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The camera often lies, or at the very least obscures.
That idea is at the heart of Running From Cops, the third season of documentarian Dan TaberskisHeadlongpodcast.
It follows last years gorgeous end-times-study-meets-memoir Surviving Y2K and 2017s delirium-catalyzing Missing Richard Simmons.
They watched hundreds of hours ofCopsepisodes to create an analyzable database of televised arrests.
They interviewed onscreen and offscreen protagonists: producers, police officers, people arrested on camera.
They talked to media-studies professors and critics to unpack the shows many complicated layers of meaning.
All this for sketch the complex web of incentives, power, and motivations that fuelCops bizarre existence.
How, exactly, does something like this come to be?
How did it become so influential?
And what has it done to the people its touched?
What Taberski and his team find is unsettling, though perhaps not shocking.
For example, the police forces depicted often have the power to sign off on final edits.
Such a strategy did ultimately bring the shows depiction of criminality more in line with national averages.
But, as Taberski points out, its a wildly inelegant solution.
