Watching the detectives

The Bill, which has been on our TV screens since the mid 1980s, is vetted by the Metropolitan police, guaranteeing a portrayal of the boys and girls in blue which is, broadly speaking, sympathetic. However, as public perceptions of the police have shifted - and they had already moved towards greater hostility and cynicism by the time The Bill first launched - storylines have shifted with them. A recent plot concerned the efforts of the police's internal watchdog to nail one of the programme's longstanding characters for corruption.

British or American cop shows, from The Vice to City Central, from Steve Bochco's Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue to Barry Levinson's Homicide: Life on the Street, are continually on our screens. They have been the staple of television throughout its history: Z Cars, back in the early '60s, was recorded live in its early days (and was an apprenticeship for, among others, Ken Loach). Softly, Softly and The Sweeney in Britain, and shows from Kojak to Starsky and Hutch in America have been long-running, highly popular series.

In film, too, stories about police detectives have been commonplace. In the '40s, British films like The Blue Lamp offered posh detectives and hard-working constables doing battle with Cockney wide-boy Dirk Bogarde. American cops have always been a bit tougher, in a tradition running through Sinatra in The Detective and Hackman in The French Connection. Films focused around police investigations remain central to cinematic output, shown by the success in recent years of such movies as Seven and Fargo.

Yet the Met have recently been condemned for their handling of a demonstration in London against a state visit by Jiang Zemin, the Chinese President, in which, acting on government orders or not, the police saw their role as keeping "order" in a repressive, politically-defined way. Last year they were publicly criticised for "institutional racism". Anyone who has attended a mass picket, for instance in the 1984-85 miners' strike, knows that the cops are not neutral, but actively serve the ruling class, at least in such high-conflict situations.

In the real world the police, fundamentally, are representatives and protectors only of a specific order. But in drama, despite the rare exception, the audience is asked to sympathise with them. It is extremely unusual to see the police acting as they did at Orgreave in 1984, or during the poll tax riots; where there are indications of this social function of the police, even in The Cops, provocative, aggressive policing is shown to be the fault of hot heads, or personal inadequacy, rather than the police acting out a fundamental role.

If we are blitzed with sympathetic portrayals of cops, as people only "doing their job", and doing a job which is obviously necessary, fighting bad people who do bad things, is it not lulling us into passive acceptance of the state and the status quo?

TV cop shows have come a long way from Dixon of Dock Green, in which an amiable bobby would address the camera and moralise to the audience. In film, it is now rare for the drama to play out simply as "cops and robbers". Murder investigations are vehicles less for singing the praises of the police as an institution than lifting the lid on some vile aspect of society and peering inside.

I will argue that cop dramas must be understood as a genre, or range of genres, which appeal to and affect the audience in the ways that genres do.

Cops on screen

The concept of "genre" may sound like the pretentious jargon of film studies courses. But you can't be part of a modern audience without some notion of genre. It determines how you watch what you see. If you think you are watching a Western, but suddenly a spaceship lands, your expectations are severely disrupted. Westerns, for instance, have their own patterns and quasi-rules. Indeed, more recent Westerns like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven have such power because they deliberately play around with the expectations of the genre: an ageing gunslinger is persuaded to put on his holster one last time, but to begin with he's woefully inadequate; then, in the climax, he is transformed into precisely the mysterious, terrifying, idealised hero the genre normally depends on. Unforgiven is a commentary on the genre, and if you'd never seen a Western before, and came to it with no expectations, the film would make less sense. Westerns also, of course, express an American myth about the frontier, with particular conceptions of "good" and "evil", negative portrayals of Native Americans, and so on. But these factors have been consciously subverted in more recent Westerns.

A murder mystery presupposes a murder and a mystery. If there is not enough mystery, the story is disappointing, unless it finds some other more interesting channel to explore. An aspect of the classic whodunit is that the murder itself is not treated as a real thing: it is the opportunity for a puzzle. If an audience, expecting a brain-teasing entertainment, were confronted by a gruesome murder in which real human consequences resulted, they would be shocked and repelled.

