Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello everyone, Malcolm Glawell here. We're continuing our
Speaker 1: build up to the main event in this season of
Speaker 1: Revision's History, which is a mini series on guns, six
Speaker 1: parts beginning August thirty first, which is some of my
Speaker 1: favorite work that we've ever done, a Revision's History. So
Speaker 1: please put that on your calendar and if you want
Speaker 1: to binge listen to it early without any adds. Go
Speaker 1: to Pushkin dot fm, slash plus and sign up for
Speaker 1: a Pushkin subscription anyway to get you in the mood
Speaker 1: for that series, which I will say right now goes
Speaker 1: in some very strange directions. I thought i'd give you this.
Speaker 1: It's a speech I gave at the New Orleans Book
Speaker 1: Festival at Tulane University. I asked the organizers if I
Speaker 1: could do an old fashioned lecture on murder mysteries and
Speaker 1: police procedurals, which I have been obsessed with ever since
Speaker 1: my dad read Sherlock Holmes short stories to me and
Speaker 1: my brothers when we were kids. They said sure, and
Speaker 1: I said, oh my god. So picture a packed auditorium.
Speaker 1: Everyone has book bags, and while they're waiting, they're reading books.
Speaker 1: They're not on their phones catching up on their proost.
Speaker 1: This is a talk to a room full of serious readers,
Speaker 1: which is to say, a room full of people who
Speaker 1: are more interested in being delighted than they are in
Speaker 1: being persuaded. My kind of people. All right, here it is.
Speaker 1: I want to thank the New Orleans Book Festival for
Speaker 1: allowing me this time today. I wanted to start by
Speaker 1: apologizing for the title. I don't know if you saw
Speaker 1: the title in the program, Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern, and
Speaker 1: over theorized and potentially absurd taxonomy of the modern mystery story. First,
Speaker 1: a simple warning that title is dead serious. This whole
Speaker 1: episode is going to get a little absurd and over theorized.
Speaker 1: So don't stand up at the end and say, mister Glawll,
Speaker 1: I found your presentation absurd and over theorized. I already
Speaker 1: warned you. I have disclosed that risk at the outset. Secondly,
Speaker 1: I've chosen to speak about crime novels because and mysteries
Speaker 1: because I'm addicted to them. I read in order spy novels,
Speaker 1: thrillers of various kinds, novels involving events that potentially threaten
Speaker 1: the safety of the entire planet, and the category that
Speaker 1: concerns us today, police procedurals and crime stories and their
Speaker 1: television and film equivalents. You know when you go into
Speaker 1: the Hudson News in an airport and there's that whole
Speaker 1: wall of paperbacks. I have read every one of those
Speaker 1: paperbacks except for the ones with the word girl in
Speaker 1: the title. My daughter, who is eighteen months old, spends
Speaker 1: a lot of time in a very large playpen, and
Speaker 1: the playpen immediately abuts the bookcase where I keep all
Speaker 1: of my thrillers, and a couple days ago she reached
Speaker 1: up and grabbed Daniel Silva's The Kill Artist and started
Speaker 1: to turn the pages. Now, The Kill Artist is the
Speaker 1: first installment in Daniel Silva's series of books on the
Speaker 1: legendary Israeli assassin Gabriel Alon, involving, in this case, his
Speaker 1: pursuit of the dastardly Palestinian terrorist Tarik. It's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite books ever. And I mean, I don't think
Speaker 1: any father ever has been more proud of his daughter
Speaker 1: than I was at that moment. But as I said,
Speaker 1: it's stories about the police that concern us today, because
Speaker 1: I think that stories about the police have not been
Speaker 1: given nearly the kind of close cultural scrutiny that they deserve,
Speaker 1: which makes no sense because the attitude of popular culture
Speaker 1: towards the police is really, really weird. So, there are
Speaker 1: two million truck drivers in the United States. How many
Speaker 1: TV books and movies and novels are there about truck drivers? Right?
Speaker 1: Once in a blue moon? There are three million nurses
Speaker 1: in the United States. How many movies are there about nurses?
Speaker 1: Is there a genre of fiction devoted to nurses? No,
Speaker 1: there is not. There are four million teachers in the
Speaker 1: United States. Teachers are everywhere. There must be a ton
Speaker 1: of teachers in this room right now. How many teachers
Speaker 1: do you know personally? I'm sure all of us The
Speaker 1: list is this long. But has any sixteen year old
Speaker 1: ever asked his girlfriend to come with him to see
Speaker 1: the new teacher movie at the multiplex? Now, the creative
Speaker 1: role was taught by teachers, nurtured by teachers, encouraged by teachers.
Speaker 1: But they don't want to tell us stories about teachers.
Speaker 1: They want to tell us stories about cops. There are
Speaker 1: only seven hundred thousand police officers in this country, but
Speaker 1: they are massively overrepresented in the culture. My guess is
Speaker 1: that almost everyone in this room can name way more
Speaker 1: fictional police officers than they can name real police officers.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard a real police officer refer to
Speaker 1: a purp? Have you ever heard a real police officer
Speaker 1: talk about a cold case. Have you ever heard a
Speaker 1: real police officer say you have the right to remain silent.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard a real police officer say of
Speaker 1: his partner, if you're going in there, I'm going in
Speaker 1: there with you too. Or hold on, Jimmy, just hold on.
Speaker 1: Remember when we were rookies together, Jimmy, No, no, no.
