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K-Ville
[Or a Post-Katrina Cop TV
Show]
By Jordan Flaherty
September 13, 2007
Next Monday the Fox network
unveils a new television show called K-Ville.
Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, K-Ville promises
to highlight the heroism of New Orleans cops.
Unfortunately, the true story of policing in New Orleans
is unlikely to be told by Fox, or by anyone in the
corporate media.
Since at least the 1950s, and shows like
Dragnet,
Hollywood's representation of cops has been as a thin
blue line of honest and straightforward heroes
protecting the good people from the bad. The Seventies
were a time of radical movements, and this brought
radical criticisms of police into the mainstream, with
films like
Serpico and
Chinatown exposing
police corruption and brutality. However, the
Seventies ultimately led to a new kind of hero. In 1980s
films such as
Dirty Harry, the cop – or, in the
case of the
Death Wish
movies, vigilante - was
brutal and violent, but ultimately sympathetic.
Audiences could no longer believe the old clean-cut
images of cops – there were too many front-page stories
of police violence and corruption – but it was still
necessary to maintain the public perception that cops
are necessary. The new generation of cops on film and
TV – later refined and popularized by stars from Mel
Gibson in
Lethal Weapon to Dennis Frantz in
NYPD Blue – was that of a troubled, violent, flawed,
but ultimately sympathetic hero. Yes, they broke the
rules, but ultimately the rules are the problem. These
cops would torture people based on a hunch – but, they
were always right. The person they tortured would
always end up being guilty, and they would always get
information from torturing them that they would not have
gotten otherwise.
This justification was developed in Hollywood, and then
perfected years later by the Bush Administration, who
made explicit the arguments that films like
Die Hard
had implied—we need cops (and soldiers and federal
agents) to break the rules. In fact the rules are the
problem. There are "good people" and "criminals," and
we don't need to worry about how the "bad guys" are
treated. Further, the job of keeping us safe is
necessarily dirty, and the police will need to break
some rules to do their job right. "Tough on Crime"
politicians like former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani
also contributed to this environment by discarding
decades of reforms and practices meant to give
opportunity for rehabilitation, instead pushing for more
police, more prisons, and more arrests.
Courage to Burn
Into this archetype comes the
Fox cop drama K-Ville. The publicity material
for the new show explains, "Two years after Katrina, the
city is still in chaos . . . many cops have quit, and
the jails, police stations and crime labs still haven't
been properly rebuilt. But the cops who remain have
courage to burn and a passion to reclaim and rebuild
their city."
Like all Hollywood products, this show is about making
money first and foremost—it attempts to ride on the
coattails of popular cop shows like Law and Order
and CSI. In doing so, it also falls perfectly
into an agenda of explaining and forgiving brutal police
behavior. In fact, it takes one of the nation's most
notoriously racist, violent and corrupt police forces,
and explains away their harmful acts as the natural
result of the trauma of Katrina and its aftermath.
When the cops on this show
torture—for example, the first episode contains a kind
of amateur "waterboarding"—it is because they are good
people who have been pushed too hard. It makes us
empathize with them and not, for example, with their
victims, who are seen as deserving of whatever
punishment they receive. As the show publicity states,
the show's hero is "unapologetic about bending the rules
when it comes to collaring bad guys. The stakes are too
high, and the city too lawless, for him to do things by
the book."
A Good Cop
Anthony Anderson stars as
Marlin Boulet, a Black New Orleans cop who has seen his
city devastated, who is fighting, as a homeowner, for
his ninth ward neighborhood to return, while fighting as
a cop against a sea of crime.
Like
Law and Order, the show (at least in the
first episode) dodges much of the racial politics of
policing by having the criminals be mostly wealthy and
white, while the police and victims are racially
diverse. Like many of these TV shows, there is an
attempt to please as wide an audience as possible—the
shows bring in conservatives with the tough on crime
rhetoric, but bring in liberals by having the villains
be corporate criminals.
K-Ville
even has one white villain say, "That storm wasn't a
disaster . . . that storm was a cleansing," a moment
that indicts white racism in the cleansing of the city,
and not something that you would expect from Fox. In
fact, despite being skeptical about New Orleans'
notoriously brutal police force being portrayed as
heroes, it's hard not to root for them when the first
episode's villains are Blackwater mercenaries (here
called "Black River").
