“And then the evil bad cop who was secretly a terrorist manipulates the dumb naive youth into protesting police violence, causing a riot which is used as a distraction for the bad cop to do a bank heist and now it’s up to the handsome good cop who doesn’t play by the rules to stop the bad cop while rolling his eyes at the dumb leftists who are so easily manipulated by their emotions”
I can’t stand cop shows anymore after seeing The Wire. I couldn’t stand them before, but especially when a show came along that actually depicted how law enforcement works.
It’s a show that spans a five-year period and there’s really only one case, the Greek. Everything connects back to him, from the original Barksdale murders, to the shipping container murders, then eventually Marlo. The show displays the hundreds of hours of investigation, trials, witnesses, and sheer bureaucracy that goes into a case. All while not shying away from police brutality and corruption.
So what the fuck even are these cop shows post-Wire? They’re still showing cops solving multiple homicides each week with 100% accuracy. “Heh, I don’t play by the rules! I work alone!” trash is still the main types of characters, despite that kind of behavior being a good way to get cases thrown out (cops planting evidence may be why Luigi walks, even if he did do it).
I know the obvious answer is “Police procedurals are easy to write and produce, while doing double-duty as propaganda to justify how fucking garbage are system is.” But you’d think they’d switch it up to something else like anti-terrorism spy slop.
The Wire still humanizes cops and barely mentions the racism inherent to policing though. There’s like one racist cop who gets reassigned immediately. The entire show spends maybe five minutes on him. I think the reality of cops is that they are rich, racist, cowardly buffoons who nonetheless follow almost any order. We never see them depicted in this way in any corporate media.
I fundamentally disagree with that take. The Wire doesn’t have to mention it, it literally shows that policing is systemically racist, so while no singular cop regularly expresses racist views, and can be quite diverse in race themselves, they still end up treating the places they patrol, which are by and large poor black communities, as their personal fiefdoms, where they believe that they have carte-blance to ‘fight crime’ even as they commit crimes (like constant reckless DWI, that even ‘good police’ do) to no actual positive effect on the neighborhood because there is no trust in the police, because there is no reason to trust them.
What the Wire is guilty of is having characters who we are supposed to think are smart (Bunny Colvin) wax on about a time when it wasn’t like this and blame it on the War on Drugs policy, which is some grade-A rose tinted glasses. But I like to think that it just portraying a guy who thinks like that (who may exist in the police), and not the writers actual opinion of historical policing.
Herc especially is portrayed as the stereotypical cop, a mildly racist buffoon who is so incompetent at his job that despite failing upwards the only actually good police work he does is when he has been fired from the police and now works as a PI for the lawyer of the very drug dealers that got him fired. We are supposed to be following the last few ‘good po-lice’, not necessarily the average cop, though them and their work do come up quite often. And pretty much all the cops are shown to be cowards who never do anything without a massive force disparity.
What we don’t get is the openly racist cop who never gets any punishment and still continues to move up the ranks, but idk if that works for Baltimore particularly as a setting.
And he’s not even Greek
You ain’t lying. Even after watching the shield and the pure fuckery there you see other shows I felt the same.