Speaker 1: Virtually everything we know about the police comes from the
Speaker 1: movies and television and novels. Right, Martians currently circling the
Speaker 1: United States in a hot air balloon. If I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: If one of those Martians currently circulating the United States
Speaker 1: in a hot air balloon ever gets a Netflix subscription,
Speaker 1: they will say, my god, we appear to have stumbled
Speaker 1: on a country of people running around in tight blue
Speaker 1: uniforms and wearing aviator glasses. So today I want to
Speaker 1: ask the question, what have we learned from our immersion
Speaker 1: in all these police procedurals and crime novels, and what
Speaker 1: are the social consequences of that learning? Which is an
Speaker 1: important question, because I think all of those crime books
Speaker 1: and movies have really really screwed us up. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: begin with Ed McBain. Now, for those of you who
Speaker 1: may not be familiar with Ed McBain, he was, in
Speaker 1: the postwar years, one of America's most popular mystery writers.
Speaker 1: He wrote police Procedurals about a fictional eighty seventh precinct,
Speaker 1: and the officers in his precinct were all young men.
Speaker 1: They all had very pretty wives, they were all happily married.
Speaker 1: They all got along wonderfully. They worked together well. And
Speaker 1: I want to read to you from one of the
Speaker 1: novels in that series, called The Killer's Wedge, and it's
Speaker 1: about one of the officers in the eighty seventh precinct,
Speaker 1: Cotton Hawes, who's just been transferred in from another precinct,
Speaker 1: and the eighty seventh is in a bad part of town,
Speaker 1: and he initially has all kinds of doubts about what
Speaker 1: it would mean to work a poor part of town.
Speaker 1: So this is Ed McBain talking about how Cotton Hawes
Speaker 1: is making sense of his experience. He had learned that
Speaker 1: the people of the slums were only people. They enjoyed
Speaker 1: the same pleasures he did, and they suffered a great
Speaker 1: many misfortunes would never have to suffer. They wanted love,
Speaker 1: and they wanted respect, And the walls of a tenement
Speaker 1: did not necessarily become the cage of an animal. He
Speaker 1: had learned this from the men of the squad. He
Speaker 1: had seen each and every one of them in action.
Speaker 1: Then he goes on, but he was surprised to learn
Speaker 1: that the men of the eighty seventh clung to another
Speaker 1: concept which in no way limited the effectiveness of their
Speaker 1: law enforcement. That concept was fairness. And within this concept
Speaker 1: they knew when to get tough and when to understand.
Speaker 1: They did not automatically equate slum dwellers with criminals. A
Speaker 1: thief was a thief, but a person was a person.
Speaker 1: Now this is eight remarkably idealized view of law enforcement, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, let me give you another example from the
Speaker 1: same era, nineteen fifties, which is, of course, the television
Speaker 1: show Dragnet, created by Jack Webb. At its height, Dragnet
Speaker 1: is an astonishingly popular television show. At one point of
Speaker 1: the twenty seven million American homes with televisions, sixteen million
Speaker 1: will be tuned to Dragnet. On Thursday nights when it ran,
Speaker 1: which is a number that has never been approximated since
Speaker 1: it's an insane number. And Dragnet is a show about
Speaker 1: the LPD, and it's the story of a group of dispassionate,
Speaker 1: unbelievably professional, highly competent police officers. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: Dragnet episodes involved Joe Friday, who is the hero of Dragnet,
Speaker 1: arresting a woman for a crime and at the end
Speaker 1: of the episode, the woman he arrests thanks him for
Speaker 1: arresting her, which when has this ever happened in real
Speaker 1: life ever? But it happened in Dragnet. And you know,
Speaker 1: you could make a list of the if you make
Speaker 1: a list of it's a very fun exercise of the
Speaker 1: top the five most influential television shows of all time
Speaker 1: right sixty minutes. Probably The Real World, which kind of
Speaker 1: invents reality TV. Probably put The Cosby Show on there
Speaker 1: for its influence on race relations. But it absolutely is
Speaker 1: the case that Dragnet is one of the five most
Speaker 1: influential and important television shows of all time. And it
Speaker 1: belongs in that list because what it does is it
Speaker 1: represents the first time on television that the same idea
Speaker 1: that Ed McBain has is put forth, and which is
Speaker 1: this notion that the police are good at what they do. Right.
Speaker 1: I'm quoting here from a Time magazine article on Dragnet
Speaker 1: when it first became a hit. The flood of Dragnet
Speaker 1: fan mail suggests that the US completely forgets that it
Speaker 1: is a nation of incipient cop haters when its eyes
Speaker 1: are glued on web show, that it has gained a
Speaker 1: new appreciation of the underpaid, long suffering ordinary policemen, and
Speaker 1: in many cases, its first rudimentary understanding of real life
Speaker 1: law enforcement. So this is Time Magazine in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: when it was the embodiment of Middle America, describing the
Speaker 1: United States as a nation of incipient cop haters. You know,
Speaker 1: today when we think of cop paters, we think of
Speaker 1: you know, progressives, radicalized activists, civil rights zealots. You know,
Speaker 1: back then, Time Magazine is saying America, Middle America were
Speaker 1: the cop haters until people like Ed McBain and Dragon
Speaker 1: Kim along and convinced Americans that their perception of law
Speaker 1: enforcement was wrong. Right. Those shows represent a massive narrative innovation.
