By and large, romance novels paint men in law enforcement as not just morally good, but also as ideal romantic and sexual partners.
The only time I have been pulled over, I was speeding down Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles trying desperately to clock in for my shift at Trader Joe’s on time. The interaction that followed was fortunately mundane; indeed, I barely remember what either officer looked like or whether I was later able to slink to the employee lockers undetected ten minutes late to work. While I was lucky to be sent on my way with a warning, the potential dangers of a routine traffic stop are certainly not lost on me. Motorists may find being pulled over by the police anything between bothersome and harrowing depending on how they move through the world. Indeed, most seek to avoid the scenario entirely. White romance novelists, however, have turned the experience into a narrative opportunity.
A meet-cute between the romance hero and heroine during a traffic stop is not novel in the genre. A familiar opening scene involves a small-town officer trying to remain stern in the face of an attractive outsider (or sometimes a returnee) to his community. Speeding into town, the romance heroine’s need for speed illustrates her desire to escape her old life—the big city, her ex, her job— and embrace the comforts and security of a homogenous small town whose boundaries are upheld by the law-enforcing hero. The traffic stop as meet-cute is one of the many ways romance novels can function as pernicious forms of copaganda. Take, for example, the titular protagonist in Seana Kelly’s Welcome Home Katie Gallagher, for whom escape is framed as a new beginning. She quits her former life and toxic ex-husband and returns to the small town where she spent summers with her grandmother. In her first run-in with the police chief, she explodes at him for being yet another man trying to tell her what to do. The traffic stop (re) meet-cute allows for Katie to have the freedom to act out her anger—she screams at him, attempts to hit him with her car door, and calls him “whiny” for charging her with resisting arrest—while maintaining the representation of the police officer as the ideal patriarchal figure. He’s attractive and strong without being threatening; he’s firm but understanding. In this scene, Kelly presents Katie’s outburst as empowering. However, the novel’s investment in upholding the positive image of law enforcement undermines its feminist critique of gendered power relations.
Likewise, the protagonists of A.J. Pine’s novella Saved By the Cowboy meet when heroine Olivia barrels into town going 72 in a 50 mph zone while Cash Hawkins, the town sheriff, is on traffic duty in sleepy Oak Bluff, CA. When he pulls her over, Cash remarks to himself that while Olivia’s beauty is distracting, he has a job to do: “He was a man of the law. Rules and regulations. This was all part of the job, which meant he should not let himself get distracted by her teeth grazing her full bottom lip—or the vulnerability he sensed beneath her brash exterior.” Though Cash does eventually arrest and then immediately release Olivia, Pine presents a vision of policing that bends in the favor of attractive white women for whom the patriarchal arms of the state work for or with rather than against.
In her foundational examination of romance readers in the 1980s, Janice Radway articulated how the romance provides white women with the fantasy of being cared for. In the small-town cop romance novel, the care of the female protagonist and of the community are the purview of the same figure. The stories tend to go just like this:
1) Cop meets/saves girl.
2) Girl is charmed by “quirky” locals.
3) Hero and heroine confront their pasts.
4) They live happily ever after in a secure, homogenous enclave as pillars of the community.
Rinse and repeat. By and large, romance novels paint men in law enforcement as not just morally good, but also as ideal romantic and sexual partners. But cop romances, of course, are not limited to beloved small-town sheriffs and deputies.
If the small-town cop curates safety by maintaining the border of the small white utopia, the urban policeman’s grit and toughness protects the heroine as she moves through a world where her safety is presumed to be precarious. Disorderly Conduct, the first in BookTok darling Tessa Bailey’s The Academy series, follows NYPD recruit Charlie and fellow commitment-phobe Ever. When Ever and her best friend/roommate Nina go out to a club, Nina’s ex-boyfriend shows up in a jealous rage and pushes her. Charlie rescues them from the spiraling altercation on the dance floor and follows them home to ensure their safety. Nina’s ex-boyfriend arrives at their apartment before the locksmith can do an emergency job. Charlie is there and able to use his NYPD-honed physique to physically block him from entering the apartment. Disorderly Conduct exemplifies how cop romances both illustrate the very real threat that men can pose, but also cast the right kind of law enforcement figure as the solution to these threats. Framing law enforcement as the honorable protectors of white women amidst the dangers of an urban metropolis is yet another way romance novels engage in copaganda.
