SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 - 1994) ↳ 3x02 | The Abbey Grange

The way Terry Pratchett handled police in the Discworld continues to be one of the many, many things I love about his works. I certainly don’t have time to describe all the details of why he wrote such good policing, but I think the best summation of it is the arc that Sam Vimes had in many of the books.

I haven’t read all the watch books, but in the ones I have, there’s often a similar plot structure. We meet a truly detestable criminal Vimes is chasing down (think the Deep Downers in Thud, or Carcer in Night Watch). They show themselves to be truly awful people who do awful things, and they’re also just plain jackasses. They’re characters you hate to read about, the grind the audience’s gears. They also grind Sam Vimes’s gears. 

Throughout the story, they commit more and more crimes. Horrible crimes, like torturing and killing innocent people, or practicing violent religious extremism. They do things that personally target our protagonist, like go after his wife and son, or relentlessly taunt him and try to kill him and his past self. They consistently do bad things, and even as Vimes is chasing them, they do more bad things. You want them to be punished.  Finally, at the climax, we get some sort of final confrontation between the villain(s) and Vimes. In a different book, Vimes might kill the people who sent people to hurt his infant son, or tortured and killed innocent people, and the audience would probably cheer. In fact, Vimes wants to kill them. 

But he doesn’t. Every time, he suppresses the urge to enact his own justice, and he doesn’t kill them. He arrests them. Because, as he says many times, if you’ll do something for a good reason, you’ll do it for a bad. Even when there’s every excuse as to why this particular villain doesn’t deserve to live, he just arrests them. It’s not his job to decide how they should be punished for their crimes.

I think this is a masterful takedown of police brutality and Punisher style characters. Vimes isn’t a perfect person, it’s not that he could never dream of killing the bad guy. He can, and he does, often. But he never follows through, he understands why he can’t do that, so no matter how tempting it is, he doesn’t.

Because in this story, the hard boiled cynical cop truly believes in following the law. The message is always that law enforcement killing a criminal is never ok, even if they’re undeniably guilty of something truly dreadful. Hell, police brutality is personified as a millennia old demonic quasi-deity possessing Vimes, one that’s never been beaten before, but he beats it and doesn’t give in. I think that’s a really unique message in cop stories, and another reason as to why Pratchett was such a good author. 

https://www.socialistalternative.org/

Dear young black kids

Don’t let your white friends get you in trouble.

You better say that.

i want to elaborate on this.

don’t buy from white dealers and don’t sell to white people.

don’t underage drink with white people.

don’t do anything that could be viewed as illegal by cops with white people and this isn’t me trying to be anti-white this is me telling you to protect yourself from anti-black cops. they won’t hesitate to pin the entire crime on you even if your white friend did 90% of the crime.

most (if not all) white people don’t understand the same crimes they commit (getting into a bar with a fake ID, stealing cigars, playing with toy guns in walmart) we are given a lengthy imprisonment or executed on the spot for.

so don’t put yourself in a situation that could get you killed and a white person a slap on the wrist.

Sorry if this isn’t the right place but I felt like its important to add, this is the most real shit I have seen on my dash in a while. After I got my license I drove everywhere, constantly picked up my friends and really just drove like a maniac making dumb decisions left and right. Now one of my best friends is a WoC and I helped her get her license and I always told her ‘9mph over the speed limit and the ticket gets thrown out in court’ because that is what I’d been taught. One day she was driving and I mentioned that to her and she kept insisting that it was 5mph. It took me YEARS to realize PoC can’t afford that extra 4mph!!!!!!!!! White teenagers are the dumbest group on the planet, please don’t let them talk you into their dumb shit!

Conversely: White people, don’t get your black friends into trouble. What is just dicking around to you is a potential death sentence to them. If you are any kind of friend, you won’t put them in that kinds of harm’s way.

Important addition

And if you wind up getting them in trouble, take the blame. If they’re getting harassed, distract the cop hassling them. I’ve defused a couple of situations when I was in college and someone was getting shit from campus cops for walking while black by going up to them like I knew them and was expecting them for a study group. If you can defend them without getting them into deeper shit, maybe redirect the attention away from them or give them a reason to be there, do so.

We’ve essentially got a bubble of protection around us and we need to use it to keep others safe.

White kids use your privilege.

Also remember this if you’re thinking about calling the police on people. My neighbors last year were super shitty and loud all night long but nobody in my house dared call the cops bc these neighbors were black men. The only time I ever called the police was on my preppy white neighbors who were about to drive drunk. Seriously, I used to be a lot dumber than I am now and I’m sure I’m currently way dumber than I will be about this kind of stuff, but as white people we have to teach ourselves. We have to realize and remember that we get off easy in comparison.

The Romanian government just decriminalised official misconduct.

This essentially makes corruption legal.

what is life

fuckers passed the law in the middle of the night

despite protests being held against this in the last two weeks

there were more than 100k people on the streets a few days ago

i can’t even

I’m shaking with rage. A huge number of politicians will have their criminal records thrown out. People who have cause state prejudice of millions of dollars (they’re estimating a total of almost one billion). People who have tried to rig the votes in the last presidential election. The officials who had done the inspection in the Colectiv club before the fire that claimed 64 lives last year will be off their charges too.

I’m numb.

Is this for real? What the fuck.

Here’s an article in the Washington Post

New York Times

Financial Times

Protests are being organized throughout the country. I’m so worried that violence may break out, despite the fact that all protests so far have been peaceful.

