Big things are happening. The sheer cruelty of the systems that drive the world have been laid bare, and right now people are trying to see if they’re going to find a way to somehow sweep the blood under the rug again.
I’m thinking about cop games and other media, which tend to disturb me not so much for how they portray police – though these portrayals are often misleading – but for how they portray ‘criminals’, as a discrete class of human being who is inherently dangerous and who needs to be addressed by violent means that belong to police alone. This ‘criminal’, a person who is solely predator and never prey, solely acting and never acted upon, existing only to satiate unknowable personal greeds and lusts, for the most part simply doesn’t exist. However, most police media requires his presence, so despite Crime Man’s scarcity in the real world he is ubiquitous in media.
I suspect many of you do not believe me. We all hear about terrible crimes, and I need not go into the grisly and horrible particulars of these, and wonder “what sort of person would do these things” – and the specter of Crime Man pops into your mind. Though these crimes may seem inexplicable violations of social norms and common decency, most of them manifest within some degree of social sanction. We have cultural narratives for violence against women, against children, we have cultural narratives for the importance of money above all else, we have cultural narratives of hate and racial supremacy, and every day we’re actors looking for roles, and every day there’s a casting call.
This might sound like it seeks to justify the horrible actions that people take. There’s a difference between explaining and justifying. What I want to explain is that no action comes from nowhere. Every action emerges from the roles people expect themselves to play in society. So we end up with a few people who, due to whatever their circumstances are, take on the role of Crime Man, because Crime Man is such a potent cultural archetype. We view these criminal acts as transgressions against law and against society – but, most of the time, they are calculated choices for either personal or cultural survival, and are made within the context of societal narratives.
However, as long as we believe in Crime Man, we must also believe in Police Man as the solution to Crime Man.
This is the core problem with police media, even beyond the naively benign portrayal of the police themselves. The characters who the cops pursue and punish are criminals, with any other characteristics being secondary to that, and their very existence justifies the core concept of what the police are and do. As long as this is the extent of how we understand crime, the underlying structure cannot be fixed.