Keep Cops Visible in Our Media

Strong majorities agree that our police departments should be reformed -- that there should be more accountability when officers behave badly. But I think most reasonable people also agree that not every cop is a villain -- that holding all cops responsible for the actions of George Floyd's killer is a gross miscarriage of justice. Why? Because that's simply not what we do in a liberal democratic society; we don't declare an entire collective guilty for the actions of a few.

It's this foundational American philosophy that drives my positively revolted reaction to the new moral panic: the craze to expunge all positive portrayals of the police in our entertainment, our toys, etc. Cops has already been canceled, and a clamor has arisen to purge our airways of the Law & Order franchise (and similar crime dramas) as well. Further, I've seen calls for Lego to stop selling its police-related building sets -- and whining claims that Zootopia and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse are now totes "problematic" because they both feature characters who work in law enforcement and yet aren't complete bastards.

Honestly, I'm just waiting for the day the Discovery Channel decides to cave and completely shutters its Investigation Discovery offshoot.

Sorry, you theory-addled utopians, but the police are here to stay. That means they do have a place in our popular media whether you like it or not. And because good and bad cops both exist, both should be depicted. In fact, since the era of Hill Street Blues (at least), both have. I'm not really an expert on crime dramas - my tastes run more to hospital shows and science fiction - but even so, I'm pretty damn sure that said dramas have been grappling with the issue of police brutality and corruption for decades. So the idea that the mere existence of a cop show is going to somehow lie to the viewer about the reality of policing in America is pure nonsense. That hasn't been true for a long, long time.

Consider too what would happen if we made overreactions like this routine. What if a white doctor, for example, killed a black patient through his malice and/or gross incompetence and the story was covered in the national news? Would that mean we'd have to wipe out every hospital show currently in existence? Would that mean the Discovery Channel would have to black out Tales from the E.R.? And lest you think this is a bad analogy: no, the ideology that's presently driving this anti-cop madness claims that our health care system is also irredeemably racist, so a high profile murder of a black patient would certainly be seen as emblematic of a larger issue that requires a radical response.

I think those of us who are normal - those of us whose brains haven't been pickled by grievance studies BS - need to rise up and push back against these new cultural revolutionaries and their attempts to "purify" our recreation. These wild-eyed idiots need to be told in no uncertain terms that if they don't like seeing cop shows, then they shouldn't watch cop shows -- and that they don't get to decide for the rest of us what we can enjoy in our spare time.

Eff censorship.