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u/DapperAgitator 13h ago
Recently watched some season 1 of NCIS. It's insane the number of times they trample over someone's constitutional rights and expect the audience to cheer bc it helps them catch the bad guy.
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u/cestquilepatron 12h ago
Many of these shows also have an "Internal Affairs" arc where the people trying to get the protagonists to stop violating people's rights are portrayed as completely unlikeable or even outright villains.
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u/Monteze 12h ago
Listen buddy, the audience saw bad guy rape-fingers kill all those people. I had to break into their house without a warrant and torture information out of them to save that innocent white girl from a middle class family they can all relate to.
What? You pro bad guy rape-fingers now?
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u/DapperAgitator 4h ago
So Johnny, did our crackhead crack? 😏
<<Won't say a word. 😠 Wants to lawyer up.
😒 I would too if a witness heard me listening to opera music the same night an opera singer was killed. But the jury's gonna want to see DNA. Dammit where's Santoli with those lab results!
<<Well Steve you know my hearings not so good lately. I'm not sure what he asked for. 😉 Plus our office's been having phone troubles...
That'll buy us a few hours. In the meantime something tells me our phantom of the rock-ra left his car door wide open 😉.
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u/SryInternet101 11h ago
Every police procedural is like thet. Theyre all coproganda.
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u/histfanatic 7h ago
Every time I see Coproganda, I like to imagine people are complaining about the influence of Big Feces.
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u/thatweirdguyted 14h ago
I have been making this argument for years about cop shows like BAU normalizing the casual violation of rights as being necessary to catch suspects. It is a fascist ideology
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u/TheBurningEmu 13h ago
Copaganda shows basically always have some instance of the police breaking the law to get the perp but it's framed as a good thing.
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u/master2139 13h ago
Isnt that most shows nowadays? Ive watched 3 seasons of Tracker and that guy breaks the law as a matter of routine every single episode.
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u/BeedrillLover88 12h ago edited 11h ago
To play devil's advocate, he's not a cop.
Edit to add, look at old shows like Mcguyver or Knight Rider or Magnum PI. None of the main characters are cops and are constantly breaking and entering and stealing evidence for thier cases. But they're the good guys!
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u/jackofslayers 11h ago
But there is a similar issue in all professional shows. Most lawyer shows involve lawyers breaking the law and it being framed as clever.
Lots of doctor shows solve the conflict by having doctors violate codes of ethics.
I do think that this is still a unique problem with cop shows because of the nature of the job. But also fundamentally, tv shows about jobs are usually really inaccurate.
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u/Lachan44 11h ago
tv shows about jobs are usually really inaccurate
if they were accurate, no one would watch them...
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u/JTtheLAR 10h ago
The Wire was incredibly accurate and it is 1000% better than any lame ass paw patrol police procedural in existence. A detective only draws his service weapon 1 time throughout the entirety of the show. And it was to accidentally shoot an undercover police officer in pursuit of a perpetrator.
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u/System0verlord 10h ago
Don’t herc and carver start blasting and clip someone when they’re at the towers in season 1? And Pryz takes the fall for them?
And then someone shoots a kid’s eye out.
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u/JTtheLAR 10h ago
I was actually wrong. A police officer only fires a weapon 3 times in the entirety of The Wire. Once in the scenario that you named (when people start throwing stuff at the towers), one accidental discharge in the station, and once when the off duty officer is shot. All 3 times it was the same officer: Prezbelewki. Nobody shoots a kids eye out, Prezbelwski pistol whips the kid in the eye for leaning on his car. This incident is what causes the people in the towers to start throwing shit at them from their balconies and windows. Herc and Carver do not return fire at the towers. I had to go back and watch, its been a minute since I have watched The Wire. Its probably time for a rewatch. I need to hunt down the entire series on DVD.
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u/System0verlord 9h ago
I could’ve sworn Pryz took the fall for someone else at some point.
Ah fuck. Can’t look it up either. Damn it. That means I have to fuckin rewatch all of it to find out if I remembered it correctly. Noooooooo
Edit: there’s an HD remaster floating around that HBO did at some point. Think Amazon Prime has it.
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u/JohnPomo 9h ago
Yes, but that was portrayed as a very bad thing.
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u/System0verlord 6h ago
I was contesting the number of times they draw a weapon. Not if it was good or not.
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u/cain8708 8h ago
Honestly I disagree. I think people just like to point out cop shows because its the easy thing to do.
If I told you the next time you go to your doctor and they will violate your consent, or lie to you to get your consent on something, or better yet skip the consent step and do a risky procedure on you, would you go see them? I just described a chunk of House.
You brought up doctor shows ya, but if you are able to name several big professions that have multiple shows that all have the same problem, then why is it only one of those professions has an issue when we are supposed to be placing our trust in all three of them?
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u/Kryptosis 7h ago
Vigilante justice is just as bad.
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u/NOOBINATOR_64 7h ago
In real life sure, but in fiction it's one of the classic archetypal characters. Depiction is not endorsement.
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u/Kryptosis 6h ago edited 3h ago
Ever? For anything? Is there ever a point for you where depiction does become endorsement? I cant think of a few examples. More-so I would argue that ANY depiction can be considered endorsement if it's not handled appropriately.
