Anthony Paletta has an interesting, though I think not wholly convincing, essay in National Review arguing that liberals don’t like vigilante movies because we don’t want to see people use force on criminals:

What, then, is the problem? A closer look at these criticisms seems to suggest that a core objection is to the justification of any violence against criminals, or the presentation as crime as something without empathetic roots. It’s one thing to point out that some villains in these films are cartoonishly evil; it’s another to object that this portrait lends undue justification to violence. Vincent Canby, after sneering at the simplistic portrait of criminals in Death Wish, notes that it “sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger.” Christopher Orr, in his The Brave One review, tires of the usual litany of “Big Apple baddies” and says that the film “unambiguously endorses vigilante killings.” The principal objection, in each case, seems not aesthetic, but moral; the offense is to create one-dimensional criminals that one need not regret seeing handled with summary force, with nary a glance at their broken homes, or hungry children, or kindness to animals. It’s tut-tutting not unlike wondering just how many maidens are actually tied to railroad tracks by top-hatted brutes each year, and whether this really justifies sending them over waterfalls without due efforts at rehabilitation and legal counsel.

I do think that the liberal and conservative approaches to criminal justice are different. But artistically, there’s something else going on here. Vigilante movies and television shows tend to lay out a solution to a problem: criminals are punks who need executing or something short of it, and if only our police officers could act in accordance with our emotional revulsion, we’d clean up our streets in a hurry; or, if only men were men, punks who want to rape and torture women would get a nasty surprise; or whatever variant of the week you prefer. Such a worldview seems to assume that crime is inevitable and can only be dealt with after the fact and through deterrence.

Anti-hero stories tend to be ways of explicating problems, rather than offering solutions. Futzing around with criminals’ backstories is an act of sympathy, but it’s also an attempt to figure out why crime happens in the first place and to consider whether we could have prevented it. Breaking Bad isn’t an argument that we should tolerate Walter White being a dreadful human being who sells drugs, watches people die of overdoses, misleads his family, and induces old men to act as suicide bombers. It’s a question about whether if Walter White had adequate health care coverage, a decent pension, and life insurance, he’d have done terrible things anyway, or if he’s a small, angry man who turns to evil because he wants to be recognized by the universe. The Wire isn’t a story about how we should substitute Inspectors General for putting Omar Little in the witness stand and being generally amusing. It’s an explication of how ridiculously difficult it is to build a safety net and put the right incentives in place to help people keep from using drugs and to encourage them to work legitimate but less-remunerative and less-reliable jobs and to build legitimate businesses. It’s a simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic perspective on crime: a belief that we can stop it before it starts, but that it’s very, very hard to do so and requires considerable investment.

I also think Paletta underestimates the extent to which vigilante fantasies are really fantasies when it comes to cops who use more force than their departments want them to. We’ve got a vigorous public debate going about the right to videotape incidents of the police using force on suspects precisely because the police use considerable force on suspects in public often enough to be uncomfortable about having it documented. In the 1990s, police brutality cases were expensive enough to spark a debate about whether they were worth the bite they took out of city budgets when the money could have gone towards hiring more beat cops. People who want to be entertained by the prospect of an unfettered police force battering criminals into submission can find plenty of real-life examples.

As a new Judge Dredd convert, and a big fan of innovative action movies, I’m actually starting to get excited about Karl Urban-starring Dredd even though the production’s hit some difficulties. What really got my juices going was the news that Olivia Thirlby’s going to be playing Judge Anderson, which I would guess mean that the Big Bad in the movie is going to be Judge Death and the Dark Judges, who hate crime so much they’ve decided the best way to stop it is to wipe out all life in the universe. Now, there’s no question that the Judges are totalitarian, but I kind of appreciate the idea that the movie will show what the end consequence of a policy aimed at getting crime to zero.

