What’s the problem with male coppers?
It may have been an accident of scheduling. Or maybe a response to the divisive state of American politics, and politics elsewhere. But my reading and viewing practices for the last few months have led me to an observation – there seems to be a lot of strong female detectives in cop shows lately facing arrogant and awful male colleagues. And to a question: If that’s right (and we’d need to test that), what might the causes be, and what the effects? Let’s consider the evidence, analyze them, and then mull hypotheses.
Evidence
In our household, we watched these shows back-to-back, and in blocks, without much other drama (apart from the US election campaign) between episodes:
“DI Ray” – A sad, stoic detective of South Asian heritage faces discrimination in the police force in Birmingham, in the British Midlands. The male coppers are almost uniformly despicable. Having missed the first season, we watched the second on ITV in Britain. It’s a show with an international audience. Season 2 aired in the US before it reached the screens in its homeland.
“Criminal Record” – Another British cop show, another female detective, this time young and of mixed race. She returns to work after a stress-related leave to find herself battling with a forceful old-school male detective who radiates corruption, but always with plausible deniability. It’s an Apple TV+ production, also destined for a global audience.
“The Wall | La Faille” – The second season of this French-Canadian series carries the title “The Chateau Murders”, now that the “wall” concealing the body of a prostitute in the first season is replaced with a bath full of concrete containing the body of a prominent businessman, high up in the hotel that is an Ottawa landmark. This time the late middle-aged female detective, Céline, is treated disgracefully by her male colleagues, though one young male detective – on leave for stress – helps in the background. Céline also takes him as an occasional lover.
“Den Som Dræber” – This Danish series started in 2011 and changed casting a couple of times, but Seasons 3 and 4 have a young woman police profiler as protagonist. In Season 4, called “Justice: Those Who Kill” in English-language titles, her presence annoys the male senior officers, though one male detective helps. He’s not as sharp witted as she is, but still pretty good, and good enough to fill the gap in her love life. There’s another copper who helps as well, an elderly Swedish male profiler, her mentor, but …
“Ellis” – Here the Detective Chief Inspector, Ellis, is a grisly woman of black Caribbean descent, parachuted by her female superintendent to troubleshoot British police stations with dubious records. We watched the first two episodes, each two hours at a different location. In the first, the male coppers all despise her, and their disdain grows as she – calmly – humiliates them by solving the crime. But one, a slow-witted but well-intentioned young cop, decides to help. Scorned by the men at that station at the end of the first episode, he joins her, doe-eyed, on the next parachute mission, where she – and he – receive a similar lack of welcome. In the third episode, the male local detectives serve under a woman officer. The men make the mistakes. Their boss thinks she’ll bear the consequences. Ellis offers her mentorship.
All five shows are entertaining, with their own individual virtues, to which we may return in time. But by viewing them in succession, I wondered whether they represent a new-ish subset of the detective genre at work, and perhaps even a genre of its own, one that employs the heuristic that women police are good, and male coppers are either slow(er)-witted or downright nasty.
During this time, I also read a crime novel. It was written by Nick Louth, an old colleague during our days in journalism. He has published about twenty or so books already, and his sales now exceed a million copies. I’ve read several. I’m jealous.
Twelve of them form a series of detective novels with a male protagonist. But recently he started a new series, this time with a female lead detective, who – following the heuristics of the subgenre – is something of an outsider.
In the first of these, The Two Deaths of Ruth Lyle, the inspector, Jan Talantire, solves a new murder that leads to the solution for another fifteen years earlier, an investigation the male detectives had messed up. It’s a story with a few ingenious twists of plot and enjoyable descriptions of setting. Worth the time I spent reading it. The male police in the story weren’t all jerks, but the outline of the story shared something with the various TV series.
So, what does this mean?
Analysis
What might have caused this subgenre – if indeed it is one – to emerge? What might its effects be? And might cause-and-effect be a self-reinforcing system? With what consequences?
I don’t have answers for any of these. The evidence is too fragmentary, coincidental or perhaps merely accidental. It’s a weak sample, subject to what we call “researcher bias,” not least my recent and enduring preferences for types of fiction. Moreover, it’s a small selection of what the vendors make available and what we hadn’t already watched or read. Male detectives have dominated the crime genre for more than a century, so it’s time women get a shot. And there are – even now – plenty of male-led detective shows around. In sum, this sample can’t pretend to be representative of anything larger. One form of justice that emerges from this subgenre is giving women a fairer share of the protagonists available.
Still, asking questions might lead us somewhere. Let’s add a bit of social context, from the market for fiction, the alternative forms of entertainment, the effects of technology, and their effects on human interaction.
We’ve witnessed falling attention to reading, especially among men and particularly for fiction (Taylor, 2019).
We know that social media absorb much of the leisure time of everyone, and that social media usage is associated with loneliness (Bonsaksen et al., 2023; Hunt, Marx, Lipson, & Young, 2018).
We know, too, that one form of that – online gaming – is both an alternative form of fiction and male-dominated (Kirkpatrick, 2017); and …
… that it can be addictive, especially for young adults (Genc, Nur Çakmak, Çiftçi, & Meryem Hocaoğlu, 2024).
