There was an excellent article in Vox by a black ex-cop about race and policing:
And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty.
Where did the narrative of the heroic officer bravely battling against non-white scumbags originate? Has it always been with us?
I certainly remember ’80s Dirty Harry movies perpetuating this narrative, saying in fact that a real cop had to take matters in his own hands because the librul nanny state over-regulated policing. When I wrote about the shift in movie mores from the ’70s to the ’80s, reader BG emailed to say I hadn’t mentioned Dirty Harry movies which devolved from somewhat complex movies to Reagan era propaganda.
Did the heroic cop narrative especially take off in the ’80s or was it always the same?
Omnes Omnibus
Junior Murvin or The Clash? Just working on my mental soundtrack.
Botsplainer
The narrative was all “heroic cop” from the 50s forward. Hollywood did a lot of damage by presenting them as unassailable guardians of moral order and societal peace in TV and film.
It wasn’t until the Godfather and Serpico that there were any real hints of wholesale corruption portrayed, and those were still outliers.
eric
The Dirty Harry movies are a little more complicated, particularly in light of Magnum Force (involving renegade cops) and the Enforcer. In the Enforcer, Harry begrudgingly accepts a female partner (Tyne Daly) only to have her die saving his life.
BR
A little OT — I participate in a gardening forum online and there are a lot of folks from Florida on there. I almost never look in the “off topic” board of the forum, but for some reason decided to today, and found, surprise surprise, one of the most prolific commenters is a Rand Paul supporter from Florida who thinks a) chemtrails are dangerous, b) vaccines are dangerous, c) that there is a conspiracy trying to stop Rand Paul and d) that Ted Cruz is the next best thing if Rand Paul doesn’t make it. Wow. I guess I live in a bubble so I don’t encounter folks like that often, but it was amazing to see.
Punchy
One doesn’t even have to be an actual cop to off a black man and be bathed in the glow of “heroism”, “risk”, etc. Paging George Zimmerman.
I’d love to see the stats on how often a black cop 86’s a white guy. My guess is hardly ever.
Chet
@Omnes Omnibus: Junior Murvin. On the Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels soundtrack.
DougJ
@Omnes Omnibus:
I like both versions.
c u n d gulag
The rich in all societies across history have rewarded police for keeping the riff-raff away from them – regardless of color.
The financial reward wasn’t much at all, but they were allowed to present themselves as the protectors of truth, justice, and the (Fill-in the blank)____________ way!
mai naem mobile
The local.bimbo teevee news had on a story about a cop buying a bike for some walmart worker who had it stolen. The guy was walking 4 miles each way in the heat to get to work etc etc. This was on the teevee. Stuff like this goes on all the time,.It’s just not a cop so those people don’t get on the teevee. Anyhow, cops are spreading it on a little thick now.
Paul in KY
@Botsplainer: Think ‘Dragnet’ helped a lot.
catclub
@Botsplainer:
How about Touch of Evil? I think there were some suggestions of corruption.
Valdivia
Somehow reading this made me think of Gangs of New York. Not that the movies started this narrative of bravery but that it details the idea that existed already then of police as keeping the sullied in line. Back then the heroism was against the Irish and Italian immigrants no?
catclub
@c u n d gulag: Ever see a Catholic Church ‘Blue Mass’? And I thought idol worship was a no-no.
celticdragonchick
The sociopath cops at policeone.com are trying to trash Reddit Hudsen and his writing.
http://www.policeone.com/patrol-issues/articles/7983454-Ex-cops-absurd-police-are-racist-and-violent-claims-are-dead-wrong/
Remember, if you don’t kiss their assess as they shoot your dog kick the shit out of you spouse and haul you off to jail in a wrong address raid, you hate cops and baby Jesus.
Phil Perspective
@Botsplainer: Don’t forget the first Rambo movie!! The cops there were portrayed as bullying a-holes!!
MattF
Maybe some of it goes back to the old ‘lonesome lawman’ upholding civilization in Westerns. You’ve got an armed enforcer of the law, basically on his own, keeping the ‘decent’ townfolk safe. Add racism to the stew, and you’re there.
celticdragonchick
@Punchy:
It does happen, but you have look a bit harder. Abusive cops run in all colors…but mostly blue.
