For over a decade, the racial justice organisation ‘Colour of Change’, has led a campaign which called for the cancellation of the long-running TV show ‘Cops’.
Rashad Robinson, president of Colour of Change, has said: “The thing about these shows is that they call themselves reality programming, but they are only from the vision of the police officers,”
“These shows have served as a PR arm for law enforcement.”
Talking to Democracy Now!, Robinson commented on how these shows can influence public perceptions of the police: “You know, the thing about these shows is that they call themselves reality programming, but they are only from the vision of the police officers. And Live PD is a perfect example of how the reality would have been — right? A real reality show would have shown all the ways in which those police officers violated their responsibility. There would have still been footage. But these shows have served as a PR arm for law enforcement.”
Discussing corporate co-operation and campaigners calling to advertisers boycott Facebook, Robsinson said: “I mean, these companies are saying Black lives matter, but all their policies and practices make it clear that they don’t actually think Black lives do matter. We’ve worked and pushed Facebook for the last several years to enact policies around content moderation, around lying, around all the ways of harassment impacts our communities,”
He added: “Facebook has 2.3 billion users. That’s more followers than Christianity. And Mark Zuckerberg is a private person who operates a public square. BlackRock has so many sort of connections to law enforcement in terms of sort of their investments and uses its resources in ways that actually keep the hands on the scale of corporate power, that really prevent Black people from being able to grow our communities in the ways that we should.”
