What's the Difference between Gangs and The Police Copaganda Episode 5.1 THE SHIELD

What is a gang? You might think you know, after all you've seen them on TV and in the news tons of times. But can you actually define them? Is it as simple as a group of people doing crime? Does that make white-collar criminals a gang? Does there have to be some kind of shared symbol? If so, are fraternities a gang? And if a group of cops breaks the law, are they a gang? Enter The Shield, FX's first original drama, debuting in 2002 and centered around crooked cops in Los Angeles. You're not a witness, then you're an arrest. And this here's just enough to make you a trafficker. You can't do that, man. What, bus drug dealers? You just made my quota for the week. The show was a smash success, the highest-rated basic cable debut to that point in TV history. It marked the dawn of gritty cable dramas, paving the way for shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, approaching the police procedural from a completely different angle, centering its story around a criminal cop, Vic Mackey. I'd like to see a warrant. I'd like to see Anna Kournikova naked on a waterbed. While The Shield might be a little forgotten in the run of anti-hero shows that followed, it captures a historical snapshot of America's war on gangs, highlighting the rampant potential and reality of corruption in the LAPD, while still upholding a number of troubling tropes about gangs and the underlying mission of the police. Welcome to Cop-A-Ganda, a series of videos exploring the portrayal of the police on television and how that portrayal has shaped our understanding of who the police are and what they should be. We've covered how the LAPD helped start the cop show genre by providing creative input and censorship on Dragnet. We've explored two wildly different approaches to supporting the police in Blue Bloods and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Last time, we talked about The Wire and what it teaches us about why reform is so challenging. And today, we're talking about this bald bastard. As a show about crooked cops, The Shield of course highlights corruption and police brutality, but on a more fundamental level, it's about society's contract with the police. That is, examining what we want the police to do, and the concessions we're willing to make to achieve that end. And if that's not relevant in 2020, after seeing police officers abuse their power against individuals like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake, and against the people protesting that violence, then I don't know what is. So let's set our sights on The Shield. Is it a thoughtful critique, or is it just police porn? What does it say, what kind of image of the police does it leave us with, and how is that message distorted by the way it's told? Heads up, The Shield is a darker and more intense series than the cop shows we've talked about so far, so there's going to be discussion of violence and sexual assault in this episode. The best place to start with The Shield is its first episode, which, more than almost any other show I can think of, is a microcosm for the entire series. So I'm going to spoil it right now. It's okay, just the first episode, don't worry, don't worry, it's okay, just the first episode, there are 87 more where that came from. Just stick with me, embrace the spoilers. The Shield takes place in the fictional district of Farmington, a hyper-violent and crime-ridden area. Some reporters have gone so far as to label Farmington a war zone. Enter the Strike Team, an anti-gang squad of police led by Detective Vic Mackey. The Strike Team is charged with cleaning up the streets, and is given a lot of freedom to do so. The members are rough and tumble, hyper-efficient and brutal. They look a lot more like they're in Zero Dark Thirty than Law and Order. They're also completely dirty. Mackey and his team have placed themselves in the middle of the drug trade. Hey, man, it's a free country. Nothing's free. I'm your landlord, Rondell. Protecting their chosen dealers for a price, and taking out the competition. Although nobody can prove it, everyone in the force knows they're crooked. And it doesn't help that they're gigantic assholes. But in the real world, I don't answer to you. Not today, not tomorrow, not even on Cinco de Mayo. But the Strike Team gets results. And that insulates them. But as long as Mackey's producing on the street, he's got friends. Gilroy, even the Chief. So he's bulletproof, huh? From you, yeah. Captain Acevedo places an inside man on the Strike Team in order to collect enough evidence to take them down, setting up what promises to be a season-long cat-and-mouse chase. But in the very first raid he's on, Vic takes the gun of a dead dealer and kills the spy in cold blood. So much for that investigation. This is a remarkable tone-setter for the series. Vic is not only a dirty cop, but one who will kill other cops in order to protect his business. I mean, it feels like he's a pretty cut-and-try villain. But at the same time, Vic and his Strike Team are treated as a necessary evil. Earlier in the episode, two detectives are trying to find a kid who's being hidden by a child monster. Time is of the essence. So our good cops turn to Vic. I