Valdivia
@Omnes Omnibus: I vote for Junior Murvin. The Clash is always apt though.
celticdragonchick
@Phil Perspective:
True.
The first Rambo movie was classic late 70’s anti authoritarianism stuff(even if the movie was in the early 80’s, the source material came in the 70’s as I recall). It was the later movies that became a right wing fever dream.
Ridge
It began in earnest with Nixon and the campaigns against “crime” (brown people) which fed into certain prejudices but in popular culture, Jos. Wambaugh’s “The New Centurions” popularized the police as a thin blue line of heroes standing tall for civilization against the barbarians (brown people).
Since then, they can do no wrong and every politician and his brother rolls over for them. It may be ending with the advent of mobile cameras as their word is shown to undependable.
srv
Harry killed lots of white people.
All the PI series of the 70’s/80’s were Film Noir. Jim Rockford always had to drag the police by the hair. Bureaucratic cops were the thing, not action cops. Even before Gov. Ronnie.
Joe Friday punched hippies, but he never did parkour.
Anyone post about the Guardian’s Trophy Board?
celticdragonchick
@Ridge:
I don’t know.
The murder of a homeless man in Fullerton by 6 officers was caught entirely on film, the prosecution really did pull out the stops to get those cops in prison and the jury still couldn’t fucking convict.
Valdivia
@MattF: yes I think that Westerns cemented an idea of the lawman as the rugged individualist upholding civilization all by himself.
I think that the worst damage is done by cop shows. Week after week the narrative of police as being hamstrung by stupid laws and stupid politicians and they alone doing what is necessary to rid society of evil.
KenB
The cops in uniform are almost always portrayed poorly, often messing up the crime scene or just making dumb moves. The heros are usually the undercover cops or detectives in civilian clothing.
Patricia Kayden
Cowboys versus Indians. The White hero versus bad non-White savage goes way back in American history.
CONGRATULATIONS!
The hero cop narrative has been with us since movies were invented.
The hero cop defending heroic white folks against dangerous, animalistic black thugs has been for considerably less time; I don’t recall seeing it until the mid to late 1970s. People usually go to the “Dirty Harry” movies as the source, but they’re wrong – Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” is the origin film for the genre.
Linnaeus
The theme of the nanny state over-regulating police officers is quite clear in the original Dirty Harry.
Cacti
@MattF:
Or the frontiersman with his trusty Winchester, keeping hearth and home safe from the predation of godless Injuns.
White hero fighting the dark skinned hordes is one of Hollywood’s oldest tropes.
Cacti
@Patricia Kayden:
Beat me to it. :-)
raven
I need input on hernia surgery from you experienced people.
Warren Terra
I would argue that it dipped a lot in the 70s, when movies could be morally ambiguous, with not a hero but an antihero in the leading role, etcetera, all in a way that was rare in the 80s.
But: the 50s and 60s had TV and Hollywood trying to convince us we all lived in Wally and the Beav’s world, and cops were lovable, trustworthy, fearless and true: Andy Griffith, Sgt. Friday. Heck, just yesterday Boing Boing had a front-age link to an article about the late 60s/early 70s show ADAM-12, from “back when we all loved the LAPD”. Serpico it ain’t.
gelfling545
I read a lot of mystery stories and lately I have been becoming more aware of how, in police procedural type novels, the main law enforcement character has to take the law in his/her own hands, violate procedures, etc. to save the victim, city, world, whatever. It’s been like this for a long time but I have just lately been noticing how common that scenario is.
raven
Lieutenant Frank Ballinger would kick your ass.
SatanicPanic
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Death Wish is up on Netflix so I watched it the other day. WOW is that movie racist. That may be the most right-wing movie (that wasn’t produced by Leni Reifenstahl) ever made.
raven
There’s a hold up in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem
That’s backed up to Jackson Heights.
There’s a scout troup short a child,
Kruschev’s due at Idlewild
Car 54, Where Are You?
jonas
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Bronson’s character wasn’t a cop, though — he was a rogue civiian who sets out to hunt down the gang of punks who killed his wife and raped his daughter because the police are too scared/unable to do it themselves.
Calouste
@gelfling545: Someone just doing their job doesn’t make for a compelling story. Same reason why two people in the movies/books can’t just meet, fall in love and live happily ever after. Something has to come between them otherwise it’s not worth writing about.
