Civil rights violations in the US today doesn’t look like the bad cops on TV, it more often looks like the good cops on TV
How many times in your favorote cop show have they kicked in a door and searched a home without a warrant?
How many times in your favorite cop show have they questioned a suspect without their lawyer present and after the suspect has clearly stated they don’t want to talk?
Special question to fans of Criminal Minds: how many times have the BAU purposefully taunted the unsub in a standoff to the point that they become agressive and the agents then shoot the unsub?
By the way, to be clear on the door kicking thing, I am very specifically talking about the following line I’ve seen countless times:
”Hey, did you hear screams/smell drugs inside?”
And like it’s always shown as a flimsy excuse, yet, still the right and good thing to do
The one where they make the suspect talk without a lawyer is so common it’s actually ridiculous.
Or the one where they get mad at a perp for having a shitty attitude/mocking them and end up losing their temper and using unnecessary force is always framed like the police had no other choice. Because the perp insulted their wife or dead colleague so obviously they deserve some brutality
Elementary is sooooooo full of this shit.
Elementary is. They regularly break into homes without a warrant because the “door was wide open” or “they heard a baby cry” (which of course wasn’t at all the case and they just picked the lock). They steal a suspects phone and look through it. And probably a bunch of other stuff like that I can’t remember.
I still love the show for its portrayal of friendship and partnership. But, Sherlock and Watson regularly invade others lives and privacy with no real consequences or regard for it.
Exactly, and like a few other shows that do the ‘civilian adviser to the cops’ thing, the civilian liason goes “Haha I’m not an actual cop so I can break all the rules and that’s how I catch the killer in this episode” as if that isn’t both (a) horrifying and (b) not-so-subtly sending the message that we’d catch more baddies if cops can routinely walk all over your rights without consequences.
TV tropes calls it the ‘Cops Need the Vigilante’ trope. Every second of Elementary is cop propaganda and it pulls many other classic cop propaganda stunts but this is the most irritating terrible trope to constantly come up.
QueerAnarchism 