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Superhero Stories and the Police
2 years ago
So, this is a subject I've been... kind of avoiding talking about, but I'm gonna need to talk about it sooner or later.
There's a major problem with superhero stories, such as "Exodimensional Hoofbun Flopsy", and that is that you can't not talk about police in them. Now, it's no secret that the settings of my stories are a little removed from the real world, and I mean beyond the magic and the mad science and such. Simply put, a lot of the things that make me feel sad and hopeless just don't exist in the stories. Trump never happened, the Republican party never went mask-off Evil, and the world generally follows how things were going when things seemed to be more hopeful. People are more accepting, more willing to help each other out, less inclined to be racist and bigoted and cruel and horrible. At least less inclined to be like that openly, reveling in it the way a pig rolls around in mud and feces, the way half the United States is doing in real life.
But the big problem with that is the portrayal of police forces. Even in more hopeful times, they were still pretty awful. "All Cops Are Bastards" is a phrase that has gained a lot of traction because it's become more visible what's happening, not because anything's actually changed. Now, if you ask me what it means, I have two main answers. First, there can be a "good person" who is a cop, but they cannot be a "good cop". The system will absolutely not allow it. A "Good cop", one who does the right thing and protects people and isn't racist, gets punished. They get financially penalized. They get sent into dangerous situations without backup. That's right, the Force will literally repeatedly threaten their life in a preventable way until they die, at which point they will use that death to talk about how "dangerous" their job is and demand even more money from state budgets so they can buy more weapons, as well as feed their own egos about what "brave heroes" they are while they don't have to face the danger they put the "Good cop" into. A "Good cop" highlights the disparity between what a cop should be and what they are. Second, "All Cops Are Bastards" refers to the fact that if you are in an encounter that involves the police, you absolutely CANNOT trust that this individual cop will be Not A Bastard. There are simply too many Bastards and the consequences too great to be able to put your life on the line and trust that the person with a badge and a gun won't decide to end your life over some trivial, perceived slight.
I'm white and appear male. I'm trans, but I generally hide that in public. The encounters I've had with police have gone "Pleasant but useless" in almost all cases, and that is purely due to luck on my appearance. As a child, I respected police officers. I swallowed the lie that high-profile incidents were isolated, caused by bad people who revealed themselves and then got removed from the force, from authority. But as more and more people had video cameras and were able to show the truth, as more and more stories kept piling up, I had to face the truth. It hurts, that betrayal of trust, but it's nothing compared to the people who have lost family members because of racist murderers in uniform who shield each other from justice.
One thing that I hear a lot in these discussions is, "It's just a few bad apples." You hear it said all the time by police unions, offices, defenders, etc. But the full saying is, "One bad apple spoils the whole bunch." One rotten apple will cause the entire bunch to rot, if not quickly removed, but this phrase is used to justify taking no steps to remove "bad apples". Bad Apples have worked their way to where they control everything, and a Good Person has only a few choices: Leave the Force, become rotten, or find themselves killed.
"Exodimensional Hoofbun Flopsy" is styled after comic books and Saturday Morning Cartoons (especially ones based on comic books, like Spider-Man and Batman). She beats up bad guys and lets police come get them. When I went to write an actual encounter, however, I found that I couldn't really bring myself to write one that went well, and still felt realistic. In fact, Chapter 7 had to be rewritten several times to keep it from being even darker. Originally, both officers were corrupt and only doing a "good cop, bad cop" routine to try to take advantage of Flopsy's confusion, but then I upgraded the "good cop" to Lieutenant Falk (a character I'd been planning on, though he wasn't a massive Columbo expy at first), which made me rewrite the scene.
I want to be able to do more storylines dealing with injustice perpetrated by the police in that story, but I also worry that it's something I won't have the experience to tell properly. I might try it anyway, I might never get around to it and simply focus on other things. Probably the latter, I worry that trying to introduce a character who would be central to the story might come across as offensive, when I don't have a wealth of experience to draw from. I don't want to appear to be making light of real problems, or to be taking advantage of actual suffering.
So, for the most part, the police in Flopsy's story are mostly going to be represented by Officer Blaine (a corrupt pile of trash who would kick a puppy if he thought it was somehow questioning his machismo) and Lieutenant Falk (a competent investigator who means well but won't be able to put the pieces together without the knowledge that magic is real). But most of the "mooks" are going to be closer to Blaine than Falk. Falk is the exception, Blaine is the rule.