EDIT: And by that I mean it won’t sell, at least not in America.
raven
@Calouste: Come on, we have to have SOMETHING to whine about!
Chris
@Patricia Kayden:
The way to get around that for decades now has been “both sides do it,” or rather “neither side does it,” where the main villains aren’t Indians but greedy whites doing the usual Hollywood Villain strategy of tricking both sides into going to war, so that they could profit from it.
Which has always struck me as kind of a weak sauce narrative, though infinitely preferable to straight up “good cowboys and bad Indians.” The conquest of the West was not a Blofeld style conspiracy and nobody needed to “trick” the U.S. into going to war with Indians.
Tree With Water
Think I’d point to the white southern slave patrols (“where do you think you’re going”), that slaveholding states in congress ultimately had written into law as the Fugitive Slave Act.
SatanicPanic
@jonas: That’s making the same case though from a different angle- the world is so dangerous that we either have to protect ourselves, or let cops off their leash. It’s a terribly corrosive viewpoint, and I wonder if it isn’t worse for society than previous portrayals of cops as heroes.
Chris
@Warren Terra:
I don’t watch as many cop shows as spy shows, but I definitely see the exact thing there. The heroes of the original age of spy television in the sixties are so good and clean and upright it hurts. In the post-Watergate era, it suddenly got way more cynical, with spying portrayed as a dirty business and you needed the hero to be a disillusioned, semi-retired outsider (Hawke, McCall) who’d occasionally give a righteous and needed talking-to to the professional spies. Fast forward another twenty years and you get 24, which accepts the post-Watergate narrative but embraces the fact that spying is ugly and dirty instead of questioning it.
gelfling545
@catclub: There is also a “red mass” for lawyers, judges, etc. Why red, I cannot say.
dedc79
I think the “heroic office bravely battling against” narrative goes way back. It’s the race/ethnicity of the scumbags that evolved. Remember, there was a time when the Italians and irish weren’t sufficiently white, and then there was a time when the Italians and irish were the American-as-apple-pie cops….
celticdragonchick
@Warren Terra:
BTW, I answered you back at Lawyers, Guns & Money on that Israel/Turkey thing in the Robert Farley thread, if you were interested.
Miss Kitka's Comrade Wayne
“Where did the narrative of the heroic officer bravely battling against non-white scumbags originate? Has it always been with us?”
Yes.
Birth of a Nation: Not cops then, but a uniformed paramilitary force nonetheless.
Splitting Image
The Clansman: An Historical Novel of the Ku Klux Klan was written in 1905 and filmed as The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The 1939 remake, Gone With the Wind, whitewashes this aspect from Margaret Mitchell’s book, which makes it much more plain that Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes are part of the Ku Klux Klan when they go into action after Scarlett is attacked on the road.
As you go back into the nineteenth century, your heroic officers start becoming military men, since they predate modern police forces, but the worldview has been around for a long time.
NorthLeft12
@CONGRATULATIONS!: If memory serves, the killers/rapists of Charles Bronson’s family were white. Might have been a mix. The bad guys Bronson dealt with later in the movie were mostly white.
No, I don’t think you have to go any further than your big city newscasts and newspapers to understand how this black thug vs white cop story got out there.
My relatives in northern Saskatchewan got the Detroit TV stations on cable [back in the 90s] and watched the newscasts religiously. I was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario right across the river from Detroit. They could not understand how we could talk about going into Detroit to shop or for entertainment. They were terrified and [surprise!] identified the black population of Detroit as the problem.
Brachiator
@DougJ:
Odd that you would remember this from 80s Dirty Harry movies, since “Dirty Harry” was released in 1971.
The propaganda of cop as heroic Joe doing his duty has been around forever. If anything, media intensified this in radio and tv shows like “Dragnet” or “Adam 12” (and the irony of dirty cops as consultants contributing to the image of squeaky clean tv cops is a plot element of 1997s “LA Confidential”). Hollywood stuff may also have been influenced by the example of Los Angeles police chief William Parker, who was given credit for rooting out police corruption during his 39 years as chief, but who also had notoriously poisonous and racist attitudes towards black and Latino citizens.
Fuck, Parker (chief from 1927 to 1966) is sometimes even credited with inventing the phrase, “the thin blue line.”
