'Dragnet' Was a Lie

Nearly 50 years ago, the NBC show Dragnet, the most influential police procedural ever, broadcast an episode that called for its hero, Sergeant Joe Friday, to debate fictionalized 1960s critics of American-law enforcement. The plot was “designed to educate viewers about policemen in general and the LAPD in particular,” Michael J. Hayde and Harry Morgan write in their history of the show. It aired on September 19, 1968, about three years after the Watts Riots, during a decade when anti-police attitudes were pervading mass culture as never before.