2007-04-02 - 11:47 p.m.

‘Is anyone here like me in that they are compelled, obsessed, and drawn beyond their will to watch the show Cops every fuckin' night?’ – Bill Hicks.

Yes, Bill, I am. I have been familiar with Cops since I was a young spark, when the kids at school would imitate the theme song – ‘whatcha gonna do when they come for you?’- and I would curse my parents for not having cable TV. Two decades later and I’m Copping off every night. It’s very strange. It’s a freak show, peep show, horror show, and it’s never less than arresting. I’ve got no right to be watching this procession of human weakness but there it is, every night, these little snippets of gothic porn. Forget David Lynch peering behind the picket fence, Cops is a nocturnal tour through the back alleys and trailer parks that form the rotten core of the apple pie dream, a nocturnal cabaret of the shifty and shirtless up to no-good. They’re all there, the drunks, the droogs, the crunked and junked, the sleazy whores, the queasy snores, the screaming, the bleeding, the shirtless when idle, the scuzzy fucked up toothless TV stars from hell. It’s the violent, defiant, deviant America buried under the bullshit, excavated for me to gawp at. If you’re worried that you might have a drinking ‘problem’, you should see some of the wretched specimens on this parade.

The opening credits are hilarious. While the mock-heroic ‘whatcha gonna do when they come for you?’ theme pumps out, you get clips of the Cops going about their daily business and looking like total dicks. One Cop tries to pick up an enormous snake from a front lawn, only to throw it away when the beast makes it clear that it doesn’t appreciate being manhandled; a driverless car is going round in infinite circles until a Cop runs up to it, smashes the side windscreen and dives in to show that automobile who’s boss; shirtless scoundrels are wrestled to the ground by several Cops – whatcha gonna do now, punk? It’s impossible not to be reminded of the Simpsons’ parody, Bad Cops, with Chief Wiggum throwing his gun at an advancing Egyptian mummy. Except Cops is real, man. All this crazy shit is actually happening, right there in close-up. No presenter, no voice-over, Cops throws you right into the stramash. Editing means that none of the comeuppance-getting ne’rdowells ever pays attention to the camera, enabling the fantasy that you’re really there as these blue-collar dramas unfold. The Cop in the Cop Car says, ‘We’ve got reports of a naked black man covered in blood so we’re gonna check that out.’ Then, there he is! He’s big, black, bloody, bawling, and bare-ass naked. The camera zooms in on his pixelated frame, demonstrating a strange mix of prurience and prudishness. He’s on PCP and he’s punching out a fence. It’s a sunny day and this rampaging looney-coon is barrelling through suburban gardens as a one-man war on conformity. It takes about 16 Cops to bring him down and one of them gets bitten. Holy shit. You can’t justify it but you can sure as hell gawp at it.

They’re not usually naked, but they’re often shirtless. At a conservative guess, I’d say that one out of every two perps that get cuffed’n’stuffed on Cops isn’t wearing a shirt. Maybe the convention of wearing a shirt is akin to the convention of obeying the Man’s laws in the criminal mind. Take your shirt off and you can regress to being a caveman, and fuck you if you don’t like it. I’m drunk as fuck, it’s hot out, and the bitch was asking for it – so what if I’m not wearing a shirt? One such shirtless hooligan was a bald-headed Hells Angel with tats and a badass goatee. He refused to get on the ground despite the Cops yelling and pointing guns at him. ‘I’m not laying in the dirt’ he kept saying, presumably because he’d just washed his tattoos. Sometimes the Cops are just as curiously attired - when it's in one of the muggy states like Florida or California, some of the bicycle Cops sport really gay little hotpants. It must be rather unsettling to be tackled and handcuffed by a burly man in a skimpy uniform. Then there's the time I saw a one-legged Cop chase a drug dealer who suddenly bolted: the hopppy-Coppy was a sweaty mess of effort when he finally caught up with his foe. The cuffed con’ is totally unfazed, and asks his captor, ‘Hey man, how come you breathin’ so hard?’ The Cop just replies, ‘Cos I’m outta shape!’ You don’t get shit like that on the brightly packaged cop dramas.

Sometimes the Cops can be complete shitheels, though. They pick up some scared kid with a joint and start acting like Dirty Harry. It’s embarrassing to see them turning into King Shit of Fuck Mountain just for busting an unlucky teenager who just wants to get high and giggly and won’t pose any sort of threat to society. Just let them smoke, you fucking pig, and if you must go by the book at least try and not look so smug about it, like you’re a hero for ruining their day. This is why I hate the ‘special’ episodes that are based on prostitution stings. They get a cop to pose as a ho, then – ta da! - book the john. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel and it sucks. No violence, either – boooooring... It’s just entrapment, and despite what they say about AIDS, there’s absolutely no reason to be hassling these guys who just want to get laid. My Libertarian hackles rise when I see the time and effort that goes into ensnaring desperate men and women who aren’t hurting anyone and are simply using the market to their advantage: if you don’t want it, don’t buy it, fucker, but let everyone else make their own decisions.

I’d love to continue this, but Cops is on.

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