But none of this has a damn thing to do with the librul nanny state.
And cops have always been responsible for suppressing the uncivilized criminal element, whether that criminal element is lower class, Irish, black or Latino (with occasional inclusions of Italians, Jews and whoever else comprises the American underclass).
And obviously, the notion of cops as heroes who deserve any benefit of the doubt was intensified after 911.
Also it is odd that you claim that the first Dirty Harry movies were complex. They were stylish and better made, but the villain in the first film was a goddamn cartoon psychopath (played with over-the-top relish by Andy Robinson) who clearly had it coming.
japa21
@raven: What questions do you need answers on?
I went in for hernia surgery. The main surgeon decided his young assistant should handle it because it was a minor hernia (he thought). Turned out that it was much bigger than expected and they couldn’t believe I had been walking around without screaming in pain all the time.
Zinsky
c.u.n.d. Gulag has it about right. Police have never been in place to protect the middle class from the poor or the poor from each other. It has ALWAYS been about protecting the rich and privileged and their property from those who have nothing. It’s the only way a hierarchical system can be perpetuated. Read Ian Welsh over at http://ianwelsh.net – he has written about this extensively.
Chris
@Calouste:
I must be the only person alive who doesn’t feel this way.
If someone can point me towards movies where the drug lord or mob boss or arms dealer is brought down by entirely ordinary and by the book police work, I’d be quite happy to watch them and suspect I’d like them quite a bit.
kc
You’ve been reading John D. MacDonald . . . he wrote several novels in which cops are depicted as corrupt and violent.
The idea that cops are ALWAYS a force for good is something that’s been promoted by politicians (and of course, cops).
raven
@japa21: Yea, I have no pain at all. The umbilical I have known about for years and was always told to leave it alone. My doc did the check and said I had them on both sides of my scrotum and it was best to get them while I was young and healthy. My luck I’d do it and get hit my a meteor.
shell
In earlier decades, the ’30’s and ’40’s, it was usually of the cop walking his beat, with the ever present Irish accent.
raven
@Chris: Fargo
kc
@NorthLeft12:
That’s right. I think one of the rapists was played by Jeff Goldblum, in fact.
If I recall correctly one of the later Death Wish movies depicted a poor neighborhood overrun by a heartwarmingly racially diverse group of violent thugs. Only in the movies . . .
celticdragonchick
@SatanicPanic:
It was made during the middle of the New York is going to hell phase of the 1970’s (and it is no coincidence that Escape From New York was made around the same time.
New York really was fucked up beyond belief in the 70’s (look at Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver or Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam for a taste).
I know some folks are nostalgic about the former triple X rated Times Square, the trash in the streets, your morning mugging on the way to work and street gangs fighting on the subway…but I imagine most folks in NYC don’t really want that back.
SatanicPanic
@NorthLeft12: There’s a scene in the movie where he’s moving through a cocktail party and overhears a man say “he seems to be killing more black people is he some sort of racist?”, which a woman responds “well black people commit more crimes, should we try to recruit more white muggers?” Something like that.
Cacti
@Zinsky:
This.
There’s a reason that the most heavy handed and autocratic regimes are referred to as “Police States”.
When the peasants have revolted and are storming the palace gates, police will always be among the last men on the ramparts protecting the despot.
Cermet
@Tree With Water: Or that after the civil war (or better known as the southern war to preserve slavery and attack the north) the south completely recreated slavery and most young blacks spent time in the criminal justice system working for companies that paid the jail system to provide them with these poor blacks as full slaves (officially called inmates) and the whole corrupt and Nazi like forced labor system {very correct usage!} designed to re-enslave blacks in most of the south (and many Midwestern states also discovered the value of these so-called chain gangs) from 1865 up to the 1940’s. So many tens of thousands were out and out murdered by the overseers and cops that the south has a vast network of unmarked graves near these slave pens where many of the companies operated.
raven
@shell: George Kennedy could wheel that nightstick in the Blue Knight tv show but the movie with William Holden was even better.
Chris
@Zinsky:
Middle and working class whites buy into this narrative by figuring that the police’s job is to protect them from blacks and Latinos.
celticdragonchick
@raven:
Wield, not wheel.