These elements point to a change in the market for fiction in written and visual forms, with women making up by far the biggest audience for novels and possibly for long-format visual storytelling.
Then there are other social forces at work. While women generally experience loneliness more often than men (Pagan, 2020), the results aren’t entirely clear (Maes, Qualter, Vanhalst, Van den Noortgate, & Goossens, 2019). Male loneliness may be growing. A headline in The Economist mooted a theory of “Why men are lonelier in America than elsewhere”. The article continued:
America also has one of the highest divorce rates; men may be more likely to lose mutual friends after a split. A strong work ethic and geographical mobility (meaning friendships are liable to be lost or weakened as people relocate) is likely to exacerbate the problem.
And the United States remains the largest market for fiction.
This article appeared early in 2022, shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine. Two and a half years on, and in the final stages of the 2024 US presidential election campaign, Donald Trump gathered growing support across the country among young men of all ethnicities, contributing to his re-election against a female rival, and to the surprise of many pollsters: young, lonely men, addicted to shoot-’em-up gaming fantasies?
Hypotheses
My hunch about the causes – the hypotheses someone might wish to research – is that detective fiction decades ago commanded the attention of male audiences as well as female (think: CSI, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and further back, The Rockford Files). Then female detectives started to gain attention (think: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit). Market forces gradually reinforced the writers’ shift of focus toward female protagonists and producers’ and editors’ attention to female writers. Those could be possible causes and point us to possible feedback loops that may accentuate the outcomes.
To create novelty in what might otherwise be cookie-cutter storytelling, the base conditions become more extreme, the crimes weirder, and the relationships among the police themselves ever more strained. Characters become caricatures, and increasingly so in a market thirsty for excitement and an industry thus in need of new scripts. As female detectives cease to be a source of novelty, the easy, maybe the lazy route is to heighten any conflict at the station by exaggerating female-male tension inside the police force. Male audiences retreat further from conventional storytelling. Lessons from fiction about human understanding fade, replaced by gender polarization.
As for the effects, my hunches are even less well grounded:
Might development of this subgenre be associated with greater loneliness, particularly among males, or even contribute to it?
Might we see a loss of the empathy that fiction is sometimes thought to develop (Kidd & Castano, 2017; Oatley, 2016; Rezende & Shigaeff, 2023), especially among men?
Might that loss be made greater if complex characterization takes a back seat to plot-driven stories (Nordberg, 2021)?
Perhaps someone might investigate further the possible effects on social cohesion and ways to mitigate the effects – if any – that these speculations raise.
Based on this (weak) sample and these (biased) observations, I’d suggest this:
Of the sample, “Den Som Dræber” best avoided the knee-jerks of the subgenre, doing a better job of keeping open the paths to empathy among the characters as well as between them and the audience. It also deserves the “pre-title” it carried – “Justice” – and in more senses than one. You’ll have to watch the show to see why.
“Criminal Record” has ambiguities in its most sinister characterizations that command and reward the attention of male and female audiences alike.
But that’s from the perspective of an audience of one. One male, who is also subject to researcher bias. And one not representative of the (probably dominantly female) market or of the larger (evenly balanced) population.
Conclusion
Do such dramas contribute to the polarization in society, or just reflect it? Are they a cause or an effect – or part of a self-reinforcing system? Are writers part of the solution, or part of the problem? It’s too soon to draw conclusions. More research needed. More thinking required.
Bonsaksen, T., Ruffolo, M., Price, D., Leung, J., Thygesen, H., Lamph, G., . . . Geirdal, A. Ø. (2023). Associations between social media use and loneliness in a cross-national population: do motives for social media use matter? Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine, 11(1), 2158089. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/21642850.2022.2158089
Genc, E., Nur Çakmak, F., Çiftçi, H., & Meryem Hocaoğlu, Z. (2024). “Fiction is the reality”: A qualitative study on digital game addiction and reality perception in young adults. Children and Youth Services Review, 157, 107445. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2024.107445
Hunt, M. G., Marx, R., Lipson, C., & Young, J. (2018). No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression. Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751-768. doi:https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
Kidd, D., & Castano, E. (2017). Different stories: How levels of familiarity with literary and genre fiction relate to mentalizing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(4), 474-486. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000069
Kirkpatrick, G. (2017). How gaming became sexist: a study of UK gaming magazines 1981–1995. Media, Culture & Society, 39(4), 453-468. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716646177
Maes, M., Qualter, P., Vanhalst, J., Van den Noortgate, W., & Goossens, L. (2019). Gender Differences in Loneliness across the Lifespan: A Meta–Analysis. European Journal of Personality, 33(6), 642-654. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2220
Nordberg, D. (2021). Category Choice in Creative Writing. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 18(3), 330-345. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2020.1855200
Oatley, K. (2016). Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(8), 618-628. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.06.002
Pagan, R. (2020). Gender and Age Differences in Loneliness: Evidence for People without and with Disabilities. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(24), 9176. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249176
Rezende, J. F., & Shigaeff, N. (2023). The effects of reading and watching fiction on the development of social cognition: a systematic review. Dementia & neuropsychologia, 17. doi:https://doi.org/10.1590/1980-5764-DN-2023-0066
Taylor, H. (2019). Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.