Damn straight he is, alive and kicking at the Atlantic, with an excellent article, “Smart Weapons Need to Be Smarter”, which I’ll discuss/amplify in the Afterwords, but for now what I want to talk about is some beautiful demolition work Gregg performed on racist/fascist television back in 2018, describing the unbridled power worship that was rampant in virtually every cop and private eye show on the tube in 2018, and probably remains so to this day. I quoted (massively) from Gregg’s research in a post labelled “Gregg Easterbrook watches the lying liberal media so you don’t have to”, adding a few cracks of my own, relating to overhyped threat of international terrorism and, in particular, “weapons of mass destruction,” which, I have argued lo these many times over, are NOT weapons of mass destruction.
Well, enough of that hobby-horse, unfortunately so far from dead. Here’s Gregg with first a paragraph on the gross sins of Hawaii Five-O and then an extended takedown on the multiple horrors of Chicago P.D. Let’s hope the current mood of the country will drive these shows, and all like them, from the air.
Five-0, a ratings hit, just reached its ninth season. In each season, individual episodes have shown more murders than occur in the actual state in a year. [35 in 2016, Gregg tells us] Five-0 has depicted machine-gun slaughters of surfer dudes and bikini babes on Waikiki beach; gigantic blasts leveling whole buildings in downtown Honolulu; bioengineered diseases causing evacuation of Hawaiian cities; death drones killing hikers and joggers on scenic Hawaiian hills; Honolulu bank robberies involving a dozen hoodlums firing military weapons; wildfires smothering Oahu; exploding tractor-trailer trucks in tourist areas; attacks by helicopter commandos on Hawaiian prisons; murders of the governor and other top public officials; and at least 100 police officers gunned down, significantly more than the total number of law enforcement officers who have died by gunfire in the entire history of the state.
Primetime American television, which is heavy on crime procedurals, is trebly wrong in its core depictions. First, violent crime is shown as out of control, when actually it is in a generation-long trend of decline. Second, affluent whites are depicted as primary targets of violent crime, when low-income minority group members are far more likely, as a population share, to be harmed. Third, law enforcement agencies are depicted as super-efficient avengers who always get their man, though, as the Washington Post reports, in the past decade, police in the nation’s largest cities have failed to make an arrest in about 50 percent of homicides.
Chicago P.D. takes these structural faults of primetime police procedurals and multiples them, pretending to be realism while relentlessly distorting practically everything about the city’s law enforcement.
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Further troubling about Chicago P.D. is that the show lauds torture of suspects. Brutalized suspects always turn out to be guilty as sin, and the beatings always cause them to reveal information that saves an innocent life. Whether torture could be acceptable if law enforcement knew for sure an innocent life would be saved is a complex moral issue. In real-world policing, detectives rarely know if they have the right guy, while torture is, itself, a crime. Chicago P.D. manipulates audiences into rooting for torture, suggesting cops have godlike powers of knowledge and would never harm a suspect except if given no choice to protect the innocent.
Constitutional protections are laughed at on Chicago P.D. In this season’s premiere, the protagonist busts into the apartment of a dope dealer, threatens his girlfriend, and starts burning the dealer’s $100 bills to get the dealer to admit where the stash house is. The detective has probable cause, so why couldn’t the entry to the dealer’s apartment have been done legally? Because real heroes don’t waste time filling out forms for some namby-pamby warrant!
Chicago P.D. suggests to the NBC primetime audience that crime could end tomorrow if bleeding-heart politicians didn’t tie the hands of heroic cops who inexplicably know exactly where every offender is at every moment and never, ever mistreat the innocent. I wonder if Dick Wolf would want to live in a neighborhood where cops are free to smash down his door and rough him up because only a wimp would go to a judge for a search warrant.
Most disturbing is that Chicago PD depicts police officers as the real victims of urban dysfunction.
In one episode, a foot patrolman chases a murder suspect while loudly yelling “Stop! Police!” After the suspect raises a gun and the patrolman shoots him, the officer is immediately fired, then prosecuted. In another episode, a policewoman observes a murder and shoots the killer while trying to apprehend him; she is fired immediately, without any investigation or union rights. In both episodes, mobs of angry African Americans form outside the precinct house—causing the viewer to perceive police officers as the ones in danger, and blacks as the real threat.
At the end of last season, a decorated detective—shown to viewers as dedicated to protecting the innocent—is sent to prison on a trumped-up charge in order to appease the media and a sinister African-American higher-up. Though the detective’s record is clean, the judge denies bail. As soon as the noble officer is behind bars, he’s stabbed to death by the drug gang that runs the jail.
Why would a judge deny bail to an officer with no prior conviction? “I got a call from the mayor,” the judge explains to the show’s hero. The media and the minority group mobs, it is implied, like to hear that white Chicago cops are being killed.
Maybe there are cities in which mayors telephone judges with instructions, though this is really not how the criminal justice system is supposed to function. But that’s how the criminal justice system is presented to NBC’s primetime audience, in a show that bills itself as the hidden truth about Chicago law.
Afterwords
In his current article for the Atlantic, Gregg argues that “we” need better surface to air (“SAM”) missiles, ones that won’t shoot down civilian airliners by accident, something that has happened four times in the past 40 years, the first occurring in 1988, when the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 on board. According to Gregg, Navy Captain Greg Baker recently told him “There was a lot of soul-searching after the Vincennes incident, a lot of determination this won’t happen again.”
Well, I hope so, but at the time, there was a hell of a lot more ass-covering than soul-searching, as I discussed in this post from 2014, “The time the U.S. blew up an airliner and lied its ass off trying to cover it up”. Among other things, the Vincennes had standing orders not to be in Iranian waters, but was in Iranian waters. The Iranian jet was on a regularly scheduled flight, of which the Vincennes was aware, as it damn well ought to have been. Then Vice President George H. W. Bush told the United Nations that the airliner was off course, but that was one of Georgie Boy’s little white lies. Will Rogers III, captain of the Vincennes, should have been court-martialed, and convicted, of 290 counts of involuntary manslaughter, at the very least.1 Instead, two years later, when leaving his post with the Vincennes, he was given a letter of commendation “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service”. Here’s a suggestion, Gregg. Take what you hear from an old salt with a grain of salt. Or maybe a shaker.
1. Since Rogers had the Vincennes in Iranian waters in direct defiance of his standing orders, the charge could easily have been upped to voluntary manslaughter.
