I confess, I should be writing papers for the next two weeks straight, but I’m in the middle of a Netflix binge. My current poison? "Blue Bloods." I’m a die hard fan of crime shows: "NCIS," "White Collar," "Graceland," and "Blue Bloods" was a damn good addition to the mix. For about 95 percent of the show, I love it.
"Blue Bloods" (with Tom Selleck, so you know its good) focuses on the life of the Reagan family. Made up of two generations of police commissioners, an officer, a detective, and a lawyer, the family represents a dynasty in the NYPD. It’s exciting, it's interesting, there are back stories and lines connecting the episodes and all in all it is a well-done show.
Currently, I’m enjoying Season five, and much of this season has focused on problems in the real word: police brutality, and campus university sexual assault. These subjects have been heavily discussed and debated in the last few years, and it is fascinating to see them depicted from a popular culture standpoint. Now, that being said, it still aggravates the hell out of me.
Here’s how they do it:
Unfortunately they often depict brutality as a misunderstanding. There was one episode in which Danny corners a suspect, and tells him to put his weapon down or he’d be thrown out the window. Instead, the guy jumps out the window himself and cries “battery.” It is careless to depict police violence as a misunderstanding. To date, according to The Washington Post, 287 people have been shot and killed by the police in 2016. There were 990 people shot and killed by police in 2015. Of those, it is next to impossible to accurately distinguish the unjustified from the justified. However, there are constantly new cries of police brutality being made, and when media depicts those people (especially those of color) as making up these allegations in order to avoid punishment, it becomes even more problematic for the general public to view allegations unbiasedly.
In 2015, 15 police officers were charged with murder, which is three times more than the year before, and this has been since the rise of videos, which were used in 10 of the 15 cases in 2015 for prosecution. In "Blue Bloods," the brutality was staged, it was faked. That is not the case in countless cases of history in which brutality was real, and charged with hate. We can’t depict incidents as faked if we want each case to be viewed unbiasedly.
Contrarily, I was very impressed with how they handled campus sexual assault. In one specific case, the university had misled the victim to believe she was more likely to find justice in their system. In doing so, the disciplinary case ignored physical evidence (which included a blood covered skirt) and dismissed the case as a couple of freshmen making alcohol-induced decisions. It was pathetic. When the girl brought the case to the police months later, it was impossible for them to charge the man with rape. However, in lieu of that, they prosecuted the woman at the university who mishandled the case. It was not a fair trade, justice was not exactly served, and they did not pretend otherwise on the show. It was exciting to see a campus held accountable for the safety of their students, and it was wonderful to see it discussed on a mass level.
I’m a fan of the show, it's exciting, dramatic and interesting. More than that, I love that in incorporates real problems. Yes, there are nods to terrorism, which of course is a huge problem in this world. But on a smaller scale, topics that have made their way to the forefront of United States’ discourse like campus sexual assault and police brutality are relevant and necessary to be discussed.
