For 20 Years, a Pleasure So Guilty It's Criminal

Langley, now 64, had dropped out of a PhD program at the University of California at Irvine, avoiding the horror of writing a thesis on the philosophy of aesthetics by becoming a documentary filmmaker. In the early '80s, he made a documentary on the drug war called "Cocaine Blues" and in the process he spent a lot of time riding around with cops.

"I found it a very exciting, adrenaline-pumping experience," he says, "and that was the genesis of the idea for 'Cops.' "

In 1988, Steve Chao, then a programming executive at Fox TV, hired Langley to shoot an hour-long pilot for 'Cops.' "It was such an absurd notion," he says on the DVD, "but it had such energy and authenticity that I was willing to bet on it."

In the pilot, Langley's camera crew not only followed the officers through their workdays, it also followed them home. In one domestic scene, a cop tries to watch TV while his wife attempts to get him to, you know, share his feelings. Clutching his remote control in one hand, he looks up at her with a pained expression on his face and says, "I'm watching 'Superman.' " Langley hated the domestic scenes -- "soap opera stuff," he calls it -- and soon jettisoned them in favor of nonstop street action.

When 'Cops' debuted in early 1989, television critics found it exciting but vaguely reprehensible. "On the one hand, it's absolutely captivating, raw and unpredictable, a bubbling boiler of excitement," wrote former Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg. "On the other hand, the camera assumes the disgusting role of hanging judge by prematurely filling the screen with the faces of numerous suspects swept up in drug busts, some of whom may turn out to be innocent."

The New York Times detected a whiff of racism in the show: "The dominant image is hammered home again and again: The overwhelmingly white troops of police are the good guys; the bad guys are overwhelmingly black."

In more than 700 episodes over 20 seasons, "Cops" has muted the question of race by showing plenty of black and Hispanic cops and countless white perps. But the show still makes a lot of people squeamish, particularly the kind of sensitive souls who don't enjoy watching the poor, the uneducated and the addicted chased down, thrown to the ground, handcuffed and hauled off to the hoosegow for crimes that are often pathetically petty.

"It's an uncomfortable subject," says Langley. "You're seeing what goes on in your society. People say they don't like it because they don't like street crime and they don't like drug abuse and they don't like poverty. . . . But I don't invent this stuff. I just record it."

Langley says he'd love to show white-collar crime but that's not what street cops usually encounter. "The Enron boys, what they did was onerous and heinous," he says. "But you're not going to catch those guys on a ride-along with cops."

In the early 1990s, the show's producers requested permission to send a video crew out riding with the D.C. police. Isaac Fulwood Jr., who was then the police chief, turned them down.

"We said no," recalls Fulwood. "For me, police work is real, it's not a TV show. We had almost 500 homicides one year. It was real. . . . If I had to make that decision now, I might let them do it. I don't know. But at that time, there was blood running deep in the city. It was real."

Now retired, Fulwood says he occasionally watches "Cops." "When my wife and I watch it, she's like, 'Oh, my gracious, do the police really do that?' " He laughs. "Sometimes they do."