need you. Your turn to play bad cop? Nah, good cop to bad cop left for the day. I'm a different kind of cop. I wish I could play- And this is the central dynamic of The Shield. Love him or hate him, Vic gets results in this messed-up world. Sure, we'd all like to play by the rules. We'd all like to get rid of the more unsavory elements. But there's evil out there. The only thing standing between us, the stand-up citizens watching the show, and the drug gangs of Los Angeles, is someone willing to do evil. That evil might not just be pointed at the evil-doers, at the gangs, but that's the price we pay to be safe. The question of process and results is made even more complicated by the historical context the show was born from. The original title creator Sean Ryan had envisioned for the show was Rampart, a reference to the LAPD's Rampart scandal in the late 1990s, which revealed rampant corruption in the anti-gang unit called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH. I know what you're thinking. How could a program using the phrase Street Hoodlums possibly be corrupt? The Rampart scandal was fueled by the turning of Officer Rafael Perez, who was caught stealing $800,000 worth of cocaine from the evidence locker, something he claimed he'd been doing regularly for nearly three years. He implicated over 70 other officers, detailing how the unit would send witnesses of police misconduct to INS for deportation, scheme to rob banks, and shoot suspects before planting guns on them. And of course, this was just the latest in a string of LAPD scandals that rocked the late 80s and 90s. The LAPD's Operation Hammer sought to conduct large-scale raids and arrests with little to no evidence, peaking in April 1988, where a staggering 1,453 people were arrested in a single weekend. According to Penn State professors Jim Ruiz and Donald Charles Hummer, charges were only brought forward on 32 of those arrests. The LAPD really didn't like what The Shield was doing. They forbade the show from using the term LAPD, thus the creation of the fictional Farmington. At the same time, the show premiered almost exactly six months after September 11th, at a time when America really, really, really wanted to believe in its traditional heroes, and especially in the police. Hey Vic, why don't I wait in the car? You know, I'll let the two of you maybe talk in private. Don't mind any strange noises emanating from this area. Perhaps this made audiences more willing to accept the Faustian bargain Vic Mackey represented, a desire to get the bad guys at any and all costs. Right. Right! Ronnie, open that window. Looks like you're gonna die a bad speller. A lot of people started to feel like Rafael Perez, who preached in interviews after being caught, quote, These guys don't play by the rules. We don't have to play by the rules. They're out there committing murders and then they intimidate the witnesses, so the witnesses don't show up in court. When I planted a case on someone, did I feel bad? Not once. I felt good. I felt, you know, I'm taking this guy off the streets. These conflicting historical vectors highlight the show's central deal with the devil, and put its audience in an uncomfortable position. The LAPD scandals of the 90s made audiences aware of the terrible costs, while the trauma of 9-11 increased the appetite for retribution and a willingness to look the other way. The Shield certainly wants to tackle this Faustian bargain we've made as a society. It wants to highlight the corruption and problems with these anti-gang units. After all, Vic isn't reducing crime. He's making crime work for him, achieving peace by becoming the biggest kingpin on the street, using his badge as a shield against any retaliation. Did you see what I did there? You're suggesting Mackey's working for a drug dealer? I'm suggesting the drug dealer's working for Mackey. To its credit, the Shield accurately represents the problems with anti-gang units in particular, and how ineffective they were in addressing any kind of gang violence issues. In 2003, a group of criminologists including Charles Katz, Edward McGuire, and Dennis Ronchik examined 300 large US cities and found no correlation between a police department creating an anti-gang unit and the size of their gang or crime problem. Instead, the strongest correlation was that gang units were formed in cities with larger Hispanic populations, and among departments that received funding. They concluded that, quote, police organizations might be creating units when the community feels threatened by a minority group, and that they, quote, might have been created prior to receiving external funding for the purposes of justifying the need for more resources. Huh. It's almost like maybe giving the police more money isn't a great idea. But you know who you should give more money to? My Patreon. Woo! My Patreon is the best way to support my channel, and it gives you lots of cool perks. Q&As, early access, and a bunch of Patreon-only blogging about TV. Check it out, because this series isn't getting a ton of views. Even while acknowledging the historical context of Rampart and Operation Hammer, you'd be forgiven for thinking that The Shield is exaggerating how little oversight the strike team has and the tactics they use. I