Twenty Years Ago, The Shield Captured the Brokenness of American Policing
No ordinary cop show, The Shield starred the LAPD’s corrupt anti-gang unit, which itself functioned and behaved like a gang. The show vividly captured the failures of American policing that would animate the George Floyd protests 20 years later.
Still from The Shield. (FX)
Americans love cop shows. In fact, about 20 percent of all scripted network TV shows are about law enforcement. And while most of these programs follow the same tired premise of honorable characters doing their best to catch the bad guys while balancing the stressors of family life, there is one cop show that stands out from the rest.
Originally aired in 2002, FX’s The Shield turned the boilerplate cop show on its head. Unlike the prestige television show The Wire, a more pensive and high-brow offering that premiered the same year on HBO, The Shield followed the format of shows like Law & Order and NCIS — except instead of unquestioningly valorizing police work, it centered on Detective Vic Mackey and his corrupt, anti-gang “Strike Team” as they rampaged through the streets of Los Angeles. What made The Shield different from its contemporaries was its explicit focus on the dark side of policing. Throughout the show, Mackey breaks every law on the books, including but not limited to drug dealing, torture, planting evidence, illegal searches and seizures, and murder.
Though twenty years old, the Emmy-winning series shines a light on two facets of modern America that still plague the country today: our punitive and ineffective policing model, and the authoritarian hysteria of the “war on terror.”
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