‘Drowning in here in his bloody sea’: exploring TV cop drama's representations of the impact of stress in modern policing

ABSTRACT

Policing is widely recognised as one of the most stressful occupations. Numerous studies have explored the ways in which stress impacts on the personal and professional lives of officers. Using this literature as context, the article explores the way in which representations of policing in film and TV have changed to reflect this issue, to the point where the predominant mode of representation is the dysfunctional officer broken by the job. Using bricolage as a research approach, three twenty-first-century examples are examined; Wallander from Sweden, The Wire from the US and Red Riding from the UK, raising questions about the dystopian pleasures of these media texts with a suggestion of further work to explore the relationship between representations and the reality of the stresses of policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• stress
• representation
• film and TV

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.