mean, it is a TV show, but that's just not the case. According to Katz and fellow criminologist Vincent Webb, anti-gang units engaged in buffet-style policing, picking and choosing which high-profile crimes they wanted to investigate, This is gangland, my domain. and often operated in separate locations from the rest of the police force. In other words, anti-gang units weren't being governed by a particular mission, but instead by a, quote, unique workgroup subculture that reflected internally shared beliefs about the nature of the local gang problem and the appropriate response to that problem. One police chief even told them that he had, quote, little understanding of what the gang unit did or how it operated. Just like in real life, Vic and his crew exist in their own little world, operating out of a semi-independent clubhouse inside Farmington's Police Department, or The Barn as it's called. That freedom gives them the ability to abuse their power, becoming a gang unto themselves. And what is the job of these anti-gang units anyway? Is it to limit criminal activity? Are they trying to break them up? Or is it something more... gross? In the words of Captain Ray Peavy, back when he was the head of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Homicide Bureau, quote, Everyone says, What are we gonna do about the gang problem? It's the same thing you do about cockroaches or insects. You get someone in there to do whatever they can do to get rid of those creatures. We don't love to hear it. And this leads us to the paradox of anti-gang units and the war on gangs. On the one hand, we're this close to losing the war on gangs. At any minute, they could take over the suburbs. And on the other hand, the only solution seems to be the same thing that we've been doing for the last 30 years. So either that solution isn't working, or the problem isn't quite as bad as we're making it out to be. The Shield wants us to grapple with this cost. It highlights the corruption. It highlights the brutality. It highlights the abuse of power. And it highlights the fact that the gang problem never really seems to be getting any better, despite these draconian punishments. But the show isn't setting up the other side of that equation accurately at all. In order to set the stakes for this deal with the devil, The Shield amps up the threat of violence. The show is shot in a handheld guerrilla style that creates tension, like we're in the room while these raids happen. There are murders every episode, gang leaders who brand children, and an Armenian hitman who has a penchant for cutting off people's feet. And while some of that is obviously not realistic, the basic premise isn't either. 2002, when the show premiered, was not a peak in violent crime by any means. In fact, LA's crime rate, where The Shield takes place, was nearly half of what it was 10 years prior in 1990. And even though we just covered how anti-gang units can't actually be effective if gang crime is spreading like a cancer, The Shield credits its falling crime rate to the strike team, juxtaposing Acevedo boasting about the falling crime rate with a strike team operation in the show's very first scene. We can make the Farmington district a safer home for all of us. That's for running, asshole. But here's a question I think we've been taking for granted. What is a gang, anyway? The Shield subscribes to the myth that gangs commit murders to protect and expand their sprawling drug business. They might be amping up the scale, but that's gotta be true, right? I mean, how many times have we heard about these drug gangs? Well, according to Chicago Homicide data, just 3% of gang-motivated murders between 1987 and 1990 were drug-related, and only 1.7% were connected to the drug business. Patterns research teams found in Boston and Los Angeles as well. As it turns out, most gang-motivated murders have very little to do with the drug trade, and instead are the result of small-time feuds and retaliatory violence. According to criminologists David Kennedy, Anthony Brega, and Ann Peel, most incidents, quote, were not in any proximate way about drug trafficking or other business interests. Fun fact, those three criminologists implemented Operation Ceasefire in Boston, reducing youth homicides by 63% through gun control programs. Maybe, maybe something we want to look into instead of anti-gang units. Just, just a thought. Street violence is real, but it's not the entrepreneurial practice cop shows like The Shield often make it out to be. You'll be leading a task force designed to learn everything we can about the roughly 50 gangs who operate on our turf. Their membership, their businesses, chains of command. With T.O. out of the way, somebody else saw these kids as an untapped market. Killing the competition would have been the blood tie that binds. You don't have a trade rep fooling the culture, and that's costing you market share. Armadillo burns out his competition, it sends me a message. The gangs on The Shield are almost exclusively racial minorities, or the occasional Nazi. Something I think a lot of audiences don't bat an eye at. How did the El Salvadorans get hooked up with the One-Niners? Blackhood jumped in, killed two Mexicans. Is it the Blacks? Chinese? Los Mags? Who are we talking