I’m Done With Cop Shows—And Every First-Responder Fantasy

Written By Callahan Blackwood

I’m tapping out. Not just on cop shows—on all the first-responder fantasies. The procedurals, the firefighter melodramas, the EMT tear-jerkers. The whole TV industrial complex that trains us to see uniforms as halos. Yes, there are good people in those jobs. And yes, real crises demand real help. But where I live in New York, the day-to-day reality is the opposite of what TV sells: slow, sloppy, performative, and often ethically vacant. The hero myth has become a smokescreen for mediocrity—sometimes worse.

Let’s start with the obvious: TV changes how people think about police. That’s not a vibe; it’s measured. A 2024 survey experiment found that simply watching a short “hero cop” clip moved viewers toward more favorable policing attitudes, especially white viewers—textbook copaganda doing what it says on the tin (paper; PDF; research talk). The industry knows what it’s doing; critics and creators have been screaming about this for years—cop shows sanitize force, flatten victims, and inflate competence while laundering policy failures into hero beats (Vanity Fair; broader explainer on copaganda as a system, via Teen Vogue).

Meanwhile, the numbers don’t support the cape. If we’re going to worship outcomes, then show me outcomes. National violent crime fell in 2024—which is good—but clearance rates still lag the TV fantasy. Even homicide, the most resourced category, only clawed back to around 61% cleared in 2024, after a historic trough in 2021—still not “every case solved by act three” (FBI release; context from CAP; city-level picture via Council on Criminal Justice). If half the murders in America make it past season one without a collar, maybe lose the aviators and focus on, you know, solving crimes.

And that’s just cops. EMS and fire in New York are in a structural crisis, especially upstate. That’s not me “being mean,” that’s the State Comptroller: staffing and funding are “perennial concerns,” the number of active EMS practitioners has fallen, and services are patchworked together with billing and bake sales (NYS Comptroller EMS report). In 2024, the North Shore Ambulance Service in the Tug Hill region shut down abruptly—a symptom of a statewide workforce cliff (Tug Hill Commission issue paper). Local analyses keep warning the same thing—coverage gaps, thin staffing, slower response (see Ulster County’s EMS Services Delivery report and the statewide workforce update summarized by NYC REMSCO and the NY Senate) (Ulster report; NYC REMSCO summary; Senate news). Rural comms are part of it, too—the state’s own task force admits persistent cell-coverage gaps along upstate roadways, which obviously kneecap 911 and coordination (Upstate Cellular Coverage report). If the system can’t hear you and can’t get to you, it can’t save you. Period.

Add the ethics piece. New York had to repeal Civil Rights Law 50-a in 2020 just to pry open police disciplinary records, which had been sealed for decades. That wasn’t a plotline; it was a political knife fight to get basic transparency (NY Assembly transcript of the repeal debate; plain-English explainer from Vox). The same years saw qualified immunity debates hit Albany and the courts—because when accountability is optional, guess what happens to standards? (NYS Bar analysis). None of that tracks with the noble-warrior monologues we get in prime time. It tracks with a workforce that’s learned it can act with swagger, not skill.

Here’s what the shows never sit with: in too many places the pipeline is thin, the training uneven, the incentives perverse, and the culture defensive. The uniform becomes a personality, the mustache becomes a theory of the case, and the wrap-up speech becomes a substitute for competence. That “we’re all imperfect but we try” speech? Great. Try harder.

You want me back? Then earn it off-screen. Fix the hiring and retention crisis in EMS so the ambulance actually comes—and fast. Patch the comms dead zones so rural residents aren’t rolling the dice every time they dial. Post discipline files like it’s normal because it should be. And for the love of all that is not melodrama, raise the bar. I don’t need another cruiser screaming through a backlot at golden hour. I need a system that works at 2:13 p.m. on a Tuesday in upstate New York when someone’s father is pinned in a truck and the clock is eating his life.

Until then, keep the shows. Keep the swelling strings and the slo-mo salutes. Out here, it’s not a season finale. It’s just people who needed help—and got a lecture, a delay, or a shrug.

Sources (selected):

Callahan Blackwood https://burgerinchief.com
Previous

Does America Have a Bright Future? Three Scenarios for 2025–2055

Next

What’s Wrong With Us? A Diagnosis of the Human Condition in the 21st Century