I also appreciate that apparently, Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson will work together, but won’t kiss, staying faithful to a narrative in which the big emotional reveal is that Judge Dredd considers Judge Anderson his friend. That’s a welcome diversion from the standard stressful situation=smooches narrative, and it’d be nice to have a story where men and women actually get to focus on building their professional relationship and friendship rather than figuring out when they’re going to get down. Of course wartime romances are a thing But if you’re going to really go in on building the world the Judges live in, it makes sense that the standard emotional narratives that operate in that realm would be different. And cutting the Judges off from a range of human experiences emphasizes both the unnaturalness of what they’re being asked to do and their distance from the people they pass judgment on.

June Thomas has what I think is a largely convincing critique of this fall’s procedurals, noting that many shows have abandoned a focus on the core case in each episode to pursue larger mysteries related to the investigators:

Why are TV writers making their mysteries less mysterious? I think it’s because lots of new procedurals try to fit more than just a case of the week into the 44-minute running time. Most shows also have a serial element, a mystery—usually a quest for elusive information—that lasts throughout the whole series. In the case of Unforgettable, it’s Carrie’s attempt to remember the day her sister was murdered; on Person of Interest, it’s a driven cop’s attempt to capture Reese, who is wanted for a number of serious crimes around the world. Person of Interest’s writers are also trying to draw our attention to that Big Brother machine and the principals’ back stories: Why does Finch have a terrible back injury, and why is Reese such a loner? These larger arcs are supposed to encourage fans to keep tuning in each week, but they can’t be so intrusive that they alienate casual viewers and send them stretching for the remote. That’s why most shows relegate the serial to a tacked-on coda.

Inadvertently, I also think this suggests something about the persistence of procedurals in an age of declining crime.

To back it up a second, when I moved to Washington, I was living by myself for the first time, in a bigger city than I’d ever lived in before. And shortly after I moved here, I was in the public library when a woman had a violent psychotic breakdown an aisle over. I may have been a little anxious. Over time, I got vastly more comfortable, but I will admit that part of what helped was watching enormous amounts of Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I recognize the ridiculousness of that, but they reassured me that as long as I took cabs home after midnight, locked my fire-escape-adjacent windows, and obeyed my instincts in relationships, I would probably not end up dead in an alley or locked in a sex dungeon. This 2002 Michael Kinsley column about women and Law & Order? That was basically me.

But my nerves were basically about the overall challenges of adjusting to a new situation, with all the commuting and budgeting and everything else adult life implies, not about realistic concerns about violent crime. Between 1991 and 2010, violent crimes overall went down from 758.2 per 100,000 to 403.6 per 100,000. Murders and non-negligent homicides fell from 9.8 per 100,000 to 4.8, and the rates of forcible rape (which, really? Is there voluntary rape?) went down from 42.3 per 100,000 to 27.5 per 100,000. Perceptions of crime risk haven’t gone down quite as consistently. In Gallup polling on whether respondents thought their was more crime in their “area than there was a year ago, or less?” the last year where a majority thought their region had gotten more dangerous from year to year was 1992, hitting a low of 26 percent in October 2001, and heading back up to 47 percent in 2005. In that same survey, 67 percent of respondents said they thought crime was rising across the country, a number that hadn’t been that high since 1996, when 71 percent of respondents said they thought crime was increasing.

But the point remains: as the actual risk of being a violent crime victim has declined, and as people perceive themselves to live in safer or at least neutral eras, it makes sense that our procedurals would move to a place where we’re less concerned with the resolution of the case and the incarceration of individual criminals and more concerned with the people who provide this bulwark of safety. I’d really like to see more successful mainstream shows that meditate on the tactics that those people use (I need to check out Person of Interest, which I’m told is surveillance-y, and also based on a dear friend’s work). If you’re going to have a long-running mystery or issue a cop or doctor has to resolve, why not have it be the reaction they got after working in Internal Affairs, a la Commissioner Gordon? Or for killing abusing or killing suspect, which could very well be part of Deena Pilgrim’s arc in Powers? One tends to think that the worst parts of our criminal justice system affect the people who commit its wrongs, as well as are the subjects of them. Not all shows about cops have to depict them as bad people. But it might make sense to draw drama from actual problems, instead of inventing absolutely ridiculous ones.