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u/unlimi_Ted 10h ago
I remember the Netflix Marvel shows always had weird takes on this where they simultaneously insisted that cops shouldn't ever do anything illegal but also vigilante justice is absolutely necessary to stop crime.
So there's an episode (I think of Luke Cage) where a police detective quits her job, does a bunch of extrajudicial violence, and then gets rehired as a cop the next episode after she's done doing illegal stuff so it doesn't technically depict an active officer of the law being a vigilante.
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u/ruiner8850 10h ago
so it doesn't technically depict an active officer of the law being a vigilante.
The thing is that it doesn't even matter if a person is technically a cop or not, if they are doing work for the police they are working as an agent of the police and are bound to Constitution in the same way that cops are. It would be ridiculous if cops were able to just get other people to violate constitutional rights for them and everything was just fine.
I remember many years ago the cops where I live got a secretary for a lawyer to search their office looking for marijuana and the evidence was eventually thrown out because a judge ruled that the evidence was illegally obtained since the secretary was now acting as an agent of the government.
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u/ObGynKenobi841 9h ago
Yep, they can't just get someone to break the law for them. They have to pay a billionaire to do it and then it's fine, per Flock and Palantir's business models.
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u/ProtonCanon 5h ago
"It would be ridiculous if cops were able to just get other people to violate constitutional rights for them and everything was just fine."
Gotham PD: "...I'm just gonna ignore that."
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u/AggressorBLUE 9h ago
Yup, rewatched Civil War recently, and was disappointed that it frames Tonys take on how the Avengers need oversight and cant keep being a self governing organization as the misguided side of things. That take really hasn’t aged well.
Sure, Caps counter point of “the people in-charge of oversight can have agendas” isn’t entirely invalid, but rather than try to work out a system of checks and balances, he just goes full “fuck it!” And does his own thing. Geo political hijinks ensue.
(I know its not literally about cops; but the core theme of ‘all that stuff oversight stuff just impedes the good guys from doing their job” was on full display, cranked to 11)
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u/Spartan_Mage 3h ago
I feel like some context is needed here. Civil War takes place after Wimter Soldier, where Hydra literally infiltrated the most secretive military in the world and then got mere minutes away from killing every last person in America that could stop them.
So in Captain America's mind he is absolutely 100% proven right every time because Hydra exists and he has made it his life mission to kill them. So from Captain America's perspective Stark was basically trying to make SHEILD again and be vulnerable to being infiltrated again and having direct access to the Avengers again, the exact thing that caused the world to almost be ruled by Hydra.
To in all honesty Captain America is right, their world is simply too dangerous to have a government run the crisis management super heros because it concentrated far too much power there and naturally attracted those who wanted to exploit it, just like in real life. Not only that, the more checks and balances you put in the way of a crisis and first responders the more people will die due to wasting time with paperwork. Not only that, regulations would not have stopped civilian casualties from happening like Stark thought it would, there was no amount of peoer work that would save those people. That is just war, it will always happen if there is combat, that is just the reality. If you don't want civilian deaths than you better find a way to end all war. (Ultron)
So yeah, there is an argument to be made that the more you put government agencies to manage somthing the more likely it is going to be corrupted eventually. That's just government. There is not amount of checks and balances that will be able to stop that, because there will always be loopholes, and people will always cheat and do illegal actions to get past it anyway. You cannot red tape away corruption, the American government has proved this time and again as an institution that was made to do exactly that, and it failed.
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u/Scott_Liberation 13h ago
I can imagine a cultural anthropologist pushing up their glasses and saying something like this kind of theme in our fiction is a natural consequence of a low-trust, individualistic society.
Except I'm not sure anthropologists are ever willing or able to make such concrete declarations about anything.
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u/vi_sucks 10h ago
Honestly, i wish we could go back to the days when the Copaganda was about making the cops look more noble and rule abiding than they actually are.
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u/Skippymabob 6h ago
Watch Line of Duty from the BBC
It's the only show I can think of where IA are the good guys because they root out dirty coppers
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u/CharonsLittleHelper 2h ago
OG Law & Order was USUALLY pretty good about it. The police would actually get in trouble the few times it happened or even claimed to have happened.
SVU though? Tons of police abuse.
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u/mortalcrawad66 11h ago
Honestly why Nash Bridges is my favorite cop show. Yes he breaks your rights and privileges, but he's also an asshole. A fun asshole, but still an asshole. He's not always likable too, and the show treats it that way.
Also, with Don Johnson as executive producer and producer, him probably casting two chicks that look alike is really funny. With one plays his daughter, and the other plays his love interest! Adds a low level on incest to the show.
Nash Bridges is a the only cop show I like, because it's not like other cop shows. Definitely worth a watch if you hate cop shows.
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u/paleo2002 13h ago
My dad used to watch Blue Bloods. Every episode ends with the entire cop family sitting at the dinner table, taking turns whining about how hard the job is, how little respect they get, and how frustrating it is to be accountable to the law. If any character has an opposing opinion, the family patriarch talks down to them and scolds them for their dissent. So egregious, might as well be a mafia show.
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u/outerproduct 13h ago
Oh God or the Chicago fire/pd/med shows. Half of the episodes are the people running the departments breaking the law, and then complaining about how it's impossible to catch the bad guy any other way.