Cop dramas consist of a number of "sub-genres". Some rely on the instrinsic fascination of the procedure of the investigation (and are called, unsurprisingly, "procedurals"), attempting to portray exactly how the police go about finding and catching the perpetrators of crime. The Steven Bochco series are typical of these, taking the audiences inside the day-to-day workings of the precinct. Others are barely interested in such things, and employ a much broader brush, perhaps also dealing with larger-than-life villains who represent dark, elemental forces: Hannibal Lector, for instance. Of course, there are no strict boundaries here, and there are hybrids. But the investigation which takes place in Silence of the Lambs would not be possible in Homicide; Hannibal Lector exists in a different type of fictional universe.

Something like The Cops is not really a "cop" sub-genre at all. It stands much more in the tradition of British televisual realism, and the interesting question about it is why, in the 1990s, the police should have become the focus for such an approach rather than its usual subject matter, working-class people on housing estates. (Tony Garnett, who produced The Cops, gave us an earlier critical look at the police in Law and Order.)

Order and chaos

Police investigations lend themselves very easily to drama. There is a crime; the crime must be solved. The central characters are those investigating it, facing the difficulties of completing their task. There is, of course, an age old tradition in which this basic framework is served not by a paid-up cop but by a surrogate - a private dick (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, etc), or an amateur genius, like those in Agatha Christie stories. But the basic premise and shape of the drama is the same. Where the central character is a PI, at least in American manifestations, the tradition largely falls within the genre of "film noir", in which the world inhabited by the characters is dark and capricious, the social order is unsettled, and the official police are hostile and obstructive. In the Christie-esque "whodunit" tradition, the cops themselves are normally thick as pig shit (as also in Sherlock Holmes). But, dramatically, the starting point is the same - a mystery to be solved - and it is this, fundamentally, which provides the appeal.

Underlying this crime/investigation/solution framework is a deeper dramatic arc, expressed through the concept of crime itself. The crime disrupts the social order. The investigation is about healing the rip in that order, and the solution to the mystery is its re-establishment. This basic pattern is common to most drama; but in a crime story the threat to social norms, to the ordered running of things, is symbolically expressed more forcefully. Cops are, literally, respresentatives of order fighting chaos. When they fail, as they sometimes do, or the resolution proves more complex, it can be unsettling (even if the unease is itself, for the audience, a form of pleasure). Many of the best cop dramas play with precisely this aspect of the material. Seven, for instance, explicitly ellaborates a theme of "the jungle" against "civilisation", in which the ardent champion of order and meaning (played by Brad Pitt) is the vehicle for the triumph of chaos.

In many cop dramas, in other words, the fact that the characters are police is secondary, if it is relevant at all. Something much more fundamental, and universal, is being addressed. Where a cop is "evil" or corrupt (Richard Gere in Internal Affairs, for example), taking on the role of villain, the basic point of the story is not (usually) to expose corruption in the police force, but to dramatise moral and spiritual corruption as such. The apogee of this would be Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, in which a corrupt cop comes to terms with God. The police are merely the arena for this battle, not the substance of it.

In this, I think, is something fundamental about the way in which drama, or at least good, successul drama, works. It works - that is, engages and moves its audience - because it appeals to things which run deeper than the overt subject matter. It works through themes which touch the experience and emotions of the audience. A cop chasing a murderer is not necessarily a representative of the state confronting someone who has broken a specific law; he or she is symbolic of the human striving for order against disorder, security against insecurity, civilisation against barbarism.

Cops and robbers

Of course, ideology can be a factor here, and a powerful one, depending on how "civilisation" is defined. During the cold war, film and television constantly rehearsed the themes of individual freedom against tyranny, which, given the context, was blatant anti-communist propaganda. This was especially clear in science fiction films, but by no means unique to them. Evil and disorder can be conceptualised as subversion, and so the restoration of order can be a defence of the existing system. But if "civilisation" is conceived more broadly, the quieting of demons achieved by catching the criminal or solving the mystery can be cathartic in a less specific, less apologistic sense.