about? However, multiple surveys have found that law enforcement greatly underestimates the existence of white gang members. The federally funded reports by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1997 and the Gang Resistance Education and Training Program in 2001 found that whites account for more than 40% of adolescent gang members, despite being estimated at under 10% by law enforcement. White boy got business skills. In the real world, the term gang, while widely used, is really poorly understood. In their wide-sweeping study for the Justice Policy Institute in 2007, Judith Green and Kevin Pranis found that, quote, It seems that the majority of academic authorities can agree on only one point in this regard, that there is no agreement, neither among the criminologists who study the gangs, nor among the cops who police them. The picture becomes no clearer when we narrow the issue by asking, what is a youth gang, or what is a street gang? And hey, you might think that we're just arguing about semantics here. But a hazy definition can lead to huge loopholes in crime stats and as justification for different policies. For example, the STEP Act in California defines a gang as an ongoing organization, association, or group of three or more persons, whether formal or informal, having as one of its primary activities the commission of one or more specified crimes, having a common name or common identifying sign or symbol, and whose members individually or collectively engage in or have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity. So, any group that breaks the law is a gang? You might not think that's a big deal, because anyone who breaks the law should be punished. But, mandatory minimum sentences rise when the word gang is involved. This vagueness is how the FBI can say gang murders are 49 times higher in Los Angeles than New York City, despite a homicide rate that's just twice as high. Essentially, gangs have become a boogeyman for the police to gain more power and funding, by stoking fears of a monster that is at the same time both a feral animal that cannot be reasoned with, and such a successful drug business that it would put Jeff Bezos to shame. Now, I'm not saying that gang violence isn't real. It is. People die in gang-related homicides. But it's not this entrepreneurial drug enterprise. Where does all this energy about gangs go? Does it go into eliminating the need for gangs? To include people into legitimate systems of power like politics and capital? No. It goes into ineffective and corrupt solutions like the strike team. Knock, knock, who's there? Strike team, Mr. Drug Dealer. By misrepresenting one side of the equation, the organized violence in the streets, The Shield is actually providing an argument that's a lot more both sidesy than the conflict is in reality. Yes, there's gang violence, but it's rarely related to the sprawling drug trade. It's rarely as organized as cop shows like The Shield portray it to be. The show wants us to think of two gangs facing off against each other. Our gang and their gang. But it only represents one side of that equation precisely. The strike team is a far more accurate portrayal of reality than the gangs they police. And even in the context of the show, their abuse of power is disturbing at best. Honestly, we could just end the video there. In a nutshell, that's what The Shield is. A show that points out some problems with the police while also reinforcing other issues. But I actually want to go further, because this kind of paradox goes way deeper than that. And in going deeper, I think we can learn some fundamental things about how our justice system thinks, and the challenges of critiquing it in this way. So for shits and giggles, let's just accept the fantasy world of The Shield. So here's the question The Shield poses. Even in this fictional world, where the streets run red with blood, and we have access to super cops who can basically do anything, what do we lose when we yield so much power to the police? Of course, Vic Mackey and his strike team are not the only cops on The Shield, and in some ways, the show's depiction of those other cops is much more telling about its position on policing. The most obvious difference between the strike team and the other cops on the show is visible. The strike team is a gang of white men patrolling majority Hispanic and Black neighborhoods, but the other members of the barn are much more diverse. There's Julian and his training officer Danny. There's Claudette Wims and her partner Dutch Wagenbach, and the precinct is run by David Acevedo. In later seasons, Billings, an older white detective, joins the main cast, but for the most part, Dutch is the only white man out of this bunch, and, well, let's just say Vic and his jabronis don't exactly consider him one of their own. You don't have to tell me about the different stages of grief. There's denial, anger, sucking you off. Oh, oh, if you can think of anything else, These other officers stand in contrast to the strike team. They challenge police myths. They can be corrupted as well, but their corruption is much different than Vic's. Vic deals drugs and murders people. Billings just wants to make a few bucks by installing vending machines in the barn. All in