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u/elnegativo 10h ago
I watched an episode becouse i read it was a good show and that was it, blue blood is the ultimate copaganda.
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u/MillennialsAre40 13h ago
Hell even Paw Patrol https://youtu.be/rwhUpu9MfZ0?is=WoW5RKoxm0IbImLN
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u/SmegmaSlurper1996 13h ago
I've lost all respect to Paw Patrol
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u/GreyGanado 13h ago
BAU? Sounds like the noise a twin demon dog would make.
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u/english-23 13h ago
Business as usual
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u/Helen_of_TroyMcClure 13h ago
Or the Behavioral Analysis Unit from Criminal Minds. You know, the unit that shoots 19% of the mentally ill people it comes across. More than that, actually, but they have a 19% chance of being shot by either Morgan or Hotch.
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u/fckcarrots 13h ago
Never considered the generations of kids who grew up on Cops now being seasoned officers. Talk about programming
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u/desquire 9h ago
Brooklyn 99 changed its colors near the end and had an entire subplot of Jake getting suspended for shady cop shit and the conclusion is shady cop shit is still illegal and he takes his punishment.
Also not quite accurate to reality, but it's a start.
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u/Captain_Zomaru 13h ago
Authoritarian ISNT automatically Fascism. Stop using them interchangeably. By doing so you water down what Facism is and why it was fought against.
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u/TheoShadowfang 12h ago
Water it down? Fascism is still fascism and the reasons it was fought against are the same, even if someone misused the word.
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u/Captain_Zomaru 12h ago
If I label all social welfare as Communism, you'd have a problem with that no?
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u/John_cCmndhd 8h ago
While this is true, is it your position that there are forms of authoritarianism that shouldn't be fought against?
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u/Captain_Zomaru 8h ago
Honestly? I believe there are worse systems than Authoritarianism. But thats outside the scope of the original comment don't you think?
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u/John_cCmndhd 6h ago
there are worse systems than Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism of any kind can't work in the long term, the incentives make it impossible. Bad people desire power more than good people do, and they'll always try harder to be the ones with the authority, until they succeed
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u/AFloppyZipper 3h ago
It's already watered down on reddit and doesn't mean anything. It's already happened.
Everyone is a fascist and nobody cares about the accusation anymore.
Mostly because it's a stupid fucking accusation. Fascism is a dead ideology with very few followers.
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u/bullybabybayman 10h ago
The networks with a vested interest in pushing Copaganda to get the public to embrace a police state is very much Fascism, WTF are you talking about?
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u/Captain_Zomaru 10h ago
Go ahead, name them, provide evidence to back up your claim. Show me how they adhear to Mussolinis Doctrine of Facism. Or to Hitlers Esoteric Hiterlism.
And if you only answer is "they like nationalism" don't respond to me, go to the library and read a textbook that wasn't written or inspired by Crenshaw.
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u/ObsessionObsessor 6h ago
Have you heard of Robert O. Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism?
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u/Captain_Zomaru 5h ago
Yes, and he's a dead wrong idilogue. He defines it as his enemies, outlining everything they stand for as the return of the new national socialist party. He likes to use loos language and people's ideas rather than actions or policy.
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u/ObsessionObsessor 5h ago
That's a perplexing idea. Have you not heard that Robert O. Paxton denied the idea of Trump being a fascist? Who are his enemies in this context?
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u/Captain_Zomaru 3h ago
You are implying I in any way support Trump and would be suppressed to learn about this. You also seem to have forgotten he has directly called Trump a fascist after he believe the lies that were spread about his involvement in the Jan 6 protest. So you're wrong on both accounts.
His 5 stage model is designed almost precisely to be applied retroactively, there is no way to apply it to events currently happening. It's vague conceptual ideas that can be framed about one individuals words or actions as if they represent an entire group. As I said before, Fascist must be clearly defined, or it will apply to everyone you don't like. And any definition which can't be clearly defined isn't fit for purpose.
As I said, Paxton is dead wrong in his thinking, because he's treating political ideology like philosophy.
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u/ObsessionObsessor 4h ago
Seriously, you need to be clear about the basics of what you're saying here.
Robert O. Paxton is literally a 94 year old man. Anatomy of Fascism was written in 2004, when he was around 72 years old, which would have been under George W. Bush's administration. He earned a PhD from Harvard University when he was around 31 years old, back in 1963. The five stages of fascism, a work by him which Anatomy of Fascism builds off of, was written in 1998, when he was 66 years old, which would have been under the Bill Clinton's administration. Robert O. Paxton is an American.
I failed to find any mention of Robert O. Paxton talking about George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. Who are the enemies you mention?
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u/bullybabybayman 9h ago
"It's only fascism if it's exactly what Hitler or Mussolini did"
fucking LOL
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u/Captain_Zomaru 9h ago
They literally defined the ideology...
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u/Cymbal_Monkey 9h ago
Fascism predates them both by quite a bit. They were end the fascism as a mainstream political idea, not the beginning. Modern European fascism begins to take shape in the 1880s.
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u/HappyCakeDay101 13h ago
Right?
My dad hated me commenting on these shows when he watches them. I've stopped but the shows are straight up crazy.
There are cop supporters today that think it works that way and fully buy into the fantasy that the cops are the good guys.
