As far as I can see the propaganda in B99 is a lot subtler than spreading the view that police are infallible, noble, and trustworthy. Rather what it propagates is the implication that racism and brutality by police are a matter of a few (or a lot of) bad apples rather than a systemic issue, that there are “good apples,” the cool ones, the woke ones, who are not subject to the corrosive police culture of dehumanization and violence. It reduces the worst issues of police to ones of individual morality and capability, and yeah, that’s pretty propagandistic.
Also, they repeatedly vilainize public defenders, like all cop shows do
That’s disgusting, public defenders uphold the Constitutional guarantee of legal representation in criminal trials and have a really hard job in a broken system. 😦
Remember that one episode in season 5 where they kept a guy in an interrogation room for 10 hours and when his lawyer showed up and said if they kept him for 15 more minutes she’d charge them for harassment and they kept him for another 14? They aren’t even trying to be subtle anymore
It’s like that post that was going around–police misconduct doesn’t look like the bad cops you see on TV, it looks like the good cops on TV.
As far as I can see the propaganda in B99 is a lot subtler than spreading the view that police are infallible, noble, and trustworthy. Rather what it propagates is the implication that racism and brutality by police are a matter of a few (or a lot of) bad apples rather than a systemic issue, that there are “good apples,” the cool ones, the woke ones, who are not subject to the corrosive police culture of dehumanization and violence. It reduces the worst issues of police to ones of individual morality and capability, and yeah, that’s pretty propagandistic.
@aphroditeorvenus who said you couldn’t enjoy it you absolute fucking weapon
Hot take: B99 is the answer to BLM like how shows like Law and Order and Cops were the answer to the Rodney King riots but in a different way. Cops/Law and Order tried to show the haunting realities of the job and that it “wasn’t so easy” and humanize the struggle of being a cop while B99 took the millennial approach as it were by showing a multiethnic/diverse cast be quirky and lovable, even going so far as to address lightly some racism homophobia and sexism.
Both times the media is trying to get you to sympathize with police officers and change your mind about them and their work.
And the showrunner himself like… literally told you this is the case. Look at what co-creator Dan Goor told Buzzfeed, emphases mine:
“Our particular squad — our heroes — we’ve always made sure are good
cops and model the kind of behavior and techniques that we would hope
all cops exhibit.”
“What is our way into the issue [of racial profiling], given that we portray our cops as cops
who wouldn’t racially profile somebody, or who wouldn’t stop-and-frisk
somebody? How do we bring those issues to the fore?”
They said, baldly, that they chose to handle the issue of racial profiling with one of our good cops being a victim of racial profiling rather than a perpetrator because they didn’t want to show one of their “good cops” racially profiling someone. Because they want to distance racial profiling from systemic issues that EVERY cop, “good” or “bad,” is subject to, and reduce it to one of individual morality where good cops are good and bad cops are bad and never the twain shall meet.
If you’re saying “B99 shows good/diverse/funny/woke cops who wouldn’t brutalize and murder civilians!” then congratulations, you’ve fallen for the propaganda. The notes are full of evidence.
Full disclosure: Idk exactly which post you’re talking about but I know a long-term fandom friend wrote a post like that which was fairly popular, and I’ve watched my more recent fandom friends react negatively to that. As a result this has been slightly awkward for me to discuss. I lean toward “it is propaganda” myself, which is why I don’t reblog much B99 stuff despite seeing it frequently on my dash.
I get that what draws people to B99 isn’t the cop aspect, necessarily, but the nuanced handling of diverse and queer characters. At the same time, that doesn’t make it any less propaganda. Propaganda can be artistic and entertaining, it can tug on heartstrings and get you to love the characters. Some great pieces of fiction have been propaganda, like Casablanca.
From what little I’ve seen of the show, it presents an ideal of cops as they should be, as a number of cop shows throughout the history of American TV have but with a more 21st-century twist of diversity in race, culture, and sexuality. Many fans have pointed to the show’s handling of police brutality, but from what I’ve seen the episode to deal with the issue most directly shows one of the Black cops as a victim of racial profiling, not a perpetrator.
Which raises the question: Does the show deal with the systemic issues that encourage even well-meaning cops, including nonwhite ones like the ones that headline the show, to racially profile and brutalize citizens they are sworn to protect? Are these characters subjected to the pressure to dehumanize, to overpolice Black and Latinx neighborhoods, to meet racist quotas? Are these police dressed down and even penalized for not stopping and frisking Black and Latinx youths?
As far as I can tell, that’s not true of our crew of lovable prankster cops. Showrunner Dan Goor has said as much in his interview with Buzzfeed: “Our particular squad — our heroes — we’ve always made sure are good
cops and model the kind of behavior and techniques that we would hope
all cops exhibit.” Also: “What is our way into the issue [of racial profiling], given that we portray our cops as cops
who wouldn’t racially profile somebody, or who wouldn’t stop-and-frisk
somebody? How do we bring those issues to the fore?”
This is pretty as baldly “a few bad apples” rhetoric as you can get without saying the exact words. The flip side of saying these cops are good apples who would never racially profile someone is that it’s the other cops, the bad ones, who do that. And that’s not only bunk, it’s a dangerous lie because the same police who really are protecting and serving (or pranking and shitting, whatever) are the ones who either commit these acts of brutality, or are cowed into complicity.
So yeah, I think B99 is propaganda. It doesn’t mean it necessarily works on everyone who watches it, but it sure seems to confirm the biases of those who want to believe the lie that good, loving, lovable police don’t do these awful things. That there is such a thing as a good cop in a rotten system–or, even more dangerously, that the system is not rotten from the core. I have no issues with anyone loving and enjoying the show, but I do get tired of people insisting that if they love a show it must be Unproblematic and Perfect and Virtuous. Hey news flash, there’s no such thing.
Any “solution” to the crisis of school shootings that does not honestly grapple with the trauma and very real danger Black students face from police, criminalization, and excessive discipline is not a real way forward.
L.J.'s Obsessions 