Law enforcement heroes, and very occasionally heroines, are prominent across romance’s many subgenres. Historical romances have Bow Street Runners and Pinkertons, fantasy and paranormal have police of manyspecies, and contemporary romance novels make heroes out of everyone from rookies to federal agents. While network police procedurals, reality TV, and local news reporting have received much of the flack for spreading copaganda, romance fiction has yet to engender the same volume of criticism. The reckoning is long overdue.
However, a few recent works in historical romance have fractured the fantasy of law enforcement as the securers of white welfare. Two works in particular—Sarah Maclean’s Knockout and Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good—construct law enforcement as inherently antithetical to the well-being of society’s marginalized. Across her Hell’s Belles series, Maclean demonstrates how violent misogyny is an organized endeavor. In Bombshell, the first book in the series, the four primary protagonists have to fight a violent gang, The Bully Boys, who raid their Black friend Maggie’s bar. The Bully Boys, and the more powerful entities paying them, are targeting spaces like Maggie’s and what they represent: “To be at The Place was to be with Maggie O’Tiernan, owner and proprietress—a Black woman who’d left Ireland for London the moment she was able to build a new life, where she could live freely and embody her authentic self. In doing so, she had built one of London’s most welcoming spaces. Whoever you were, whomever you loved, whatever your journey to yourself, there was a seat for all women at The Place.”
The situation escalates in the third book Knockout, where Maclean illustrates how deeply involved the police are in leveling women-owned businesses and queer spaces like The Place and bombing underground abortion clinics. Police violence and corruption has disproportionately affected people of color since the invention of organized policing; while Maclean does address this by making Maggie Black, her primary aim is to demonstrate how the police are deployed to violently maintain heteropatriarchy.
Similarly, Cat Sebastian illustrates the risks queer people took to craft full lives amidst the threat of police violence and exposure during The Cold War. While We Could Be So Good’s protagonist Nick works on a story for a newspaper, he informs the reader: “He’s used to coping with a certain amount of anxiety always simmering on the back burner—the old familiar fear of cops materializing out of nowhere, like they had that one time. He doesn’t even mind it—the steady hum of fear is a reminder to stay quiet, to keep to himself. It keeps him safe. Except that’s a delusion. He was never going to be safe.” In this scene, a run in with a cop who arrested him in the Navy Yard while cruising when he was eighteen sends Nick into a panicked spiral. At this point, past the novel’s halfway mark, the reader understands how police cruelty and institutionalized homophobia has forced Nick to be hypervigilant and to close himself off from others. This characterization and plotting in Sebastian and Maclean’s recent books demonstrate the real dangers law enforcement pose to marginalized groups like women and queer people.
Historical romance fiction always dramatizes the contemporary concerns the works emerge in. In the wake of Dobbs and the George Floyd protests, these 2023 novels reckon with law enforcement’s role in upholding white supremacist, patriarchal dominance. Black romance writers, like Beverly Jenkins, have long written honest depictions of law enforcement or grappled with the complexity of Black people working within or adjacent to police. Recent work by white writers in historical romance builds on the work of Black novelists and other romance writers of color to further illustrate the threat law enforcement poses to the abilities of many intersecting groups of people to live full lives with loving partnerships.
Copaganda, however, still dwarfs these more honest depictions. As the police continue to commit violent acts with impunity and protect the global far-right, it is long past time for romance novelists to stop laundering their image for them.
Jackie Johnson is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches classes on film and TV. Her writing examines race, gender, media, and genre. If you have a minute, she would love to explain why Beyoncé is actually underrated.