The Myth About the Police

I’m thinking about myth. Now, in a sense, you could say I am a doctor of myth: my training in psychology has been to use myth as a lens for understanding dreams, symptoms, and psyche. Much of that training has been an attempt to apply myth, symbol, and symptom to our current epoch – in an effort to better understand the interventions or responses to the health of communities, systems, and institutions. 

Contrary to popular parlance, “myth” for me does not simply mean “not true” ; rather, our myths are the stories that enact powerful resonance on how we live our lives. One can see, for example, the way that the stories we hear most growing up tend to give direction to what we see is possible. As myth and media become more and more conflated in our present society (all those memes!), I’m mulling over the relation between the two in this current moment. 

I’ve recently been infatuated with the Netflix series Lucifer, an obsurd scenario in which the devil becomes a sexy British human who owns a nightclub in Los Angeles and moonlights as a detective consultant, solving murders and punishing evil. He’s visited over the 5 seasons by angels, demons, Cain, and Eve. While I enjoy the buddy-cop suspense and campy humor, I’m also fascinated with the way that various Biblical myths are applied to modern scenarios. 

But the reason I’m thinking about myth in Lucifer, at least for this blog post, is not for all the powerful Biblical imagery and metaphor. It is the realization of how prevalent, in the United States and perhaps other places, is the myth of the “cop”. We have so many sitcoms and films about police that we “know” so much more about how the police operate by our media, than we have any accurate sense of the reality. At least until the camera phone.

Despite the focus on police solving murders, in shows like Law & Order and Blue Bloods and my new favorite Lucifer, it turns out that surprisingly few police hours actually get spent on this arguably important function. Asher and Horwitz wrote in a recent New York Times article that the share of policing “devoted to handling violent crime is very small, about 4 percent.” In the real world, a “lucky” cop will get to pursue a serious case like this once a year – and if it happens twice, they’re celebrated as “Police of the Year”. Clearly, much of the work of police goes to other things. 

One of the elements of the media-caused myth of police is the chase scene. We consumers get to be on the edge of our seats. As they leap over walls and cars, swoop around corners, we wonder: are they going to catch him? If they do, it’s sometimes an easy arrest; sometimes the pursued actually attempts to fight the pursuers; and, often times, whoever is arrested turns out to be completely innocent. But, by the end of the episode, the “bad guy” is caught. 

Yet I can’t think of (almost) any police show where the cop says “he’s too fast and too far. I’ll just shoot him from behind”, shoots the suspect in the back, and “suspect” immediately becomes “victim”. I can’t quite fathom a scenario in a TV show where the cop simply says (forgive my harsh language but I couldn’t imagine otherwise): “Oh well, just another bum / addict / ni**er dead. Let’s go grab a coffee”.

The absurdity of this scene in a show becomes even more painful when compared to the reality I imagine for the hours that immediately followed those* who murdered George Floyd. Did those four officers grab lunch? Kiss their wives? Talk about what they did? They just committed a murder. But on our televisions, the police are the heroes.

How little life and art imitate each other in this case. The extent to which our reality and our (media-derived) myth are disconnected is troubling. And so, another black man – Jacob Blake – was shot in the back, from behind, by those paid by tax dollars to “serve and protect”. Somehow still unfathomable. One of the questions this begs is: what is a new myth for this area of American life?

There is more and more in our media (in large part, our social media) that attests to the reality of the police system – and sheds light on its disconnections from our myth of the police. From When They See Us and The Hate U Give to Spike Lee’s See You Yesterday. While these examples certainly speak the truth about police in this country, they aren’t quite myth. And myth is important – stories are important – because they give us a framework, a context, hopefully on which to base reality. 

I also just recently saw HBO original mini-series Watchmen. What a brilliant and powerful, while at times troubling, story. SPOILER ALERT: this show does a great job of critiquing the police myth, making a large percentage of police double as white supremacist terrorists (Yikes!), but also having a few of the police double as superheroes. Now, I don’t know that we necessarily need a myth where the heroes are played by law enforcement – I guess that’s been part of the problem. So I’m not saying that Watchmen is a perfect substitute for all the other stuff. But, in a world where our myths of police are so incredibly out of alignment with the reality, we need to create a new myth that both takes into account the reality, but also develops some new possibilities for it. 

* may they burn in whatever hell exists when their time comes