Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

I'm utterly against any form of system working so I have no idea. The US thread is about believing that cops following the rules is better than the reverse even though the rules are what make them racist assholes.

I think the least cop shows could do is be more conscientious about systemic problems and the implications of the Cowboy Cop trope.

A lot of the time cop stories won't shy away from corruption, but it's almost always portrayed as an individually bad cop or precinct (whether the problem can be solved or not) instead of the whole system of policing in the US (or whatever other place) having serious issues with its training and culture.

The framing of the Cowboy Cop is also an issue because it treats proper procedures as annoyances and contrivances that stop well-meaning cops from doing their jobs and nailing perps they "know" are guilty. The problem with this being that procedures exist for a reason and a lot of the time cops being given total discretion and no policing leads to worse results and lives lost, as we've all seen.

I guess you can also write in things as innocuous as an instructor or chief going, "We take on the worst of the worst so others can sleep. So watch each other's backs and make sure they don't get loose."

You can guess how that can easily be twisted into the issues police cause nowadays.

My wife's favorite show, PRODIGAL SON, had an interesting bit where the black head of the serial killing hunting unit was almost gunned down by his fellow police for being in the wrong area at the wrong time (and being black). He resisted to avoid being killed but that meant he assaulted a fellow officer.

Which puts him in all manner of shit trying to prove his point as the other officers backed up the racist officer.

That's not true, the rules include things like "due process" and "respecting the rights of the accused". Abuses occur when cops ignore the rules and are covered by the legal system. Cops who violate the rules commit more abuses not less.

I believe that is a dangerously naive sentiment and something that lets the system off for the fact the laws, training, and white supremacist bureaucracy is the problem.

The law is the enemy not the friend.

The culture of police training and certain aspects of law like qualified immunity are problems. That being said it isn't as if cops will hesitate to violate laws and overstep their boundaries either so this isn't a question of one or the other, it's both.

I guess my question is, without any sort of system, what standardizes methodology and punishments? All policing should be done by members of the community, but without a set of rules that say "X crime has Y sentence", you're basically leaving it up to a group of armed vigilantes - who are going to be racist if the community is racist, laws or no. And yes, the police as they exist already do that, but removing the code of law is hardly going to help. All it does is remove what little ability to point at brutal cops and say "hey, you're not allowed to do that" we currently do have.

@Light novels output:

Yeah, Kamachi is pretty much a extreme example. Most writers usually do two volumes per month, it genuinely becomes more insane if their series gets too popular

@Morning: People genuinely feel George (and Togashi from Hx H) practically cancelled their series de facto. So its not a big constrast neither, there are also lots of cancelled light novel series.

Light Novel series also have hiatuses and long waits, thought this usually happens on series that aren't very popular (still popular enough to sell, but without a sucessful anime)

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jan 17th 2021 at 10:49:08 AM

Regarding Isekai and slavery, aside from obvious power fantasy elements, these things also take place in a setting where slavery is common, so the story tends to praise MC and make him be a "desire" for female characters, solely because he is a "good slaver".

Also some cultural element, because we tend to forget, that even in the US, there are hundreds of thousands of people, who think that slavery is okay or that it wasn't bad (like saying that Black People "prospered" during slavery years and that slavers were "kind and just masters") and some of them openly say that it should be brought back.

Regarding Cowboy Cops, its kinda jarring to me, when people miss that Cowboy Cops WERE the ones, who the most actively spread police brutality around, i don't think that torture of prisoners and suspects (which is MUST HAVE element for a Cowboy Cop) is something to be defended or justifyed.

Note that the problems of police training aren't exactly "the system". There's a difference between problems endemic to police culture and problems endemic to legal procedure.

Dave Grossman's Killology classes are very popular in police culture, but Grossman himself is a private individual completely unrelated to the United States Justice System. Many parts of the country have banned police funds from being used to put rookie cops through his courses, which has prompted police to spend their own money putting rookies through them instead.

Killology isn't part of due process. It's a foreign parasite that's latched itself onto our justice system.

Legal procedure is when cops are made to wear body cams when they're on the job. Police culture is when they regularly turn those body cams off before interacting with black people, and encourage new officers to do the same.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 18th 2021 at 7:01:02 AM

If law was actually enforced as written, Police Brutality would be a way smaller problem than it is because a lot more of these cops would be rightfully in jail. The law is the tool, not the problem. People are the problem — cops who don't follow the rules, police chiefs who don't hold them accountable, union reps who funnel cash into pro-cop political campaigns, judges who don't admit evidence into trials, and juries who don't vote to convict.

The laws are set by people. This is actually something I've mentioned but I think people don't quite note how many of the laws like virtually the entirety of the legal code as relate to narcotics and other drugs are designed with the purposes of supporting white supremacy.

I recommend Netflix's 13TH as a good educational tool where it talks about how Nixon started the war on drugs as as a way to disenfranchise left leaning Americans (hippies) and black Americans in particular before being massively inflated by Ronald Reagan as well as others who saw drug felonies as a way to permanently disbar minorities from voting.

The laws as written are the problem.

No, we're aware. We're also aware that cops are not responsible for prosecution or sentencing. It's not the racist cops sending people to prison for forty years due to a gram of cocaine; it's racist juries and racist judges. There are a lot of problems with the judicial system.

And we're also aware that cops use planted evidence to arrest people for minor drug possession crimes, which is not a part of due process. Nor is stopping black people for "looking suspicious" in the first place so they can plant that evidence. There's one cop whose friend ratted him out to the internet who makes a habit of confiscating IDs from black kids he stops so that they won't be able to show ID to the next cop and that guy can arrest them; that sure as shit isn't part of due process.

