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Anti Federalist
03-28-2014, 05:44 PM
Interesting piece on Copsuckers in the media.



"Do What You Gotta Do": Cop Shows Bolster Idea That Police Violence Works

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/22433-do-what-you-gotta-do-cop-shows-bolster-idea-that-police-violence-works

The new NBC series "Chicago PD" (created by Dick Wolf, the man behind "Law and Order") opens with steel-eyed Detective Sgt. Hank Voight glaring coolly into a rearview mirror from the backseat of a car. We quickly learn that the man driving the vehicle isn't chauffeuring Voight around by choice.

"I don't know where I'm going," whimpers the driver, a young man with a bloodied face and a seemingly broken right arm.

"Just keep driving," gruffs Voight.

When the two finally pull off into an empty gravel lot, Voight grabs the man by a tuft of hair and yanks him out of the driver's seat. The sergeant slaps and kicks the young man around until he crumbles to the ground in a sobbing heap.

"Who's puttin' out the bad dope?" Voight snarls, and when he follows up by pressing a handgun to the quivering man's face, the latter finally relents.

"His name is Ralph! He deals out of his apartment in South Emerald!"

Within a minute and a half of the first episode, the show has summed up its central message: Police violence works. This is relayed again and again throughout the series: When a cop with a chain-wrapped fist savagely beats a Spanish-speaking suspect demanding an attorney until he relinquishes a tip; when officers debase the idea of policing without intent to arrest; when cops round up black non-criminals and deliver them to precinct torture chambers. In every episode, these methods achieve the desired ends. The message: Police violence works.

Crime dramas that embellish the lives of police officers are not new. Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes says crime drama is "the most enduring of all cinematic genres," and television holds to the same rule.1 What sets "Chicago PD" apart from others in the genre is that police violence isn't just presented as an exciting feature of the job; rather, its producers have made it the primary point of appeal to its growing audience of 8 million.

What does it mean that a TV show so sympathetic to police abuse has become the most popular evening program among NBC's 18-49 demographic? To understand its appeal, it's necessary to couch recent trends in cop media within historical transformations of public opinion toward police and federal support for local policing.

In the past 40 years, the militarization of police forces occurred concurrently with an increased emphasis on “law and order,” perpetuated by race-baiting politicians who spurred alarm among white Americans following the racially charged riots of the mid-1960s that shook white America to its core. To the prudent majority on the conservative side of the era's culture wars, the 1965 Watts riots in LA, along with "riots in Baltimore, Newark, Washington and Detroit in the following years, were signs of a rising criminal class that was increasingly out of control," as Radley Balko observes in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop.

This induced a broad call for "law and order" among the white American majority by the end of the decade, and race-baiting politicians used the mandate to launch an unprecedented militarization of police forces that continues today. The threat of crime soon embedded itself at the forefront of national consciousness, and in response to that reality, Hollywood started pumping out a slew of films and TV shows centered on the lives of police officers, giving birth to a new subgenre within crime drama: the Cop Booster.

However, policy doesn't only influence media; sociologists have found that media has a real effect on policy. Because "public knowledge of crime and justice is largely derived from the media," the Cop Booster subgenre is part of a larger criminal-media-complex that manufactures "pervasive images of predatory criminals" that "steer [the] currents on our criminal justice policy."

Television programs like "Chicago PD," a classic Cop Booster show, reproduce a narrative that that not only shields real life police forces from the scrutiny of public accountability but also engenders millions of people's assumptions about criminality - assumptions that help keep the gears of the prison-industrial complex spinning.

More at link...

DamianTV
03-28-2014, 05:56 PM
Suspension of Disbelief.

Be afraid of the "boogeyman" around every corner and that Cops are the only ones that can save you from that "boogeyman". What is important is that people are afraid of what will happen if Cops all suddenly, without any reason what so ever, all just up and disappeared. Fear that occurs during a Suspension of Disbelief is exactly what causes people to demand the existence of Cops to begin with, and everything that results from their existence, including Police Brutality.