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u/Smithereens_3 12h ago edited 11h ago
I don't regularly watch Law & Order but I've seen multiple instances of the suspect giving a monologue to the cops about why they did what they did, and I will sit there fully agreeing with them and being like "oh shit, good nuance," only for the cops to all respond with disgust and "get this asshole out of my sight" and the music plays and that's a wrap.
The level of disconnect blows my mind.
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u/Monteze 12h ago
The trick they pull on a lot of folks is we the audience usually knows who the bad guy is and the show is the cops working to prove it. Implying that the pesky law is getting in the way of justice. Or its a mystery but when they find the bad guy its obvious and they might be saved by a loophole...which is usually not even real e.g they claimed insanity or religious exemption.
If our cops get it wrong its usually the fault of the bad guy framing an innocent but never the cops fault for going outside the law.
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u/HappyCakeDay101 11h ago
Those shows really push the "the ends justifies the means"
There'd not be much of a show if the bad guy lawyers ip before admitting to anything and literally stays quiet, while the lawyer gets all the inadmissable evidence thrown out because always angry LL Cool J decided to break into a home without a warrant.
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u/futuretimetraveller 12h ago
I remember there being one episode of SVU (I think?) where a psychiatrist pulls a cop's gun to shoot and kill a child with anti-social personality disorder because "he'll just grow up and become even more evil," and the episode kinda frames it as this terrible but ultimately necessary thing to do. It's just.... so horrible on so many levels.
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u/Personal_Leave_9758 12h ago
To be fair, the kid killed the psychiatrists kid.
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u/futuretimetraveller 11h ago
There is something darkly comical about Kyle Maclachlan murdering a child out of revenge, but the overall way the episode treats the subject matter just feels deeply unethical.
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u/HappyCakeDay101 11h ago
Except in real life that psychiatrist would be going to prison for life.
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u/nimrodii 13h ago
Dad nearly exclusively watches copaganda if it is scripted TV. I would guess around 90% of his scripted media consumption.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo 9h ago
Cop Shows universally have:
- MC cops are good guys
- There are bad cops but they get dealt with by the Good Cops
- The criminals are uncomplicated and bad
- Anyone whos liberal or cares about the constitution or rights is presented as directly impeding justice because it's like, a little girl being raped and the fat black liberal activist is preventing them from saving her or whatever
The Wire is the only realistic cop show. The cops are often likeable people, we enjoy hanging out with. Then one of the really shitty roided out psychopath ones says something horrific and the cops we like don't say anything.
The Good officer coaches his subordinate who permanently blinded a 14 year old by pistol whipping him on how to lie so that nobody faces consequences
It shows why the really shitty police are allowed to prosper, and even the "good" ones only care about constitutional rights and the law insofar as their not wanting to get chewed out or fired for crossing too many lines.
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u/yay855 13h ago
It's always telling how much people just don't question the horrors when they're portrayed as normal. And it's not just copaganda casually getting people to cheer for their human rights violations and condemn people who weren't even doing anything wrong simply because a cop shot them for existing, you also have shit like Bluey where a kid's show literally treats having a military dad deployed in the middle east to murder brown people as normal.
There's always sympathy for people who are doing the killing, and never any for the people who are being killed.
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u/Trigger109 10h ago
Yeah it’s pretty in your face in tv and movies. In the new spider-man movie when that detective was like “You almost killed a cop!” I could not help but think so what? They kill us all the time.
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u/AggressorBLUE 9h ago
I like how Brooklyn 99 went out of its way to be the Anti-typical cop show in that regard.
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u/chiksahlube 12h ago
"24" glorified torture so much the military and CIA sent representatives to tell them to tone it down, their new recruits kept jumping to torture at the first sign of resistance.
And the producers of 24 still had the audacity to claim their glorification of torture had no impact on the real world...
Even as congressmen used examples from the show that have never happened in real life, to justify "enhanced interrogation techniques."
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u/OptimusPrimeLord 11h ago
They also work as propaganda for police evidence. The term "Match" as used in these shows or in actual evidence doesn't align with what most people would think. Like a "ballistics match" is just someone firing a bullet from a gun, looking at a bullet from the scene, and saying they look the same. When they do actual scientific studies on this the investigators are easily biased and hardly better than a coin flip.
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u/GrumpyCloud93 9h ago
I did notice though, that after a few seasons, *Chicago PD* stopped beating anyone except the truly despicable and definitely guilty. Also after a few seasons they figured out to cover the back door when raiding a house.
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u/DickweedMcGee 8h ago
Or just the sheer volume of COP Show, too. Add LAWYER Shows & TRUE CRIME shows too and that's like 70% of media programming.
The reality is that like 90% of people that get arrested for moderate to severe crimes are homeless, poor, uneducated and NOT photogenic at all. We would not be so enthralled with being 'TOUGH ON CRIME!' if we saw the general reality of what crime really is.
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u/Otto_the_rhinocerus 8h ago
And look at movies like Bad Boys and Bad Boys 2. In the second they literally destroy the shop of a civilian, their own criminal informant. And this is shown as just some fun thing. And with that information they enter a house without any warrent and start a shootout. And when there is only one criminal left they kick him in the face and basically threaten to kill him if he doesn't talk. At one point they DO obtain a warrant but only after illegally entering a company and recording things.
There is probably more, but thats just off the top of my head.