(And if anyone doesn't get the joke, the actor who played Columbo was named Peter Falk. ^_^)
There's a major problem with superhero stories, such as "Exodimensional Hoofbun Flopsy", and that is that you can't not talk about police in them. Now, it's no secret that the settings of my stories are a little removed from the real world, and I mean beyond the magic and the mad science and such. Simply put, a lot of the things that make me feel sad and hopeless just don't exist in the stories. Trump never happened, the Republican party never went mask-off Evil, and the world generally follows how things were going when things seemed to be more hopeful. People are more accepting, more willing to help each other out, less inclined to be racist and bigoted and cruel and horrible. At least less inclined to be like that openly, reveling in it the way a pig rolls around in mud and feces, the way half the United States is doing in real life.
But the big problem with that is the portrayal of police forces. Even in more hopeful times, they were still pretty awful. "All Cops Are Bastards" is a phrase that has gained a lot of traction because it's become more visible what's happening, not because anything's actually changed. Now, if you ask me what it means, I have two main answers. First, there can be a "good person" who is a cop, but they cannot be a "good cop". The system will absolutely not allow it. A "Good cop", one who does the right thing and protects people and isn't racist, gets punished. They get financially penalized. They get sent into dangerous situations without backup. That's right, the Force will literally repeatedly threaten their life in a preventable way until they die, at which point they will use that death to talk about how "dangerous" their job is and demand even more money from state budgets so they can buy more weapons, as well as feed their own egos about what "brave heroes" they are while they don't have to face the danger they put the "Good cop" into. A "Good cop" highlights the disparity between what a cop should be and what they are. Second, "All Cops Are Bastards" refers to the fact that if you are in an encounter that involves the police, you absolutely CANNOT trust that this individual cop will be Not A Bastard. There are simply too many Bastards and the consequences too great to be able to put your life on the line and trust that the person with a badge and a gun won't decide to end your life over some trivial, perceived slight.
I'm white and appear male. I'm trans, but I generally hide that in public. The encounters I've had with police have gone "Pleasant but useless" in almost all cases, and that is purely due to luck on my appearance. As a child, I respected police officers. I swallowed the lie that high-profile incidents were isolated, caused by bad people who revealed themselves and then got removed from the force, from authority. But as more and more people had video cameras and were able to show the truth, as more and more stories kept piling up, I had to face the truth. It hurts, that betrayal of trust, but it's nothing compared to the people who have lost family members because of racist murderers in uniform who shield each other from justice.
One thing that I hear a lot in these discussions is, "It's just a few bad apples." You hear it said all the time by police unions, offices, defenders, etc. But the full saying is, "One bad apple spoils the whole bunch." One rotten apple will cause the entire bunch to rot, if not quickly removed, but this phrase is used to justify taking no steps to remove "bad apples". Bad Apples have worked their way to where they control everything, and a Good Person has only a few choices: Leave the Force, become rotten, or find themselves killed.
"Exodimensional Hoofbun Flopsy" is styled after comic books and Saturday Morning Cartoons (especially ones based on comic books, like Spider-Man and Batman). She beats up bad guys and lets police come get them. When I went to write an actual encounter, however, I found that I couldn't really bring myself to write one that went well, and still felt realistic. In fact, Chapter 7 had to be rewritten several times to keep it from being even darker. Originally, both officers were corrupt and only doing a "good cop, bad cop" routine to try to take advantage of Flopsy's confusion, but then I upgraded the "good cop" to Lieutenant Falk (a character I'd been planning on, though he wasn't a massive Columbo expy at first), which made me rewrite the scene.
I want to be able to do more storylines dealing with injustice perpetrated by the police in that story, but I also worry that it's something I won't have the experience to tell properly. I might try it anyway, I might never get around to it and simply focus on other things. Probably the latter, I worry that trying to introduce a character who would be central to the story might come across as offensive, when I don't have a wealth of experience to draw from. I don't want to appear to be making light of real problems, or to be taking advantage of actual suffering.
So, for the most part, the police in Flopsy's story are mostly going to be represented by Officer Blaine (a corrupt pile of trash who would kick a puppy if he thought it was somehow questioning his machismo) and Lieutenant Falk (a competent investigator who means well but won't be able to put the pieces together without the knowledge that magic is real). But most of the "mooks" are going to be closer to Blaine than Falk. Falk is the exception, Blaine is the rule.
(And if anyone doesn't get the joke, the actor who played Columbo was named Peter Falk. ^_^)
(That is, police as theoretically-neutral enforcers of the law, with authorization to neutralize dangerous individuals who do not cooperate, or due to risks cannot be trusted to cooperate.)
Instead, their functions are split up between 1) something akin to a militia, and 2) a borderless organization that has thousands of roaming mediators.