all, these other cops do things the right way, or at least in a better way. They don't cut corners. They follow evidence and leads instead of manufacturing them. They're investigators, not brawlers. But despite looking like saints in comparison, these other cops turn to Vic more than a few times to clean things up in his illegal and immoral ways. When this happens, the message the audience receives is pretty clear. We'd like to do things without Vic, but sometimes he's the only option. As for Claudette, she's as close to a stereotypical hero as we get in the story. She's against Vic from the beginning, far less willing to use him as a last resort the way her colleagues are. But her morals come at great political cost, marginalizing her to the sidelines despite being the best detective in the barn. That code is discouraged by the police as an institution, and it is clear that Claudette is the exception rather than the standard when it comes to integrity. But what I find insidious about the other cops isn't that they give in to Detective Antihero. It's that their methods are held up as the inverse of his. While the strike team is quick to violence, raiding drug dens, guns a-blazing, Dutch and Claudette are always shown slowly working a case, and then breaking it in the interrogation. Now, confessions are a huge part of pretty much every cop show, not just The Shield. But I want to highlight them here because the show points to them as the opposite of Vic's methods. Getting a suspect to confess in the interrogation room is the right way to do things. But the way these confessions are portrayed points to an uncomfortable idea bubbling beneath the surface. In many cop shows, a confession is always the end of the case. Once you get those magic words out of a suspect's mouth, everyone pats themselves on the back and the credits roll. You got em! But this isn't really true. About 27% of the people in the National Registry of Exonerations accused of homicide gave false confessions. And among those with mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities, that number is 81%. In his book, How the Police Generate False Confessions, former DC homicide detective James Traynham details how investigators can extract admissions from innocent people. His journey began in 1994 when a woman gave her confession to him after 16 hours of interrogation. She was charged with first-degree murder until weeks later, Traynham found proof that she could not have been at the scene of the crime. From Tom Jackman's review of the book in the Washington Post, he realized that implying her cooperation would get her better treatment from the prosecutors and minimizing her role in the case to obtain her testimony against co-defendants, as well as a mistaken handwriting analysis and a bogus voice stress test, got her to confess. According to Traynham, there are eight steps detectives take into an interrogation. One, conclude that the suspect is guilty. Two, tell them that there is no doubt of their guilt. Three, block any attempts by the suspect to deny the accusation. Four, suggest psychological or moral justifications for what they did. Five, lie about the strength of the evidence that points to the suspect's guilt. Six, offer only two explanations for why he committed the crime. Both are admissions, but one is definitely less savory than the other. Seven, get them to agree with you that they did it. Eight, have them provide details about the crime. You might recognize these tactics from the Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer, where Brendan Dassey confessed to participating in a murder, mutilating a corpse, and sexual assault. Or you might recognize them from the Central Park Five or the Norfolk Four. Or you might recognize them from a cop show like The Shield. We found him that way, in your garage. You think I killed those girls? I know you killed them, Steve. So you had her killed and reported her missing so you could make yourself look innocent. No! She may not be a woman yet, but you can't call her a girl. You know what I'm saying? We established the ties to the schools, and you're sure to get the death penalty for that little boy. Maybe you didn't set out to hurt the guy, but he's in a coma. He disrespect you, you're dating his daughter, what? You're going to jail for this, whether you confess or not. So for our own morbid curiosity, you know, why'd you do it? Now, I am by no means trying to assert that all confessions are false. Certainly, the police obtain many true confessions in real life. But it's probably not safe to assume that a case is over simply because of a confession. It is not the end-all be-all it often presents as in The Shield, something Dutch and Claudette don't always entertain. What if I'm right? There are times when you entertain the possibility that you're not. There actually is one episode where Dutch obtains a false confession. And while I hesitate to reduce any TV show to a single episode, I'm going to. Because I'm the Vic Mackey of this channel, and I can do whatever the f**k I want. Get over it, and don't bring it up again. The episode in question is from Season 3, titled Bottom Bitch, and it's probably the most problematic episode of the series from top to bottom. Vic's storyline is especially