I have finally had time to get into this today (I have now finished the first two installments as well, and browsed some of the remainder) and can second Tom's recommendation. Because it is serious work, I am taking it seriously, and have a few critical comments, but these are not intended to undermine the overall value of the ambitious project.
1. This is the kind of thing that back in the day one might have expected to see in the LA Times, rather than the Washington Post. That is primarily intended as a slam against my old home town paper, but also a warning note about the new WaPo. While serious, after a very promising start with the first installment, the series seems to be settling into more of an extended essay based on a critical reading of police shows and films, with relatively little actual investigative reportage. It feels like something that could have been written from 3000 miles away from the industry. Not surprisingly, the pieces are strongest when they deal with "The Wire", presumably because the WaPo has better or easier access to the principals. The stuff on Dragnet and Wambaugh and the like is pretty good, but also could be found in a good college term paper on the subject. 2. Personal peeve - they have a section on how the Miranda case impacted both real and TV police, but do not mention what in my experience is the single most important TV discussion of the issue - "The Marcus-Nelson Murders", which served as the pilot for Kojak. Whatever you might think about the series, the pilot was serious and make a big impact at the time. It was broadcast in 1973, about 7 years after the Miranda SCOTUS decision, and at a time when the LAPD (and most other police departments) were still resentful and passive-aggressive about implementing it. My parents heard about it in advance, and had my sister and I (we were in our early tweens) stay up to watch it with them. 3. They mention Chief William Parker of the LAPD in the first article that discussed the cozy relationship between the LAPD and programs like Dragnet, but do not really give an adequate view of the man. This is the kind of thing that would not have been done had it been written by the LA Times (or rather, a halfway decent version of the LA Times, which currently does not exist). Parker is one of the fathers of modern, professional policing, and did a lot to save the LAPD from its corrupt, outlaw and inefficient form during the first half of the 20th century. But he was also a horrible, horrible, evil man. He was in some ways the LA version of J Edgar Hoover, and transformed the LAPD from a corrupt to professional racist terrorism force. In my childhood home the name "Chief Parker" was used like an epitaph or invocation of personified evil. Most cop shows on TV in the 1960s and early 70s were kissing Parker's ass, and covering up the systematic violence of his force. The LAPD motto "To Protect and to Serve" under Parker was a dark joke for many in Los Angeles. 4. The series is already long form journalism on popular culture, so it is hard to criticize it for leaving things out, but I really do think that any serious, critical look at the dialectical relationship between television and the police must include a detailed discussion of John Reid and his 1961 book "Criminal Interrogation and Confessions". This is literally "The Book" they talk about on TV police shows all the time, that gives detailed instructions on how to question suspects. Maybe this will be done in some of the articles I have not yet read, but a review of the titles and a quick browsing suggest not. It became more and more important in the aftermath of SCOTUS decisions like Miranda, because of its emphasis that the focus of police interrogation should not be collecting evidence to be used at trial, but extracting confessions. In what became known as the "The Reid Technique", suspects were not actually "suspected" of committing a crime, but assumed to be guilty. The interrogators task was not to find out if he was guilty, but to persuade him to confess. Almost every TV cliche surrounding this process comes from Reid, and actual police practice, not from the imagination of Hollywood screenwriters. HLOTS and NYPD Blue are a few of the shows that came closest to actually addressing Reid (I have a personal memory of NYPD Blue actually referring to the book and the man, though perhaps it was with an altered name, and HLOTS of course spent a lot of time mediating on the proper technique and culture in "The Box"). For the most part, TV has assumed the validity of the Reid Technique. Bad or incompetent cops often do bad or stupid things during interrogation, but the implicit message typically is that if they had only followed "The Book" or proper police procedure, everything would have been okay. Or, or course, sometimes Good and Courageous cops who are sick of evil prevailing, are too old to take this shit anymore and can not stomach scum bags getting off on technicalities, violate "The Book", threatening or using violence to get a confession. The role of "The Book" in police procedure basically was to find a way for police to transition away from the indiscriminate use of violence (which had become problematic already before WII, and was increasingly viewed as unconstitutional in the late 1950 and early 60s) to psychological methods of manipulation. The problem with the Reid Technique is not that it doesn't work, but that it works too well. It is a pretty effective means of getting people to confess, whether or not they actually committed the crime. It is responsible for very large numbers of false confessions, in which either completely innocent people confess to crimes they never committed, or partially innocent people confess to many more, and more serious, crimes than they actually committed. Television has played a profound role in getting the public to assume that these methods are the best or even only way of getting valid confessions, but we now know that they are not. Last I checked Reid is still alive and working, and claiming that the rivers of harm and injustice caused by his technique are not his fault, but the fault of poorly trained practitioners. I think that is bull shit, but it hardly matters; Reid has been all too happy to encourage and profit from the promiscuous use of his technique for 50 years, and in my book is responsible for the harm done. On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote: > Normally I don't recommend an article before I finished reading it. In > this case it's a five part series in the Washington Post. It is about how > public perceptions of police work are shaped by movies and TV and the role > police departments play in shaping those perceptions. I have read two parts > so far and I can't recommend it highly enough. > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/opinions/2016/10/24/how- > police-censorship-shaped-hollywood/ > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "TV or Not TV" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. 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