After a Hollywood reckoning over long-existing stereotypes of small-screen police, the industry is slowly trying to make a change but is it a genre that should be saved?
There’s a moment of police harassment in the pilot of ABC’s cop drama The Rookie, which premiered in fall 2018, that’s so tangential to the plot you could easily miss it.
Three Mexican gardeners honk at the cruiser of an abrasive training officer, who then berates the gardeners as a “test” of his rookie trainee on her first day. The three mostly mute Mexican men are accessories to this characterization of the tough-guy officer and his flustered trainee, as the effect of the harassment on their lives goes unexplored – until a third season episode from earlier this year, in which the trainee asks the officer to imagine how the gardeners felt about the “terrorizing” encounter that, for them, was not a test. His admission that he “used” the gardeners is a startling example of on-air revision: a main character acknowledging a personal failure that is also the show’s failure to consider that the minority characters – in real life, the policed – were used to positively characterize its police officers.
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