Speaker 1: They introduced Americas to an idea that had never occurred
Speaker 1: to them before, and that is the idea of the
Speaker 1: excellent police officer. More on the taxonomy of the modern
Speaker 1: mystery story in a moment. Now back to my speech
Speaker 1: on the taxonomy of police story telling. Now, this is,
Speaker 1: of course, not the only way that the popular culture
Speaker 1: represents law enforcement. Before Dragon came along, the dominant narrative
Speaker 1: mode was the Western. And what is the Western? It's
Speaker 1: the parable about the consequences of the absence of institutional authority.
Speaker 1: What do you do in your little town on the
Speaker 1: plains when there is no police department. Well, ordinary citizens,
Speaker 1: possessed of no more than their own courage and a
Speaker 1: six shooter, have to restore order on their own. Now,
Speaker 1: alongside that, you had the rise in fiction of the
Speaker 1: private detective. Herkilpoiro Sherlocombe's Philip Marlowe Angela Lansbury in Murder,
Speaker 1: she wrote, and what is the prevailing view of law
Speaker 1: enforcement in the world of the private detective? It is
Speaker 1: that the police are present, but they're incompetent. They can
Speaker 1: only catch bad guys with the help of talented outsiders. Right, babamaters,
Speaker 1: If you've read your Shola Coombs, you know all about
Speaker 1: Shola Colms' long relationship with Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.
Speaker 1: Lestrade is honest, he's dogged, he's hard working, but he
Speaker 1: lacks imagination and he can't solve a crime to save
Speaker 1: his life. And there's a moment in the adventure in
Speaker 1: the Adventures of the Six Napoleons in nineteen hundred when
Speaker 1: we have this passage Lestrade is addressing Holmes after Holmes
Speaker 1: has just done one of his spectacular feats of deduction
Speaker 1: and figured out who the real criminal is, and Lestred says,
Speaker 1: we are not jealous of you at Scotland Yard, No, sir,
Speaker 1: we are very proud of you. And if you come
Speaker 1: down tomorrow, there's not a man from the oldest inspector
Speaker 1: to the youngest constable who wouldn't be glad to shake
Speaker 1: you by the hand. So at Scotland Yard they are
Speaker 1: under absolutely no illusion about their own ability, right. They
Speaker 1: know Holmes is better than they are. They know that
Speaker 1: they're useless at this task of crime solving, and that
Speaker 1: the guy with the pipe and the crazy hat from
Speaker 1: Baker Street is the only way they're going to keep
Speaker 1: the criminals of London under control. Same thing in Agatha
Speaker 1: Christie's her kil Paro novels. Right, Her kill Paro is
Speaker 1: solving crime after crime to the extent the police ever
Speaker 1: show up. Right, when they show up, they have no
Speaker 1: idea what's going on. And he looks at them, our
Speaker 1: little Belgian with the mustaches looks at the police with
Speaker 1: absolute contempt because he's the only one who can ever
Speaker 1: finger the bad guy. Right. So we have stories about
Speaker 1: highly competent cops, and for the sake of argument, let's
Speaker 1: call those Easterns. We have stories about absent cops. That's
Speaker 1: called those Westerns, Right, they are called Westerns. And we
Speaker 1: have stories about incompetent cops. And let's call those northerns,
Speaker 1: which only leaves the southern. So what's the Southern. Well,
Speaker 1: the Southern is the narrative of the police and authority
Speaker 1: as malignant. Right. Think about the great Brian de Palmer
Speaker 1: movie The Untouchables, with Kevin Costner playing the role of
Speaker 1: Elliot Ness, Right, the incorruptible Chicago District Attorney Elliot Ness
Speaker 1: who goes on his crusade against the mob during the
Speaker 1: heart of Prohibition. The reason it matters that Ness is
Speaker 1: incorruptible is that all around him the police of Chicago
Speaker 1: are corruptible. Right. They're not absent, they're not incompetent, they're
Speaker 1: not deaft and professional. Note they have been seduced by
Speaker 1: the criminality that they're supposed to contain. They are indistinguishable
Speaker 1: from the bad guys. That's what a Southern is, right.
Speaker 1: So these are the four kinds of police stories. Excellence, absence, incompetence, corruption,
Speaker 1: And this is the first. Here's the first of my claims.
Speaker 1: I think that every single example of a crime novel
Speaker 1: or a police procedural falls into one of these four
Speaker 1: categories without exception. So let's explore this. I assume some
Speaker 1: of you have read the Lee Child Jack Reacher series,
Speaker 1: and if you haven't, you need to start right after this.
Speaker 1: The talk is over. I once said a back of
Speaker 1: the envelope calculation based on the very large sample of
Speaker 1: Jack Reacher novels that I've read, which, as it follows,
Speaker 1: Reacher kills on average twelve bad guys per book. There
Speaker 1: are twenty six Reacher books, meaning that he has murdered
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty four people over the course of
Speaker 1: his life. He is the most prolific serial killer in
Speaker 1: American fiction, and yet twenty six years after Jack Reacher
Speaker 1: first appeared in The Killing Floor, he remains at large.
