Cops (TV program)

Cops (stylized in all caps as COPS) is an American documentary television series that is currently in its 38th season. It is produced by Langley Productions and premiered on the Fox network on March 11, 1989. The series, known for chronicling the lives of law enforcement officials, follows police officers and sheriff's deputies, sometimes backed up by state police or other state agencies, during patrol, calls for service, and other police activities including prostitution and narcotic stings, and occasionally the serving of search and arrest warrants at criminal residences. Some episodes have also featured federal agencies. The show's formula follows the cinéma vérité convention, which does not consist of any narration, scripted dialogue, incidental music or added sound effects, depending entirely on the commentary of the officers and on the actions of the people with whom they come into contact, giving the audience a fly on the wall point of view. Each episode typically consists of three self-contained segments which often end with one or more arrests. It is one of the longest-running television shows in the United States and, in May 2011, it became the longest-running show on Fox (since then, its duration has been surpassed by the duration of The Simpsons). It also became the longest running live action series on Fox.…

Cops (stylized in all caps as COPS) is an American documentary television series that is currently in its 38th season. It is produced by Langley Productions and premiered on the Fox network on March 11, 1989. The series, known for chronicling the lives of law enforcement officials, follows police officers and sheriff's deputies, sometimes backed up by state police or other state agencies, during patrol, calls for service, and other police activities including prostitution and narcotic stings, and occasionally the serving of search and arrest warrants at criminal residences. Some episodes have also featured federal agencies. The show's formula follows the cinéma vérité convention, which does not consist of any narration, scripted dialogue, incidental music or added sound effects, depending entirely on the commentary of the officers and on the actions of the people with whom they come into contact, giving the audience a fly on the wall point of view. Each episode typically consists of three self-contained segments which often end with one or more arrests. It is one of the longest-running television shows in the United States and, in May 2011, it became the longest-running show on Fox (since then, its duration has been surpassed by the duration of The Simpsons). It also became the longest running live action series on Fox. When America's Most Wanted was canceled after 23 years, the show's host John Walsh, made numerous appearances on Cops. In 2013, the program moved to Spike (now Paramount Network). In late 2007, during the premiere of its 20th season, episodes of Cops began broadcasting in widescreen, though not in high definition. In June 2020, Paramount Network pulled the show from its schedule in response to George Floyd protests, after the murder of George Floyd by an officer of the Minneapolis Police Department, and announced its cancellation days later. The show remains in production for its international and overseas partners, and began to film anew in Spokane County, Washington, with its sheriff's department in October 2020. In September 2021, it was announced that Fox sibling Fox Nation picked up the show. The 34th season premiered in September 2022. Season 35 premiered on April 7, 2023. Following a three month hiatus, the show returned on October 6. Season 36 would premiere on April 5, 2024 with several episodes featuring beach patrol officers during spring break. Season 37 would premiere on March 7, 2025, initially consisting of 10 special spring break-themed and Las Vegas-themed episodes before airing its first standard episode on October 24, 2025. Season 38 premiered in the summer of 2026. Filming for the upcoming 38th season of Cops got underway by May 2025. ==History== Cops was created by John Langley and Malcolm Barbour, who tried unsuccessfully for several years to get a network to carry the program. When the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike forced networks to find other kinds of programming, the young Fox Television network picked up the low-cost Cops, which had no union writers. The program premiered on the Fox television network on March 11, 1989, following a seven-week test run on six Fox owned-and-operated stations. The program was one of only two remaining first-run prime-time programs airing on Saturday nights on the four major American broadcast television networks (along with CBS's 48 Hours Mystery). Malcolm Barbour left from producing Cops in 1994. For the first 25 seasons, Cops was broadcast by the Fox television network with reruns of earlier seasons syndicated by local television stations and cable networks, including truTV and G4. After Fox canceled the show in May 2013, Spike, which later became known as the Paramount Network, picked it up for an additional five seasons, in addition to reruns of previous seasons. The 30th season premiered on June 17, 2017. On August 21, 2017, Cops celebrated its 1,000th episode with a live special called Cops: Beyond the Bust, hosted by Terry Crews (who plays a police sergeant in the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine), which included historical clips from the run of the program as well as reunions of officers and the suspects that they arrested. The date of the 1,000th episode also marked a shift of episode premieres from Saturdays to Mondays. The show follows officers in 140 different cities in the United