Police v. Demonstrators Protesting Killing of George Floyd

Saw Krystal Ball tweeted about this:

Police are at this journalist’s house right now in Portland, Maine threatening to arrest him for tweeting about cops. Not good. pic.twitter.com/uKxeuQvsyP

— Nathan Bernard (@nathanTbernard) June 9, 2020

NYT:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/arts/television/protests-fictional-cops.html
Critic’s Notebook
The Protests Come for ‘Paw Patrol’

A backlash is mounting against depictions of “good cops,” on television and in the street.

It was only a matter of time before the protests came for “Paw Patrol.”

“Paw Patrol” is a children’s cartoon about a squad of canine helpers. It is basically a pretense for placing household pets in a variety of cool trucks. The team includes Marshall, a firefighting Dalmatian; Rubble, a bulldog construction worker; and Chase, a German shepherd who is also a cop. In the world of “Paw Patrol,” Chase is drawn to be a very good boy who barks stuff like “Chase is on the case!” and “All in a police pup’s day!” as he rescues kittens in his tricked-out S.U.V.

But last week, when the show’s official Twitter account put out a bland call for “Black voices to be heard,” commenters came after Chase. “Euthanize the police dog,” they said. “Defund the paw patrol.” “All dogs go to heaven, except the class traitors in the Paw Patrol.”

It’s a joke, but it’s also not. As the protests against racist police violence enter their third week, the charges are mounting against fictional cops, too. Even big-hearted cartoon police dogs — or maybe especially big-hearted cartoon police dogs — are on notice. The effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop archetype, which reigns on both television and in viral videos of the protests themselves. “Paw Patrol” seems harmless enough, and that’s the point: The movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm.

The protests arrived in the midst of a pandemic that has alienated Americans from their social ties, family lives and workplaces. New and intense relationships with content have filled the gap, and now our quarantine consumptions are being reviewed with an urgently political eye. The reckoning has come for newspapers, food magazines, Bravo reality shows and police procedurals.

Last week, Tom Scharpling, an executive producer of “Monk,” criticized his own show on Twitter: “If you — as I have — worked on a TV show or movie in which police are portrayed as lovable goofballs, you have contributed to the larger acceptance that cops are implicitly the good guys.” Griffin Newman, an actor who appeared in two episodes of “Blue Bloods” as a detective, donated his $11,000 in earnings to a bail fund, inspiring other actors who have played cops to do the same. LEGO has halted marketing on its “LEGO City Police Station” and “Police Highway Arrest” sets. A&E has pulled its reality show “Live PD” from the schedule. On Tuesday night, “Cops,” the show that branded suspects as “bad boys” and spawned the whole genre of crime reality television, was canceled after 32 seasons.

Cops are not just television stars; they are television’s biggest stars. Crime shows are TV’s most popular genre, now making up more than 60 percent of prime-time drama programming on the big four broadcast networks. The tropes of the genre are so predictable that a whole workplace sitcom, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” is layered atop them. “A police station was a shortcut,” Dan Goor, the show’s co-creator, has said, “because people are very aware of how police television works. You know instantly who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”

That shortcut now feels like a cheat: After images of a very special episode where Terry Crews is racially profiled were passed around as evidence of responsible police TV, others marked the show as “copaganda.”

Even on television, the good guys are not always so good. In a recent report, the racial justice organization Color of Change assessed depictions of the police across television and found that modern cop shows “make heroes out of people who violate our rights.” Many of them, it argued, show the good guys committing more violations than the bad guys, making police misbehavior feel “relatable, forgivable, acceptable and ultimately good.”

On television, the hero itself is a concept under review. Just a few years ago, at the height of the antihero craze, a prestige drama could seem a little fluffy if its protagonist was not an actual murderer. There is an artistic justification for humanizing bad people and complicating good ones. It’s hard to argue that a show like “Watchmen” (in which a black policewoman brutally beats suspected white supremacist terrorists) or “Unbelievable” (in which two female detectives repeatedly collar the wrong guys) would make for better television if their star cops acted more like German shepherd puppies.

After Inkoo Kang, a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, described “The Wire” as painting police with a “heroic gloss,” Wendell Pierce, who played Detective Bunk Moreland on the show, pushed back. “How can anyone watch ‘The Wire’ and the dysfunction of the police & the war on drugs and say that we were depicted as heroic,” he tweeted. “We demonstrated moral ambiguities and the pathology that leads to the abuses.”

