Remember CHiPS, Adam 12, In the Heat of the Night, Cold Case,The Gentle Touch, Highway Patrol, Longstreet, N.Y.P.D., Dragnet, Police Story?
Now, compare them to modern cop shows: COPS, Flashpoint, Law and Order, The Mentalist, N.C.I.S., Rizzoli and Isles, Blue Bloods.
Do you see the difference I see?
I'm seeing the modern shows having less community connection.
All of the old cop shows relied more on the interaction between the people and the cops. There's lots of interaction between the police and the people in the community and very little is shown of the station and labs. The police listen to the people they talk to, they act on what they hear, and they always seem sympathetic when they have to arrest someone. You rarely see them actually handcuffing anyone. When they read the Miranda Rights, they make a big deal of it and they seek to reassure themselves that the suspect fully understands (although the suspects seem to give up those rights really easily). They try very hard to persuade the suspect to talk, but they don't interrogate or intimidate.
Modern ones rely on the interaction between the employees in the station/lab and focus on the process more than the people being investigated. Modern cop show cops are quick to slap cuffs on people (and it's almost always the wrong one the first 2 or 3 times, and if they'd just listened, they'd have gotten the right one much earlier) and to react strongly and violently at any questioning or resistence. They're really big on interrogation and intimidation. It's very much less kind.
If the script writers are reflecting the current zeitgeist in the shows, then everyone has indeed gotten meaner, and less willing to listen to one another and too quick to act without all the information and so impatient that they'd rather beat the info out than wait for kinder confirmation.
And if the shows reflect society, it's no wonder people perceive police as enemies instead of allies.
I don't know if the attitudes in the shows filtered into society or if society's attitudes affected the shows. What I do know is that the shows perpetuate and reinforce the attitudes and behaviors of people to the police and of the police to the people.
And reality cop shows are scary at how often the police resort to violence - they're being filmed and they don't hesitate to escalate the contact between the police and the people into something violent. The old cop shows spent a lot of time de-escalting events and getting things calm and under control and doing their best to avoid arresting people unless they knew the person had a strong chance of being guilty.
I know the shows are fiction and real police aren't always like that. But then we see news footage and raw video footage of police inciting violence, and I wonder.
I wonder what happened that the police have mostly stopped seeing themselves as part of their community with the role of taking care of the people within it - their neighbors and people they knew by name and started seeing themselves as authoritarians whose purpose is to subdue and control people. In larger cities, police rarely patrol in their own neighborhoods and they often don't know the people with whom they interact.
Even my LE relatives aren't as kind or understanding as they used to be towards non-LE people and their families.
I wonder, if scriptwriters wrote kinder, more concerned police characters that spend more time in their local communities with their neighbors as part of their precincts if that would seep into society and the real police would start emulating the shows.