From Hawaii Five-O to Law and Order, police officers on television make a big splash every week.  And it only takes an hour on TV for the good guys to apprehend the bad guys. 

Dr. Jay Baldwin, assistant professor of communication at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, will explore these fictional crime-fighters in the ABAC Lecture Series on Feb. 20 in a speech titled “From Dragnet to Blue Bloods: TV Cops and Why They Matter.”  Open to the public at no charge, the event begins at 7 p.m. in ABAC’s Howard Auditorium.

“All these shows such as Blue Bloods, Law and Order, Hawaii Five-O, NCIS, Chicago P.D., SWAT, and others are known to media scholars as ‘police procedural’ or collectively as ‘procedurals,’” Baldwin said.  “They are a sub-genre of crime dramas. 

“Before 1948, no shows placed special focus on how cops do their job.  Instead, crimes on the shows were solved by private citizens, often unwittingly swept up in criminality themselves.”

During the lecture, Baldwin will treat the “procedurals” as potentially important cultural artifacts capable of revealing shifting notions of crime and criminality, law and order, and justice.

“We’ll discuss the salient cultural shifts and the historical events that influenced those shifts, ultimately tracing the origins of the ‘procedural’ to the training practices of the Los Angeles Police Department after World War II,” Baldwin said.

For more information on the lecture, interested persons can contact Baldwin at [email protected].

Dr. Sandra Giles will complete the 2019-20 ABAC Lecture Series on April 2 when she speaks on “Mr. Pete and the Baldwin Story” in a presentation on former ABAC President Pete Donaldson.