Year: 2026 | Month: February | Volume: 13 | Issue: 2 | Pages: 16-31
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20260203
Hyperreal Policing on Television: Media Logic, Symbolic Closure, and the Construction of Police Authority in Indonesian Reality Cop Shows
Daniel Artasasta Tambunan1, Adrianus E. Meliala2, Supardi Hamid3, Ilham Prisgunanto4
1Doctoral Program, Police Science, Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Kepolisian – PTIK, Indonesia
2Professor of Criminology, Department of Criminology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Indonesia
3Lecturer in Criminology, Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Kepolisian – PTIK, Indonesia
4Lecturer in Communication Sciences, Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Kepolisian – PTIK, Indonesia
Corresponding Author: Daniel Artasasta Tambunan
ABSTRACT
This article analyzes how television reality police show construct hyperreal representations of policing through systematic visual, narrative, and relational strategies. Drawing on a comparative quantitative content analysis of 30 purposively selected episodes, 15 from 86 (NET TV) and 15 from The Police (Trans7), the study examines twelve analytical dimensions of police representation, including visual symbols, operational environments, police image, narrative structure, police actions, police community interaction, public reaction, and displayed punishment. Inter-coder reliability testing using Krippendorff’s Alpha confirms a high level of coding consistency. The findings reveal a consistent and multidimensional pattern in which 86 (NET TV) produces a more intensive, coherent, and symbolically saturated representation of policing across nearly all analytical dimensions, while The Police (Trans7), presents a comparatively restrained and fragmented portrayal. Descriptive comparative results show that 86 (NET TV) emphasizes dramatized police actions, heroic narrative structures, affirmative police community relations, and symbolic closure through the visualization of punishment and public consent. These patterns indicate that policing is represented not as a procedurally complex and uncertain practice, but as a resolutive, morally ordered, and visually legible process. Interpreted through the theoretical lenses of hyperreality (Baudrillard), media representation (Hall), and symbolic capital (Bourdieu), the study argues that reality police television functions as a site for the production of hyperreal policing. Rather than reflecting empirical policing practices, these programs construct a mediated model of policing that reduces procedural ambiguity, dramatizes authority, and normalizes institutional legitimacy through repetitive symbolic reinforcement. While such representations enhance visibility and narrative coherence, they also risk producing symbolic transparency that obscures the structural and procedural complexities of law enforcement. By integrating comparative quantitative content analysis with conceptual synthesis, this article contributes to scholarship on spectacle policing and media–police relations by demonstrating how mainstream television actively participates in the production and normalization of police authority. Methodologically, it advances the use of analytical dimensions and visual synthesis to examine hyperreal institutional representation in mediated contexts.
Keywords: Hyperreal policing; police representation; reality cop show; media logic; spectacle policing
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