Speaker 1: This is pretty good evidence that the police are absent
Speaker 1: in the Reacher series, the Reacher novels, the Westerns. Only
Speaker 1: in the Western can you get away with killing two
Speaker 1: hundred and four people and remain at large? Right for
Speaker 1: the Northern For the incompetent police, we have more examples
Speaker 1: than we can count. But the one that I remember
Speaker 1: from my childhood, and many of you are old enough
Speaker 1: to remember this as well, is Hogan's Heroes, the legendary
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies sitcom. For those of you who are too
Speaker 1: young to remember Hogan's Heroes, it was a hugely successful
Speaker 1: TV show set in a German prison of war camp
Speaker 1: during the Second World War, in which the comic foils
Speaker 1: of the captured German soldiers were Nazi prison guards. Don't
Speaker 1: even try pitching that show today, by the way, because
Speaker 1: and why do we laugh at the Nazis, if memory
Speaker 1: serves Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz right, Not because they
Speaker 1: are malicious or vicious, not because they are ineffective or indifferent. No,
Speaker 1: we laugh at them because they're inapt. Because Clink is
Speaker 1: a self important fool, because Schultz is a clown who
Speaker 1: says I know nothing, I see nothing. Right. The literary
Speaker 1: conceit of Hogan's heroes is that is that the Nazis
Speaker 1: were the three Stooges, which is a northern That's what
Speaker 1: it is. Right. Then there's the Southern authority as malignant
Speaker 1: and corrupt. Who is the king of the Southern Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's obvious if you think about it, it's
Speaker 1: John Grisham. The plot of every John Grisham novel ever,
Speaker 1: and I say this as someone who loves John Grisham
Speaker 1: like a brother, is about the subversion of institutional authority.
Speaker 1: How does the Pelican Brief end? The richest man in
Speaker 1: the country is under indictment, as are his closest aid
Speaker 1: and all of his lawyers. The chief of staff to
Speaker 1: the President of the United States has resigned, and the
Speaker 1: President himself has wisely decided not to seek a second term.
Speaker 1: In the firm, our hero, played in the movie version
Speaker 1: by Tom Cruise, discovers that the biggest client of his
Speaker 1: law firm is a mafia crime family. The FBI gets involved,
Speaker 1: and we think the movie is going to end with
Speaker 1: the FBI helping Tom cruise resolve the matter. But no,
Speaker 1: what does our hero do? He ends up making a
Speaker 1: deal with the mafia crime family and turning his back
Speaker 1: on the FBI. Why because the FBI double crosses him.
Speaker 1: Of course they do, right, this is a Grisham novel. Right,
Speaker 1: the law is less trustworthy than a mafia crime family.
Speaker 1: I have argued long, at hard over the years to
Speaker 1: very deaf ears that Grisham is the most important literary
Speaker 1: figure of our generation. And I'm not joking. I mean,
Speaker 1: why did so many Americans think the twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: election was stolen, that truckloads of purloined ballots were ferried
Speaker 1: around Philadelphia in the back of pickup trucks, that voting
Speaker 1: machines magically preferred Democrats to Republicans. Because these are the
Speaker 1: kinds of things that happen all the time in John
Speaker 1: grisham novels. Right, And given that John Grisham has sold
Speaker 1: three hundred million books and has had twenty eight consecutive
Speaker 1: number one New York Times bestsellers, it is a statistical
Speaker 1: certainty that a good majority of the people wearing mega
Speaker 1: hats and storming the Capitol on January sixth read a
Speaker 1: Grisham book every night before bedtime, after of course being
Speaker 1: inoculated with their daily dose of Tucker Cars. Let's still
Speaker 1: more difficult. Example. Some of you may have seen the
Speaker 1: new Apple TV series Slow Horse, based on the mickhern
Speaker 1: Spy novels. The show is about an intelligence officer played
Speaker 1: by Gary Oldham who has been exiled to a decrepit
Speaker 1: outbuilding called slow House and along with all the other misfits,
Speaker 1: all the other rejects, screw ups, weirdos who can no
Speaker 1: longer make it within five headquarters. So what's that? Well,
Speaker 1: that that sounds like a Northern right, It's an authority
Speaker 1: is incompetent. Right. We have a group of screw ups,
Speaker 1: but then the slow House crew go on to solve
Speaker 1: some of the most pressing national security crises of the day,
Speaker 1: which makes it sound like an Eastern like a dragnet
Speaker 1: and Ed McBain like uber competent authority. So it doesn't fit, right,
Speaker 1: Doesn't that invalidate my theory? No? No, no, Slow Horses
Speaker 1: is just a hybrid. Right. It's hybrids have been around forever.
Speaker 1: If you remember how many people read Scarlet Pimpernel novels
Speaker 1: growing up. What is the Scarlet Pimpernel. He is the
Speaker 1: nobleman who everyone thinks is stupid, but is simultaneously outwitting
Speaker 1: all of the evil French. Right. Or think about Columbo, right,
Speaker 1: the magnificent nineteen seventies television detective series, but where Peter
Speaker 1: Falk pretends to be a bumbling fool but always gets
Speaker 1: the bad guy in the end. These are Easterns masquerading
Speaker 1: as Northerns. They're Northeasterns. There are no easters. Right. What
Speaker 1: does Hamlet say to Horatio? There are more things in
Speaker 1: heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Speaker 1: That does not apply to my taxonomy. Okay, Why am
Speaker 1: I going on and on about the four categories? Because
Speaker 1: I think they're deeply problematic, and I think they distort
Speaker 1: our understanding of what policing is. And here I'm going
Speaker 1: to go on a digression and simultaneously get a little
Speaker 1: bit serious. The father of modern policing was a man
Speaker 1: named Sir Robert Peel, and he founds the Metropolitan Police
Speaker 1: Force in London in eighteen twenty nine, which is the
Speaker 1: first great urban police department. And Peel famously sets out
Speaker 1: nine principles that he thinks ought to govern modern police forces,
Speaker 1: and they are as applicable, if not more applicable, today
Speaker 1: than they were in eighteen twenty nine. They are the
Speaker 1: ten commandments of policing. They're what every police officer is
Speaker 1: taught on the first day of their time at police academy.
