Policing the Media: Street Cops and Public Perceptions of Law Enforcement

The book is perceptively written. The social interaction of ordinary cops with ordinary people is well researched by an acutely sensitive ethnographer and the findings have universal validity.It has the right dose of evocative empathy for the police.Visual media has bowdlerised the cop beyond redemption. Every crime, or almost every crime, is solved in the reel life , but in real life less than a quarter of the indexed cases of the FBI have been solved. How far the media influences the cops in their work to act as heroes , take charge, or do something even if they are not competent has been etched in the citizen's psyche is tellingly brought out in a grisly incident when a cop does CPR on a child before tha paramedics arrive just to satisfy the parents who want some miracle, even when he knows it is dead. Basically a cop's existence is ridden with contradictions. On the one hand he is to protect the people and on the other carry out penal action against offenders. Ordinary people who have occassional brush with the policemen perhaps once in a life time, say, for traffic violation etc, feel they are innocent and indulge freely in fibbing.This is considered by the cops as an affront to their intelligence. Although the cop himself does not have complete faith in the system-"they are the real parts of the system" from which lawyers, superior officers and judges capture palimpsest impression, yet they do not want sympathy and would feel quite uncomfortable if any large public movement is launched to clean up their television image.It is a truism that the police system will fail when the guarded and the guardians feel that "freedom" is no longer worth the price of "personal fear". In poorly administered places like Bihar in India it is common for the citizens to have their private posse of police or guards.