Originally written for Inequalities: Exploring Causes, Consequences, and Interventions at the University of Leeds, taught by Dr. Daniel Edminston
True crime has exploded into one of the largest genres of reality/non-fiction content. This genre exists as a form of police and white supremacist propaganda, driving narratives of Black guilt and aggression, normalizing rights violations, portraying race issues as flukes rather than systemic inequalities, and defining the police as working class protectors. So too, the fact that this genre is driven and consumed by young (often white) women, these shows or documentaries often rely on the protection of white femininity in order to justify their treatment of detainees. This essay will analyze two documentary series, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer and Time: the Kalief Browder Story, to highlight the ways in which the criminal justice system, through these docuseries, target POC youth, reinforce white supremacy in the system, and manipulate the appearance of bias in policing.
To explore the ways True Crime TV acts as police propaganda, we must first overview some of the key things that make the true crime genre what it is.
At its most basic level, true crime is a form of documentary that gives the accounts of crime, most commonly murder or rape, but also sometimes robbery or other petty crimes. Though it’s too early to fully categorize because of its recent explosion of popularity, Bruzzi (2016) found a couple commonalities within the genre. It can be found across almost every medium—books used to be the most common, but now we’re overwhelmed with choices of TV series, documentary films, biopics, or even podcasts. True crime TV and documentary films, which I’ll be focusing on here, usually include interviews with the police departments that ran the case, some of the friends or families, or even sometimes the perpetrators or the victims, if they’ve survived. Footage is either dramatically recreated or pulled from CCTV or news media in order to tell the story to viewers (Bruzzi, 2016). A breadth of market research finds that most consumers of true crime are women under 50 (Wonder, 2020); with some sources claiming that 85% of their audience is female (Dickson, 2019).
There’s some discussion to explain this largely female audience. Vicary and Fraley (2010) found that women, more than men, choose true crime books, and in particular, choose books that feature female victims, provide methods of survival, and explore the psychology and motives of the perpetrator. This points to women’s interest in true crime as a method of self preservation or skills preparation. Some see this violent content as a method of catharsis for women, who are socialized from birth to fear the world and the things people (men) could do to them if they’re not careful (Moskowitz, 2020). Moskowitz (2020) puts it particularly clearly: “We like it because it confirms that the world is dangerous and bad. But unlike the real world, in which men harass and assault and murder women, true crime can always be switched off.” Kort-Butler and Hartshorn (2011) found that people who watch true crime tended to be less trusting in the criminal justice system compared to people who watched fictional crime dramas. They explain that this is because fictional crime has a clear distinction between good and bad, where justice and the police always prevail. True crime, on the other hand, focuses on context and reality, framing crime as something that can happen to anyone, that the police can’t always save you. To me, this also makes sense with the fact of high female viewership—women already know anyone can be a victim, and that the police can’t save us.
Despite this explosion of viewership and the potential economic value therein, some work has pointed to the possibilities that true crime can be both bad for the victims and the perpetrators of crimes. When true crime shows or movies are created, producers are often forcing the families of victims to relive their most terrible moments, whether or not they participate in the content, since producers aren’t required to have consent from the families to feature their story (Chan 2020). Irwin (2017) shows that true crime shows, which sometimes air before a conviction has been carried out and thus taint public opinion, can often breach perpetrator’s right to a fair trial.
All of this, however, is just the general context in which true crime content exists. I’ll draw on my own experience as an avid true crime viewer, other literature, and an analysis of two prominent true crime docuseries to demonstrate the ways in which true crime targets people of color, upholds systemic white supremacy, and serves as propaganda for the police.
Contrary to the overwhelming Black population within American prisons (making up almost 40% of the incarcerated population [Prisons, 2021], despite only making up about 13% of the general public [Bureau, 2019]), in my experience, the vast majority of criminals featured on true crime shows were white. And though this seems like it would be a plus—breaking the stereotype of Black male violence—it actually seems to do the opposite. By rarely featuring black perpetrators, or even victims, it sets up that crime and those police interactions to be normal and not interesting enough for the public to view. It, somewhat ironically, highlights the fact that most of the imprisoned black population is there due to over sentencing, over policing, and implicit racial bias. As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010) explained within Time: The Kalief Browder Story (2017), the reality is that stories of black imprisonment aren’t special or unusual, what’s unusual is how often they happen unjustly. If a show does feature people of color, it’s usually tied back to stereotypes like gang involvement, or they’re portrayed as containing otherworldly levels of aggression. Instead, shows focus on white men committing acts of violence, placing that population as the only ones worthy of attention.
