Law and Order

Cop shows piss me off for a number of reasons.  The main reason being why a television show pisses me rather than a movie is that cop shows try and mask themselves as reality driven.  While they aren’t trying for the same gritty reality there is still a degree of reality  in the movies, if not there wouldn’t be things like gravity or character consistency.  Sadly, there are movies that defy both those simple truths.  But we accept some falsehood.  There is this ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.  With a cop drama we are made to assume the actions taken by the actors are meant to truly mimic reality.  They play up interrogations, trials and plotline ripped from the headlines.  When I think plotlines ripped from the headlines I think lazy writing  cashing in on poor attention spans and sensationalism.  They treat it like a good thing.  This one point of contention but not where I grow weary and or angry.

Law & Order is really more famous for its' ‘dunt dunt’ noise than anything within the show.  It’s a device that serves as a cut.  Which is actually kind of cool and it works..  It’s a sound cue to acknowledge a change in place or time.  Cuts take place every time you move from one shot to another.  Normally these cuts seem seamless even though we are using multiple angles and points of view in one scene.  There are reasons why it works and how they interact and they are based on our perception and visual cues.  Things like eye line match and shot reverse shot are built in filmic devices we just naturally understand and accept.  The transition between scenes is handled through the traditional fade out and loud ‘dunt dunt’ sound effect or non-digetic sound (digetic = inside the film world, non-digetic = outside the film world, so a radio is digetic music while a character’s theme is non-digetic).

What the show tries to do is realistically take a forced plot and have detective instigate a crime interrogate suspects and hand off to District Attorney’s office who then prosecutes the case.  Now there are obvious things we as an audience are built to ignore.  If there is meant to be total transparent reality these would all be normal looking people.  There would be no one who looks like a leading man or leading woman (looking at you Mariska Hargitay) and more importantly those DA’s would have more than one case going on at a time there wouldn’t only be focused on this one case in every damn discussion they have.  Obviously with selective use of film time we can assume the character are doing other things during their off screen hours but these guys never seem to be doing anything that isn’t immediately plot A related.  A lot of stories tend to have another plot, a plot B (often times a romance) to round out the story and give more options for scenes to go.  This way a scene could be about plot A or plot B.  So it’s like a cop show having two crimes at the same time not interrelated.  As it is a narrative those crime scenes would tie back together but you can’t do that every show.  Cop shows try to replace the plot B with witty banter.  Witty banter pisses me off for different reasons.

If we work with the premise these shows are meant to mirror reality the things that aggravate me and are so egregiously incorrect are as follows in no particular order:

• Interrogations
• Crime scene investigations
• Court room antics

Here is a simple reason why the interrogations piss me off.  All the rough and tumble interrogations assume their targets, assume half of these people are wholly innocent and are in no way criminals.  Not relegated to the crime, not holding information back.  Just people who happened to be blamed for one reason or another.  Now think back to the actions of these fake police people interrogating them.  There cool and flippant attitude.  Constant one liners and crude demeanor.  Violent outbursts and inappropriate conduct.  Imagine those things aimed at a shit ton of poor innocent people who don’t deserve to be there.  And yeah the police depending on the city on city can be truly awful at interrogations and yes they can coerce people into admitting wrongdoing they didn’t commit but this often comes out eventually and the case is overturned.  But the bullshit TV cops do is okay because we sympathize with that character and we know they are on the right side and they’ll get their man.  Reality doesn’t work that way.  Cops have specific lines they are meant to follow.  And they usually do.  The egregious violations are not the normal way of things.  IN films the cops get their badges taken away and they have to act outside the law.  Even though they aren’t trying as much to be realistic they do a better job of being realistic in a sense.  Odd how that works.

Crime scene investigations anger me because it’s obvious TV writers read a chem book once and based a bunch of half assed ideas of that.  Hey he was stabbed with a  corkscrew because of the blood pattern.  Enhance!  Enhance!  Enhance more!  No image can enhance and cleaned up as much as those shows allow.  Oh and crime scene guys don’t do investigation.  They give notes to the detectives you know the guys who are trained for investigative work.  Fuck you CSI and your bullshit.

Law room battles anger me because well the legal knowledge of a couch potato  is shitty so the writers only have to give some semblance of truth and they ignore, sadly, true and correct legal precedent.