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u/Diabetesh 10h ago
I feel like cop shows are unrealistic by showing main character cops being against corrupt cops where as we know they defend each other on average.
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u/myychair 5h ago
lol this is giving “in my opinion Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year” energy
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u/thatweirdguyted 5h ago
I have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/myychair 5h ago
It’s a quote from king of the hill. Peggy acts like Black Friday being the best shopping day of the year isn’t well known or factually accurate. I fully agree with your I’m just busting your chops a little
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u/AndroGhost 14h ago
The Venn diagram of actors playing these roles and actors making these statements is either empty or an extremely thin line
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u/FerretAres 13h ago
One of the main actors in The Rookie left the show during the height of the BLM movement given moral objection to glorification of the police from the show.
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u/KrackerJoe 12h ago
Stephanie Beatriz had her character on B99 reworked entirely because she took a stance against police targeting minorities
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u/YNot1989 11h ago
I maintain the final season should have been "Brooklyn 99: Vice," with most of the squad becoming criminals after being, yet again, wrongfully accused by the rest of the NYPD.
Santiago should have been the one person to remain behind (because she's the ultimate narc), and should have been the antagonist for most of the season.
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u/Skippymabob 6h ago
Nah, Santiago, Hitchcock, and Sully all stay on the inside to help exonerate the crew. With Hitchcock and Sully getting the most useful info because nobody believes they're good cosp
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u/flyco 12h ago
The movie Elite Squad shows executions, torture, etc, as a way to denounce police brutality in Brazil, but it kinda backfired from people praising the main character (Captain Nascimento) as a super badass dude killing drug dealers and corrupt cops on the spot.
But both the director José Padilha and the main actor Wagner Moura are openly Leftists, and have said in interviews the movie should be taken as a critic to state violence and dehumanization of slum residents. Which left some far-right folks confused (and pissed).
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u/azdrubow 12h ago
Then you should watch the Brazilian movie Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite). The main actor is Wagner Moura (he played Pablo Escobar in Narcos). His political positioning is exactly this.
Actually, the whole movie message is to show the problems of the military police in Brazil, more specifically in Rio de Janeiro.
Btw, the second movie is better than the first, but it’s necessary to understand.
I think it’s worth it watching, unless you can’t stand violent movies.
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u/WagwanMoist 11h ago
I watched the second movie before the first and had no problems following it. But it would add a lot of context to watch them in order of course. Just saying it's not a necessity.
Great movies though.
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u/MetallicOrangeBalls 10h ago
The Venn diagram of actors playing these roles and actors making these statements is either empty or an extremely thin line
Or you get the Ron Swanson effect.
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u/Kitakitakita 7h ago
I've yet to see any of the pups from Paw Patrol speak out about its pawpaganda and pawmotion of police barkality.
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u/theglenlovinet 11h ago
I love how Ice-T has been saying so much shit about law enforcement yet he’s known more for playing a cop than he is for any other role or musician.
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u/JohnRobGnar 8h ago
You can be associated with something & critique it. Look up what Marika Harigtay did to revamp the system for dealing with SA kits
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u/sillypotatoes564 13h ago
The show that comes to mind for me is Brooklyn 99; specifically during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Apparently, they scrapped four completed?wprov=sfti1#Production) episodes in light of the George Floyd protests.
The show always tried to be progressive, which I can appreciate. But at the end of the day it did fall under the category of copaganda. I wonder how much the BLM protests influenced the creator's decision to end the show since it ended soon after in 2021.
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u/Prime624 13h ago edited 12h ago
I think it was the entire reason they ended the show when they did. The last season made it clear they wanted to address some issues, but you can only make that entertaining for so long, after which they had to end the show. Judicial warrants and lengthy trials aren't sexy.
ETA: I've also read that Stephanie Beatriz (Rosa) specifically requested that her character quit the NYPD, because of ethical concerns following the George Floyd protests.
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u/19olo 12h ago
I feel like B99 was among the least copaganda of cop shows. They don't do the "breaking the law to catch bad guys" thing and is usually very aware of laws regarding policing.
Shame they were affected by the wider police controversies though.
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u/GallopingOsprey 11h ago
lol they constantly violate constitutional rights in that show, wtf are you talking about? they never get warrants and just go in places with no exigent circumstances and almost every episode they arrest the very first person they see with no actual evidence
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u/jackofslayers 11h ago
Also there was a plot where the MC arrests someone without evidence and they have 48 hours to find evidence to justify it.
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u/19olo 9h ago
What constitutional rights? When did they ever enter without warrant? It's mostly a sitcom comedy dressed as a cop show lol are we even watching the same thing?
And that arrest without evidence is my point: Jake eat shit because of it. They at no point saying it was the right thing to do.
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u/MasonP2002 6h ago
Also, practically every cop character outside of the main cast is horribly corrupt and/or bigoted. In total I think there were probably more dirty cops than clean ones in that show.
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u/Finito-1994 11h ago
Jake bragged about how he can legally lie to people because the Supreme Court ruled it.
Jake arrested a guy for 48 hours for making a joke. This was framed as bad because he ruined people’s weekend. Not because of the abuse of power.
Jake started the series making a bet he was going to fuck Amy.
Terry was constantly sexually harassed and that wasn’t addressed in the metoo episode they did.
Rosa was constantly talking about police brutality.