Although the show gets much wrong about how race, class
and power work in New Orleans—and the US—it also gets a
surprising amount of details right. For anyone from
Louisiana, the short scene with a barbeque and the song
Cupid Shuffle playing makes up for a lot that has
come before (the song is by Cupid, an artist from
Lafayette, Louisiana, and plays at virtually every party
in New Orleans). The show also has throwaway references
to other New Orleans-specific phrases and foods—from the
term "neutral ground" to eating gumbo— that makes the
viewer feel that someone involved in writing the show at
least spent some time in New Orleans.
In the end, however, these accuracies only help to
convey the deeper, and more problematic, purpose of the
show—a portrayal of New Orleans police as an essential
thin blue line of protection in an outlaw city. The
show brings up the horror of prisoners abandoned in
Orleans Parish Prison, but only to reinforce a law and
order message. The show brings up white racism, but
only as an exception, not as a system of power that has
displaced almost half of the Black population of the
city. In short, the show gets some of the problems
right, but it gets the answer deeply wrong.
The Disaster before the Disaster
The reality is that the
police, glamorized on K-Ville, are a part of the
disaster the people of New Orleans have faced, not part
of the solution. As has been widely reported, the town
of Gretna, across the Mississippi from New Orleans and
part of Jefferson Parish, stationed officers on the
bridge leading out of New Orleans blocking the main
escape route for the tens of thousands suffering in the
Superdome, Convention Center, and throughout the city.
In the months after Katrina, while New Orleanians wanted
to return and rebuild their city, they got "security"
instead. Hundreds of National Guard troops, as well as
police forces from across the U.S. and private security
forces including Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli
company called Instinctive Shooting International began
patrolling the nearly empty city.
From the initial images broadcast around the world,
demonizing the people of New Orleans as "looters" and
"criminals," the public perception of New Orleans'
people has been shaped by vigilante rhetoric,
exemplified by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco
bringing in National Guard troops shortly after Katrina
with the words, "They have M-16s and they are locked and
loaded. . . .These troops know how to shoot and kill,
and they are more than willing to do so if necessary,
and I expect they will." This assessment, now validated
by K-Ville, was no doubt a big cause of so-called
"Katrina Fatigue" – the widely reported feeling that the
nation has run out of sympathy for the people of New
Orleans. Why feel sympathy for a city of criminals?
While shows like K-Ville draws a solid line
between good and bad, real life is murkier. Nationwide,
nearly 90 percent of people imprisoned in federal
prisons are there for nonviolent offenses. Louisiana is
at the vanguard of mass-imprisonment, with the highest
rate of imprisonment in the country—816 sentenced
prisoners per 100,000 state residents. If Louisiana were
a country, it would have the highest imprisonment rate
in the world. As cases like the Jena Six so vividly
demonstrate, the racial disparity in both arrests and
sentencing in the state is striking. Although
African-Americans make up 32 percent of Louisiana's
population, they constitute 72 percent of the state's
prison population.
The stories that shows like K-Ville leave untold are
those of community coming together to solve problems.
In New Orleans, our real "first-responders" are folks in
the communities most affected, who were out in the days
after the storm rescuing people and distributing food.
The true hope for our city lies in projects such as Safe
Streets Strong Communities, Families and Friends of
Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, and Critical
Resistance, grassroots organizations that are on the
frontlines of struggles for justice in New Orleans,
organizing in their communities and building a
movement.
There are also the lawyers and advocates of
organizations such as Juvenile Justice Project of
Louisiana, Innocence Project New Orleans, A Fighting
Chance and the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center.
These organizations have represented those who the
system has abandoned, from kids caught up in notoriously
brutal youth prisons to indigent people on death row.
These are the truly compelling stories of criminal
justice in New Orleans post-Katrina, yet you can be sure
that these local voices will be among those that
K-Ville will not air.
If you like this review consider making a donation
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Jordan Flaherty is an editor of
Left Turn Magazine , a journal of grassroots
resistance. His previous articles from New Orleans are
online at
http://www.leftturn.org . To contact Jordan, email:
neworleans@leftturn.org . On myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/secondlines .
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A version of this article originally appeared in the
fall issue of
The Abolitionist. The Abolitionist newspaper is a
project of Critical Resistance in Oakland, and is
primarily distributed to prisoners in California and
around the US. You can subscribe or contribute online
at:
http://www.criticalresistance.org/article.php?id=75
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For more information on some of the
organizations and resources mentioned in this article:
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posted 16 September 2007 / updated 28
March 2008 |
