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.