While the shows mostly focus on white people as their perpetrators, they regularly highlight Black or other officers of color—and almost always do so while on a case that features a person of color as the victim or perpetrator—despite only making up 12.8% of the police force (DataUSA, 2018). This seems to be purposeful in order to make it seem like police forces don’t have any diversity issues or problems with racial bias. Detectives or police officers on true crime shows regularly refer to the idea of being “colorblind” to race, while at the same time trying to diminish their association with the “bad cops” that actually get caught (Dominquez, 2021).
Wrapped up in all of this, true crime also has a few specific methods of serving as propaganda for the police state. Cops are shown within stories as overcoming hurdles and working incredibly hard, even at the detriment of their personal life, in order to protect the communities they serve and love (Kort-Butler and Hartshorn, 2011; Bruzzi, 2016; Dominquez, 2021; Moskowitz, 2020). Cops are the heroes of the true crime story. They’re framed as someone you can and should call for help (Moskowitz, 2020), without a single mention of the constant abuse people of color face while being policed for simply existing in white spaces (Hawkins, 1973; Jenkins et al, 2020). Linnemann’s (2017) description of the culture where, in photos, police show off their “trophy shots” of what they have seized (money, drugs, weapons) or who they have taken on a “perp-walk” can be applied to true crime tv as well—officers and detectives get the most air time so they can describe every detail of their brilliance and the case, “displaying and celebrating everyday domination and death” (Linnemann, 2017, p. 57).
Finally, before getting into the specifics of the series’ I’ll be looking at, I think it’s interesting to examine Netflix’s place in this narrative. Both of these docuseries are available on Netflix and one of them was produced by Netflix. The platform hosts a large selection of other true crime tv and film, with many of the ones they produced becoming international sensations, reaching far beyond the typical female viewership. Netflix also, however, hosts an entire section dedicated to “Black Stories” (also sometimes labeled “Black Lives Matter Collection” or “Black History Month Collection” when applicable). Many of these “Black Stories” are clear and impactful depictions of the issues within the criminal justice system, the prejudice and abuse people of color face on a daily basis, and black history in general. Netflix seems to try very hard to promote an appearance of being a progressive new media company (Smith, 2019), giving voice to people and stories that previously wouldn’t have been heard (Goodfellow, 2014). But at the same time, they fill a large portion of their site with true crime documentaries and TV, making millions in profit for themselves and their shareholders, working against the very documentaries and “Black Stories” they say they support. It’s not unusual for companies to seek profit in every avenue possible, but it does create an interesting irony when they produce a movie like 13th (2016) that documents the history of Black oppression, the school to prison pipeline, and forced inmate labor, and have it advertised right next to their series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer (2021), which blatantly ignores police malpractice and glosses over the racial tensions and context of the time in which its set.
There is and always will be a debate surrounding corporate activism and profit-seeking companies, so there isn’t anything to be solved in this one section of an essay. Instead, I’ll move onto briefly overviewing the plot and details of the Night Stalker (2021) and Time (2017) cases, and then will continue with the specific ways inequalities of race and ethnicity are highlighted in these media pieces.
Plot Lines
Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer (2021) tells the true crime story of two main detectives, Gill Carillo and Paul Skolnick as they try to piece together and solve a series of rapes, murders, and child abductions across the Los Angeles, and later San Francisco, areas over the course of a year. Carillo, a young detective with a childhood spent in and around Mexican gangs, as it’s told, was the first to connect all these crimes to each other and to one main perpetrator; something that his colleagues originally laughed at, since there had never been a serial killer without a specific “type” of victim. It’s only when Skolnick, a seasoned and well-respected detective, jumps on board that the departments believe that it could be one person doing all these crimes, and they can actually begin working the case with a unified front. The docuseries includes interviews with the two main policemen as well as a few others as they become relevant, press who reported on the crimes at the time, as well as victims who survived. Their stories, told as voiceovers to gory photographs of crime scenes and police sketches, provided some of the most shocking details. The “Night Stalker” as he’s later dubbed, ends up being Richard Ramirez, then 25 year old, from El Paso, Texas. The show briefly details his youth being raised by an abusive father, a policeman, and growing up with an older cousin who constantly told him violent stories of his time in the Vietnam war, taking pride in showing polaroids of the Vietnamese people he was instructed to abuse. The series closes with a quick overview of the capture, interrogation, and trial, where Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. He was sentenced to death, but instead died of lymphoma in 2013, after spending over 20 years on death row. (Night Stalker, 2021).