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u/renegadecanuck 10h ago
I give B99 some leeway because the show was also in many ways a parody of cop shows.
Yeah, if it were real life, I'd hate all of them, but it's not.
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u/Finito-1994 5h ago
Yea but you can’t parody something and also play it straight. Satire isn’t bankruptcy. You can’t just declare it.
They poke fun at a lot of cop tropes. They also play many of them straight.
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u/renegadecanuck 3h ago
Disagree. You can't expect every joke to have the character yell "this is sarcasm!"
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u/brannanross 9h ago
Jake wasnt bragging about being able to lie, he brought it up as strategy to which Captain Holt said it was a bad idea. Jake does it out of desperation and it immediately backfires showing that it was never the right option.
Jake admits to fucking that up and letting emotions get the better of him and he is then scolded by Captain Holt.
Jake did not start the series with a bet to fuck Amy. It was bet about more arrests. When Jake won, he took Amy on a purposefully terrible date. There was never any sex involved and he wasn’t gonna rape her to end the night.
I agree, they should’ve done better about that
Rosa talked a tough game and her character grew over the show. When exactly did she actually commit police brutality?
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u/19olo 9h ago
So? Most of these are sitcom shenanigans or jokes, not actually glorifying cops.
And the 48 hours thing proves my point: Jake fucked up and had to deal with its consequence. They certainly didn't try to argue keeping them any longer.
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u/Finito-1994 8h ago
The consequences of the 48 hours wasn’t that Jake did something wrong. The reason people were angry was because he ruined their weekend plans.
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u/Beneficial_Present 13h ago
I mean…the whole morality of being a cop thing is part of the plot during the last season
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u/Ace_And_Jocelyn1999 11h ago
It definitely felt like they started writing like that because public perceptions had changed. Up till then the characters did shady, borderline illegal, and excessive things all the time. Then suddenly the very actions they partook in their against. If it had built to that it would have been fine but it kind of came out of the blue.
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u/TurgidGravitas 8h ago
They handled it terribly too. It was like someone getting caught by HR and having to give a presentation. Just soulless and by the numbers.
The worst part was having Rosa be the one who quits on moral ground. They removed her since she was, by far, the most problematic officer but they justified it in universe by having her quit on moral grounds. That doesn't jive. It's like having Trump resign because of White House corruption. You are the corruption.
Terry should have been the one to resign. He's always had the biggest heart and having Terry quit due to Rosa's constant rights violations would have meant something.
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u/maringue 13h ago
It cracks me up that CBS has a TV lineup that's almost 90% cop/lawyer shows.
Literal propaganda.
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u/FormerChocoAddict 14h ago
This is based on the very typical shallow view of TV and movie characters in plot. Sometimes violence in media is for the purpose of parody or commentary. It's not necessarily meant to be instructive or even excuse that type of behavior.
As in the movie Fight Club the Tyler Durden character is not meant to be imitated. The whole movie is a social commentary.
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u/Destroythereapers 14h ago
While that’s often true, cop shows tend to have much more simplistic rah rah blue line messages. Often along the lines of ‘oh we need to commit this violence to save the day but damn the regulations stand in the way’. And the message that gets absorbed is that the regulations are the real problem.
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u/Blade_Shot24 14h ago
Law & Order SVU, The Rookie, Blue Bloods, etc. copaganda.
Folks unaware or Gen Z, go watch Police in Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and then in Home Improvement. Great portrayals.
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u/FormerChocoAddict 13h ago
Yeah all fair points. Not sure why I went to 'violance in media' in general when the comic was specifically targetting cop shows.
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u/brickmaster32000 12h ago
Because your default is to argue against anything someone says which is easier to do when you can just build your own strawman instead of engaging with what was actually said.
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u/FormerChocoAddict 6h ago
One that came to mind later that doesn't quite fit this mold is Southland. The characters are complex and flawed, and while it's not perfect I think it does a better job than most to be realistic. They are definitely characters on there that are bad cops that the audience is not meant to sympathize with.
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u/Suitable-Answer-83 13h ago
It was also weird in Brooklyn 99 that they had the epiphany in the final season that sometimes cops can be bad, after 7 seasons of very aggressive policing where they would draw their service weapons as a reflex every time they entered a new room.
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u/SirCampYourLane 13h ago
And Rosa's entire character being excessive force and anger is my only emotion is funny if a latina woman does it.
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u/Suitable-Answer-83 13h ago
Then she becomes so opposed to the idea of working as a police officer that she decides to become a private detective which apparently means working as a public defender without a law license.
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u/BrianWonderful b.wonderful comics 13h ago
Very good point. I find that I always give shows like Brooklyn 99 a complete pass because they are comedic and in a heightened world. You could say the show is a parody of police shows, but that doesn't mean they don't fall into the same patterns.
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u/Notreallyaflowergirl 8h ago
Eh B99 is a comedy show where them being cops is just a vessel. Like how Tacoma FD is a show where firefighters are the vessel. You don’t look at these shows and think “ that’s how cops/firefighters are” and they’re not like Chicago fire or blue bloods where it’s obvious they’re trying to be taken seriously
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u/Master_Breadfruit_46 8h ago
There are many serious moments in B99 where it is very much meant to be taken seriously, but i agree it is 90% comedy show. (It is after all a mike shur show so that makes sense)
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u/Notreallyaflowergirl 8h ago
Serious moments don’t make it a serious show, just like silly comedic moments don’t turn a serious show into a comedy. Sometimes that makes the moment hit harder tbh
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u/Master_Breadfruit_46 8h ago
That does not mean the serious moments are irrelevant or don’t have relevant meaning to the subject matter they are portraying (e.g cop shows). Exactly what you said, comedy shows can hit much harder for that reason, moments that are less frequent can be much more impactful.