But that is the world of fiction.  What truly anger me is the law and order grievances around us.  The interrogation techniques we see in these shows used in real life; on our own soldiers, or on own school children.

Now we all know about the horrors of places like Abu Ghraib but I figure we can talk on that briefly anyway.  Now Abu Ghraib’s issues were so prevalent they leaked.  And not just a little leak.  They have an entire wiki page built for torture and prisoner abuse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

In the article it talks about prisoner death by torture and prisoner rape.  The rape was not prisoner on prisoner rape, like here in the states, but detainer on detainee rape.  I mentioned prisoner on prisoner rape in the states because quite alarmingly the occurrence of prison rape is so prevalent it inflates rape statistics so that is more common for a man to be raped than a woman because of the amount of that sexual violence happening in our prisons.

The quote “war is hell” is true.  The kind of psychological twisting that goes on is not normal.  It warps people.  Strong willed people too.  And the people we have in warzones are kids.  You say eighteen years olds aren’t kids but to me that’s too damn young to be thrust into such horror.  And this unhinging can lead to the dehumanizing of the enemy.  People were shocked by the picture the casual disregard of their humanity and dignity.  I wasn’t.  I was depressed and saddened but not surprised.  War is ugly.

Even if these picture didn’t leak out we would eventually, one would hope, learn about these atrocities through the Freedom of Information Act.  But don’t bet on people consistently following through with the letter of the law on the Act even damn time.  The cynical part me can’t expect those types of secrets to be unearthed easily or on schedule.

Now these are acts of cruelty to people identified solely as the enemy from the get go.  What about Bradley Manning suspect in the wikileaks scandal.  Now he was charged on 22 counts included aiding the enemy.  Aiding the enemy is not so a good thing to be hit.  Treason is not so good.  Below is our definition and punishment of Treason.

“Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

You’ll notice it says treason is punishable by death and then the or bits.  The lesser possibility is a minimum five years imprisonment with a fine at a minimum of ten thousand dollars.  So treason is somewhat serious.  Now you can imagine that this should be handled delicately as it would be in the middle of a media frenzy and the armed forces acting inappropriately would only make the leaks seem like a good idea.  Fortunately the armed forces couldn’t give a damn about logic and probably tortured the shit out of Bradley for close to a year.  Close to year of isolation and psychological and physical abuse and torture.  Good job armed forces way to make America proud.  Sarcasm!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un

But, you say to yourself, that was justified as this man, if he is guilty (stupid if statements and jurisprudence) , could have put  America in harm’s way.  Okay, you heartless bastard, how about traumatizing a young school girl and coercing her to give up private information without consent from a legal guardian all because of some insults.  And yes young girls are fantastic with using insults to make people feel insignificant.  Not that I speak from experience.  Ahem.

http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-10/us/us_minnesota-student-privacy_1_school-counselor-school-house-gate-facebook?_s=PM:US

Privacy is a big issue now.  With the pervasiveness of the internet as the new media and medium we need to guard ourselves from the new ways upon which bad people will steal or misuse our private information.  There are safe guards for things like PHI through HIPAA (private patient data) but there are a lot of loopholes when it comes to other information on the net.  All the shit we dump into Facebook is being leveraged somehow to make money.  Facebook doesn’t make all its too much too count money from ads alone.  In this age there is a glut of information and content.  Sifting through that and extracting data is of worth.  Gathering information is of worth.  Protecting your rights isn’t monetized in worth like the other two.  There is no payoff for privacy rights.

This is stated in the lawsuit accordingly to the article linked:

“The girl was called to a meeting with a deputy sheriff, school counselor and an unidentified school employee, the court documents states.

There, she was "intimidated" into giving up her login and passwords to her Facebook and e-mail accounts, the lawsuit says.”

So a minor was ambushed in a sense by authority figures.  And wrongfully coerced into divulging private information.  I think this goes a bit beyond the realm of vengeance for nasty twelve year old girls taunts.  The girl’s nastiness is not covered in the article.  I would think she is foolish above nasty as this is not the first time she had been caught speaking out on Facebook against school employees.  But this a very bad showing for Minnesota public schools and for educational professionals in general.

So I guess this Law & Order breaking the rules because we feel like it might actually be more realistic than I’d like to admit.  Dunt Dunt!

Ben