Copping out.

• Author: Oliver, Charles

During a January conference sponsored by National Review, Media Research Center Chairman L. Brent Bozell III said, "Surveys have shown that one in every three cops on television today is the villain. It is devastating that one out of every three policemen is perceived and promoted as an evil person."

For a medium that supposedly hates the police, television continues to produce an awful lot of cop shows. You can turn on network television almost any night of the week and watch detectives relentlessly and painstakingly put together clues on shows such as Law & Order or Homicide. Or you can flip over to an independent station and watch syndicated action shows such as Renegade or the new version of The Untouchables. By my count, there are at least a dozen police shows currently in production. And ABC has added a new series by Stephen Bochco to its fall lineup--NYPD Blue. If they're portraying cops as bad guys, either Hollywood is on a suicide mission or the American people are deeply disillusioned with the police.

In fact, neither is the case. Bozell's statistic may be devastating, but it isn't true. When I asked the Media Research Center where Bozell got that figure, they said that it came from the book Watching America by Robert and Linda Lichter and Stanley Rothman, a survey of television programming from the 1950s to 1986.

But on page 222 of the book, the Lichters and Rothman report, "Only one law enforcer out of seven was portrayed negatively," compared to an average of 23 percent among all the professions whose portrayals they tracked. Two-thirds of the cops were positive, and the rest indeterminate.

And the negative characters included not only "evil" cops but police officers who were vain, or dumb, or supercilious, but not evil. In fact, the Lichters and Rothman tell us, "Most of these [negative portrayals of police] were well-intentioned bumblers whose ineptitude or naivete provided comic results." The example they cite to illustrate this point is a bumbling policeman on The Flying Nun. They continue, "Only 5 percent of the law enforcers in our sample were real evildoers."

The Lichters' organization, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, is updating its survey, which is, after all, seven years old. Research Director Daniel Amundson says, "My gut reaction is that the percentage of negative portrayals is down. In the 1980s, you had shows like Miami Vice that dealt with police intrigue and corruption. Today, the typical show is Law & Order; it's more cops-on-the-beat type of shows. They are less likely to present policemen as villains."

In many ways these current shows seem much like all of the other cop shows that TV has produced. (Many of which themselves live on in syndication or on cable.) But over the years, cop...