On the one hand you have the ultra conservative Dick Wolf american cop show. In this type of show cops are basically treated as being almost infallible, and that they need their abilities and power expanded to do their jobs. They beat criminals, throw them out of windows, constantly go off the book, etc. Lawyers are the ultimate evil, people are unreasonable when they fear cops and everyone is guilty until proven innocent. “Bad apples” aren’t just cops who abuse their power. Bad apples to them are legit serial killers and anything else is just “Tough decisions.”
But then you have the other side. I can’t think of a lot of cop shows like this, so its basically just The Rookie and Brooklyn 99. As much as I have a soft spot for B99 cause it’s funny, they both have something in common. They both portray cops with this wierd liberal propaganda filter. They don’t have the Gung ho john mclane esque rogue behavior and don’t actively support, yknow, torture. But they have the same throughline of “but da cops are good too, they care about the law and not abusing it and have all of these procedures and stuff.” What I mean is that they portray cops as though they don’t have the problems that everyone rightfully criticizes cops for. Which, idk, I don’t think that’s worse but I feel like its more infuriating. At least with a complete denial seen in shows like Blue Bloods and Law and Order, it feels like they aren’t just straight lying to you. It’s kinda like that Malcolm x quote about white liberals and such.
(I know this doesn’t matter that much, but I like cop shows and watched them a lot before my ideological transformation[yes, i know of “In the Name of the People,” I’ll watch it at some point], and now I’m being reccomended a deluge of cop content for some reason, so wanted to rant for a minute)
I’ve only seen a few SVU episodes, so every antagonist is awful. Consent is always cool. But that kind of storyline has made it hard to focus like you have. Thank you for pointing this out, and I’ll think more critically next time it’s on.
The liberal version is much more insidious. It is much more effective at brainwashing people. I would rather have the straight up psycho version, that way a lot more people can recognize the reality of what the real function of police is under a bourgeois system and which class interests they serve.
Exactly, I prefer outright fascists to crypto-fascists too. The only thing worse than a bad person is a bad person who can convince people they are good.
I read crypto-fascists as the unholy union of fascism and cryptobros — basically,
— and you can’t convince me it means anything else
I’ve seen a lot of copaganda cause of the “murder mystery” / detective interest someone I know has. And it is insidious, like someone else said. You have these shows like Monk, Diagnosis Murder, Psych, Perry Mason, and they often follow this general pattern of “somebody who is working outside the law and/or stretching it a bit because the law doesn’t do enough.”
There’s a very particular technique that these kind of shows often use: The audience sees the murder happen.
This sets the stage for the audience 1) being on the side of the protagonists, no matter how they go about things and 2) believing a crime happened and happened more or less as the protagonists come to suspect (because you saw it).
But in real life, no such thing happens. If there was evidence that direct, you wouldn’t need much of an investigation. It’s almost never going to be the case in real life that it’s so straightforward. And if it’s not, that means much of what people do in these shows unravels quickly.
And you can see this reflected in the way some people think about a concept like “due process” in real life, where a personal belief that somebody did wrong means not only that they must have, but that no investigation is needed. Or if an investigation is done, it should be as intrusive and browbeating as necessary to “force the truth out of them.” In reality, this is not only unnecessary, but could create false positives if you hurt someone badly enough that they fake a confession just to make it stop.
But anyway, I focus on that technique about how these shows start because I think it’s important in how this sort of thing becomes warped. If you truly believe that someone has done absolutely horrible things, you may be more apt to go outside the law yourself, in order to stop them, or at least sympathize with someone who is trying to. I guess what I’m touching on here is the nature of atrocity propaganda.
The soy cop shows are worse. At least Dick writes characters you can imagine murdering black people between episodes. CC seems to want me to think cop brutality is funny.
I just read an enjoyable Dashiell Hammet novel in which the gumshoe main character correctly assumes the cops were crooks no different than all the other gangs in town. This is what they took from you
