FOR 20 YEARS, A PLEASURE SO GUILTY IT'S CRIMINAL

Guy gets pulled over by a cop. He steps out of his car. He's wearing a
white T-shirt, bluejeans, a baseball cap and a goofy grin. The cop
asks if he's been drinking.

"A couple of beers," the guy says.

Ah, the old "couple of beers" gambit. In traffic-stop America,
everybody has imbibed only "a couple of beers" -- a couple being
loosely defined as somewhere between two and 387. This cop's not
buying it. Now , he's getting a goofy grin.

"Something leads me to believe narcotics might be involved," the cop
says. "Any guess what it might be?"

"No."

"Have you smoked any pot tonight?" the cop asks.

"No."

So the cop reaches over and plucks out the joint that's tucked behind
the guy's right ear, sticking out from under his baseball cap for all
the world to see.

The guy's goofy grin wilts. "I didn't even know that was there," he
says.

"Amazing how that happens," replies the cop.

It's just one of a thousand magic moments from "Cops," the reality-TV
police show that proves, pretty much every week, that the phrase
"criminal mastermind" is an oxymoron.

"Cops," a pioneer of reality TV, is celebrating its 20th season by
releasing a two-DVD greatest-hits compilation that includes many of
the show's most memorable perps. Like the guy with the joint behind
his ear. And the shirtless midget who tried to flee the cops by
shinnying up a light pole. And the woman who attempts to talk her way
out of getting busted for dope-dealing by calmly explaining that she's
not in that line of work. "I don't sell crack," she says. "I'm a
prostitute."

"Cops" is a show about cops, of course, but the real stars -- the
folks who make "Cops" a guilty pleasure for more than 5 million TV
viewers a week -- are the perps. Even the show's famous theme song, a
catchy reggae number by Inner Circle, is about the perps, not the cops:

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

The cops in "Cops" -- real police officers going about their rounds,
accompanied by a camera crew -- are, generally speaking, friendly,
courteous, kind, cheerful, brave, clean and reverent. The perps are --
not. The alleged perpetrators of various crimes are the kind of folks
who sally forth for a night on the town and end up getting arrested,
handcuffed, shoved into the back of a cop car and hauled off to jail
and then willingly sign a release that permits " Cops " to broadcast
their arrest on national television without paying them so much as a
nickel.

This is not a demographic that tends to overlap much with, say, the
mailing list of the Harvard Business School alumni
association.

The kind of people who end up starring as alleged perpetrators in
"Cops" are generally not folks who wear the latest haute couture.
Perps tend to underdress. In fact, a surprisingly large number of the
perps on "Cops" do not wear shirts. The plethora of shirtless perps
has become a running gag for "Cops" fans. On the 20th-anniversary DVD,
in the part where celebrities offer their learned analysis of the
show, the comedian known as Larry the Cable Guy addresses this issue:
"The more naked the guy is," he says, "the more guilty he is."

But why? Why do so many of the perps on "Cops" choose to eschew
shirts?

"I'll tell you the secret of why so many people are shirtless," says
John Langley, who is the show's founder, creator, mastermind and
executive producer. He's on the phone from Los Angeles and he's eager
to clear up this mystery. "We film most of the shows in the summer
months because street crime is higher in the summer. In the winter,
it's too cold to go out and do street crimes. But when it's hot and
sultry and people are outside in these street crime areas, there are a
lot of people going shirtless. That's the secret."

Now we know.

"Cops" was born during a writers' strike.

"I had been trying to sell 'Cops' for seven years and nobody wanted to
buy it," says Langley. "And then there was a writers' strike in 1988
and suddenly the idea of a show with no writers, no narrator, no
actors and no script seemed more appealing."

Langley, now 64, had dropped out of a PhD program at the University of
California at Irvine, avoiding the horror of writing a thesis on the
philosophy of aesthetics by becoming a documentary filmmaker. In the
early '80s, he made a documentary on the drug war called "Cocaine
Blues" and in the process he spent a lot of time riding around with
cops.

"I found it a very exciting, adrenaline-pumping experience," he says,
"and that was the genesis of the idea for 'Cops.' "

In 1988, Steve Chao, then a programming executive at Fox TV, hired
Langley to shoot an hour-long pilot for 'Cops.' "It was such an absurd
notion," he says on the DVD, "but it had such energy and authenticity
that I was willing to bet on it."

In the pilot, Langley's camera crew not only followed the officers
through their workdays, it also followed them home. In one domestic
scene, a cop tries to watch TV while his wife attempts to get him to,
you know, share his feelings. Clutching his remote control in one
hand, he looks up at her with a pained expression on his face and
says, "I'm watching 'Superman.' " Langley hated the domestic scenes --
"soap opera stuff," he calls it -- and soon jettisoned them in favor
of nonstop street action.

When 'Cops' debuted in early 1989, television critics found it
exciting but vaguely reprehensible. "On the one hand, it's absolutely
captivating, raw and unpredictable, a bubbling boiler of excitement,"
wrote former Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg. "On the other
hand, the camera assumes the disgusting role of hanging judge by
prematurely filling the screen with the faces of numerous suspects
swept up in drug busts, some of whom may turn out to be innocent."

