[ SECRET POST #5515 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5515 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #789.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[meadowphoenix]

Understandably, you don't know what copaganda is. Cops, all of them are state (a political division of a body of people that occupies a territory defined by frontiers) actors, they act on behalf of their power structure, whether municipal, city, county, state or federal. That's their purpose. And so, there is no cop that can be separated from the operation of the state in enforcement.

So when media presents the idea that individual cops can be effective on at least one case, they are doing so as a form of inductive persuasion, a metonymy of the state. Because what it does do is allow you to believe in the credibility of police tactics, because they worked right? Even though, a lot of police tactics and forensic practices have significantly less credibility. A lot of solved crime is incredibly stupid criminals or a great deal of happenstance. There is zero way to you to gauge the actual effectiveness of these tactics with singular cases, but the significantly higher solve rate in the aggregate is going to give you a incorrect idea, because that's simply how the brain works unless you know better.

Furthermore, it's a tv show OP. Nothing about the media you see isn't framed by the producers, even if they do mostly tell the truth (a lot of true crime programs straight up make-up narratives, but I'm assuming this isn't one of them). It's reality tv, and just like reality tv, it doesn't present an "real" understanding of anyone involved to make sound judgements about, including the police officers, prosecutors, and forensic specialists.

Here are the real questions. Do you see all the cases those cops have worked? The prosecutors? The forensic specialists? Would the heroes in these cases be willing to show you, the audience, the places where they fucked up in others? What understanding of anyone's general behavior could you possibly get from one instance? Seriously.

Like the show, if you want. A lot of cop shows are both comforting and entertaining for the reasons you mentioned. It's really satisfying to see women get justice. But media depictions, especially of actual police departments with their willing consent, are still very much copaganda.

[(Anonymous)]

So when media presents the idea that individual cops can be effective on at least one case, they are doing so as a form of inductive persuasion, a metonymy of the state. Because what it does do is allow you to believe in the credibility of police tactics, because they worked right?

Yeah. I saw an interesting article about this the other day talking about The Wire - and The Wire is obviously one of the most realistic and probably one of the most critical depictions of police in American media, it portrays the police largely as a venal, corrupt, ineffective bureaucracy and most street cops as little more than stupid bullies.

At the same time it still portrays homicide detectives as cynical and not overly concerned with legal niceties, but basically intelligent, competent and dogged when given a chance to do their jobs. But it turns out that the actual detectives that the characters from The Wire were based on have had tons of convictions overturned because they had essentially framed a bunch of people by doing things like pressuring witnesses to lie and hiding exculpatory evidence. In other words, even the most critical depictions of police in American media end up overstating the effectiveness of the police and implying that when police break the rules it's justified.

[meadowphoenix]

That's really interesting about the wire (and is probably true of homicide life on the streets), but not surprising. Passive incompetence does not a compelling protagonist make, and David Simon was a police reporter so we know that to a certain extent reporters collude with police narratives.