FWIW, based on what other work I've read of hers, I think the lead author would
welcome comments like these.
David
Sent on my Virgin Mobile Samsung Galaxy S® 5
-------- Original message --------
From: PGage <[email protected]>
Date: 11/19/16 13:01 (GMT-06:00)
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [TV orNotTV] How Police Censorship Shaped Hollywood
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.
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