Speaker 1: And to give you a flavor, I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a couple of Peel's principles. The ability of the police
Speaker 1: to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of
Speaker 1: police existence, actions, behavior, and the ability of the police
Speaker 1: to secure and maintain public respect is another one. The
Speaker 1: police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in
Speaker 1: voluntary observance of the law to be able to maintain
Speaker 1: and secure public respect. There's another one. The degree of
Speaker 1: cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately
Speaker 1: to the necessity for the use of physical force and
Speaker 1: compulsion in achieving police objectives. And here's a crucial one.
Speaker 1: The police at all times should maintain a relationship with
Speaker 1: the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that
Speaker 1: the police are the public and the public are the police. Right.
Speaker 1: What is the word that appears in all of those principles,
Speaker 1: as often as police. It's public right, public, public, public.
Speaker 1: The police are the public, and the public are the police.
Speaker 1: I would submit to you that that those two sentences
Speaker 1: are one of the most beautiful and essential lines that
Speaker 1: have ever been written about the modern democratic experiment. Now
Speaker 1: where are we today with respect to Peel's principles in America?
Speaker 1: Are we a societ that believes that the people are
Speaker 1: the police and the police are the people? I'm not
Speaker 1: so sure of that. One of the ways, for example,
Speaker 1: that we measure the health and effectiveness of a police
Speaker 1: force is clearance rates. A clearance rate is simply the
Speaker 1: percentage of crimes that are solved by the police, and
Speaker 1: the most important of those, obviously, is the homicide clearance rate.
Speaker 1: And over the last thirty years, the homicide clearance rate
Speaker 1: in this country has been falling, and not by a
Speaker 1: small amount, by a large amount. Thirty years ago it
Speaker 1: was roughly seventy percent. It's now fifty percent. So half
Speaker 1: of all murders committed in the United States go unsolved
Speaker 1: by the police. And by the way, that's an average.
Speaker 1: There are many many places where the clearance rate is
Speaker 1: much lower than that. The clearance rate in Michigan is
Speaker 1: seventeen percent. For homicide in Honolulu it's eighteen percent. It
Speaker 1: also varies by neighborhoo. But if somebody was murdered outside
Speaker 1: of this auditorium here in Tulane, the clearance rate would
Speaker 1: probably be ninety percent, but in the seventh ward it's
Speaker 1: probably I don't know, ten fifteen percent. Right, that is
Speaker 1: a very, very big problem for modern society. In the
Speaker 1: classic formulation of deterrence, deterrence is a function of the certainty, swiftness,
Speaker 1: and severity of punishment. And of those three things, the
Speaker 1: first is the most important. Right, Deterrence is really a
Speaker 1: function of the likelihood of being caught. And if we
Speaker 1: are in a situation where the clearance rates in many
Speaker 1: high crime neighborhoods is less than twenty percent, then that's
Speaker 1: the description of a failed state. Right. We live in
Speaker 1: a society now where there are many neighborhoods where murderers
Speaker 1: murder with impunity. Now, why are clearance rates falling? It
Speaker 1: makes no sense. The police today are better funded, they're
Speaker 1: better trained than ever before, they have more access to technology.
Speaker 1: There's cameras everywhere. Plus murder rates have fallen dramatically in
Speaker 1: the last thirty years, they have less to do. If
Speaker 1: you watch CSI on television or Law and Order, you
Speaker 1: would think clearance rates would be one hundred percent, but
Speaker 1: they're not. They're low and they're dropping. One reason for
Speaker 1: that is obvious, and that's the rise of gun violence.
Speaker 1: Guns used to be a small percentage of homicides. They're
Speaker 1: now an overwhelming percentage of homicides. And a gun crime
Speaker 1: is a lot harder to solve than a knife crime.
