Every time a new crime drama premieres, Hollywood promises “realism.” Streets that look gritty, police who always know best, and neighborhoods that somehow only feel dangerous when Black folks live there. And each time, I watch it like, who told y’all this is us?
Here is the complicated truth: some of the stories these shows pull from are real. Our communities are not imaginary, and our struggles are not scripted fantasies. The problem is what happens when our truth enters a writer’s room that treats Black life as lacking nuance.
Color Of Change’s new report, Normalizing Injustice 2, spells this out clearly. According to the report, crime shows routinely distort policing and overrepresent Black communities as the face of danger. Viewers often accept these portrayals as fact, thereby shifting public understanding of the criminal justice system. It is one thing to tell a story, but it’s another to reshape how the country sees an entire people.
And let’s say this plainly. These distortions are not accidents. Color Of Change found that most crime shows are created, written and produced by white men. The lack of representation behind the scenes directly feeds the level of bias that shows up on screen. The report’s Copaganda Index, which measures how one-sided and police-friendly these shows are, rates programs on a scale that reflects their harm. Some of the worst offenders, including Chicago P.D., Mayor of Kingstown and City on a Hillscored above 100, with the highest scores hitting 200.7.
Paramount Global and NBCUniversal produced most of the shows with the highest scores. According to the report, they created 24 of the 30 worst-ranked shows and 16 of the 17 worst overall. That level of concentration cannot be minimized as a creative coincidence. It feels intentional and deeply rooted in a profit structure that uses fear as currency.
But the heart of this conversation is not whether challenges exist in Black communities. They do, but so do joy, nuance, brilliance and layers that are not shown as often as they should. What matters is who gets to turn those truths into entertainment. The report mentioned above found that shows with people of color as showrunners scored significantly better. Yet across 39 shows with Copaganda scores above 50, there were only two non-white showrunners out of 51 total.
This is why the 2023 film American Fiction felt so on time. Jeffrey Wright’s character watches the industry reward the most extreme and stereotypical portrayals of Black life. The film exposes the same truth the report highlights. The danger is not that hard stories exist. The danger is how capitalism twists those stories until they fuel someone else’s agenda.
Crime TV too often erroneously shapes how people understand justice, policing and Black humanity. These shows influence juries, voters, and everyday assumptions, turning bias into background noise.
If Hollywood intends to continue telling stories about Black communities, it cannot keep doing so without accountability to the people it claims to represent. These narratives require truth, context and a level of cultural honesty that goes beyond spectacle. That means Black creators must be centered as the architects of their own representation. They should be shaping the frame, defining the terms and setting the narrative logic, rather than waiting outside writers’ rooms built to exclude them. Until that shift happens, the industry will continue producing stories that speak about Black life without ever fully seeing it.