Time: The Kalief Browder Story (2017) takes a different approach to true crime. This series tells the story of Kalief Browder, a Black 16 year old from New York who was accused of stealing a backpack, arrested, and held in one of the toughest prisons in the country for three years because his family couldn’t afford his $3000 bail. Pulling from interviews with the Browder family, others who were incarcerated with him, his lawyers and therapists, celebrities and activists, and Correctional Officers, along with media footage of elected officials who were involved in his case, and media appearances Browder made, the series explains everything that went wrong from Browder’s birth and place into the foster system until his suicide (only two years after his release) and beyond. (Time, 2017). It is true crime, it follows the tradition and format, but in this case, the criminal justice system itself is the perpetrator.
On one hand, these are very different docuseries: set in different decades and parts of the country, with different backgrounds, crimes, sentencing, and results. But they both, one accidentally and one purposefully, paint a picture of a broken and negligent criminal justice system, designed to uphold centuries of white supremacy. Night Stalker plays into this narrative willingly, seemingly designed to celebrate cops and justice served; Time subverts this, and in this essay, acts as a representation of everything that is systemically ignored and overshadowed by the true crime genre.
Analysis
Both these shows exist in a cultural context of police violence against people of color. In the 1980s, Los Angeles was reeling from the crack epidemic and War on Drugs, entire (poor and largely minority) neighborhoods were under surveillance and abuse during the 1984 Olympics, held in Los Angeles, and citizen reports of police brutality increased by 33% (almost all of which went unprosecuted) (Zirin, 2012). This also coincides with decades of abuse within LA County jails, dating back at least to the 1970s and continuing until the mid 2010s with convictions (California, 2016); as well as a swell in gang violence and another active serial killer and rapist, “The Grim Sleeper” who targeted prostitutes and drug addicts and continued his crimes until the early 2000s (Zuppello, 2016). And while Night Stalker (2021) ignores all of this context, only providing one-off mentions of the gang violence or Hollywood’s overshadowing of poor neighborhoods when they give morality to detectives.
Where violence and racial trauma makes us empathize with Carillo, it’s glossed over in favor of portraying Ramirez as evil to his core. Where one police officer jokingly remembers he threatened to beat a reluctant informant in order to get Ramirez’s name, Carillo makes it seem like the only prejudice he ever faced or saw in the criminal justice system was towards him for being a “rookie” detective or for not solving the case faster, “The pressure was on, to stop the mad man that was doing all of this” (Night Stalker, 2021). Carillo’s seasoned partner heightens this sense that the police are one the victims of the story, when he discusses this being the only time in his life where he actually slept with a gun.
Night Stalker also repeatedly overlooks instances of systemic failure on the part of the criminal justice system to protect the citizens of Los Angeles, instead making each set-back seem like random obstacles Carillo has to overcome. Two different police departments, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) and Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), are consistently struggling for the leg up in solving the case, overlooking and sometimes (supposedly accidentally) destroying important evidence (Night Stalker, 2021). However, this is simply seen as something Carillo and LASD has to overcome, since they’re the smaller and less well known department in the area. This portrayal is common in true crime, that the detective is a brilliant underdog that must save the day. Another example is one of Investigation Discovery’s most popular shows, Homicide Hunter (2011), which stars Lieutenant Joe Kenda. It portrays Kenda as an up and coming young detective who uses his natural born skill and then-unusual collegiate background to overcome old detectives who call him “college boy” and think he’s not hard enough for the job. Similarly, while Kenda is lauded for solving almost 400 murders over his 23 years in police work, there’s rarely any mention to the systemic reasons he might be dealing with so many murders in his area (Homicide Hunter, 2011).