Your daily dose of pedantry, brought to you by the following sponsors… ;)
SatanicPanic
@celticdragonchick: I know it was bad, but making a racist movie suggesting people should just go out and shoot criminals seems not helpful
Big ole hound
I have not personally seen nor heard a cop who I would trust to act as a peace maker in my lifetime. They must find someone at fault instead of just keeping the peace. In most cases they escalate a situation when they arrive on the scene. A police presence can prevent action at times until they put on that tough guy attitude then everything goes to shit.
Another thing that bugs me, why does a cop’s funeral draw every cop for miles when other dangerous jobs are blips on the radar. Who pays for this time and blocked roads and who bears the responsibility for unanswered calls while the every motorcycle in the area parades for miles. Cops aren’t even in the top ten dangerous jobs and they are armed. When did they become the “heroic victims” for doing their jobs Baaah, oldtimers rant
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: Yeah, it seems like a three-step progression to me. Squeaky-clean heroes, to ambiguous antiheroes in a gritty violent world, to killer heroes subduing a violent world by brute force.
The Andy Griffith Show image of Officer Friendly is still at step one: that guy doesn’t use violence very much and he doesn’t live in a very violent world.
I’d even put Dragnet in that earlier category; it got crankier in the late 60s version where they were always up against damn hippies and their Mary Jane, but, still, the guys on Dragnet weren’t shooting at mass murderers all the time; they spent a lot of their time dealing with petty crime.
JPL
nbcnews is streaming the service for Beau Biden at the Delaware Legislature Hall. It’s heartbreaking.
Chris
@Cacti:
A funny thing occurred to me while watching an adaptation of “Les Miserables” a little while ago, specifically Javert’s work spying on the student groups that include Marius; nobody uses the phrase “secret police.” Just as, in fact, in all the works I’ve read from that era, I can’t remember that phrase or anything like it ever being used to distinguish what Javert was doing from “ordinary” police work. It’s just “the police.”
Presumably, because it was understood in those days that looking out for the rich and powerful and stomping hard on anything that might threaten them was simply what the police did.
NotMax
@Warren Terra
TV, yes (usually*).
50s films showcasing some seamier aspects include Blackboard Jungle, Detective Story, Touch of Evil, The Wild One, Ace in the Hole, to name just a handful.
*Even Leave It To Beaver made an occasional foray into a topic less banal – alcoholism, for example.
@raven
“Ooh, ooh!”
Bex
It really ramped up after 9/11. The first responders did heroic things, but not everyone fits that description.
NotMax
@raven
The transition from cop on the take to cop on the make was slow but steady. Might hazard a guess that The Laughing Policeman was a precursor.
raven
@NotMax: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 was badass too. So was Charlie Varrick.
boatboy_srq
@Botsplainer: Exactly. A lot of it from the “we’re the best of the best” post-WW2 Cold War jingoism. If you look back only as far as the 30s, across the board in entertainment, law enforcement was well-meaning but neither particularly bright nor especially effective: consider Maltese Falcon, for example, or any book by Christie, Berkeley/Iles or Sayers: the police mean well but they just don’t pick up the clues. Doyle’s police foils for Sherlock Holmes (going back that far), while good were always a few leagues behind Holmes in solving crimes. There was also – at least in pop culture – a distinct lack of awareness of the crime rates: crime statistics are a fairly new development, and data gathering for crime was barely out of infancy, so the idea of massive armies of criminals out to commit heinous deeds against innocent civilians and society hadn’t yet dawned. There was, however, a strong positive – almost familial – connection to the local beat cop. “Crooked cops” seems (as Warren Terra points out) a mainly 70s construct.
raven
@JPL: I thought it was Saturday.
dSmith
I remember in the 70’s the cop shows always seemed to revolve around the exclusionary rule about illegally gathered evidence. Criminals were constantly getting away with murder because the police made some little mistake. I remember a “Streets of San Francisco” where a criminal confessed after being read his rights but then he claimed he lost the battery to his hearing aid so he didn’t hear the officer, therefore the confession was not admissible. I was surprised to find out that in real life evidence was excluded in less than 1% of actual criminal trials.
gelfling545
@Chris: They could even create drama by the law enforcement personnel being tempted to go outside the proper procedures but winning the day by strict adherence to the law.
