Watching the Detectives

By G. Beato, AlterNet
Posted on April 29, 2003, Printed on February 13, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/15766/watching_the_detectives

If you've ever watched an episode of Cops, you know it's not easy being a police officer. Mostly, you work at night. And mostly you drive around aimlessly and relentlessly, sort of like a cabbie except that all your fares are jerks and you never get a tip. Inevitably, a very drunk, very shirtless man with a mullet starts brutally assaulting all known standards of pronunciation and syntax and you're forced to restore order.

Sometimes this involves a chase through a dark, abandoned field. Other times you just have to hold the hand of a baleful 5-year-old staring down the face of his own shirtless, alcoholic future as your partner cuffs his dad. On most occasions, only six to 10 of your colleagues will arrive to provide back-up for such maneuvers. After your partner plops the perp in the backseat of your cruiser, you're required to give your colleagues a play-by-play recap of what they just stood around watching, no matter how out-of-breath you are. Alas, you only have five minutes or so to do this, because crime runs on a clock of its own, and somewhere out there, in the dark American night, there are other grizzled boozers determined to drink themselves right out of their shirts.

OK, sometimes it's tougher than all that. People lie to you. People shoot at you. There seems to be a lot of paperwork. If you wear a uniform, there's probably a lot of laundry too. Police work is a tedious, depressing, violent, and spiritually draining business, and those who can do it well deserve respect, gratitude, and plenty of free coffee.

But along with the good cops, there are bad cops too, of course. And is there anything worse than a bad cop? They're like criminals, only with better equipment and all the advantages of unassailable authority. And it seems like there's quite a few of them working the streets these days.

According to the activist group October 22nd, "The number and rate of people killed by law enforcement agents have jumped alarmingly in this new political climate of increased 'homeland security' and repressive laws." The group publishes a book called "Stolen Lives" and is now working on a third edition of it. The 2nd edition documented "over 2,000 cases of people killed by law enforcement agents in the 1990s."

Why are there so many violent and out-of-control cops today? I blame Dirty Harry Callahan.

For years now, psychologists, talk-show hosts, and cultural custodians have been debating the connection between violent media and real-life violence. But such discourse invariably focuses on civilian (and usually teenage) violence. Marilyn Manson caused the Columbine massacre. The Sopranos proved that HBO really isn't just TV -- it's distance-learning for novice psychopaths (like the two young men in Riverside, Calif. who cut off their mom's head and stored it in a duffel bag after watching Tony Soprano and his nephew Christopher employ a similar tactic on HBO).

But it's not just teenage droogs who get their fix of ultra-violence from electronic media. And no TV series has ever been built around the amoral exploits of a 15-year-old killer. In the cathode universe, week in and week out, season after season, it's cops who are an undertaker's best friend.

Of course, it wasn't always this way. Even in the face of the surliest late-'60s bacon-baiting, Dragnet's stalwart Joe Friday maintained the demeanor of a robot teaching high school civics. A few years later, he passed the baton to Adam 12's Pete Malloy. Like Carson Daly following Dick Clark, Malloy was The Guy to Friday's Man, hipper, fully motile, but still a genuinely civil servant sworn to uphold the law with fairness, restraint, and faultless manners. Then there was Columbo, sloppier than a sociology professor (no crisp martial duds for him) and packing less heat than a wet match. A hard-boiled gumshoe in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, he got his collars without even flashing a gun, much less firing one. And how about Greenwich Village's finest, the multi-ethnic men and woman of the 12th Precinct? Under Barney Miller's watch, toilet plungers were simply props for jokes about Fish's gastrointestinal distress; if someone had wandered into their squad room brandishing a wallet like NYPD police-brutality victim Amadou Diallo, Miller and his officers would have responded with nothing more lethal than 41 rim-shots.

But while all of these well-behaved, relatively peaceful role models were making television a safe and orderly wasteland, a more troubling figure was patrolling the nation's moviehouses. In 1971, when San Francisco's hippies, homos, campus radicals and uppity Negroes were twisting the established moral order into a Lombard Street of psychosexual perversion and cultural upheaval, the original Angry White Man took it upon himself to set things straight, right, and uptight again.

Ironically, all the really crazy San Francisco stories (the Zebra killings, the SLA, Jonestown) still lay in the future, but already Harry Callahan had seen enough. Hedonism and lawlessness had robbed him of love and sex when a drunk driver killed his wife. Now all he pined for, like a smitten stalker who will not take no for an answer, was order at any cost. Alas, simpering citycrats and Berkeley law professors had forsaken the efficacies of the Ten Commandments for mealy-mouthed legislation that strait-jacketed cops and functioned as soft armor for sickos: when Callahan finally captures his serial killer nemesis Scorpio, the vaguely hippieish, vaguely effeminate sadist is allowed to limp away scot free.