Night Stalker and other true crime TV also make it seem like everyone who becomes a cop or detective does so because they want to help their community, or because they’ve grown up with experiences of the police. However, Cunningham and Murphy (2020) found that actually very few students studying criminal justice in University were interested in it because they wanted to help people. They did find that the most common reason people wanted to enter the criminal justice system was because they wanted job security and because they were influenced by their family, however, the latter reason was far more prevalent in white and Hispanic/Latinx, male, students (Cunningham and Murphy, 2020). This suggests that, because of the traumatic history between Black populations and the criminal justice system, African American students are unlikely to have support from their families in this career path, and they’re unlikely to have family members who work in the system.
It’s also likely that there’s some pushback, either implicit or explicit, against Black populations from the system itself. The police and the criminal justice system in the United States originated from Slave Patrols, where patrolmen would be rewarded for returning escaped enslaved people to their enslavers (Waxman, 2017), and has since continued to reinforce white supremacy, even with the introduction of people of color into its ranks (Beliso-De Jesus, 2019; Castle, 2020; Gray 2018; Jones, 1985). Nicholson-Crotty et al (2017) even found that having a higher population of Black cops, particularly when policing Black or other ethnic minority neighborhoods won’t make a difference on police brutality unless the proportion of Black to White officers reaches above 35%, over double what it currently is, and even that’s a minor change. But buy portraying police precincts as open-armed workplaces where everyone is there because they want to help their communities and the most prejudice you might face is for being young, true crime reinforces the feeling that the police are the good guys, and anyone who complains about them are actually criminals—because why would good people do bad things? This, in turn, reinforces the broader culture of white supremacy, in which Black people have the cops called on them for existing in “White Spaces” because they’re seen as criminals from the get-go (Williams and Clarke, 2018; Embrick and Moore, 2020; Jenkins et al 2020).
This surveillance of Black people and culture of white supremacy is something that Time (2017) doesn’t shy away from, something that only highlights the oversights made by other true crime media. While the 1980s in California saw the rise of under-the-radar police brutality and racial bias, New York was ramping up laws that gave police legal rights to detain and often racially profile suspects. It was called “stop-and-frisk”, where officers with “reasonable suspicion” could stop someone on the street, detain them, question them, and search their bodies for weapons. Search was previously illegal without a warrant, but this method gave police the power to search anyone they wanted, and they often abused the already-flimsy concept of reasonable suspicion in order to target poor and minority neighborhoods (and often abused the detainees themselves [Kramer and Remster 2018]) (Ridgeway, 2017; Kramer and Remster, 2018; Goel et al, 2016; Gelman et al, 2007). Time (2017) sets out this as a violation of rights from the beginning, albeit one that was a normal part of poor youth’s lives. Browder, when discussing his original police interaction surrounding the stolen backpack, assumes it’s just “a normal stop-and-frisk” (Time, 2017, episode 1) and that he’d be on his way, something he’d experienced multiple times in his 16 years.
Browder already understood the world he lived in: one where Black people are presumed guilty before everything else (Edwards, 2020; Varner, 2019; Williams and Clarke, 2018; Kumanyika, 2016; Stewart, 2014) and watched since birth, to catch them in the act of making mistakes (Sewell, 2016); one where Black children in particular aren’t allowed to have a childhood, seen, treated, and tried as adults (Goff et al, 2014; Daftary-Kapur and Zottoli, 2014); one where Black children often grow up without their families because of over-policing (Sanden and Wentz, 2017; Weitzer, 2000). Browder knew all of this and reported his experiences with it more clearly within a few sentences than hours upon hours of other true crime is able to do in their purposeful disavowal of the bias and negligence within the criminal justice system.
Time (2017) also makes it obvious how normalized rights violations have become within the criminal justice system, something that even I didn’t notice within other true crime series’ until after I watched this one.