Chris
@dSmith:
TV portrays a system in which the deck is stacked against the cops, in the name of “innocent until proven guilty.” Real life, as I understand from my lawyer friends, is pretty much the opposite.
JPL
@raven: Saturday is the Mass, today is at the Delaware Legislature Hall.
Tomorrow is public viewing also. Growing up Catholic, I personally hated the viewings and my sons know that if they do anything but have me cremated and toss me to the wind, I will haunt them forever.
Jill’s granddaughter has been holding her tight.
Chris
@raven:
Thanks.
celticdragonchick
@SatanicPanic:
I agree.
Valdivia
is it the case that movies and tv shows cement this image while music tries to undermine it?
Matt McIrvin
@boatboy_srq: On the other hand, it seems to me that there had been a pervasive fear of widespread crime back before World War II, and you could see it in the pulps and comics of the day, which were often about vigilante superheroes just flat-out murdering criminals. In the comics, they softened it a lot in the post-Wertham, Comics Code era, though the attitudes gradually returned in the 80s and 90s.
The cops weren’t usually the big heroes in those stories, though; they were overwhelmed and the superheroes had to take over.
Seanly
I think a big part of the cop cinema of the late 60’s & 70’s was driven by legitimate fear of escalating violence in several major cities. The homicide rate in the US peaked in the 70’s/80’s. Almost 25 years into a huge drop in the homicide and other violent crime rates and sometimes it seems like the media still acts like it’s a lawless hellscape.
However, movies like Predator 2 and the original Robocop seem so dated nowadays precisely for the absurd paranoia of violent crime. I think people are coming around to realize that things aren’t as dangerous out there as we’ve been told for the last 50 years.
On the cop note, there was a great article in The Atlantic (around the time Tango & Cash was out as it talked about that film) which savaged the idea of the Dirty Harry-type cop. It discussed how the movies routinely show even the most basic of constitutional rights being trampled in order to catch the criminal. One aspect is that while the Captain gets angry at Dirty Harry for doing it incorrectly, they ultimately praise Harry for doing it his way. Since Harry does nab the bad guy (by violating his rights as opposed to through better police work), the will of the state is still done. Ever since reading that, I always keep a critical eye on the police procedurals that I watch – my wife loves L&O:SVU but I can’t stand to watch it for all the unconstitutional interviews they have in the show.
Matt McIrvin
…consider also: Dick Tracy. He actually was a cop hero who lived in a violent world inhabited by grotesque super-criminals, and horrible grisly deaths were pretty common in his strip. In some ways he was more like the modern fictional police character.
But he was pre-war, a creation of the 1930s, and by the 1960s the strip had gotten all weird and science-fictional, with Dick Tracy regularly visiting the Moon.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Weren’t the superheroes just as often striking back against the rich and powerful, e.g. Superman roughing up slum lords and war profiteers and corrupt politicians?
It might be splitting hairs, but I kind of make a distinction between stories where “the bad guys are so rich and powerful and connected that they’ve broken the system and going outside the law is the only way we can accomplish anything” (e.g. the premise of The Untouchables) and “the system as functioning normally and following all the rules and respecting all the rights that it’s supposed to is weak and objectively pro-criminal and needs to just die and let the heroes do their work” (I believe that’s the premise of Dirty Harry, where a criminal goes free and kills again because Dirty Harry didn’t get a warrant).
One of them is saying that the system can be hacked so that it no longer guarantees justice (which is basically true, even if that doesn’t make vigilantism right or even a good idea). The other dismisses the entire concept of justice as irrelevant, because all you sheep should just stop asking questions and put all your faith in the infallible sheepdog.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: Yes, that’s true. Even the petty crooks often tended to be working for powerful mobsters. It’s a bit different from the Seventies-Eighties cop-show model where you expect to just have random encounters with street scum all the time.
ThresherK
@Seanly: One aspect is that while the Captain gets angry at Dirty Harry for doing it incorrectly…
“This cop has never been suspended, only fires his weapon on the practice range, and has never argued with his hard-nosed captain. It’s Richard Dreyfus starring in By the Book, another Movie Men Don’t Want to See.”
(Paraphrased, from The Man Show, by memory.)
japa21
@raven: It was pretty much a breeze. No major activity or lifting for a few weeks but I was back at my desk job within a week. No major pain or soreness afterwards.