The recurrent message of cop stories, that crime doesn't pay, criminals will be caught, murderers will be found out no matter how perfect their crime, plays a certain ideological function, stressing the dangers of transgression. Sometimes the function is more overt, and the police are righteous heroes without qualification or criticism. But then there is Colombo, which is all about the outwitting of rich, smug, calculating killers by a man in a crumpled overcoat.

It is a long time since the conflict between good cops and bad criminals could be played out simplistically, as it was until the 1960s. The strongest echo of that black-and-white moral universe, these days, is in action-adventure, where the force of evil usually takes the form of terrorists.

And audiences have always had a more ambivalent perception of who is, or is not, a hero. The interesting thing about gangster movies, for example, a genre which flowered in the early days of sound and still, periodically, surfaces, is that the central characters - with whom the audience is asked to identify - are not cops, but robbers. The conflict between order and chaos is played out within the forces of disorder. In the classic Hollywood gangster films (Edward G Robinson, James Cagney), the protagonists verge on classically tragic figures, who ultimately pay for their crimes. An aspect to what is acted out here is an ideological commitment to the established system, the ultimate victory of the status quo, and a warning against transgressing it. But even then it is more complex, because the gangsters are intriguing, exciting, more charismatic than the dull plods who defeat them. The films are expressions of audience fantasy, of the desire to transgress.

Later gangster films build on the fascination and excitement audiences feel for the illicit world they portray. The Godfather tells of the son of a mob boss who wants no part of the mafia but is driven by the power of family loyalty to participate in it. Once Upon a Time in America is about friendship. Goodfellas deals explicitly with its central character's lack of repentance; he learns nothing from his defeat by the law, and yearns for his days as a wiseguy long after he has been forced into anonymity.

But just as these films are not necessarily celebrations of crime and criminals, but work with more subtlety on audience perceptions and fantasies, so too stories in which the central characters are cops are not necessarily celebrations of the police. They are, or can be, environments for more general human themes, the scaffolding for a more general narrative. Only an unimaginative viewer could think that Silence of the Lambs, Seven, or The Usual Suspects are about the police.

Form and content

TV cop series, it is true, often invite us to see things from the police's point of view, to sympathise with how difficult their jobs are, and how unreasonable the public. There is a tradition in which the heroic cop is one who breaks the rules, refuses to abide by the law (Dirty Harry, The Sweeney), who inhabits a world in which petty bureaucracy and bleeding-heart liberals obstruct the task of catching villains (in The Bill, for example, there is relentless hostility to defence lawyers, rarely portrayed as anything but gullible fools or corrupt money-grabbers). Even here, although there is a right-wing logic, if taken literally, to the idealisation of such characters, there is some tension in the audience's perception. What is idealised is only partly a cop: it is also an image of masculine fantasy, the wild man, the rebellious outcast (close, generically, to Western heroes in American film). What makes such characters attractive is their closeness to the people they are fighting; a cop, as symbol of order, who acts as a representative of chaos, is a fascinating, ambiguous figure.

This tension is played out over and over. Fitz in Cracker, for example, while he represents the triumph of the intellect, and is a kind of Christie-esque amateur genius fused with scientific expertise, is a deeply flawed, troubled and dislikable character. Perhaps he is best understood in the tradition of private dicks who like their women and their liquor and have an uneasy relationship with the official forces of the state. But he is integrated into the police, friends with them, a sometime lover to one. Cracker was used by its writer Jimmy McGovern to explore such issues as the failure of the authorities to take responsiblity for the Hillsborough disaster (a question McGovern returned to in the drama-documentary Hillsborough).

Police dramas can be ideologically-driven apologies for the state and the status quo. But they need not be. They are a form, which can be filled with a variety of contents. Well-executed, they can be immensely enjoyable, without corrupting our minds or brainwashing us about the police's role in society.