Despite being foreigners in most places, the mediators get the first option on resolving situations that don't pose an imminent threat to multiple lives. (And in some cases, may get called on even in that scenario, if the militia's command feels the other party can be talked down).
If a mediator makes a subjective call that violates a local law, it takes priority over the law and the local authorities must honor it. That is one of the foundational agreements they have with the nations they're allowed to roam in.
They are sworn to do this only if they know it's a harm-reducing net benefit to all parties, and there's a magical doodad that binds them to that promise directly and immediately, under pain of... well, profound pain.
Enough pain to force a reaction that makes it obvious when one of them goes rotten.
Is that lazy writing? Maybe. But it's writing I've been able to make internally-consistent and successfully weave a lot of history into, so hey!
I've also had some fun playing with "what if the mediator is so idealistic they don't realize the solution is a bad thing, so even though it's a net negative they don't get zapped? What mechanisms are there for righting that?"
While I don't plan on Officer Blaine to be more than a background nuisance, it's a thing that's been weighing on my mind since a few chapters in.
Police simply haven't shown up in Princess except for an exceedingly minor moment, and in Vayryn, her one encounter highlighted more "confused human falls back on protocol if given something they understand to latch onto" than anything else. Definitely falls into the "pleasant but useless" category of encounters, but thankfully Vayryn has white fur. ^.~
I still haven't gotten around to reading EHF, but I'm glad to know you've put this kind of thought into the police portion of those tales. :}
My impression of ACAB is this: cops are very prone to Hero Syndrome. They tend to think they are the only ones fit to defend the innocent world from lawlessness. They tend to overestimate their ability to tell wrong from right. And they are all convinced that every one of them is on the same side. I still think cops have enough humanity within them to recognize wrongdoing, but they are kept silent by that thin blue line, by their self-perception of being the only legitimate law enforcement agency that could exist.
So, why aren't my police gun-crazy? Because, like everyone else, they're baffled by what's going on, and they have no protocol for what to do. So every cop is either treating the TF outbreak as some kind of epidemic, or is leaning on their chief's decision to just diffuse the situation. I understand that this is just my idea, based on my own limited experiences with cops (both good and bad), and that every author ultimately puts themselves into their stories.
They've also had it hammered into their heads so much to take an "Us vs. Them" mentality when dealing with non-police that anything that even hints at being a threat to an officer puts the person 100% into "Dastardly Criminal" territory. Dark skin? Higher chance of being a threat, therefore treat as threat. Angry person? Trying to threaten your job, treat as threat. Wears "strange" clothing (punk, goth, flamboyant, has text they don't like or don't recognize)? They might be "woke" and "anti-cop" or even some kind of gang, treat as threat. And you can't know where a random cop is on that brainwashing, or what insignificant-seeming thing will "push" them into deciding they hate you now.
And then you get the the other side of the issue: Power trips. Too many officers are wanna-be soldiers, they want to be action movie stars, they want to shoot Bad Guys. They want to be Big Man In Charge, and don't take kindly to being told they can't do anything they want. Officer Blaine is the quintessential Power Trip Cop, he sees himself as the Protagonist of Reality, the Good Guy In Uniform, and therefore everything he does is good by definition. Any puppies he kicks, well, they did something to deserve it, even if he doesn't know what yet. And that extends to his kid: Jim can do no wrong (except disobey his father). "My kid stole another kid's debit card and beats him up regularly? Well, the other kid shouldn't be such a wuss! How DARE you lay a hand on my kid?" Blaine treats his kid as an extension of himself, existing to make him look good, which is why he'll dismiss or attack anything that at all goes against His Boy. That's why he broke the rules to take charge of the Assault case, because he wanted to punish whoever pushed His Boy. And that's why there's a growing dislike of the Superbunny among the police, since Superbunny broke his kid's arm (a total over-reaction to being stabbed in the gut, because obviously Jim was right to do that, for... reasons? Reasons. Don't question it, Cop Said So.) Blaine also isn't done trying to seek vengeance, but we won't find out about that for a bit yet... ^_^;;
Falk would be the kind of guy who isn't seen speaking out, yet somehow Internal Affairs somehow just happens to get all the info they need to investigate wrongdoing... Whether anything actually comes of that, well, that remains to be seen... He does what he can, and usually that's just "investigate every lead, leave no stone unturned". Doggedly persistent.
Of course, in my stories, police are also not as bad as real life, for the same reason everything else isn't as bad as real life. But even my rose-colored world-filter can only extend so far. ^_^;;
Yeah, I chose to use the 2008 financial collapse as the branching point for my stories for that reason. That was a turning point, where things could have gone worse than they did … or better than they did.