The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office will be featured on the 38th season of “Cops,” the television series, and filming for the show started last week.
“This gives people the opportunity to kind of do a ride-along and not be in the ride-along,” Hamilton County Sheriff Austin Garrett said of the show. “I want them to highlight and showcase the work that the men and women of the Sheriff’s Office are doing 24 hours a day, seven days a week across this county.”
This is not the first time the show has featured Hamilton County. Camera crews followed deputies around in 2018 and 2020 as well, Garrett said. The show also featured the Chattanooga Police Department in the early 2000s, said Sgt. Victor Miller, spokesperson for the department.
“Cops” is a docu-series by Langley Productions that follows on-duty officers while they are patrolling in jurisdictions across the country. The show now airs on Fox Nation. Garrett said the production company reached out to the Sheriff’s Office inquiring about coming back.
“I believe it’s due to the incredible work the men and women of the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office do,” Garrett said. “I don’t think they would have reached out wanting to come back if they hadn’t had success here before, and I believe they’re going to have even more success now with their latest filming.”
The camera crews will be riding with select patrol deputies and deputies in the strategic enforcement unit, composed of patrol deputies and some school resource deputies, that works crime hot spots in the summer.
The deputies were selected by captains and lieutenants, Garrett said. He said he avoids being involved in the show because he wants the crew to showcase work that the deputies are doing day in and day out.
“Not to say that I won’t, this time, if they happen to catch me out conducting traffic stops, because I’m a working sheriff,” Garrett said. “There is the likelihood that I’m going to be involved in an incident they’ll capture, but I intentionally don’t seek out or try to talk to them or be involved in the ride-along.”
The agency signed an agreement with the production company that says the film activity will take place from May 28 to July 19.
Garrett said there is no money exchanged between the production company and the agency. The only exchange involved is the signing of the agreement, which lays out liability insurance, consent and the agency’s right to review rough cuts of episodes before they are put online.
For each episode that Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputies will be featured in, the production company will send the rough cut of the episode to the agency 20 days before the episode airs, and the agency has the opportunity to review each segment and request removal or revision of any portion of the segment for any reason, and the production company must abide.
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The agreement also said the deputies and office personnel will not be compensated by the production company for any time, effort or other cooperation expended on the program.
Deputies and citizens involved have the right to refuse being filmed, according to the agreement, and Garrett said that the production company gets signed releases from anybody featured in the show.
“The person signs an actual release,” Garrett said. “It’s not just something that’s done without some involvement of the people who are involved in the incident.”
Rick Dierenfeldt, head of the criminal justice department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said the show doesn’t create issues with due process, but there have been legal challenges that hinge on the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“Why that’s particularly problematic for a show like this is you have non-law enforcement personnel basically invading the privacy of individuals,” Dierenfeldt said. “The scope of that concern is limited though, where you run into issues is within private residences, the curtilage surrounding those private residences.”
Garrett said that the production company gets consent from anyone and everyone involved, and if an incident occurs inside a business, the business can deny the film crew entry. He also said the crews do not go into a residence unless the resident consents.
Garrett said he believed more than one of his deputies had been influenced to pursue a career in law enforcement after watching “Cops” or a show similar.
“It depends on who you ask, it can be controversial, but I think it highlights, again, it highlights not only the routine work that we do, that we’re changing a tire on a car for someone on the side of the road or we’re working traffic at a routine incident to something that’s very dynamic and very dangerous,” Garrett said, “It highlights to the public what this job entails.
“Hamilton County is very pro-law enforcement,” he continued, “and when I say pro-law enforcement, they’re pro-doing the job the right way. And I think that’s very evident with the Sheriff’s Office.”
A reporter called Langley Productions, the company that produces the show, for comment and did not get an answer by press time.
Contact Kailee Shores at kshores@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6659.