"Where the hell does it say you've got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel?" the city's district attorney asks Callahan. "Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I'm saying is, that man had rights."

A year earlier, 3,000 miles away, real-life counterculture cop Frank Serpico had accused the New York police department of institutionalized extortion and various other forms of impropriety, but Dirty Harry revealed where the true corruption lay: in such hoary and ineffectual concepts as distributed justice, checks and balances, the presumption of innocence. When the system would no longer let Harry Callahan be a cop, he started multi-tasking, becoming judge, jury, district attorney, and executioner all rolled into one shoot-first-then-shoot-again exterminating angel. In Dirty Harry's final scene, Scorpio gets the .44 caliber sentence he has coming to him, but Callahan realizes he's a dead man too, at least institutionally, so he tosses his badge into the marsh where Scorpio's body is sinking.

Of course, this wasn't really the end of Callahan's career: it was the beginning. Sequels and copycats followed, and Callahan -- anti-social, impulsive, pre-emptive, a relentless advocate of magnum force -- became the role model for a new generation of cops, both imaginary and real. According to the "Behind the Scenes" notes of the Dirty Harry DVD, "A branch of the Phillippine police asked for a copy of the film to use in their training program."

Callahan's ascent from department pariah to law enforcement role model was mirrored only by his acolytes' escalation of his tactics. The official body count of Dirty Harry is just four, with Callahan himself racking up only one kill. By today's standards, that almost qualifies as a pacifist tract. But that's how slippery slopes work, and ultimately, Harry Callahan, genteel torturer that he was, helped popularize the idea that "criminal rights" was such a preposterous notion that it actually legitimized any action against odious beasts like Scorpio. Also part of Callahan's gospel: a healthy disrespect for laws, rules and multilateral decision-making of any kind.

Such doctrine made for a great movie series, but what happens when real-life cops, like those in Los Angeles' Rampart Division, start planting evidence, intimidating witnesses, shooting people without just cause and selling drugs themselves? Well, then, you've got a hit TV series, of course. And while The Shield's Vic Mackey makes Harry Callahan look like Florence Nightingale, he suffers from none of Callahan's angst over his place in the system. In the early 1970s, Harry Callahan was a lone wolf, but today, Vic Mackey is leader of the pack, with all the usual bureaucratic enemies, sure, but also a constituency that extends to all facets of L.A.'s criminal justice system. In other words, Harry Callahan is now the status quo.

As an isolated phenomenom, Callahan was troubling but manageable, a last resort for those rare occasions when a giggling super-fiend straight out of Gotham City was haunting rooftops and hijacking school buses. But now with seemingly every cop harboring an inner Callahan, he's a first resort. And a second and third. Alas, there aren't always enough giggling super-fiends to go around, and thus extraordinary firepower is occasionally unleashed upon unarmed individuals like Amadou Diallo and Gonzalo Martinez, who in February 2002, was gunned down by cops in Downey, California even as he was raising his arms in surrender.

Despite such incidents, the appeal of the rogue cop only increases. Michael Chiklis is winning Emmys, and while Clint Eastwood never converted his Dirty Harry shtick into as much real-life political power as he could have, our current national leader, with his make-my-détente brand of foreign policy and his deep contempt for U.N. bureaucrats, is no doubt a fan of Inspector Callahan.

In the end, then, the joke's on Hollywood liberals. For years, William Bennett, Joseph Lieberman, Bill O'Reilly and various others have been urging the entertainment industry to tone down its output in the name of curbing criminal violence. But the Malibu millionaires, safely nestled in their highly securified enclaves, stubbornly insist that there is no correlation whatsoever between their work and the world's ills.

Every once in a while, they give us a show like Cop Rock, which suggested that police officers, in addition to being trigger-happy thugs determined to impose justice on the world by any means necessary, also loved musicals. Unfortunately, such multi-dimensional portraits of the law enforcement world are exceedingly rare. Mostly Hollywood has simply churned out malignant copaganda that glamorizes police brutality and normalizes the idea that the only good cop is a bad cop.

Is it possible, at this point, to reverse the damage done? To present alternate modes of copdom that might inspire real-life police officers to act with compassion and restraint rather than aggression? Might Hollywood summon the courage (and the responsibility) to banish the ghost of Inspector Harry Callahan forever and replace it with kinder, gentler law enforcement icons? Dirty Harry, Lethal Weapon, and The Shield maybe be harmless to mature adults, but remember, impressionable cops who lack parental guidance are watching such fare too.

G. Beato is the editor of Soundbitten.com.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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