New York (AFP)
The controversial American reality TV series "Cops", which has been on the air for more than 30 years and is a small screen institution in the United States, was deprogrammed by the Paramount Network, in the midst of a protest against police violence.
Paramount Network, a subsidiary of the ViacomCBS group, confirmed to several American media that the program was no longer on the schedule and that it was "not planned to return to it".
Asked by AFP, Paramount Network did not confirm the information.
Since 1989, "Cops" has been assisting the police on the ground, filmed mainly during arrests, most of the time hectic.
The program has been regularly criticized, in particular for exaggerating the scale of crime in the United States.
She was also accused by the Color of Change association of showing arrests of suspects from minorities in proportions that did not correspond to reality.
Under pressure from this campaign, the historic broadcaster of "Cops", the Fox channel, had given up programming it in 2013.
The show was taken up by the small cable channel Spike TV, renamed Paramount Network in 2018.
On Tuesday, the Color of Change association announced that the program had been rescheduled by Paramount Network "after our conversation with them this week," according to an official tweet.
In 2019, the podcast "Running From Cops" painted a vitriolic picture of the series, showing in particular that the police exercised strict control over the content broadcast.
"We found a lot of things that were not constitutional, legal, unethical, and did not meet the rules of policing," commented journalist Dan Taberski, author of the podcast, in an interview with Los Angeles Magazine.
He stated in particular that many of the suspects arrested did not sign a release in full possession of their means and were therefore filmed against their will.
For him, the show had a major influence on the vision that many Americans had of what a "good" policeman was.
The death of George Floyd, seen by many as an illustration of police brutality targeting black people, sparked outrage and protests across the United States and other countries around the world.
© 2020 AFP