'The Copy Cat Killer': A South Park portrayal of law enforcement

Recently I watched an episode of South Park, 'The Copy Cat Killer' from Season 8, that touched on the topic of crime; it was a parody of shows like CSI and Criminal Minds, but it did make a real point that the way in which crimes, criminals and crime fighters are portrayed in these types of shows is caricaturistic in nature. 

Now while these shows, if seen for what they are, as pure entertainment then this would not be any issue worth discussing. However, it is a well established fact that people rely almost entirely on media for their information about crime; they develop their attitudes, beliefs and fears purely from what they see in the media, and this includes fictional programming. Thus I thought it would be interesting to write about what I personally identify as the most significant, and most frequent misconceptions that people get about law enforcement and the nature of crime, as they appear in the South Park parody of crime media (while trying as hard as possible to not spoil it for people who might to want to watch it).

1)      That the lives of police, and the crimes they investigate, are all so dramatic:
There is a montage in the episode that begins with the stereotypical quip, “my police instincts are telling me the answer’s right in front of us”, then follows with dramatic music and scenes of intense investigation involving many intense faces and strange technologies. These sorts of are slowly replaced by scenes of the officers day to day life; him at the gym, at the beach playing beach volley ball, and forgetting what he was doing in the first place.

The point that this montage makes, is that while we’d like to think of police as ultra dramatic supermen, and of the process of investigation as a round the clock job in which the notion that “sleep is for the weak” is actually practiced is very far from the reality. The reality is that police are just normal people, with normal lives, who, while admittedly more dedicated and emotionally invested than some, are just employees working to run their own lives.

2)      That stereotypes are used by police as investigative tools:
In the South Park episode, there is a man at the scene of the crime who is dressed dirtily, talks in a deep and shaky voice, and who carries a blow up doll of a female who he talks to and refers to as ‘mother’. One of the children, observing, immediately calls over the officer to say they should investigate the man, while the officer contrasting says that it’s too obvious.

When we watch a show, we are very often left with the sense that whoever was the criminal was fairly obvious; this might be revisionist, but the fact is that normal people, with little experience of real crimes, do generally stereotype or judge people on the smallest of things. Note here, that the writers of crime shows are ordinary citizens.  However the fact that this type of thinking is attributed to law enforcement in shows, when the pretty girl is let off by the male officer or when a close family member is immediately assumed innocent (in ignorance of real world statistics), is in stark contrast to the painstaking and highly intelligent work done by police officers.

3)      That police are indiscretionary in their use of 'arrest' and 'charge' powers:
In the episode, officers begin to use the services of a clairvoyant who is actually just a child who has suffered from recent brain trauma and is thus having hallucinations. The police make arrest after arrest on the advice of the child, presuming that there are an endless number of copy cat killers before presuming that the child is simply wrong.

It is a common plotline in crime dramas for the police to be looking in the wrong direction and arresting and even brutalising the wrong person; who can’t recall the dramatic phone call and close up of the police officer as they hear of a particular crime being committed- a crime that they had thought would cease because they had ‘got their guy’. As I established earlier, real life police are just normal people who are as prone to error as the rest of us. However, a great deal of research, investigation and expertise goes into arrests and as such they are very, very rarely wrong. Whilst the principle that it is better to let 10 men go than to imprison 1 innocent is primarily a doctrine of the court, the logic behind it is equally applicable to police work.

We might assume he's a killer, but a policeman would require much more convncing.