REPRESENTING THE POLICE

REPRESENTING THE POLICE

There is a long tradition of reports of crimes and their detection, especially the gory crimes featured in 18th century broadsheets, and accounts of hangings, murders and such like. Modern crime fiction, centred in the city and characterised by complexity, begins in the 1820s, (Edgar Allen Poe), and extends through the century in the work of Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. The genre was firmly established in the twentieth century, with the British "middle class crime" portrayed in writers such as Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris and Agatha Christie ("snobbery with violence" or W.H. Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage", the setting, perhaps, of the crime portrayed in 'Morse'). In America Crime Fiction took two dominant forms: puzzle stories (e.g. Ellery Queen or the Perry Mason mysteries), or the emergence of the "hard-boiled detective" (Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler).

On film and television crime, and particularly the police series, became increasingly popular and prevalent. In Britain the key figure was Jack Warner's East End copper, 'Dixon of Dock Green', the "Policeman as Boy Scout". Dixon first appeared in The Blue Lamp, but was reincarnated in 1955, through 434 episodes until 1976. Loyal, honest, trustworthy, brave, hard-working, punctual, reliable, knowledgeable and helpful, Dixon was a "community copper" of the era, and the series was characterised by its emphasis on certain themes of the community, of family, national pride, basic morality and detected minor criminality. Dixon was further characterised by a rich and fulfilling home life.

By 1976 it was clear that the community that Dixon represented existed only in the folk imagination, and was superseded by the new vision represented in programmes such as 'Z Cars'. The world of 'Z Cars' was far less cosy, reflecting a more bureaucratic, organised and 'professional' police force, making greater use of technology, and operating in a more alienated landscape of urban sprawl (based on Skelmersdale), where police do not "know their patch", and where also there is a greater tension between the need to act and the constraints of bureaucracy. Furthermore, in 'Z Cars', the police themselves are characterised in more naturalistic terms, with troubled domestic lives and career ambitions. When the series began, in 1964, it was characterised by its 'documentary' or 'fly on the wall' style: by 1979, when the series finished, it had spawned a number of sequels (including 'Softly, Softly' and 'Barlow', and was an unrecognisably different portrayal of a highly organised and bureaucracy-dominated police service, serving or servicing a very different community to that represented in 'Dock Green'. From these in turn have developed increasingly naturalistic versions of the uniformed police, including 'The Gentle Touch' and 'Juliet Bravo' (both attempting to 'feminize' a masculine-dominated genre) and the proclaimed naturalism of 'The Bill'.

In the later 1970s the influence of American "Action-based" police series (such as 'Kojak', the "buddy-buddyism" of 'Starsky and Hutch', and icons such as Clint Eastwood's "Dirty" Harry Callaghan) gave rise to series such as 'The Sweeney' and 'The Professionals' In such series "action" was a prominent feature, but the types of crime depicted were increasingly "organised" and there was greater focus on the issue of "agency", and the means by which increasingly violent and sophisticated (and internationally based) criminals may be brought to justice within an increasingly bureaucratic system. This, in turn, produced the conflict between "law enforcement", the policeman as "moral agent", and the policeman as "hero", in or out of uniform. Such series relied on more ambivalent forms of characterisation, with Regan and Bodie and Doyle having disrupted or undeveloped "home lives", and themselves having to resort to violence, and perhaps also "enforcing the law by breaking it". The moral 'grey area' of crime detection in such series was, in turn, one response to the issues of corruption and the changing public perception of a police force employed to enforce "Law and Order". 'The Professionals' were closer to a paramilitary third-force than to the "community copper" of Dock Green.

General aspects of the crime series: "vilification of the abnormal, criminalization of the deviant and censoring of the unusual". crime shows offer a vicarious experience of these, and of low life, a "fictional playing out of the parameters of socially acceptable behaviour", whilst also allowing an exploration of the limits of order, coupled with a fascination for transgression. In the police series, viewing transgression from the point of view of the police, we are permitted to witness a resolution of forms of disorder and its symbolic setting right.

With this comes a preoccupation with certain themes: Justice and individual rights, social order, "Legality", "agency" and the problems of those individuals who must enforce the abstract Law. The "Law" itself is subject to continuous exploration, whether it is seen as abstract, a means of upholding the existing order, or a socially and humanly necessary set of limits and boundaries which must be humanely enforced.

Secondary issues follow from the above: images of social order overall; issues of the "community" and the individual's place within that community; concerns of bureaucracy, the use and role of technology; individualism versus cooperation and 'team-spirit'.

In portraying the police, film and television are implicitly portraying the wider society within which the police have to operate, and the nature and basis of the social order which is upheld, preserved or enforced by that police service: "the police we deserve".

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