It predisposes people to take a “realistic” attitude to the failures if the justice system while still believing it’s the best we can do and the only thing keeping us safe.
Copaganda has mostly moved to pessimistic attitudes that still encourage no change to the current system.
“Cops and prosecutors may be flawed individuals but they almost always get the job done” is a running theme throughout the entire Law & Order franchise.
Who here is surprised by this news? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
it occurs to me how odd it is that we require investigators to be beat cops first ( or at least that’s the way it sounds like from the op’s report, and shows like law&order )
i know other countries require even regular cops to have the equivalent of bachelors degrees and the like. so it just seems wild to me that we don’t make the primary requirement for investigators be criminology and/or sociology degrees
it doesnt even make the thinnest of sense that investigators have to regularly train on carrying and shooting a gun, rather than, say: the latest techniques in dna and forensics
nothing about being a beat cop is going to improve ones ability to question a suspect or follow up leads when the majority of calls they deal with are things like traffic violations and unhoused people being… visible.
A few years ago I heard a lecture from our state’s police commissioner. He’d followed on from two intelligent, broadly educated commissioners who the Murdoch press hounded relentlessly, with editorials along the lines of “we really need a beat cop, one who’s driven around in divvy* van and knows the streets.”
The new commissioner was very aware of how he’d got there and the political pressure behind it, but wasn’t buying it. He said “do you know how much I learned about how to lead an organisation with more than 20,000 staff from doing Saturday night patrols in a divvy van? Nothing.”
*divisional. Hence the chant at the cricket when a drunk and rowdy gentleman is escorted away by the police, “YOU’RE GOING HOME IN THE BACK OF A DIVVY VAN”.
It’s getting to be that you’d need to launch an investigation to find a police department that’s not corrupt in some way.
This is the talking point I wish the “defund the police” movement would land on. It is easy to make that case, compared to the (poorly phrased) “Defund the Police” which most opponents believe is abolitionist in nature.
As other have mentioned, what you’re describing is still really effective copaganda. Cops make mistakes and do illegal things? Sure, but they’re still sympathetic, and even justified within the framework of the narrative - the “system” is fucked up, there are unfair limits put on them, the situation is dire, so this what needs to happen to make sure “justice” is done. (Or their rule breaking/bending is “a mistake” but not a serious one that destroys people’s lives.) The people they “know” are guilty are never revealed to actually be innocent. The other “bad” cops are contrasted with the group of “good” cops - the “few bad apples” model, whereas the reality is the system is entirely designed to reject good cops and retain bad ones. Even if the “good” cops are portrayed as rare and unusual, the reality is still that such a team simply doesn’t even exist at all. Even saying “the system worked - just this once” doesn’t mean much; when the show routinely depicts the system working, over and over again, that message gets lost.
I know at least some of the people working on that show have good intentions - and even have done some good (e.g. Mariska Hargitay) - but the show, as a whole, still functions as effective copaganda. (It wouldn’t be allowed to be on the air if it didn’t.) Showing that the system “doesn’t always work” or that there are abuses, etc. lulls people into a false sense of realism, whereas it has nothing at all to do with the reality, in fact.
I’ll have to admit, other actors drew me in…like Tamara Taylor and Dash Mihok.
It’s a shite show.
You mean the NYPD unit or the TV show?
Both.
I am shocked that TV isn’t real
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