The New York Times detected a whiff of racism in the show: "The
dominant image is hammered home again and again: The overwhelmingly
white troops of police are the good guys; the bad guys are
overwhelmingly black."

In more than 700 episodes over 20 seasons, "Cops" has muted the
question of race by showing plenty of black and Hispanic cops and
countless white perps. But the show still makes a lot of people
squeamish, particularly the kind of sensitive souls who don't enjoy
watching the poor, the uneducated and the addicted chased down, thrown
to the ground, handcuffed and hauled off to the hoosegow for crimes
that are often pathetically petty.

"It's an uncomfortable subject," says Langley. "You're seeing what
goes on in your society. People say they don't like it because they
don't like street crime and they don't like drug abuse and they don't
like poverty. . . . But I don't invent this stuff. I just record it."

Langley says he'd love to show white-collar crime but that's not what
street cops usually encounter. "The Enron boys, what they did was
onerous and heinous," he says. "But you're not going to catch those
guys on a ride-along with cops."

In the early 1990s, the show's producers requested permission to send
a video crew out riding with the D.C. police. Isaac Fulwood Jr., who
was then the police chief, turned them down.

"We said no," recalls Fulwood. "For me, police work is real, it's not
a TV show. We had almost 500 homicides one year. It was real. . . . If
I had to make that decision now, I might let them do it. I don't know.
But at that time, there was blood running deep in the city. It was
real."

Now retired, Fulwood says he occasionally watches "Cops." "When my
wife and I watch it, she's like, 'Oh, my gracious, do the police
really do that?' " He laughs. "Sometimes they do."

Fulwood is ambivalent about "Cops." He believes that the show gives
the public an appreciation of the dangers and difficulties of
policework but he also thinks the cops on "Cops" sometimes look like
they're acting. "I'm not sure when I watch it if the police officers
are not doing some things for the cameras," he says. "They're playing
up the excitement."

He has a suggestion for the producers: "At the end of the show, I
would like them to explain what happened," he says. "If they show a
shooting, I would like them to say, 'The officers involved in this
shooting had to go to a post-trauma program.' Because you don't walk
away from it like it's nothing. That stuff has a impact on you."

A cop knocks on the door of a rundown house in Indianapolis. A guy
with a scraggly beard answers, holding a bottle wrapped in a paper
bag. He takes a swig and invites the cop inside. The cop says he heard
there was a fight in progress. The guy sits in a chair and takes
another swig.

"Put the bottle down," the cop says.

The guy makes a peace sign and takes another swig. He denies that he's
been in a fight. "I didn't bust him in the eye," he says. "He busted
himself in the eye."

The cop gets up and looks around. In the bathroom he finds a guy
washing blood off his face. His nose and his gums are bleeding, one
eye is swollen and he's missing a tooth or two.

"Are your teeth messed up?" the cop asks.

"Well, my teeth are messed up anyhow," the guy says.

"Well, more than normal?" the cop asks.

On and on it goes. The cop ends up busting the guy with the bottle in
the bag, who offers one final attempt at an excuse as he's hauled
away. "I didn't hit him," he says, "and if I did, he deserved it."

It's another funny, sad, pathetic "Cops" moment -- the kind that makes
you feel vaguely guilty for watching or, worse, for laughing. But one
of the unspoken pleasures of watching "Cops" is seeing people who are
uglier and dumber than you are. For decades, until "Cops" ushered in
the era of reality TV, the people you saw on television were
better-looking than you (because they were professional actors) and
better-spoken than you (because they were uttering lines scripted by
professional writers). But "Cops," along with Jerry Springer,
introduced the pleasure of watching people who are so pathetic that
the average TV viewer could feel smug.

"What reality TV did was give us something we could feel superior to,"
says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at
Syracuse University. "You enjoy it in the mode of mockery. You feel
superior to it."

"There's some truth to that," says Langley. "A lot of people like it
for the wrong reasons. They like it because they see people behaving
stupidly, stupid human tricks. You see people at their worst. It might
be schadenfreude or it might just be entertainment."

Whatever it is, "Cops" provides plenty of it. In fact, the producers
are promoting their greatest-hits DVD with a sheet that provides
statistics on the human folly captured on the show in 20 seasons:

Arrests made on "Cops" -- 2,044

Shootings -- 102

Hookers arrested -- 98

Couples caught having sex -- 9

Transvestites featured -- 28 in 12 different cities.

Over the last 20 years, "Cops" has become so familiar a part of
American pop culture that it spawned a parody TV show, Comedy
Central's "Reno 911!," which in turn spawned a movie, "Reno
911!:Miami."

" 'Cops' is what it is and it keeps on delivering," says Thompson.
"It's been going on for 20 years and theoretically it could go on forever."

Meanwhile, Langley reports, more and more perps are eager to sign the
releases that permit their images to be shown on "Cops."

"Twenty years ago, it was harder to get releases," he says. "Now, it's
way over 90 percent of people who sign. We live in a celebrity culture
and people are almost always willing to be on TV -- even if it's
committing a crime."