chunks of flommus
SUBSCRIBE! FEEDLY RSS EMAIL

in that narrative

Ya know what, we need to stop prefacing every instance of police brutality with 80 lbs of treacly horseshit about how “most officers are brave superheroes” as if we are walking on eggshells to not offend some supernatural Greek gods who deign to offer their unearthly powers to protect the rest of us, so long as we avert out modest gaze as unworthy mortals.

A good (presumably big, tough no?) cop wouldnt/shouldn’t need to have their feelings bubbleewrapped when the other adults in the room are talking about them *murdering* people with total impunity.

Particularly since it’s those same cops covering for the ones that get caught.

It was the Reagan ’80s that started this reductive Hero In Blue myth that rarely if ever proves accurate. The cop that bends the rules but gets results was practically minted in the 80s.

Sure, there was Dirty Harry in the 70s but the reason those films were so successful was because of what an outlier he was. By the 80s, the trope was absorbed so far into the vocabulary that it was the cop that *didn’t* warp his own ethics that was called out and made fun of.

The culture we take in matters and this very real thing was toxic in a way that affects us now. How many idiots in comments sections grew up on Cobra, etc. thinking a murder here and there is just the cost of doing business?

We used to side-eye cops. Back when I was a very young kid (late 70s) we didn’t openly disrespect cops for no reason but culturally we *absolutely* considered them suspect because we all knew what kind of authority-obsessed chip-shouldered types gravitated to the uniform.

We used to think of cops as hapless like Roscoe P. Coltrane, bigoted authoritarian and ethically-challenged like Buford T. Justice, any number of assholes that worked in Serpico’s department (and those of course were all based on real crooked cops.)

I’m being serious though. We need to get back to that.

—jason malmberg