More people need to understand what we mean when we say that "Brooklyn 99 is pro-cop propaganda"
Are there worse tv shows, that depict more police brutality? Yes, obviously. But there’s a big difference between shows meant to rile up existing pro-cop sentiments, and shows meant to subtly convince people who are against police abuses that some police abuses are actually ok, and that cops can be just and good. NCIS and Blue Bloods might be worse, but Brooklyn 99 is more dangerous, precisely because Brooklyn 99 is so much more palatable to people who feel gross watching cops beat unarmed black men.
Despite its claims of demonstrating good policing and idealized behavior, Brooklyn 99 regularly shows cops violating people’s constitutional rights. But whereas other more right-leaning shows highlight violations and are explicitly in favor of them, Brooklyn 99 glosses over them. And it does so to such a degree that a lot of people don’t even realize that what they are watching, despite being about “good” cops, still contains a ton of systemic police abuses of power in it.
Take the seventh episode of the very first season as an example.
In this episode, the main character arrests a man with no evidence whatsoever and detains him for 48 hours while his colleagues go on a mad hunt to find evidence of a crime.
Here’s the thing with that depiction:
The episode treats the main character’s behavior as though the problem is that he made work for his coworkers, not that he violated a suspect’s constitutional rights. It’s made very clear that his coworker’s date night is more important than a wrongfully arrested man being confined in a jail cell for two full days.
It is in fact illegal to go on a fish expedition like the one depicted after detaining a suspect. The “you have 48 hours” rule is meant to give the courts time to hold the required probable cause hearing even when there is a court backlog, not to give the cops a chance to gather evidence. In fact, the SCOTUS case which created the 48 hour hold rule even explicitly says: “This is not to say that the probable cause determination in a particular case passes constitutional muster simply because it is provided within 48 hours. Such a hearing may nonetheless violate Gerstein if the arrested individual can prove that his or her probable cause determination was delayed unreasonably. Examples of unreasonable delay are delays for the purpose of gathering additional evidence to justify the arrest, a delay motivated by ill will against the arrested individual, or delay for delay’s sake.” The main characters are breaking the law, and it’s clear that the policy within their precinct is to break the law.
When the suspect gets a lawyer who starts arguing for a civil suit on the basis of his unlawful detainment, this is treated as a horrible thing and the suspect is portrayed as smug and immoral for doing it. This is despite the fact that he is completely legally justified because the police have clearly violated his constitutional rights.
The suspect is eventually revealed to have committed the crime in question, by route of a plan which the main character admits to having not even considered when he arrested him. Police hunches are glorified; the assumption that former criminals are guilty is reinforced.
Ultimately, the suspect is unable to sue for the violation of his rights and his unlawful detention because there is evidence that he committed the underlying crime. In fact, this would have no bearing whatsoever on his standing to sue. Guilty people still have constitutional rights, and by the text of the episode, the precinct violated his rights regardless of his guilt or innocence. The show glosses over this, and strongly implies that guilty people (and he is treated as guilty despite not yet having been tried) are unable to legally take actions against police abuses.
Putting it all together, from it’s outset, Brooklyn 99 has justified non-violent but extremely illegal police abuses, eroded people’s belief that our constitutional rights are inalienable and apply even to the guilty, camouflaged the fact that people are legally allowed to sue over police abuses, and demonized the lawyers and suspects who try to go after those sorts of civil rights cases.
I’m sorry, but that’s propaganda no matter how you slice it.
Police violence is not always physical brutality. Brooklyn 99 might not show cops beating Rodney King in the street, but it gleefully showcases violations which selectively target the disenfranchised in other ways, and then couches those violations as “what a good police station would be like, in an ideal world”.
The cops in Brooklyn 99? They’re bad cops, end of story. They all routinely commit this-should-be-an-instant-firing level of offenses against helpless individuals, and it’s portrayed as normal. And the fact that people will endless parrot the idea that Brooklyn 99 shows the way that police stations could be if they were manned by good police officers shows that not only is it propaganda, but it’s working. And that should terrify us all.
[insert garfield meme here]
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