After days of impassioned demonstrations across the world, Hollywoods propensity for valiant police depictions is facing its own reckoning. The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of white cops have prompted some writers and executives to rethink their roles in mythologizing American law enforcement. The long-running docuseries Cops and its popular cousin Live P.D. were both canceled this week, while the creator of S.W.A.T. and the showrunner for Law & Order: SVU have publicly questioned the genres history. The Brooklyn Nine-Nine cast reportedly donated $100,000 to the National Bail Fund Network. Even the childrens cartoon Paw Patrol got flak .

The degree to which popular culture informs our perceptions of the world may be up for debate, but the ubiquity of entertainment about police is undeniable. Crime series currently comprise more than 60% of prime-time drama programming on the major four networks, and the 1970s, 80s and 90s were famous for turning cops into blockbuster heroes.

Dragnet, which began as a radio program and became a TV hit in 1951, is to blame for some of this phenomenon. Credited with popularizing the police procedural, Jack Webb, the shows creator and star, partnered with the Los Angeles Police Department. Webb granted the LAPD script approval in exchange for story ideas and logistical aid. Negative portrayals of officers were scrubbed , creating the good-cop archetype and advancing rosy ideas about systematic policing. Things only grew more one-note from there, with Clint Eastwood emerging as the avatar of the celebrated rogue cop via 70s films like Dirty Harry and Magnum Force.

Todd Boyd , a professor of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California, has been writing and thinking about this stuff for years. In light of current events, I asked him to reflect on the history of police in entertainment something he sees as generational and likely to change amid the Black Lives Matter movements amplification. By phone this week, we discussed Dragnet, Dirty Harry, Beverly Hills Cop, The Wire and more.

To what degree do you think that peoples attitudes about the world in this case, their attitudes about law enforcement and criminal justice can be directly informed by the entertainment they consume?

I think theres a straight line you can draw from the entertainment people consume to police killing unarmed Black men. The image of the threatening, menacing, violent Black thug, Hollywood gave us that image. Its given that image to us repeatedly for a long period of time.

In so many of these cases involving the cops killing someone, you get a story that Ive heard over and over again. A police officer will say, He was reaching for my gun, which in turn allows them to justify killing someone. Where does that come from? You would have to be a crazy person, if youre unarmed, to go after an armed persons gun. It makes no sense. So when you look at Hollywood movies and you see the threatening, Black, menacing thug, hes like a monster, and I think a lot of people, particularly people who dont spend much time around Black people, believe that. They believe that Black men have extraordinary physicality. I mean, you see that every Sunday when you watch NFL. That plays into it. [They think] Black men can use that physicality even against people who have been trained and have weapons to deal with such a thing. But thats false. Its also based on a very troubling stereotype.

But the police department didnt create these stereotypes. Hollywood did, going as far back as The Birth of a Nation, the film upon which Hollywood is built. The movie is racist propaganda. When you talk about Hollywood and popular culture, it may offer alternatives to these images or it might feed into these images. It kind of depends on what youre looking at and the context around it. But the point is Hollywood has not been innocent in creating and circulating the images that many people come to believe really exist. And thus, when someone is killed in this manner, its not as though youve killed another human being, but youve killed a monster. Its a form of dehumanization that transcends history and, I think, directly relates to police killing Black men.