There are 175.000 people out in the streets in the entire country. I’m hoping this changes something.

Over 300.000 at the moment. It’s the biggest protest in Romania in the last 25 years.

Bill Clinton cheats on his wife. Impeach him. Trump proudly brags about sexual assault (and has cheated on his wives). Elect him.

Hillary oversaw the department of state while 4 people died in an embassy attack. Put her in jail. 2 Republicans were in office while over 200 people died in embassy attacks. No problem.

Immigrants don’t pay taxes. Round them up and kick them out. Trump doesn’t pay taxes. He’s a business genius.

Hillary’s foundation only spent 87% of their donations helping people. She’s a crook. Trumps foundation paid off his debts, bought sculptures of him, and made political donations to avoid investigations while using less than 5% of funds for charity (and he got shut down by NY State). So savvy… Put him in the white house.

Trump made 4 billion dollars in 40 years, when an index fund started at the same time with the same “small loans” he received would be worth $12 billion today… without a trail of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits and burned small business owners. He’s a real business whiz. Hillary took a loss of $700k. She’s a criminal.

Trump is the first candidate in the modern era not to release his tax returns, and took a billion dollar loss in 1 year. Genius.

Hillary takes responsibility for private email servers and apologizes. Not credible. Trump denies saying things (on the record) he actually said (on the record), he’s just telling it like it is.

Your arguments are thin. Your ignorance of reality is shocking. Your double-standards are offensive, and your willingness to blindly support him and recycle the rhetoric is absurd. Your opinion is not fact. Your memes are not news articles. And your hypocrisy is not a platform.

- Alex Schiller

^^^^^^^^^^^^hella important! #BlackLivesMatter 

I just shut down a bunch of racist youtube trolls about this. They kept saying we make up 50+% of the crime in America. I brought out the statistics on all they asses(WITH SOURCES something they didn’t do) and they refused to engage any further into the debate with me.

We are the most incarcerated, but we are not the most dangerous.

The Purge really confuses the fuck out of me. Like white people are crazy as fuck. You mean to tell me all crime is legal and the first thing you think of is murder? I want a few cars, I’m def infiltrating the banks, I'ma be all up in the clothes and shoe store back rooms like what? What the hell is wrong with people?

"white privilege isn’t a thing stop playing the race card"

(X)

Rape is the only crime on the books for which arguing that the temptation to commit it was too clear and obvious to resist is treated as a defence. For every other crime, we call that a confession.

This is awesome!

YAYYY

The Glorification of White Crime

Take a facet of crime, and then look at television shows/movies that feature those criminals as protagonists.

White mobs.

White pirates.

White serial killers.

White political corruption

White drug dealers

I mostly want to talk about this as a TV phenomenon, but pick a crime, any crime, and Western media has probably made a movie/TV series/play/etc. with a white person that romanticizes the criminal activity. No matter what, a white person can do whatever terrible crimes and still have a TV/movie fanbase that loves them.

When you see black or brown people committing crimes on screen, you are to see them thugs and criminal masterminds and people to be beat down.

When you see white people committing crimes on screen, you see a three-dimensional portrait of why someone might commit that crime, how criminals are people too, and how you should even love them for the crimes that they commit because they’re just providing for their families or they’ve wronged or they’re just people and not perfect. This is particularly a luxury given to white male characters, since there few white female criminals as protagonists.

If and of the above shows were about black or brown folks, there would be a backlash of (white) people claiming that TV and movies are romanticizing criminals and are treating them too much like heroes and that it will affect viewers and encourage violence and “thuggish” behavior. And yet fictional white criminals get to have a deep fanbase who loves these white criminals, receive accolades and awards, get called amazing television that portray the complexities of human nature. Viewers of these characters see past the atrocious crimes and into their humanity, a luxury that white characters always have while characters of color rarely do. The closest that mainstream TV has come to showing black criminals as main characters is probably The Wire, and even then, the criminals share equal screen time and equal status as main characters as the police trying to stop them.

The idea that crime can be so heavily romanticized and glorified to such a degree is undoubtedly a privilege given to white characters. The next time you hear someone talk about Dexter Morgan or Walter White in a positive way, it may be an opportunity to rethink how white people can always able to be seen as people no matter what they do, while everyone else can be boiled down to nothing but a criminal.

This is true. The only exception I could come up with is “The Wire”.

The Wire wasn’t the exception tho. That show got ZERO mainstream accolades (and for it being on HBO, that’s just BIZARRE).

The criminality and corruption were never glorified nor justified with “well, I got cancer”, or “I’m seeing a therapist for my emotional issues”, or "hey, it’s prohibition, let me make a buck against an unfair law", or “I witnessed my mother being dismembered when I was four.  Of course I’m a serial killer.  But my victims are criminals so it’s OK!!!”.  These shows started from a place of “empathize with these troubled souls”.

Not surprising though, this is exactly how the treat white criminals in real life. White man shoots 9 people in a church and we hear his entire life story, see pictures of him as a kid looking innocent. He’s called just a kid. White man shoots up school we hear about his good grades and sad former teachers talk about how he was a good, quiet kid with a bright future ahead of him until this tragedy happened and ruined his life, the tragedy being that he went and murdered a bunch of people in cold blood but that’s never what they say. And ofcourse, he is a child also dispite being well into hs 20’s. We are always expected to sympathize with with white criminals.

If we talked about theft like we talk about rape, here’s how absurd it would sound

TDS, March 25, 2015