They are different, and that is okay.
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u/HITNRUNXX 14h ago
I think this is based in actors making their entire career by glorifying things that they speak out against as activists.
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u/CincyBrandon 14h ago
Portraying these things is not the same as glorifying them.
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u/HITNRUNXX 14h ago
Then that isn't what this is talking about? Jokes aren't 100% applicable to every situation. That's the "joke" here. I didn't say it was a good one.
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u/ls20008179 14h ago
While true you also have shows like blue bloods that exists entirely as Copaganda and being a work program for Mark Wahlberg's less talented brother
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u/Suitable-Answer-83 13h ago
Hey, floor seats at Celtics games don't come cheap. Especially if you're not famous enough to be given the tickets for free.
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u/blizzardplus 6h ago
“Hey guys, we’re going to have young Brad Pitt in a red leather jacket beat the shit out of people while looking like a badass. But remember, he’s the guy you DON’T want to be.”
Yeah that didn’t work on teenage boys lol.
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u/jmil1080 11h ago
I hadn't watched hardly any cop shows (other than Brooklyn 99, which feels different as a comedy) since I was in my late teens or early twenties. My gym has a bunch of TVs, and I caught a scene from one of these shows a couple of weeks ago while doing the chest press (requires you to look up a bit).
In the scene, two cops were interviewing a guy in a mental health facility who had significant developmental issues. One cop was asking questions while the other was circling the patient like a predator, intentionally doing things he knew were triggers for the guy. They were just straight up putting a mentally compromised person into an elevated emotional state just so they could provoke a response that allowed them to arrest him.
The guy ended up being a close friend of the person murdered (who was also in the mental health facility), so they were basically torturing a guy while he was mourning the death of his friend and this was portrayed as a great thing. I was distracted for the rest of my workout with thoughts about how I used to like these shows and never gave a second thought to the underlying message when I was a kid...
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u/LeoLaDawg 11h ago
Law and order is or was the worst. They'd start the show with a little bit of investigation then spend the rest randomly accusing people of murder until the luck upon the person who is guilty only to then trample on the rest of their rights and criticize them for wanting a lawyer. Ending with high fives.
That show used to piss me off when I had to listen to it every single fucking day because the ex was too stupid to enjoy anything else.
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u/sport-utilityrobot 11h ago
My sister in-law loves SVU and can watch it on repeat for the whole day. She will make jokes when me and my brother watch something like Andor. I told her that Star Wars is more realistic than any Law and Order show
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u/LeoLaDawg 10h ago
I firmly believe that these type shows, of which there are tons, tap into American's crazy need to see people punished and "bad guys" taken out. These shows have dumbed down people for decades now and made civil liberties a dirty word.
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u/UncleCeiling 12h ago
Even the tamer police procedurals are pure propaganda for the simple reason that they show the police actually solving crimes. FBI data from 2017 shows that law enforcement only cleared 45.6% of violent crimes and 17.6% of property crimes. Even murder and manslaughter cases only have a 61.6% clear rate.
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u/GoodKing0 11h ago
Dexter somehow managed to be the most "realistic" "cop" show in existence by virtue of opening the first episode by pointing out just how dogshit the cops are at their job, and then INSTANTLY lost all semblance of realism when it started to claim there's enough of a serial killer element in Miami alone to allow Dexter's many murders to happen.
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u/raxitron 9h ago
Is this supposed to be a 'gotcha'?
This is the exact person who should be making these kinds of statements.
How pathetic that the same people who scoff at a truck that has a 'thin blue line' Punisher sticker can then look at this comic and nod aggressively without a hint of irony.
If you can't understand that characters should have depth and faults and not always be a beacon of perfection just because they're the protagonist then you are not an adult. Watch Paw Patrol and leave the rest to people who are media literate.
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u/arakus72 9h ago
I agree in theory but in practice most cop shows just unironically glorify this stuff, even the ones trying to be critical usually end up being like "oh it's just a few bad apples" and ignoring the systemic issues, or depicting it as morally grey bc it "gets results", idk honestly can't think of many that don't end up questionable at best
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u/raxitron 9h ago
The Wire
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u/arakus72 8h ago
Haven't seen it yet, but from what I hear it sounds like the one (1) exception, doesn't really invalidate the comic's point tho when literally the entire rest of the genre seems to fall in
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u/raxitron 8h ago edited 8h ago
I get that it's targeting NCIS but as I initially mentioned The Punisher is another. Once you get away from network television you find a lot of decent shows that don't rely entirely on selfless idolized heroes.
That said, NCIS guy should be educating and even shaming the mindless masses who can't separate fiction from reality. It's not unreasonable to believe we can have a society where the majority of adults understand that.
Hence my shade throwing on the comic - I partially agree with the sentiment, but not with who the comic blames for it.