Gravenstone
@Botsplainer:
The ghost of Jack Webb says hello.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I’ve only seen the original Dirty Harry, none of the sequels, but as others have noted the main villain is a white psychopath supposedly loosely based (or maybe not so loosely) on the Zodiac Killer. But the plot device of the renegade cop/PI bending the rules to solve the crime has been around along time in cinema – Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon wasn’t a cop per se but he solved the crime they couldn’t and worked around their interference to do it. Sort of the same motif.
celticdragonchick
@Seanly:
My wife is a forensic biology major and she can’t stand any of those shows because of the preposterous forensics they portray.
celticdragonchick
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
The rugged individualist myth is about as American as it gets, and it has manifested in numerous fiction genres that would seem to be unrelated on the surface.
schrodinger's cat
A vigilante policeman taking the law into his own hands, because he was thwarted by a corrupt politician, in the pocket of the local mob boss was common Hindi film trope in the 70s and 80s. Zanjeer (Chain) and Ardhsatya (Half truth) are two movies that come to my mind.
Zanjeer was a big budget movie which took Amitabh Bachan’s career to the stratosphere as an angry young man. Ardhsatya was a more realistic look at Bombay’s underworld, with a great cast. Om Puri, plays the anguished cop and Sadashiv Amrapurkar plays the slimy mob boss while Smita Patil is the policeman’s idealistic girl friend.
eyelessgame
There have been Knights In Shining Armor defending us against The Scary Other People for as long as there have been Scary Other People. But the degree to which we deify them depends on how scared we are at the moment.
Tree With Water
@Cermet: That’s definitely a bit of American history that “exceptionalists” refuse to acknowledge, though it certainly fits the description. It’s a shame, too, if only because understanding the story won’t do anyone a bit of harm to take to heart. Quite the contrary, of course. Like the man said not all that long ago, “..Let us therefore study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged”.
catclub
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Of course, Magnum Force was about out of control cops taking the law into their own hands, because they thought that society was constricting them and their policing too much. They did not end well.
Sherparick
Its a pretty old myth, adapted for the police in the 20th century. In the 19th, in the dime novels and earlier formats it was “Indian” who was typically seen as the threatening other to whom the forces of order was protecting us from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_novel
fuckwit
In the 1930s, cops were mostly buffoons. Have a look at an old Marx Brother’s movie for example. Even in the hard-boiled detective movies of the 30s, the private detectives were heroic, but the city cops were portrayed incompetent. Not an expert on movies of that era though, but that’s my impression from watching the old movies on TV back before there was cable and there was nothing else on.
WaterGirl
@raven: My niece just had outpatient hernia surgery last week. They went in through the belly button. She said it really hurt for a day once all the initial drugs wore off, then she was pretty good. If I had to guess, I’d say she is a low-pain threshold person like me. :-)
boatboy_srq
@Matt McIrvin: Superheroes were big in the 20s and 30s. there was a lot of “lawlessness” in the interwar years, first from the various circumventions of Prohibition and then from the organizations created for that once Prohibition ended and surviving in the post-Prohibition years. The gangster was as frequently a romantic character as a villain in that period: Bonnie and Clyde, for example, were criminals but attained a certain “folk hero” patina. Law enforcement was at once outclassed by organized crime and vilified for impeding what most US citizens considered harmless entertainments. The period is probably not an ideal precursor window to compare against.
boatboy_srq
@fuckwit: Society of the 20s and 30s had a very hard time with law enforcement: in the ’20s the same guys who tracked down the hood who snatched purses or stole cars were the ones breaking up respectable society’s evening relaxation in the speakeasy and confiscating all the booze; otherwise they were hopeless at either task. That sort of cultural trauma is difficult to forget.
orogeny
@SatanicPanic:
Weren’t the three rapists who set off Bronson’s crusade white? Seems like one of them was Jeff Goldblum in his first movie role.
boatboy_srq
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Key difference: in the 30s/40s the good guy was a private citizen; by ’71 he was a cop. The Good Guy With A Gun became the Good Guy With A Badge And A Gun. That’s significant.
FlipYrWhig
@orogeny: I think that gang — in one of the 1980s Death Wishes — includes both Goldblum and Laurence Fishburne (wearing those louvered sunglasses).
