The entire series is a propaganda piece financed by police unions.
- The police are always shown as being right.
- The Police Computer is always right. All arrest warrants really are valid, all stolen cars really are stolen, all expired licenses really have expired.
- Few mistakes by the police are shown.
- No bad (e.g. lazy, incompetent) police officers are ever shown.
- The majority of the civilians that the police encounter are poorly educated, intoxicated, emotionally disturbed, or mentally disturbed.
- To be fair, this one's actually Truth in Television.
- No one ever invokes their right to counsel as soon the police arrive.
- there are probably two reasons for this: first, the right to counsel doesn't really apply until a person has been placed under arrest and Mirandized, or formally charged with a crime. And second, a person shouting "I want a lawyer" the second police show up, while not constituting Probable Cause for arrest, doesn't exactly lend itself to one's presumption of innocence, regardless of the actual status of innocence one may have.
- Police officers from different departments are shown working together professionally without rivalries or contempt for one another.
- Jurisdiction Friction can be exaggerated by fiction. While tensions obviously do exist between different law enforcement departments, they can and do work together more-or-less peacefully on a regular basis (and indeed have to — otherwise, how's the system supposed to function?). The fact that they're on their best behaviour can be explained by the fact that they're being filmed and so probably don't want their friends and families to see them as "that obnoxious asshole".
Since the above portrayals show the police as "heroes" (which they usually ARE) ALL of the time... who would be the primary beneficiary of this unrealistic worldview? Any or all of the police unions that most law enforcement officers in the US are members of.
Conspiracy!!
- Titling this "Fuck Da Police" was rejected as being "too vague."
- It's probably more a matter of the show making a lot of money, and not being much of a show if they can't get any PDs to cooperate.
- Many of these can also be explained by the simple fact that almost anyone, much less a police officer, is likely to try and put forward the best possible version of themselves if they're being followed by someone filming their day-to-day lives, and especially if that footage is going to be shown to millions of people across the world on television. Would you want your friends and family to see you on national television being a lazy, incompetent boob?
- Also supporting this is that they have so much footage, but only so little time. I imagine that the show has to get permission from police departments, and since this isn't an investigative reporting show uncovering bad cops (if anything, I'd compare this to Jackass), odds are that if they showed footage of bad cops, most police stations would probably not allow them to use footage for this sort of thing.