awful, but what I want to focus on is Dutch's investigation into the rape of a 73-year-old woman. He follows a dubious lead to a registered sex offender named Paul Fetz. In classic let's-amp-up-the-stakes fashion, Fetz isn't just your run-of-the-mill sex offender. He assaulted a paraplegic girl. Dutch interrogates the s**t out of this guy, going so far as to tell him that it's only a matter of time before he recidivates. In my experience, people who would rape an old woman or a crippled lady, they always do it again. Fetz is clearly struggling to totally banish the mental problems that led him to commit sexual assault in the first place. I don't think that way anymore. And Dutch uses that to absolutely break him. What if your moral compass is broken? How do you fix it? You can't. Soon after, Dutch realizes Fetz didn't do it because of the other facts of the case, and he tells him that he's free to go. We're sending you home because you didn't rape Mrs. Nelson. But I think about it with other women, just like you said. That was just an interrogation technique. I needed you to believe it because I wanted you to confess. And this should be unsurprising given the stats we just looked at. Fetz certainly seems to have some kind of mental illness. So how do things end up for him? Well, after being told that he can't ever be saved from himself and that it's only a matter of time and that he can't ever be rehabilitated, he gives in to his illness and offends. I tried real hard. My son just left. She's alone. While I think it's really admirable that The Shield is highlighting the dangers of extracting a false confession, it points to a troubling philosophy underlying The Shield, a lot of police media, and in the way our justice system treats criminals. It's a kind of Hobbesian state of nature. Philosopher and villainous mustache aficionado Thomas Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature, a time before rules and civilization as quote, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Basically, the idea is that without rules, bullies dominate. On cop shows and on The Shield in particular, the logic goes something like this. There are bad people out there hiding among us. They are fundamentally criminals, bad or evil in essence, and it is only through crime that they reveal their true selves. In other words, it's only through crime that we're able to see through their mask and see who someone really is. On The Shield, where crimes are amped up in both volume and severity, this philosophy becomes even more pronounced. This philosophy doesn't believe in mistakes or context. Crime is an indication of your true character. And that means that if you aren't caught, it's only a matter of time before you kill again. With Vic, this idea is very direct. If he sees the uniform he runs, he did it. You all find ways of killing yourselves. He tried to stick you and me both in a cage with the same goddamn animals we fight every day. Option one is we take him alive and feel free to consider option two. But it's present with Dutch and Claudette as well. Dutch is often questing after people he suspects of being serial killers. Putting aside the fact that there are way more serial killers in Farmington than is realistic over the span of the show, Dutch is almost always right with his hunches. He really buys into the psychobabble, even occasionally asking profilers to take a look into his cases. The best example of this has to be from the show's seventh and final season, where Dutch becomes convinced that this kid set up his friend so he could murder him. And look, I get it. Beaver from Veronica Mars is a suspicious looking dude. He's always playing some kind of closet freak on TV. But typecasting is not a reasonable method of policing, Detective Wagenbach. Let's also set aside the fact that the FBI has disputed a ton of these serial killer myths for a future episode, where I finally work up the courage to watch a bunch of criminal minds. Whether it's extracting confessions or hunting serial killers, even the good cops on the Shield subscribe to the idea that crime is just a person's underlying evil poking out from behind the mask of a civilian. And that's a troubling insight into our own justice system. If crime is an indication of fundamental evil, it means we can't believe in second chances or rehabilitation. It's an incredibly black and white worldview. One that paints all crime with the same brush. And yet, there's a double standard with the show's biggest criminal. And we'll get to that in part two of the Shield videos. I was really hoping to keep everything I wanted to say about the Shield to one part, but I hope you're starting to see how this show is a really interesting paradox. Something that is both scolding the police and also reinforcing them. And I think we can take that approach to a lot of different things in both media and culturally. In part two, we're going to look even more intensely at the Vic Mackie of it all, and take on the idea of anti-hero cop shows in more detail. As always, thanks for watching. Please like, share, and subscribe. If you find this work interesting, give me money on Patreon. It's the only way I'm going to be able to continue with this detailed analysis. Thanks again, and I'll see you real soon.