The more salient critique of the crime genre is not how it depicts the police, but just how obsessively it privileges their ambiguities and pathologies over all other players in the criminal justice system — namely, the people cops target as suspects. “As TV viewers we are locked inside a police perspective,” Kathryn VanArendonk wrote recently on Vulture. Color of Change notes that defense attorneys, like Perry Mason and Matlock, “once embodied the character of the American hero,” defending the American people “against the many police officers, prosecutors and judges who jumped to conclusions too quickly and stood as symbols of a deeply flawed system.”

But a sea change led by Dick Wolf’s mammoth “Law & Order” franchise has realigned the crime genre under the perspective of prosecutors and cops. “Our sympathies have generally been with victims,” Warren Leight, the showrunner of “Law & Order: SVU,” said last week on the Hollywood Reporter podcast “TV’s Top 5,” in a conversation about rethinking the show. He added: “Cops behaving illegally, that’s not part of Dick’s brand.”

Cops and Hollywood enjoy a symbiotic relationship, as Alyssa Rosenberg detailed in a Washington Post series in 2016 on policing in popular culture. Cops consult on movies and series, helping mold the characters to their self-conception, and then they take cues from those characters in their own police work.Police officers in Detroit have been spotted wearing the skull insignia of the Marvel antihero the Punisher, and squads in Minnesota have watched Disney’s “Zootopia” as part of their anti-bias training. “LAW & ORDER” has become President Trump’s preferred call-to-arms as the government dispatches police forces and National Guard soldiers against the protesters.

…see link

seattle:https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/11/seattle_activists_create_autonomous_zone_near
Seattle Activists Create Autonomous Zone Near Abandoned Police Precinct After Days of State Violence
Web Exclusive, June 11, 2020

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is_Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Protesters in Seattle, Washington, have taken over several city blocks after a protracted standoff with the police force there, shutting down a police precinct, declaring part of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood as an autonomous zone, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. A banner on the perimeter of the area reads, “This space is now property of the Seattle people.” Activists took the area after a week of rising tension over the police killing of George Floyd, as police responded with tear gas and force, prompting calls for the resignation of Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan.

Citizen journalist Omari Salisbury live-streamed Seattle police using pepper spray, tear gas and flashbang grenades on demonstrators and reporters, like himself.

OMARI SALISBURY: There’s the spray. There’s the spray. There’s the spray. Now you saw them now. It’s on. East Precinct, they’re losing control. State police are trying to open the barricade. They’re putting the pepper spray in the air. Share the street! Share the street! Share the street! Share the street! This [bleep]! God [bleep], they got me! You [bleep]!

AMY GOODMAN: Facing mounting criticism for its militarized response, the Seattle Police Department abandoned its Capitol Hill precinct this week.

Last night, President Trump tweeted, quote, “Radical Left Governor @JayInslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!” President Trump tweeted, then said, “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle, run by Radical Left Democrats, of course. LAW & ORDER!” Trump tweeted.

The Seattle mayor, Jenny Durkan, responded by tweeting, quote, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker. #BlackLivesMatter.” Congressmember Pramila Jayapal tweeted, “Don’t you have a bunker to be in?” She was referencing Trump’s visit to the White House underground bunker when mass protests first broke out in late May. Trump has insisted he went to the bunker for an inspection, a claim his own attorney general contradicts. William Barr has said the move was to protect Trump from the protesters.

Well, for more, we’re going to Seattle to speak with Omari Salisbury, who’s been covering the protests in Seattle since they started, on Twitter and for his website, Converge Media….see link

Billy_T wrote:

Hey, WV,

I posted two articles about Seattle and Trump’s response earlier, in your thread What do we think, etc. etc.

Trump is committing political suicide, luckily for the world, with his insane, fascistic support for police brutality, for using the military to attack Americans in the streets, and he just recently showed his support for the Confederacy by saying he won’t allow the renaming of military bases, etc.

In my lifetime, we’ve never had such a despicable human being in the White House, and we’ve had some doozies.

=====================

Part of me agrees with all that. And part of me thinks we are all living out some kind of Twilight Zone episode.

If its a twilight zone episode, hard to tell how it all ends up.

w
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