When Browder is taken into custody, he doesn’t truly understand what his rights are. Police regularly pressure people to give statements and be interrogated, often implicating themselves or even being manipulated into giving false confessions. And while technically people are allowed and informed they can leave interrogations at any time if they haven’t yet been arrested, allowed to have a lawyer, and allowed to not speak at all if they choose to, many don’t really believe this when put in the position due to the aura of importance and power the police hold (Tiersma and Solan, 2004; Varner, 2019). This is practically a trope within true crime media, there are entire series’ dedicated to revealing the “shocking details” of interrogations, with others dedicated to exposing the power detectives have in convincing people to give false confessions (The Innocence Files, 2020). In Night Stalker, there are clear instances of forced confessions and forced information, most notably when one cop remembers threatening to punch an informant if they didn’t cooperate (Night Stalker, 2021). There’s also a more subtle culture of assuming guilt based on whether or not you’ll speak to the police, so even though its within a person’s rights to refuse to speak or ask for a lawyer, many people feel uncomfortable doing so because they don’t want to implicate themselves. This is regularly brought up within Homicide Hunter (2011), and is mentioned a few times in Night Stalker (2021), when interviewing a suspect that doesn’t end up being the one they’re looking for, but raises suspicions when he’s unwilling to be interrogated and seems to hide from police.
So too, Browder is repeatedly pressured to take a plea deal—where he would plead guilty to the crime and doesn’t go to court, but often receives a reduced sentence for cooperation—despite there being no evidence against him and him maintaining his innocence. The United States has a right to a fair and speedy trial written into its constitution, however, because of the overwhelming number of people arrested on a daily basis, the vast majority of cases are settled with pleas. This doesn’t seem like such a bad thing—less tax-payer money spent on trials, moving people through the system faster, reduced sentences for offenders—however, the fact is a great number of these pleas happen without informed consent of what it means for the defendant (Daftary-Kapur and Zottoli, 2014; Stewart, 2014; Petersen, 2020). Pleading guilty, while potentially reducing one’s sentence, or, in Browder’s case, getting out on “time served”, impacts a defendant for the rest of their lives: making it more difficult to get jobs, having a stain on their reputation, and sometimes even taking away their right to vote (Edkins and Dervan, 2018).
Finally, a vast majority of the people within the system dealing with Browder’s case refuse to take any responsibility for the abuse he faces. Interviews with Corrections Officers, former lawyers, and even judges, show that they place the blame on the general system, rather than their part in it, or they defer any blame at all, suggesting that Browder shouldn’t have made himself seem suspicious. (Time, 2017).
However, compared to the abuse Browder faces within the prison itself, these injustices seem like minor inconveniences. Browder, because he was tried as an adult (despite being 16 at the time of his arrest, since New York has 16 as the age of responsibility) and because he couldn’t afford his bail, was placed in one of the most notoriously abusive prisons in the country, Rikers Island (Time, 2017; Mooney and Shanahan, 2020; Shanahan, 2018). He was repeatedly beaten by other inmates and his correctional officers, placed in solitary confinement for over two years (which has since been made illegal for juveniles, and is only supposed to be done for up to 14 days in a row [Time, 2017]), often starved, denied mental healthcare even after multiple suicide attempts, and constantly had his trial date delayed, thus subjecting him to even more abuse. And yet, the system didn’t seem to care, even when this abuse was caught on tape. As Browder’s lawyers point out, it seems like the justice system had already decided he was guilty without trial, and was just waiting for him to give in and plead guilty (Time, 2017), which is what many detainees do after spending years in jail, even if they maintain their innocence (Peterson, 2020). In other true crime, including Night Stalker this violence is normalized and even celebrated, positioned as something that the convicted deserve and as just another part of their sentence. When Ramirez is finally caught, it’s done through a public mob and “vigilante justice”, cornering him in a suburb and almost beating him to death before the police can detain him. Police on the case even imply they wish they were allowed to be a part of the mob (Night Stalker, 2021). And though there is no doubt about Ramirez’s guilt, unlike Browder’s, the abuse he faces is still inhumane.
Overall, Time (2017) showcases in great detail the lengths the criminal justice system will go to target young, poor, Black and minority populations
Conclusion
There is a lot of room for the true crime genre to do good, combat stereotypes, and educate the public on their rights and on injustices within the criminal justice system. We see this in the important work of Kalief Browder’s story (Time, 2017), and many other documentaries created by racial and criminal justice activists. However, the genre, as it stands today, regularly creates and reinforces cop propaganda, placing the criminal justice system as the savior of communities, and oppressed communities as the creators of their own bad outcomes. True crime normalizes rights violations, police brutality, the stereotype of Black male aggression and that of Black crime and imprisonment as the norm.
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