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u/thethunder92 2h ago
Apparently 24 was really bad for this, they always show him torturing people for information and a lot people are so stupid it really does affect their reality
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u/WingedSalim 34m ago
I agree. Many of them reinforces the idea that to make change and be an "effective" cop, they have to break the rules.
While many do get punished for their actions, their methods are rarely shown to be ineffective.
For once I want a show to have a protagonist cop break the rules because of a sense of justice but not only fail but actively make the situation worse.
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u/USDXBS 11h ago
I hate how real cops ruined fake cops for me. I always think "Cops would never do that or care about that"
Brooklyn Nine Nine was funnier when it was a less edgy Reno 911. When they started trying to associate it with real world social issues, it changes the context of the show. If they are the real world NYPD, the entire cast of B99 are criminals. It was funnier when Rosa was laughing about police brutality.
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u/ChiefSenpai 9h ago
Watching real body cam videos on YouTube are far more entertaining than the shows, because they actually follow protocols(most of the time).
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u/PhantomPharts 10h ago
Shout out to Brooklyn 99 for listening to their audience and ending the show.
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u/subjectseven 6h ago
Op can u name a single actor from a copaganda show that won an award for said copaganda show and then went on to use that stage to denounce said copaganda show.... I think you're making someone up just to be mad at them
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u/humanoid7340 9h ago
I think the I only good cop show was Reno 911. They even got in trouble for the dumb stuff they pulled.
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u/screwikea 8h ago
Friendly reminder that Dick Wolf is 100% down with the militarization and rights stomping, which is why all of the Law & Order stuff is this way.
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u/thundastruck69 7h ago
I can't even watch CSI any more for how blatantly it's just "officer hunch-a-lots and officer lunch-a-lots both decided this random person was the absolute 100% guilty party so we're just going to harass them at their work. Harass them at social punlic places. Harass them at their house. Harass them AFTER BEING TOLD TO STOP BY A HIGHER UP. But then oh noes?!? It turns out it WASN'T that person?! Oh well okay too bad so sad sucks it wasn't you have a good one! (Ruined life, ruined home, fired and blacklisted from job, and a lifetime of distrust of the police) oh man sure was close i almost had to say sorry to that guy and that i was (this is a cops worst nightmare)
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u/thekyledavid 4h ago
I feel like the opinions of the actor can be different than the opinions of the character
Bryan Cranston probably doesn’t think people should smoke meth in real life
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u/GoodKing0 11h ago
It's not as famous as like, Blue Bloods or Law and Order or Criminal Minds and all the ways these shows prime USAmericans and any other countries they are exported to to essentially submit to the cops honestly, but to this day I haven't found a more egregious example of Copaganda than The Closer.
That shit had LITERALLY a whole ass story arc about a dastardly evil lawyer who finally does a class action lawsuits against the head of major crimes, the protagonist, for ALL the people who keep dying in her custody after she "accidentally" gets them off suicide watch or she "accidentally" releases in enemy gang territory, and the WHOLE fucking time we're supposed to side with her, to the point that when she GETS AWAY WITH IT ALL scott free after YEARS of violating EVERYONE'S rights by refusing them lawyers among other things, she still WHINES over the fact the lawyer managed to pass a ruling that forces cops to not release suspects in dangerous environment and named it after her, you know, THE WOMAN WHO WILLINGLY RELEASED A SUSPECT IN A ENVIRONMENT SHE KNOWS FULL WELL WILL KILL HIM.
The main bad guy was a fucking defense lawyer for crying out loud, a different one from the class action one.
Did I mention she's in the LAPD and one side character in her department is literally a consultant for another in universe cop show so he can push propaganda there?
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u/Primary_Durian4866 10h ago
Don't get me started on crime show, or war movie.
But for real, if it's on film it's being glamorized. It doesn't matter how bad you make it look, the spotlight can make anything shine.
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u/DigiSmackd 9h ago
I think it's interesting because a whole generation grew up with a big push from certain powerful figures hellbent on banning what they perceived as "evil" media. So, hard rock, rap, etc. And then they also wanted to ban video games because they claimed it caused people to be horrible and do horrible things just like in those video games. And of course, when we all grew up and realized that we weren't suddenly murdering people or living like a violent video game nor were we worshipping Satan because we liked loud music or dark imagery - we realize those people were a bit extreme.
However, I think we also over-corrected. And it would get you strung up if you suggested media had ANY impact on how people act or how a society views things - along with social/cultural norms. And the idea of suggesting that "hey, maybe all of this isn't actually great for everyone..." was shouted down. That maybe we should be a bit more mindful of what we feed our brain - even if just for entertainment.
I think the answer lies somewhere in between. I think we need to acknowledge the impact of the media we consume while also taking personal accountability and responsibility. I don't think we should have to restrict/moderate/regulate things more - but it sure seems like a whole lot of parents aren't doing it themselves. I suspect the amount of 14-16 year old kids who have never played one of these games (https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_video_games_rated_M) or one of these movies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_R-rated_films) or any song labeled "explicit"
The best we have at this time is something as basic as a "rating" system - games, music, movies being rated "R" or "M" or "Pegi 18", or simply "explicit" etc etc.
It's all very normalized in a lot of places - from aggressive casual sex to extreme violence. And at a very young age. It's easy to be desensitized to it.
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