I’ve spoken to an on-duty police officer maybe three times in my life. Each time was a traffic stop.
Outside those 15 minutes, my primary understanding of the police comes from ?television.
And let me tell you, broadcast news and cop dramas are telling two starkly ?different tales.
If you’re only watching the dramas, you’re sure to get the wrong impression.
More and more police officers can be heard bemoaning the public’s distaste for them.
On the website policeone.com , “The One resource for Law Enforcement online,” columns questioning “Why are cops so easy to hate?” and “Are America’s officers at war?” engage with a real fear that uniformed police officers are now subject to systematic and overt ?discrimination.
It’s a feeling that’s hard for me to understand when shows such as “NCIS” have dominated television ratings for years and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” won two Golden Globes.
In the world of scripted television, law enforcement officers are likable and ?attractive.
They’re moody and clever with a thirst for justice. And they’ll do anything — anything — to catch their man.
These are the rogue agents we root for, often at the expense of anything resembling protocol or rule of law.
Imagine a stark interrogation room.
Two police officers, or whatever unlikely cop-civilian duo is popular this week, are asking the tough questions. They have the perp right where they want them, until she says those words deadly to an investigation, “I’m not talking until I see my lawyer.”
In real life, this request should cease questioning until an attorney is present. In TV land it’s a suggestion that’s usually ignored, followed by a tearful confession.
Picture the same scene, but the investigators are getting a little hot under the collar. Their suspect won’t talk, even though they know he knows something. So, they decide to beat it out of him.
Yeah, that’s not allowed either.
And of course, every once in a while an agent goes rogue, with little evidence and even less legal standing, and takes out the bad guy by any means necessary.
Even though our protagonists blatantly flout protocol, we cheer for them. They’re good. They’re just. They’re our friends we check in with every week.
Of course, more nuanced portrayals of the police do exist, but let’s be honest: comparatively few people are lying in bed binge-watching “The Wire.”
In the real world, there’s a reason rules exist. We can’t trust a writer’s room to assign benevolent goodness to anyone in uniform. Instead we’re stuck with real people.
People who get tired. People who make mistakes. People who are not morally incorruptible. People who break protocol, not always in the name of justice. People whose interpretation of justice strays from yours or mine.
But these shows ask us to blindly trust law enforcement, and some of us do.
Those of us who don’t interact with police very much sometimes let this blind trust bleed into real life — the police must have had a good reason to shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice within seconds of arriving on the scene. Eric Garner must have done something to deserve a deadly chokehold.
We don’t have a script to make sense of the Daniel Holtzclaws of the world, a policeman who sexually abused 13 women.
We have an extensive propaganda machine telling us not to worry, because the boys in blue are on our side. Often that’s the case. But when it isn’t, people are left with little recourse.
casefarr@indiana.edu