Speaker 1: Less physical evidence, the killer can be further away. But
Speaker 1: that's not the real reason. The real reason is that
Speaker 1: the most important factor in solving a homicide is the
Speaker 1: cooperation of the public. You find out who pulled the
Speaker 1: trigger because three people come to you and said, I
Speaker 1: was there, I saw Billy pull the trigger. Right. But
Speaker 1: if those three people don't come forward, if they don't
Speaker 1: trust the police anymore, if they think of the police
Speaker 1: as an occupying force, then you have a problem. Remember
Speaker 1: are that those principles from Peel The ability of the
Speaker 1: police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval
Speaker 1: of police existence, actions, behavior, and the ability of the
Speaker 1: police to secure and maintain public respect. That is what
Speaker 1: we don't have right now. In the most recent Gallup poll,
Speaker 1: only nineteen percent of black adults said they were confident
Speaker 1: they had any confidence or trust in the police. The
Speaker 1: numbers for White Americans are a little bit higher, but
Speaker 1: they are also at historic lows. Right, how do you
Speaker 1: solve a homicide in a community where eight out of
Speaker 1: ten people don't trust you. What Robert Peel said two
Speaker 1: hundred years ago is absolutely correct. The police cannot do
Speaker 1: their job without the support of the public. Right now,
Speaker 1: you might say, well, this collapse in trust makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: Think about the last ten years. We had Ferguson, we
Speaker 1: had George Floyd, we just had tire Nichols On and on. Right,
Speaker 1: all of these stories of kinds of things that would
Speaker 1: naturally undermine our faith in law enforcement. But that still
Speaker 1: doesn't solve the puzzle, right because in every way this
Speaker 1: kind of problem was worse fifty years ago than it
Speaker 1: is today. Would you rather have the police Department of Birmingham,
Speaker 1: Alabama in nineteen sixty three or the police Department of Birmingham,
Speaker 1: Alabama today? Would you rather have the police Department of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles in nineteen sixty three, when they wouldn't even
Speaker 1: let black officers ride in the same squad cars as
Speaker 1: white officers than the LAPD of today. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: I could go on. I mean, in Atlanta in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight, they hire their first black police officers, group
Speaker 1: of eight men. They call them the YMCA eight. Why
Speaker 1: because they won't let them into the precincts. They make
Speaker 1: them work out of the basement of the colored downtown. Right,
Speaker 1: and they get so much abuse that half of them
Speaker 1: quit within the first year. Abuse from their fellow white
Speaker 1: police officers. They're not allowed to drive squad cars, They're
Speaker 1: not allowed to arrest white people. They're not allowed to
Speaker 1: patrol white neighborhoods. White officers would gang up against them
Speaker 1: and falsely report them for drinking on the job. White
Speaker 1: officers tried to run down a couple of them in
Speaker 1: the street. One white officer in Atlanta put up bounty
Speaker 1: on the head of the black officers, say he would
Speaker 1: give two hundred dollars to anyone who killed one of
Speaker 1: those officers. Now, those are good reasons not to trust
Speaker 1: a police department, right, really good reasons. Not today, not today,
Speaker 1: when the Atlanta Police Department is world's better and different
Speaker 1: from that, you would have thought there was a crisis
Speaker 1: in clearance rates back then, not now, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: You would have thought that in every way we would
Speaker 1: be better off today than we were fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: So what's to blame for this? Right? This is one
Speaker 1: of the most profound problems facing our society. I think
Speaker 1: that there are many, many important issues, but the one
Speaker 1: I want to talk about is the influence of these
Speaker 1: four narratives. The first problem with the narratives, I think
Speaker 1: is obvious, and that is that it is a dangerous
Speaker 1: thing to over narrativize a group of people. The obvious
Speaker 1: analogy is the way the popular culture treated African Americans
Speaker 1: in the movies in the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: There were only three categories of black people in the
Speaker 1: movies in that period. There was the Mammy, remember Gone
Speaker 1: with the Wind, the role played by Haddie McDaniel. And
Speaker 1: that is the big, warm, sassy, surrogate mother who puts
Speaker 1: her mistress's children ahead even of her own children, and
Speaker 1: who keeps her misching in line, you know, with her
Speaker 1: straight talk.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's stereotype number one. Second stereotype was the sambo. What
Speaker 1: is the sambo? The sambo is the childlike, passive, deeply
Speaker 1: loyal man, servant, right, the uncle Tom. And if you
Speaker 1: were a black actor or actress in Hollywood in the
Speaker 1: first forty years of the twentieth century, those are the
Speaker 1: two roles that were available to you. And the third
Speaker 1: group is the shiftless, devious, untrustworthy, lazy, subversive. Right. The
Speaker 1: screenwriters and the novelists of America put all black people
Speaker 1: into one of those three categories for one hundred years.
Speaker 1: Why because they couldn't be bothered to explore the idea
Speaker 1: that there was as much variety and beauty and complexity
Speaker 1: in black people as they were in white people. A
Speaker 1: narrative is a stereotype. It's a kind of shorthand used
Speaker 1: by writers. And these stereotypes aren't harmless. Famous study done
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties of ethnic stereotypes where a group
Speaker 1: of psychologists asked thousands of Americans to describe what they
Speaker 1: felt black people were like, and the three most popular
Speaker 1: adjectives used by white people to describe black people were superstitious, happy,
Speaker 1: go lucky, and lazy. And the kicker was that most
Speaker 1: of the white people they talked to for that survey
Speaker 1: didn't know any Black people, So where do they get
Speaker 1: those ideas they got them from the movies. Right. So
Speaker 1: the stereotypes that are put forth in popular culture matter.
Speaker 1: They are the raw material that people use to form
Speaker 1: their attitudes and perspectives about the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: And I really worry that police narratives are doing the
Speaker 1: same thing. They are doing an injustice to our understanding
Speaker 1: of the police. You know, Derek Schavan murders George Floyd,
Speaker 1: and thousands of people take to the streets and say,
Speaker 1: let's defund the police. Right. The George Floyd case activated
Speaker 1: the southern narrative law enforcement as impossibly corrupt and malicious.
Speaker 1: Our only choice is to shut it down. But there's
Speaker 1: seven hundred thousand police officers in this country. How do
Speaker 1: you possibly label the entire group based on the behavior
Speaker 1: of a small number. You know, after the Ruddy King
Speaker 1: beating thirty years ago, it led to the Los Angeles riots.
