The camera often lies, or at the very least obscures. That idea is at the heart of “Running From Cops,” the third season of documentarian Dan Taberski’s Headlong podcast. It follows last year’s gorgeous end-times-study-meets-memoir “Surviving Y2K” and 2017’s delirium-catalyzing “Missing Richard Simmons.” It’s also his most journalistically pressing effort, tackling one of America’s thorniest epistemological quandaries: policing and the media.
“Running From Cops,” which was produced at around the same time as “Surviving Y2K,” takes the form of a six-part sociological examination of Cops, the reality-television phenomenon, still going strong, that debuted three decades ago, developed a massive broadcast following, and forged an undeniable legacy. Cops provided viewers with the voyeuristic thrill of a viscerally “real” look into everyday policing, delivering the goods in the…