The Western/cop connection is everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s. Think not only Eastwood but Fort Apache -> Fort Apache The Bronx.
Bill
The 80’s had some pretty great, and nuanced, depictions of policing though. Hill Street Blues comes to mind. That show did a great job of showing cops as flawed people dealing with a stressful job. Sometimes heroes, sometime villains, but for the most part people doing a job and making mistakes while doing it.
Movies like Colors took on the brash “shoot first ask questions later” type cops by showing Penn’s character evolve under the Duval’s tutelage. It also pretty starkly showed the inequality between brown people and the cops in LA.
Even 48 Hours, a quintessential “good guy cop operating outside the law” movie, showed Nolte as a deeply flawed character and took on racial issues in a pretty brutal way.
orogeny
@FlipYrWhig:
Oh, the western thing is there for sure. Heck, even the gun Paul Kersey uses is a western gunfighter’s gun with notches pre-carved on the grips. I was talking about the “wow, is that movie racist” comment.
Tao of Nope
@raven: I’m your man. Had inguinal repair in late December.
Tao of Nope
@raven: I’m your man – had inguinal repair in late December. What can I tell you?
NotMax
@boatboy_srq
The first popularly accepted superhero (as opposed to hero), Superman, premiered in print in 1938.
Feathers
Officer SuperAwesomeWonderfulCop is more driven by politics and TV news than Hollywood. Namely because Officer Wondercop is kind of boring, storywise. Maybe I’m watching the wrong shows, though.
As a film noir buff, there is a long history of bad cop movies. Interestingly, the bad cops were more likely to be corruptly in league with criminals, rather than just beating up citizens for kicks. The production code may actually allow for more bad cop movies, because bad cops were OK if they were caught and/or died horribly at the end.
There is a short memory for how corrupt municipal and state governments used to be. There is a reason why the states started running lotteries. In the 50s, Peoria, Illinois had twenty-some openly operating brothels, with probably the same number of gambling houses. The city government kept no books and city employees had to go to a window on Friday afternoons to get paid in cash.
Things got cleaned up because of WWII. Soldiers came home having been away for close to a decade, if they got a degree through the GI Bill. They weren’t afraid of mobsters or their goons. The fight to clean up towns got ultraviolent. Bombings of reformers were not uncommon (including a judge in Peoria).
I’ll put in a pitch here for TCM’s Summer of Darkness, which features 24 hours of noir every Friday in June and July.
I’ll try to go through the schedule and list films of interest in an open thread.
Chet
An eye-opening glimpse into the mind of our Thin Blue Line can be found at this blog, from “a retired police officer from a large metropolitan agency in the mid-west” who “write(s) from the perspective of a traditionalist conservative”.
To serve and protect.
David Koch
I blame Adam-12
I don’t know if I want to blame Dirty Harry.
The villains were white:
1st movie: white psycho kidnapper
2nd movie: white police death squad
3rd movie: white SLA
A guy
Hey dougj, have you ever been shot at? Or even been in a fight?
boatboy_srq
@NotMax: I stand corrected – freely admitting I’m not a comic fanatic.
Ruckus
@raven:
Had it done 2 yrs ago. Not a lot of fun but better than living with the hernia.
The one thing they didn’t tell me was that everything in the general area turns black and blue. EVERYTHING. A little disturbing, not knowing. Other than that went pretty well. Took about a week to feel somewhat normal, I took a month off work to heal.
James E Powell
@dSmith:
I was surprised to find out that in real life evidence was excluded in less than 1% of actual criminal trials.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but you have the right order of magnitude. A trial judge once told me, “this is all for the court of appeals to deal with.”
There may be significantly different numbers for cases in which the defendant is wealthy or famous enough attract the press/media.
James E Powell
@FlipYrWhig:
Fishburne & Goldblum. Reminds me of one of my favorite obscure and much better than expected films, Deep Cover.
James E Powell
@raven:
Had one on each side, three years apart. What do you want to know?
Jado
Late 80s Hollywood. Colors w/ Robert Duvall & Sean Penn, New Jack City, Scarface, The Principal, etc. Late 80s/early 90s movies about white guys against the hilariously overarmed gangs. How are cops supposed to deal with Tony Montana’s rocket launcher? Nino Brown’s Uzi? Those poor cops are outgunned!!!
They must be heroes…