Just saw a post making fun of "Officer Grayson", and people were engaging (agreeing) so hard with it, and I'm just? So confused? "He deserves to be made fun of by his fam", "Fuck you, Officer Grayson.", "DIE!", "Finally a good post" Like wtf is this??? Dick joined the force to fix the system from within! Did they all forget that?! It's so weird that being a good Samaritan is now considered an evil work, and killing has become the good work because "they are criminals, it's only the bad guys being killed", "They deserve to die."
I'm so tired of this fandom, a bunch of clowns. Now I remember why I left Tumblr 2 years ago...
The thing is, just because he was a cop doesn't mean he was toeing union lines and condoning police brutality and whatever. In fact, his time at the police department was specifically spent preventing this exact type of behavior.
Intervening to prevent police brutality from other officers:
Using his cop connections to more easily access villains by slipping in and out of the Nightwing persona, with the added benefit of not having to butt heads with the law and accidentally getting them freed in the process
Clearing OVER A HUNDRED CORRUPT BPD MEMBERS using officer privileges and his ties to Amy
And on the smaller end of things:
Preventing harassment of a gay cop
Saving a girl who wrote to her Christmas letter to the BPD
And it isn't like Dick doesn't recognize the limitations of being a police officer either. There's a whole subplot in an issue where he can't deal with a domestic dispute as a cop because it's out of his jurisdiction, but it is because he is an officer that he was aware of it and could exact vigilante justice after the fact.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's fine if you don't like him as a cop in the present day or if you don't think the job suits him in general. I liked his time as one, but there are other things you can do with his character.
What bothers me is when Dick is prescribed the typical negative stereotypes associated with being a cop simply because he was one, when in fact his whole arc as a cop was about going against the grain to cripple the corruption from the inside. He at no point adhered to the stereotypical standards of being a cop. Most of his fellow cops kind of hated him. He did his best regardless. And, for many relevant stories of the era, him being a cop gave him access to resources that were integral to his job as Nightwing. It worked.
And I guess you could say that the BPD was still corrupt at the end of the day, but you could also say Gotham is still full of crime after a decade and a half of Batman. Why does he apprehend the criminal?
Because, even if for a second, there's hope of improvement. And that's what matters.
TL;DR: He wasn't some gun-toting power-abusing jackoff or something. He did his best to spite the system in every way and measurably improved the BPD from the inside for it.
