Tuesday, May 06, 2008 Obenieta: Do we get what we see? By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
BLOOD is not so bad as long as it lights up the living room. Knives and bullets, and what they do to the victims, may stir up our intestines. But as long as the crime scene and the trail down the scumbag’s muck are as crisp as the potato chips we’re munching, the real world is easier to stomach.
Turn the TV on, there’s nothing like its depiction of good versus evil to vivify the headline’s usual monotone. The wild guess in a whodunit. The jigsaw of solving a controversial case. The pulse-pounding chase. The works. See, even if the offenders are still on the loose, the officers are also up their alley, always on the move. They hardly have swell time over beer at a bikini club, no chance to envy at the dancers’ lean bellies.
In the book “Watching America,” a survey of television programming from the 1950s to 1986, its authors found only one law enforcer out of seven was portrayed negatively compared to an average of 23 percent among all the professions whose portrayals they tracked. Two-thirds of the cops exuded positive vibe and the negative characterization of police officers…were vain, or dumb, or supercilious, but not evil. Most of these were well-intentioned bumblers whose ineptitude or naivete provided comic results.”
There’s nothing more exciting than a day in the serialized lives of law enforcers.
And so on and on goes the assembly line of police drama serials, from “The Untouchables” where policemen loom like superheroes to “Chips,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Cagney and Lacey,” “Law and Order” up to the current craze, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigators,” among others. Gripping, indeed, are its edge-of-the-seat narrative and innovative characterization (hey, even the culprits are charismatic they might as well gather cults around them). Even police intrigue and corruption, as shown in “Miami Vice,” looked cool.
Of course, couch potatoes are putty in the hands of cops who still managed to be telegenic in the face of danger and the grind of duty, still driven by an almost masochistic work ethic, each action suffused with a sense of moral purpose. In other words, they don’t wind up as gas at the gust of our sniggers. We don’t have to guess why 10 cops died when there were only five aboard a boat that sank, and slap ourselves silly because it turned out five perished during the accident and five others during the re-enactment. Or, this: “How many cops does it take to screw in a light bulb? Just one, but he is never around when you need him.”
That’s out of the park, of course, from the Cebu City Police Office where the sun is blazing on crime solution efficiency at 81.67 percent, “which means majority of complaints brought to the police were solved.” That’s no fluke if we’d ask the city cops’ counterparts in the province where there’s reportedly “a 3.5 percent reduction in index crimes from Jan. 1 to April 15 this year compared to the same period last year.”
Hands down, a police job is never a yawner. According to the chief of the Philippine National Police, “there’s nothing more handful for our cops than the monster of multi-tasking.” See, “the desk officer receives the complaints. In some cases, he also serves as the jail officer, the building guard, the reception clerk and the radio operator. He answers calls on the landline and cellular phone.” Whew!
So that desk officers in police stations concentrate on their work, the PNP has banned the viewing of television in police stations. Yes, sir, watching TV is distracting for a desk officer. There’s no discounting, after all, the daydreams it might trigger. Especially when the news doesn’t have anything new. Or when reality check has the consistency of tone, grammar and penmanship worthy of a duck’s waddle from the gutter down to the police blotter.
