Life can be messy, and people don’t like or accept messiness for a variety of reasons.
It’s ugly, distasteful, inconvenient and unpleasant. Citizens hope for a best-case scenario, optimal outcomes and a world where everything works as it should.
Life doesn’t generally work that way.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast Hollywood’s portrayal of policing in sitcoms, movies and filmmaking. There are police pursuits, car crashes, gun play and mayhem.
Criminals get arrested, injured victims are usually placed in an ambulance to heal and recover later and justice is served. But in real life, when people die in car accidents and suffer horrific injuries, we cover the bodies with a sheet.
People don’t get to experience the upsetting reality.
Average citizens don’t look into the eyes of a dying person calling for Jesus or their momma as life drains out of them from a gunshot or knife wound. They don’t comprehend what it’s like for a police officer to have to deliver a death notice to a family at 2 a.m. because a loved one’s life was prematurely snuffed out.
They don’t understand what it’s like to spend Christmas morning with a mother and
her two young children, who are sobbing in grief because a husband and father walked into the living room, sat on the wrapped presents stacked under a decorated tree, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Hollywood, through pop culture, feeds a false narrative by portraying police work unrealistically. Cops can’t arbitrarily violate policy and established procedure to get the job done.
Shootouts and gunplay in movies between the police and despicable villains are commonplace and expected in film. Police officers are sometimes depicted abusing their authority and the badge, reinforcing widely held perceptions of repressive behavior and targeted discrimination.
Force is portrayed as a tool and means commonly used to impose control and compliance. Favorable portrayals of police are sometimes labeled “copaganda,” a combination of the words “cop” and “propaganda.”
A police career in reality is sobering. You eat in restaurants where there’s an open kitchen so you can keep an eye on your food, wondering whether some fry cook just released from prison might put saliva sauce on your burger.
A smiling little kid approaches you as you eat and tells you he wants a shotgun to make people “fly back.” That’s the Hollywood movie effect suffered by those at the receiving end of a Mossberg 590A1 in film.
Then there’s the choking three-month-old baby girl named Erica, with her tiny hoop earrings, whom you swabbed for a throat obstruction and on whom you performed CPR in earnest. She didn’t make it after being rushed to a nearby hospital.
Later, hospital staff called your home to inform you that Erica tested positive for spinal meningitis, and you were forced to quarantine for two weeks. In the heat of the moment
you initiated CPR, forgetting to use your department-issued barrier.
Hollywood makes no distinctions.
Movie gunplay is also too precise. Naive citizens ask, “Why didn’t the cop shoot the person in the leg?” Ever try to hit a moving target, let alone in the leg? We did training drills with Simunition, running in circles around one another and simply trying to land a hit.
Center body mass is targeted for a reason, with an additional head shot sometimes considered when confronting body armor, if you’re even fortunate enough to achieve it in a real-life shooting situation.
If you’ve never been under fire in chaos, you’re really missing out. Hollywood doesn’t concern itself with such trivial details.
Black-colored toy guns sometimes have their tips sprayed bright orange by the manufacturer to indicate they are toy replicas. Then some juvenile spray paints the orange tip black, and his eight-year-old brother ends up with it. As you drive by in the patrol car, the smiling kid points that toy replica at you.
You have seconds to decide how to respond.
Or maybe a guy shoots at you, and your immediate reaction and instinct are to return fire, but the woman with a baby carriage in the background causes you to pause. In Hollywood, you successfully take the shot, or maybe you shoot the gun out of his hand. Everybody applauds.
In real life, when you pull that trigger and that bullet exits the barrel, you’re not getting it back. You better be right each and every time.
In Hollywood there’s no ambiguity or enigma. In real life, what is legally correct may not be prudent.
A law enforcement officer, by law, does not have to retreat. So you respond to a domestic dispute and a nine-month- pregnant woman exits the home armed with a knife. She’s closing the distance, but her condition hampers her speed and mobility.
Do you stand your ground, draw your duty weapon, and fire multiple projectiles into her pregnant belly, or do you run to evade her? Times up. I’d be running.
Citizens have freedom of speech. Cops are held accountable for everything they say and do.
Hyper vigilance is exhausting: walking around watching everyone and everything, knowing that the one thing you miss could cause you to lose your life. One mistake or error in judgment, in just one incident, could end your career through termination, pending criminal charges or possible decertification.
Hollywood paints a picture of the police profession through comedy and drama, but a cop career is fraught with stark and stressful consequential danger. Police agencies often give out career-service ribbons, usually at five-year intervals, to display on your uniform shirt.
During the first five years, you’ll see a plethora of names of officers receiving a career service bar. At ten years that number may drop by half. At 15 years, you may be down to a quarter of the number who originally began. Get to 20 years, and there are even fewer names.
At 25 and 30 years, you may be down to single digits, and beyond that, you’re lucky to have two or three names.
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So what happened to all those police officers who started together at the beginning? It’s simple: they didn’t make it. Some are killed in the line of duty. Others leave because of physical, duty-related disabilities, while others choose to retire.
Still others choose to leave the police profession altogether to work in the private sector. Some face criminal or administrative charges and are arrested or terminated.
In any event, and whatever the circumstances, the numbers dwindle and decline. Hollywood doesn’t concern itself with police-related attrition.
It’s worth remembering that Hollywood is primarily entertainment and should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s dress-up. It’s storytelling.
However, Hollywood would serve itself-and the public-better by presenting more responsible and accurate accounts of policing while still preserving its entertainment value. There’s plenty of drama, conflict, danger, and human emotion in real police work without having to manufacture an unrealistic version of it.
The reality is compelling enough.
John Wolf has an AS Degree from St. John’s University (NYC), BA from Biscayne College (Miami,FL), and Master’s (MS) from Nova University (Ft. Lauderdale). He has an extensive number of specialized Career Development courses offered by the Police Academy and retired in good standing.
His new book, “Wolf with a Badge,” is available now on Amazon.com.
The post Hollywood’s Fake Cop Stories vs. Real-Life Policing appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
