Reality-based television and police–citizen encounters

Abstract

Recent theoretical analyses concerning mental illness argue that persons labeled as such are punished first through discourse, subsequently legitimized, knowingly or not, through social effect. In this framework, punishment is an artifact of unconscious and symbolic forces whose structuration can be positionally, relationally and provisionally decoded through careful textual exegeses. Linked to several strains of postmodern inquiry, a number of application studies have examined the varied sociological and criminological contexts in which this phenomenon operates; including the reality construction undertaken by legal and psychiatric decision brokers and tribunals. However, one under-investigated dimension to this critical theory of punishment is found within popular media portrayals, including reality-based television programming. This study explores the intertextual construction and situated meaning of mental illness derived from the acclaimed television show, COPS. By appropriating the methodological tools of discourse analysis, this article describes the richly detailed, constitutive order lurking behind and through one excerpted police–citizen (P–C) encounter. At issue here is the dialogical function of fear and laughter, and the manner in which each uniquely functioned to transform the phenomenon of mental illness into the sign of punishment, expressed through harms of reduction and repression. Several social and justice policy implications stemming from this inquiry also are described.