What the hell are they doing?

Reportedly, people whose idea of the cops comes from watching TV cop shows think the cops succeed in punishing crime, prevent crime, and behave within the law unless it's for the greater good.

The cop shows do teach those lessons.

And that a lot of the time it's best to break the law.

American cop shows far more than those from the UK or Europe, where law enforcement is far more often shown to be careful of human rights, proper procedure, and compliance with the spirit as well as the letter of the law.

Those observations are true.

American crime dramas regularly, in pretty much every episode, portray cops as breaking the law for the greater good and as being able to get the bad guys only by committing crimes or at least violating procedures and ignoring rights guaranteed by the courts and the constitution.

American cop shows also sometimes portray the cops as also being criminals without such excuses, like Chicago PD.

But on the whole it's wall to wall propaganda for cop thuggery, crime, and even sometimes murder.

I have made this observation, myself, before, and claimed it disserves us by encouraging cop criminality and in effect urging the public and those who would police the police to be grateful for it.

Just watched Trevor Noah summarize the case against American cop shows, both reality TV and TV dramas.

And, really, the shows about heroic prosecutors are just as bad, though it's legal chicanery and shameful doings, even including threats to prosecute or otherwise punish someone known to be innocent, sometimes even children, in order to get the targeted suspect or witness to cooperate, testify, or confess, rather than coercion and violence they justify as needed and useful to get the job done.

Come to that, Trevor didn't address the fact that these shows argue police lying, burglaries, and other forms of horrific behavior are both necessary and useful.

In fact there is no limit to the shit from cops and prosecutors these shows won't try to justify in the same way.

By the way, it's no good trying to justify those shows by saying they're just in the gritty noir tradition of cop fiction reaching back to the days before the Supremes did their best to get rid of the third degree by making it useless in pursuit of convictions.

Chambers v Florida

Brown v Mississippi

The noir tradition represented the cops as thugs, but did not attempt to justify that thuggery by showing it as both necessary and able to get the job done.

What we need to do now is go beyond making unlawful police violence useless.

We need to make it personally costly to all those involved by firing them from law enforcement and disbarring them (if they are lawyers) and sending them to prison or even executing them.

PS.

Noah did not mention the undoubted extent toward which acceptance of police violence as "a necessary part of the job" (in LA Confidential, Captain Dudley Smith, a villain and murderer killed in the end, makes that claim, though the violence he actually runs either frames the innocent to cover up for the guilty or aids his personal criminal career, or both) is related to the criminals being black and the acceptors white.

I guess if we wanted to know how far such acceptance is based on racial difference rather than fascist leanings, say, we could compare acceptance in America with acceptance in countries where the criminals and the populace in general are racially homogeneous.

But even without that who is kidding whom?