Speaker 1: The Los Angeles Police Department was thrown into chaos, and
Speaker 1: they were accused of racial bias and sensitivity and turning
Speaker 1: a blind eyed to misconduct. And they had once, of course,
Speaker 1: been the embodiment of the Eastern Dragnet was a celebration
Speaker 1: of the perfection and professionalism of the LAPD, and now
Speaker 1: they were the Southern. They were cast as corrupt and malicious,
Speaker 1: and there was a massive investigation that was launched. And
Speaker 1: what the investigation found was that of the eighty five
Speaker 1: hundred police officers in the LAPD, one hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: three had been the a subject of four or more
Speaker 1: excessive force complaints over in the period between nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: six and nineteen ninety Right, so one hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: three out of eighty five hundred, forty four of those
Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty three had six or more complaints
Speaker 1: and sixteen had eight or more complaints. The investigation found
Speaker 1: that the LAPD, in other words, had a very small
Speaker 1: core of really bad apples and did a really bad
Speaker 1: job of identifying their bad apples and getting rid of them.
Speaker 1: That is not an Eastern where everyone is perfect. There
Speaker 1: was one officer who had more than sixteen excessive force
Speaker 1: complaints in the previous four years and still had his job. Right,
Speaker 1: that's not dragnet. That's something very different. That's problem. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, that is not the description of
Speaker 1: a Southern. It's not a description of an entire department
Speaker 1: that is malicious and malignant right. You cannot call a
Speaker 1: department of eighty five hundred people corrupt and malignant because
Speaker 1: it has forty four really bad apples. So our police
Speaker 1: narratives have made us sloppy. They've made it really hard
Speaker 1: for us to understand the nature of the problem we're facing.
Speaker 1: They blur over the subtleties. You know, you have one
Speaker 1: side saying it's all rotten, and the other watching Dragnet
Speaker 1: and reading Ed McBain and saying, these are noble, courageous
Speaker 1: men doing an impossible job against overwhelming odds. They deserve
Speaker 1: our unqualified to support. Right that neither of those narratives
Speaker 1: are true. How can the people be the police and
Speaker 1: the police be the people when the people don't understand
Speaker 1: who the police are. Problem number one. We don't make
Speaker 1: this mistake with teachers. We don't make it with truck drivers.
Speaker 1: We don't make it with nurses. When we hear that
Speaker 1: the teacher is a bad teacher whose students don't learn anything,
Speaker 1: we don't say, oh, man, teaching is broken. Let's defund teaching. Right,
Speaker 1: that's a We just say that's a bad teacher who
Speaker 1: should be replaced, and let's do a better job of
Speaker 1: training and selected them next time. And the reason we're
Speaker 1: free to do that is that none has come along
Speaker 1: and constructed a magical teacher genre that allows us to
Speaker 1: assign every teacher to one of four reductive narrative categories. Second,
Speaker 1: and a more important point, is that I think we
Speaker 1: need to consider what these narratives do to those within
Speaker 1: the profession, because how the police think of themselves is
Speaker 1: also shaped by these theories. You know, it's often been
Speaker 1: said that The Godfather. I'm sure you've heard this, The
Speaker 1: Godfather started out being about the mob, but before long,
Speaker 1: the mob was about being like the Godfather. Right, they
Speaker 1: all started pretending they were Marlon Brando or Cultural narratives
Speaker 1: about groups don't just reflect those groups, they also start
Speaker 1: to define those groups. So the police also watched Law
Speaker 1: and Order, Right, They also read crime novels. And what
Speaker 1: do they learn from them? They learned that law enforcement
Speaker 1: is about them. It's the story of their own identity
Speaker 1: and skill. Are they any good? Are they honest? Are
Speaker 1: they as dogged and skilled and fundamental and as the
Speaker 1: police of Ed McBain's eighty seventh Precinct, or as hapless
Speaker 1: as Colonel Clink and Sergeant Schultz? The great crime novelist
Speaker 1: Joseph Wambach, who was an LAPD officer for many years,
Speaker 1: one said that the modern police novel was not about
Speaker 1: the man working the case, but the case working the man,
Speaker 1: meaning that the innovation of police fiction in the modern
Speaker 1: era was to turn the spotlight on what the job
Speaker 1: of maintaining law and order did to the psychology and
Speaker 1: peace of mind and character of the man tasked with
Speaker 1: maintaining law order. And I think that's exactly what the
Speaker 1: four narratives are doing. They are simply giving different answers
Speaker 1: to that question of who the police officer is. In
Speaker 1: the Western, it's it's just the ordinary man must summon
Speaker 1: his own courage to step into the breach. In the Northern,
Speaker 1: the officer is not up to the task, in a
Speaker 1: Southern the officer is corrupted by his responsibilities. And in
Speaker 1: the Eastern, our hero rises magnificently to the challenge. Police
Speaker 1: fiction in all of those forms is an exercise in narcissism.
Speaker 1: These are not novels and shows about solving crimes. There
Speaker 1: shows about crime solvers and where is the public in
Speaker 1: that right? Where? If Robert Peel were alive today, he
Speaker 1: would look around him and he would say, we have
Speaker 1: given police officers a picture of their profession that leaves
Speaker 1: out the most important element in their success, the people
Speaker 1: whose respect and support make police work possible. Remember that
Speaker 1: Peel principle. The ability of the police to perform their
Speaker 1: duties is dependent on public approval of police existence. I
Speaker 1: defy you to find we're in the world of crime
Speaker 1: fiction a representation of that idea. It doesn't exist. That's
Speaker 1: not the reason people write fiction police fiction, and it's
Speaker 1: not the reason why readers like me love polase fiction.