Our drug laws are a problem, but they are a relatively minor problem compared to the way our cops and judges choose to enforce them. The Cowboy Cops are not the valiant heroes standing up against an unjust system; they're the reason the system is unjust, and the fact that there are so many of them does not mean that what they're doing is actually legal.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 18th 2021 at 7:29:27 AM

And prosecutors.

A lot of the problem are prosecutors who throw the book at some crimes like drugs and kids-gloves for others like police brutality.

Wow.

Cops are a fucking mess.

I consider myself lucky everyday that I've never had to deal with Racist Cops, and wonder how long that level of luck will hold out.

I admit, I'm not sure if there's any way to portray them sympathetically anymore, unless it's specifically minority members who have to work double time not only to fight against their own corruption, but to earn the trust of their community members who see them as traitors for being cops in the first place.

I myself had a story I'd been working on for years that had cops in it, and I wanted to subvert the Police Are Useless trope, showing them to be relatively competent and trying to do their jobs....but my goodwill towards them has evaporated and I honestly don't know if I can do that anymore, which is frustrating (this story has been going slowly enough already).

I think the fact is that police are necessary is a nasty thing for those who want to believe that they are an institution we could do without. I had that disabused when a man tried to kill his family 3 houses down from my house while on a drug rage and the police saved the baby and wife from his murder/suicide.

So its hard for me to believe Police Are Useless and I'd very much love to.

There's also the fact that the criminals in my area are not minorities. They are white supremacist Neo Nazis and Neo-Confederates. Hell's Angels, Neo-Nazis, and militia types.

That leads to a DRAMATICALLY different police vs. criminal dynamic.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 18th 2021 at 9:28:48 AM

I can see Internal Reformist cops begin a thing is they want to go with a sympathetic angle. People that join the force not only armed with the knowledge of the systemic issues, but with the reason to try to rout out those issues and purify the industry from within.

An idealistic take on this premise would see such efforts eventually succeed, even if he doens't live to see it. A cynical take would instead be a tragedy as the activists in blue slowly becomes those they swore to destroy as their moral compass is whittled away form the corruption they seek to fight or outright die futility trying to do what is an Sisyphean task for someone within the system.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 18th 2021 at 9:30:43 AM

There's a kind of interesting take on Justified which stars a Cowboy Cop in the most literal sense and the fact he's stuck behind a desk in Lexington, Kentucky because of his habit of shooting suspects. The thing is that immediately takes him against the Neo-Nazis, hillbilly mafia (that's what they call themselves in RL), and other white power related syndicates.

It's an interesting series to look back on after BLM.

It may just be that urban police have a fundamentally different dynamic than rural (and Louisville is full of the most racist scummy cops in the world—as we saw during the last year).

Sadly, that cynical take is probably 90% more likely to be the one people will see.

Even I think it's more likely, and y'all have heard me get annoyed about that kind of stuff where the most cynical take is treated as the most realistic one by default.

Edited by HandsomeRob on Jan 18th 2021 at 10:35:24 AM

Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if someone gives the Evangelion or Madoka treatment to the Police Procedural genre in a few years...or even if they already done so.

I think the premiere episode of Law and Order: SVU season 22 addressed police racism in a fairly decent way.

The episode opens a white woman at a park calling the police on a black guy named Jayvon who insists he isn't bothering her. This is based on the Central Park Karen incident of May, 2020. When the police arrive, they find a man who has been raped and hidden behind some of the trees and assume Jayvon is responsible. They handcuff him and the video of them doing this goes viral. They ultimately realize they got the wrong guy and Jayvon sues them for wrongful arrest. Worse, Internal Affairs is brought in and Deputy Chief Garland chastises Olivia for her conduct. When Olivia tries to defend her actions as "by the book", Garland retorts "that's the book that got us here". The IA officer also tells Olivia that while she may not be blatantly racist, it doesn't mean she doesn't have biases that she hasn't truly confronted yet.

The SVU's arrest of Jayvon also allows the real rapist to get away with his crime by manipulating the jury against the SVU, showing that the police acting fairly and ethically is important.

I do think it is possible to portray the police as sympathetic in the future. Writers just need to be careful about how they portray them.

That does sound like a decent portrayal. I was waiting for the twist where Javyon was actually guilty and am glad that didn't occur.

Also, it sounds like the initial incident is inspired by that "Central Park Karen", but the main crime is inspired by the Central Park Jogger Case, which similarly involved an actual brutal rape but the wrong person(s) arrested for it.

outside of police here's Wisecrack's take on Animaniacs and how it relates to Hollywood/the film industry

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 18th 2021 at 10:13:35 AM

One thing police stories also need is to evolve the depiction of the corrupt cop. We do see corrupt cops in a lot of media, but the particular nature of their corruption is typically that they're on the mafia's payroll. They're paid to look the other way while the Maggias steal TVs from some dude's shop, or to cover up the Russian hitman's murders.

Media doesn't really talk about ideologically corrupt cops; police who ignore or even actively participate in crimes because the things they believe in are toxic. White supremacy being the biggest one. And that's a much more prevalent problem in our police force than cops accepting bribes from Don Corleone.

When media talks about bad cops, they talk about cops who are willing tools of the bad guys because of financial interests. They don't talk about cops who are the bad guys. They are the KKK, they are the murderers, they are the people storming the capitol. They aren't just derelict in their duty while crime is happening; they are the ones perpetrating the crimes.

To plug Cellular again (seriously, fantastic movie), it had both a great example of a good cop protagonist in Sgt. Mooney, but it also knew how to depict bad cops. The crooked cops of the film are its actual villains. They break into a woman's house and take her hostage because they're trying to silence her husband, who has video evidence of them murdering and robbing a pair of drug dealers. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent just how deep the rabbit hole goes as even Mooney's boss is revealed to have been in on the whole thing.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 18th 2021 at 10:36:00 AM