States, British Hong Kong, London, and the former Soviet Union. In the wake of the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota under police custody, Paramount Network pulled the series from the air ahead of its season 33 premiere, which was scheduled for June 1, 2020. On June 9, 2020, a network spokesperson announced "Cops is not on the Paramount Network and we don't have any current or future plans for it to return". The episode "Party in a Box" (season 28, episode 20, originally aired December 12, 2015) featured Atlanta Police Department Officer Garrett Rolfe, who in 2020 was charged with the killing of Rayshard Brooks during a driving under the influence investigation. In September 2020, Cops resumed production. The new episodes were being produced for international syndication and to fulfill contracts overseas that had not expired; Langley did not secure a domestic distributor until 2021. Rocket Rights picked up the show for distribution outside the United States in early-2021, with Langley's distribution unit, Langley Television Distribution (as of 2021) handling sales in the United States. On September 13, 2021, it was announced that Fox's sister streaming service Fox Nation had picked up the show. The 33rd season premiered on October 1, 2021. Fox Nation premiered the show's 34th season on September 30, 2022. On July 11, 2025, Cops, which still regularly airs on Fox Nation, aired a new episode on the Paramount Network again titled "Stick and Move". ==Agencies featured== ===Domestic=== In September 1992, reruns of Cops went into broadcast syndication, and like Fox's fellow series The Simpsons, it became a mainstay of the format, with its carriage being led by Fox Television Stations itself, be it Fox stations or those stations which belong to its sister network MyNetworkTV; it was also consistently included on the schedule of The CW's smaller-market chain of local cable channels and broadcast subchannels, The CW Plus. Seasons 7–24 would air on Court TV which eventually rebranded to TruTV in 2008, over the course of its syndicated run from 1998–2014 on the network, seasons 7–24 would be broadcast on the network, in 2014, it was announced the program would be pulled off the air by 2015, due to its syndicated contract expiring, the network decided not to renew the contract and by January 2015, the network would stop airing the syndicated reruns. In the fall of 2013, it mainly began to air on Spike (now Paramount Network) on the cable side as part of that network's agreement to air new episodes, after several years on truTV. Older episodes were picked up by the now defunct Cloo in September 2014, after spending years on the now defunct G4, which was discontinued in December 2014. Local station syndication of the show was prevalent on most Fox stations and affiliates at the time, but as of 2015, older episodes were shifted into Cops Reloaded. WGN America also carried reruns of the regular version. At the start of 2016, the episodes in the now defunct Cloo/G4 package were moved into the Spike/Paramount Network syndicated package when the former G4-Cloo syndication agreement expired, giving that network the rights to the majority of the program. After Viacom's acquisition of Pluto TV in 2019, a 24/7 channel made up of episodes of the series directly programmed under license from Langley Productions was launched. Related to Paramount ending its carriage of Cops in June 2020, it has also relinquished its syndication rights; WGN America, which began to convert to a general news network as NewsNation under new ownership, also decided to stop carrying the show at the end of its existing carriage contract, which happened to terminate by coincidence on June 30, 2020. Disney Media Distribution, which syndicates the FTSP-era episodes under its former name of 20th Television to local television stations, replaced the series for the remainder of the summer with the 2018–19 run of the defunct syndication version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on June 15 (of which an hour of episodes were distributed, as Cops was often paired with Live PD: Police Patrol, which was also pulled from syndication at the same time new episodes of that series were cancelled). Reelz began to carry Reloaded episodes again on September 3, 2021. Reelz also began to carry older episodes of the regular version from seasons 8–17. Since May 2023, Fox Business has also began carrying syndicated reruns of seasons 32, 33. Law & Crime Network carries syndicated broadcasts of Reloaded as of 2023. ===International=== Cops is broadcast in the UK on CBS Drama, CBS Reality and Fox. In Portugal the show is aired on Fox Crime, in Brazil on truTV, in Colombia on truTV, in Australia on Network Ten, 10 Bold (a sub-channel of Network Ten) and Crime + Investigation, in Japan on Fox Crime, in Philippines on C/S 9, in India on Star World and FOX Crime, in Norway on V4, in Sweden Reloaded airs on TV12 while original runs on TV6 and TV10, and in Denmark on Canal 9. In Canada, both the original and Reloaded versions of the program aired on Action (now Adult Swim). BiteTV began airing the program in December 2014 (until its relaunch as Makeful in August 2015), while sibling channel RadX (which re-branded to BBC Earth in January 2017) began airing it on Monday, August 3, 2015. ===Cops 2.0=== An enhanced version of the program branded as Cops 2.0 with live web chats and program facts aired on G4 from May 2007 to 2009. ==Tie-ins== In 1994, Pacific Gameworks created a proposal for a video game project intended for the Atari Jaguar based upon the TV show; however, production of the game never started and it was left unreleased. In 1995, Nova Productions and Atari Games released a LaserDisc