Almost 40 years after Cops first put viewers in the passenger seat of police cruisers, the show’s famous refrain — “Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?” — still thumps through every episode. But in a new commentary for American Thinker, writer Noel S. Williams argues the theme has become an awkward artifact, one that increasingly clashes with the show’s own on-screen reality and with national crime data.
Williams points to a startling set of statistics: arrest rates for women were 38 percent higher in 2019 than in 1980, and women’s share of total arrests grew from 14 percent in 1980 to 27 percent in 2025. Meanwhile, women make up only about 14 percent of full-time police officers. The mismatch, he suggests, has turned the old anthem into a running joke — and a revealing one.
The rise of the ‘bad girl’ era
When Cops premiered in 1989, it became one of the most-watched reality programs on television, running for decades and spawning countless parodies. In the early years, Williams concedes, the “bad boys” framing fit the times — street crime was overwhelmingly a male domain, and gender parity was not yet the cultural watchword it has become.
But the landscape has shifted. “There are bad girls everywhere,” he writes. It’s not just a rhetorical flourish. Women today account for more than a quarter of all arrests in the United States, a near doubling of their share over roughly four decades. The offenses most often associated with female arrestees mirror the ones Cops regularly showcases: property crime, larceny, public nuisance, and domestic disturbances. On that last count, Williams adds a wry aside — women may not “smite like the bad boys,” but they “sure do spite and provoke a lot of disturbances.”
A theme tune that refuses to evolve
The show’s producers have gone to what Williams calls “great feminist pains” to acknowledge women in law enforcement. The opening narration of each episode references “the men and women of law enforcement,” a deliberate nod to the growing — if still modest — presence of female officers.
Yet the theme song remains frozen in time. Even new episodes on paying platforms are still introduced by the same “Bad Boys” tune, originally performed by Inner Circle. “The rates of ‘bad girl’ behavior are much higher than the rates of female police officers,” Williams writes. “Yet, even new episodes of Cops are accompanied by the ‘Bad Boys’ theme tune.”
The incongruity, he argues, isn’t merely a question of outdated aesthetics. It points to something deeper about how American culture picks and chooses which inequalities to address. Female officers are celebrated in the narration, but the show’s most recognizable cultural signifier still frames lawbreaking as a male pursuit. Williams calls this a kind of selective feminism — a willingness to acknowledge women when it’s convenient, but not to bother examining a ubiquitous and, in his view, sexist theme song.
What’s good for the goose…
The title of his piece — “Bad girls: What you gonna do when they come for you?” — is a playful inversion of the song’s refrain. But his underlying point is more serious: if women now commit a substantial and growing share of the crimes that Cops documents, the show’s branding is no longer just nostalgic — it’s misleading.
Williams frames the discrepancy as evidence of persistent double standards. “What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander,” he writes, turning the old proverb on its head. In his telling, the show is happy to feature women being arrested and to tout female officers, but it stops short of updating a theme that implicitly tells viewers crime is still a man’s world.
Some observers might counter that song lyrics are hardly a policy statement, and that Cops — like any entertainment property — has little obligation to track demographic shifts in criminal behavior. Others might note that the show’s producers understand nostalgia is part of its appeal; changing the theme would risk alienating longtime viewers who hum along out of habit.
But Williams is not primarily concerned with audience preferences. His argument is cultural. In an era when public discourse is saturated with talk of equity and representation, he wonders why one of television’s most enduring law-enforcement images remains so thoroughly male-coded — even as the women the show portrays on both sides of the badge increasingly tell a different story.
The broader point
The commentary arrives amid a larger national conversation about women’s involvement in crime, a topic that has drawn increased attention in recent years as researchers and policymakers examine rising female arrest rates for property and drug offenses. While American Thinker is a conservative outlet and Williams writes from that perspective, his observations about the Cops theme are rooted in data that crosses ideological lines.
If anything, Williams suggests, the show’s longevity makes it a useful mirror. Cops has been on air — in some form — for more than three decades, capturing policing in America across eras of shifting social norms. That it still opens with a song about bad boys, even as its own episodes increasingly feature bad girls, is, for him, a small but telling illustration of how slowly cultural assumptions change.
“Ultimately, when one thinks about it, it further proves their real inequality,” he writes. “In their case, what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander. In a sense, they can’t handle the truth. They mention women in a positive light when it is convenient, but are unconcerned about the sexist theme tune.”
Whether the producers of Cops will ever heed his call to update the tune remains an open question. But Williams’ broader point stands on its own: if the show’s opening narration can acknowledge the women of law enforcement, its theme song might one day catch up — or risk being remembered as the relic of an era when “bad boys” was the only story television wanted to tell.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/bad-girls-what-you-gonna-do-when-they-come-for-you/