Abstract
This chapter examines Weapon Product Placement (WPP), the sponsored use of recognisable branded firearms in screen dramas, with a particular focus on depictions of police gun violence in mainstream police television dramas. By exploring the media theory constructs of priming and the copycat effect, we suggest that depictions of police gun violence, which are overwhelmingly positive, contribute to a widespread misunderstanding of policing and the role of violence within policing. We argue that the valorisation of police gun violence on screen is not harmless. It runs counter to well-established and often-codified obligations on police to use minimum levels of force in all circumstances and helps create unrealistic and undesirable public expectations of how police are armed and go about their work and especially of how critical incidents should be resolved. We suggest that WPP should be banned, or at least better regulated, and that classification schemes should be changed to ensure that depictions of policing conform to the doctrine of minimum force. We also suggest that police agencies use their influence over screen producers to ensure that depictions of policing are framed by the minimum force doctrine. (This chapter expands our examination of WPP in ‘“The Devil’s Right Hand”: Policing, Media and Weapons Product Placement’ (Evans and Farmer. Do police need guns?: Policing and firearms: Past, present and future. Springer, 2021, Chap. 7)).
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Notes
- 1.
This trailer was accessed in February 2022.
- 2.
It is emphasised that these are hypothesised associations; they are offered as a way to approach the analysis of media depictions of police gun violence.
- 3.
This trailer was accessed in November 2021.
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Evans, R., Farmer, C. (2023). ‘Facing Death Gave Him New Life’: On-Screen Police Gun Violence and Weapon Product Placement. In: Farmer, C., Evans, R. (eds) Policing & Firearms. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13013-7_13
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