At that point, the group had been around for two decades, staying together after the untimely 1980 death of their revered lead singer Jacob Miller. That’s the song for the show,'” Langley told EW. “I heard the song and I said, ‘That’s it.

While looking for a theme song, a field producer brought Langley One Way, the new album from reggae group Inner Circle that featured a track about Jamaican wayward youth and the perils of growing up in a dangerous environment.

New York Senate Votes to Overturn 44-Year-Old Law Shielding Police Disciplinary Records 'Cops' TV Series Canceled Amid Police Brutality ProtestsĮnd Police Brutality Against Black People. “It seemed to announce, this is not your regular cop show.” “I was a Bob Marley fan - still am - and I thought it would be very interesting to counterpoint law enforcement with reggae,” Langley told Entertainment Weekly in 2017 about the soundtrack to what would become Cops. He had the basic premise for a follow-up - follow police officers on the job with no narrator or re-enactments - but there were still crucial stylistic details to sort out. A few years earlier, his first foray into the then-nascent genre, American Vice: The Doping of a Nation, had brought live drug arrests to prime time. In 1988, reality-TV producer John Langley was plotting out his next show.

Bad boys bad boys what you gonna do