (Cleveland, Ohio), and Freddie Gray (Baltimore, Maryland) incidents, as well as many others, provoke discussion about police response and when deadly force is appropriate, given the demands on law enforcement. A quieter but no less important element of that discussion is related to the nation's preconceived notions of cops--who often are the most common public administrator with whom citizens interact--and where those perceptions might originate.
Regardless of perceptions about the role of law-enforcement officers in society, it is readily acknowledged that images of cops are ubiquitous and that those images come from many different sources. Perhaps the first source is the portrayal of those incidents in the news media. Popular culture invariably contributes to those images of law enforcement as well. In particular, narrative forms--including books, television shows, and movies--have an incredible ability to influence the images and perceptions of individuals and society in general about numerous topics (c.f. Holzer and Slater 1995; Lee and Paddock 2001; McCurdy 1995), including law enforcement.
In light of the recent national news stories that have galvanized a debate about the role of law enforcement, this study explored one source of images about law enforcement in society: the motion picture. More specifically, it investigated the image of law enforcement on the silver screen from 1984 through 2014 to determine how cops are depicted, both generally and in terms of specific, individual characters. By exploring the portrayal of cops in film, we can better understand the images of cops in popular culture and where they originate. This understanding then may contribute to the ongoing discussion about society's expectations for law-enforcement officers.
Using a sample of 34 films and more than 200 cop characters, this study found that law enforcement has a mixed depiction; overall, the majority of films show law enforcement as good and bad, competent and incompetent, efficient and inefficient. In terms of individual cop characters, the majority was depicted as young white...