One-Two Punch Slams Portrayals of Police as ‘Trigger-Happy Thugs’

“Somewhere between Sgt. Joe Friday and Sgt. Stacey Koon,” writes Jon Katz in the Jan. 21 Rolling Stone, “the good guys became bad.”

Katz examines what he sees as the news media’s tendency to portray cops as “trigger-happy racist thugs quick to beat or shoot innocent civilians for little or no reason.”

He writes essentially the same essay in the January/February Columbia Journalism Review. Good thing. His message bears repeating.

In both articles, Katz criticizes print and broadcast journalists’ reportage of the July, 1992, police shooting of Jose (Kiko) Garcia in Washington Heights, N.Y.

Katz says the media jumped to erroneous conclusions provided by dubious witnesses, and then went with the flow of mob hysteria against the police. He attributes this hoodwinking of journalists to a trend he traces back 30 years or so.

“Once,” he writes in Rolling Stone, “journalism was a working-class institution whose sons (and a few daughters) chose reporting over plumbing, firefighting or building inspection.”

That changed in the ‘60s, as educated and idealistically liberal young reporters from middle- and upper-income homes pushed into the trade and dubbed it a profession.

It is very good, Katz says, that the old chumminess between cops and reporters vanished. It is good that an adversarial approach to covering the police emerged, exposing all-too-common incidents of police corruption, incompetence and racist thuggery.

Now, however, reportage is all too often biased against the police, he says.

The exception is the way police work is portrayed in reality-based shows such as “Cops,” he writes in CJR. “ ‘Cops’ reminds us how dangerous, terrifying and complex a police officer’s job is, and how unseemly it is for journalists sitting in safe and comfortable newsrooms to make self-righteous snap judgments about police work.”

As a result, he says, “Broadcasts like ‘Cops’ are moving into a vacuum that would be better filled by journalists.”

In Rolling Stone, Katz concludes:

“The real issue isn’t whether or not the police are capable of brutality or racism. We know that some are. But beyond that lie questions about the most fundamental concepts and traditions of policing: who and what the police ought to be.

“Those questions seem more critical every day as the country steadily degenerates into one of the most violent cultures in the world.”

REQUIRED READING

* Here’s a deep thought:

Magazines are a medium, and so is television. Suppose the two could, even momentarily, fuse their creative energies? Wouldn’t the world be a happier place? Just suppose!

OK, now wiggle your fingers and make that doodily-doodily-doodily sound that Garth and Wayne make when they’re about to daydream and. . . .

Voila! There’s the February SPIN magazine, written in its entirety by the cast of “Saturday Night Live!”

Bob Guccione Jr.--the editor man, the Bobmeister, Mr. Son of Cootchy-Coo Guccione--has done this sort of wild and crazy thing before.

In October, 1990, issue, he turned his magazine over to Spike Lee, who gave the music publication an Afrocentric spin. Then he let a bunch of students have their way.

Interestingly, the SNLers seem to take their temporary assignment seriously. Clearly, they got a kick out of this ensemble role as magazine crew and they put considerable effort into it.

Six-time guest host Tom Hanks starts things off with an earnest, amusing look at SNL’s role in his own life and the culture: “When something happens in the world during the week, you still automatically think, ‘Man, I wonder what Saturday Night Live’s gonna do about this.’ ”

Comedy aficionados will enjoy such fare as David Spade’s Q & A with Dan Aykroyd.

Rockers will like the cast’s assessments of and interviews with such acts as the Seattle grunge band Mudhoney.

The spoof of Madonna’s “Sex,” in which Julia Sweeney’s androgynous “Pat” fills in as objet d’art erotique , is a hoot.

On a more serious side is Guccione’s interview with SNL creator Lorne Michaels, which will remind viewers that the show has lived dangerously from time to time.

Particularly interesting is their exchange on the recent Sinead O’Connor incident, in which the singer unexpectedly tore up a photo of the Pope after a ponderous a cappella rendition of Bob Marley’s “War.”

Michaels says he was shocked, as if a house guest had relieved herself “on a flower arrangement in the dining room.” It was hard, he says, to get the laughs going again.

Michaels: “Maybe she doesn’t know we’re a comedy show, that could well be. . . . Tearing up a picture of the Pope comes under the heading of a Comedy Killer. It kind of breaks the spirit of the evening.”

Guccione: “I thought it was a selfish act.”

Michaels: “All saints are selfish.”

As with the other efforts, the result of the SPIN-SNL collaboration is bracingly uneven. That’s good. If every edge had been worried off this experiment, it wouldn’t have its daring air.

So, let’s close with a non sequitur, another deep thought, this one from Jack Handey:

“It’s easy to sit there and say you’d like to have more money. And I guess that’s what I like about it. It’s easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.”

* This week’s New Yorker brings the second and final installment of Susan Sheehan’s account of one family’s three generations in urban poverty.

Like Dickens’ serial fiction a century ago, Sheehan’s journalism sheds light onto the grimmest corners of street life. And although her work is sadder and grittier than Dickens’--things have worsened since the Artful Dodger’s days--this series is, nevertheless (and almost inexplicably), a page-turner.

Artist Sue Coe’s brilliant color illustrations are the perfect complement to this complex, frustrating, heartbreaking story.