My roommate has been watching the 1980s series Miami Vice, and I’ve mostly been watching with him. It has its moments, but it’s probably the dourest and most humorless TV series I’ve ever seen. That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.
On several occasions, officers from Internal Affairs accuse the protagonists Tubbs and Crockett of doing bad things. It’s always bull****, which gives these characters the opportunity to whine about how IA is always harassing good officers and wasting their time with said bull****.
Please note, however, that these are (fictional) officers who regularly beat and kick and otherwise physically abuse people who don’t present any threat to them, to ferret out information or just assert their dominance. If anyone looked at this honestly, they’d deserve not only to be fired but to spend a few years in jail.
If you need something more copaganda-friendly, they also regularly ignore direct orders, sometimes resulting in injury and death to citizens and colleagues. This would be very easy to document in-universe.
But of course Internal Affairs never investigates these entirely true and legitimate things. Otherwise we might have to recognize the fact that IA serves some kind of useful purpose, rather than essentially being mustache-twirling villains.
None of this is limited to Miami Vice, to be sure. Even shows that generally seem more progressive, like Barney Miller or Cagney and Lacey, treat IA officers as a kind of cancer that only prevents actual good cops from doing their jobs.
It’s time to change this. There needs to be a show called Internal Affairs that shows these heroes weeding the bad officers out of the Force while clearing the good ones of any wrongdoing they’re accused of. There could be some personal intrigue to give the title a sly double meaning.
I’d watch. What do you think?
The later seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, though a comedy, seemed to be moving in this direction. However, after the George Floyd protests, the theme of "good cop versus bad cop" got a little too fraught and they moved away from law enforcement themes as much as they could in the last season.
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