Speaker 1: So what is the solution? Well, it breaks my heart
Speaker 1: to say this, but it is time for us to
Speaker 1: turn our backs on his spine novel right, No more enough.
Speaker 1: It's been one hundred years or more and it has
Speaker 1: left us worse off than we started. I'm sure all
Speaker 1: of you. I've been watching the Governor Florida on his
Speaker 1: current cultural cleansing campaign, and all I have to say is,
Speaker 1: where is Ron DeSantis when we need him? He's so
Speaker 1: busy banning Jody Picot novels that he's missed the real culprit,
Speaker 1: which is the child John Grisham, Ed McBain and our
Speaker 1: Sir Conan Doyle let us go to the Hudson News
Speaker 1: at the Jacksonville Airport, take all of those paperbacks off
Speaker 1: the wall, put them in a big pile in front
Speaker 1: of the State House in Tallahassee, and light a match.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I have time for a few questions. I
Speaker 1: think anyone wants to come forward.
Speaker 2: Hi, I just wanted to ask if, in this new
Speaker 2: conclusion that it's time to move past the mystery novel,
Speaker 2: the spy novel. Do you think there's a room for
Speaker 2: something more nuanced, one that has evolved maybe with our
Speaker 2: understanding and our ability to capture information. You know, certainly
Speaker 2: when these the genre was born, we did not have
Speaker 2: cell phones, we didn't have social media, and we certainly
Speaker 2: didn't have instant news. And these have all drastically changed
Speaker 2: the culture around policing and at least in the US.
Speaker 2: Do you think there's a way for the genre to
Speaker 2: move on and be more incorporative of these elements and
Speaker 2: more reflective of the way policing actually is.
Speaker 1: I do think that. I mean, basically, what has happened
Speaker 1: I think is if we have exhausted the possibilities of
Speaker 1: the form and it's time for reinvention. And I think
Speaker 1: as well that people who write this kind of fiction
Speaker 1: need to understand what their social obligations are. That what
Speaker 1: has happened, I think is that there's a generation. I
Speaker 1: think this is more true in Hollywood than it is
Speaker 1: in the world of fiction, that people have really dodged
Speaker 1: the question of what the impact of their writing is.
Speaker 1: And you make a movie, you make a really bad
Speaker 1: cop movie, and you shrug and say it's entertainment, and
Speaker 1: you forget that actually know, what you are providing is
Speaker 1: the cultural raw material for the way we make sense
Speaker 1: of the world. And if you just mail it in
Speaker 1: and just stick to some formula that is no longer
Speaker 1: relevant to the world we live in, you're doing society
Speaker 1: a disservice. So yes, I do think it is possible
Speaker 1: to reinvent it, but I think it's going to require
Speaker 1: a change of heart within the creative community. Thank you. Okay,
Speaker 1: so hi, my name Isabella.
Speaker 3: First of all, thank you so much for talking. I
Speaker 3: wanted to ask a little bit about kind of going
Speaker 3: along that same crime show narrative, about how much police
Speaker 3: officers are really able to do and how that kind
Speaker 3: of changes our public view and our public narrative. I'm
Speaker 3: a huge fan of Brooklyn nine nine knives out all
Speaker 3: that stuff, and we see police officers and detectives going
Speaker 3: in asking questions, breaking into things, all without warrants and
Speaker 3: everything like that. Do you think that changes the way
Speaker 3: we view police officers and how incompetent we may see
Speaker 3: them to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it's a really interesting point, the unreality of
Speaker 1: a lot of police fiction. Does it contributes to our
Speaker 1: disillusionment because we have this impression from the way that
Speaker 1: police work is represented in fiction that the police officer
Speaker 1: has an awful lot more agency than he or she
Speaker 1: actually does in real life. Right, there are, for good reasons,
Speaker 1: significant constraints on what they are able to do, and
Speaker 1: of course it doesn't make for a good story. So
Speaker 1: when we compare the there's a whole line of psychology
Speaker 1: on what's called the CSI effect in juries that juries
Speaker 1: are now more likely to acquit defendants because the level
Speaker 1: of evidence presented in the trial does not match up
Speaker 1: with the level of evidence they're used to seeing in
Speaker 1: criminal trials from CSI. And that's a good example of
Speaker 1: how like that's there's no sure path to distrust and
Speaker 1: disillusionment if the standard of police work is described over
Speaker 1: here in fiction and in real life it's over here,
Speaker 1: so I think that that is a very accurate observation.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: I think I've run out of time, so thank you
Speaker 1: all very much. This episode of Revision's History was produced
Speaker 1: by Kiara Powell with Ben Nadaph Haffrey and Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Garra,
Speaker 1: mastering by Lawn Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Thank
Speaker 1: you to everyone at the New Orleans Book Festival, including
Speaker 1: Lindsay Phillips and Amy Bradshaw. If you haven't signed up
Speaker 1: yet for Pushkin Plus, now is the time. We're about
Speaker 1: to drop us sweeping mini series on guns in America
Speaker 1: where we go down all kinds of strange holes about
Speaker 1: our national obsession. It's going to drop August thirty. First
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus listeners. We'll get the whole series that day,
Speaker 1: add free. Everyone else gets the first episode and then
Speaker 1: the balance of the series over the next five weeks.
Speaker 1: Both good choices, but I highly recommend the first option.
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Speaker 1: Mountain Bubble