arcade game based on the show. The game uses live-action full motion video for graphics and consists of a driving stage and a shooting stage very similar to Mad Dog McCree. In 1999, Cops associate producer and sound mixer Hank Barr published The Jump-Out Boys, a book about the show's production. ==Reception== ===Recognition=== Cops has received four Primetime Emmy nominations, as of May 2017. The website of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences specifically lists four nominations of Cops for Outstanding Informational Series (in 1989, 1990, 1993, and 1994) but ultimately no Emmy awards were awarded to the show. Awards won have included: 1993: the American Television Award for Best Reality-Based Program 2008: American Cinema Editors, USA Eddie (award) for Best Edited Reality Series Other nominations (not resulting in an award) have included: 2016: Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Unstructured Reality Show ===Criticism=== Even though it is popular and long-running, Cops has drawn mixed reviews, and it has also raised ethical questions. ====Positive==== In Season 3 (1991–1992), Alan Bunce of The Christian Science Monitor praised the show as network television's "only true 'cinema verite' series"—declaring it "innocent of re-enactments," and "free of fancy production effects," while remaining "doggedly faithful to its format." Bunce raved about its "honesty of tone" and the show's "commitment" to, in his words, "recording exactly what happens" (nothing more, nothing less)—"an implicit rebuke" to what he called "the excesses and sleight-of-hand" indulged in by most other "reality" shows. "Cops", he said, "is a stickler for authenticity." ====Negative==== In 1999, the Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning, long-time, television critic Howard Rosenberg chastised ride-along reality TV shows (like Cops, which he particularly named), as "uniting" police and media in ride-alongs where each party is "an extension of the other." When invading "private property with their cameras rolling," said Rosenberg, these partnerships' behavior is "appallingly indifferent" to the "fundamental privacy rights" of the people whose homes they invade, and the resulting TV shows depict "social and moral crises" deceptively, "without context"—doing so in "the most narrow, emotional terms" they can. In a 2009 interview, Cops executive producer John Langley admitted that his show is built around a three-segment structure, presenting an "action" piece, an "emotional" piece, and a "thought" piece (an example of the rule of three). Rosenberg further describes such a commercial police–media partnership as exceptionally prone to media corruption—yielding misleading, one-sided perspectives. "The collusion potential is enormous," says Rosenberg, because a so-called "reality" series can choose to air nothing that they fear will put their partners (the police) in a bad light (an embarrassment which, says Rosenberg, would cut off the TV show's access to the ride-alongs, resulting in "no access, no show".) A podcast called Headlong: Running from Cops started in April 2019. Presented by Dan Taberski, it investigates Cops and Live PD, their alleged treatment of participants and whether scenarios are portrayed truthfully. Critics have noted the use of propaganda for cops, or copaganda, in the show Cops. The civil rights group Color of Change began a campaign to cancel Cops in 2013, stating that the show's producers and advertisers had "built a profit model around distorted and dehumanizing portrayals of black Americans and the criminal justice system." Civil rights leader and president of Color of Change Rashad Robinson praised Paramount for cancelling the program, adding that shows such as Cops "that glorify police but will never show the deep level of police violence are not reality, they are P.R. arms for law enforcement. Law enforcement doesn’t need P.R. They need accountability in this country." ===Use of Cops videos by defense attorneys=== Cops videos have been subpoenaed and used by defense attorneys, resulting in the suppression of evidence owing to police misconduct which was revealed in the Cops videos. In 2015, "late at night in a high-crime area," a Fort Myers, Florida police officer—accompanied by a Cops video crew—stopped and frisked a man who was wearing dark clothing and walking in the middle of the street. In an encounter that only lasted 23 seconds, the officer discovered that the suspect (who turned out to be a convicted felon) had a gun, and the suspect was arrested. In subsequent criminal proceedings, in federal district court, the defendant moved to suppress the frisk-acquired gun evidence on the ground that the officer violated the defendant's Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures—arguing that the officer did not have "reasonable suspicion" to frisk him. More specifically, the defendant argued that the officer did not believe, reasonably, that his safety was threatened—nor the safety of others—before conducting the pat-down. The officer countered that the defendant had exhibited suspicious behavior that justified the frisk. Relying heavily on the "indisputable video evidence" that contradicted the officer's testimony on multiple points, the judge agreed with the defense and barred the evidence of the handgun. Further, the judge suggested that the officer may have altered his original report after viewing the Cops video. At least one academic reviewer of the case described it as raising questions about how often such police actions are illegal, but unprovable—describing it as a strong justification for requiring police officers to wear body cameras.

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