A Note for Authors Writing Police Officer Heroes

I feel like I keep starting these discussions with disclaimers.  I am not anti-police officer.  But I've seen a lot of people out and about discussion how current events have soured them on billionaire heroes and I have seen very little about police officer heroes.  I am aware that police officers can also be female or non-binary, I have not encountered those in fiction, particularly romance fiction with the same regularity, so I am not addressing that in this post.  Although the more i think on it, a non-binary police officer would be awesome, if you know of such a book, please let me know. 

I'm going to focus on heroes, as the post title suggests, this can also apply to side characters, even in non-romance.  Angie Thomas' The Hate You Give, for example has an uncle who is a  police officer and his character was great.  

Some of this was always true, some of this I and others are simply far more aware of, but of course much fiction exists in a time that is contemporary, yet divorced a bit from reality. Timelines are compressed, diseases particularly sexually transmitted ones are often non-existent, and there is a tradition of protagonists, especially male protagonists doing things that are really quite terrible and we hope there is enough groveling in the end to make it pay off.

I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, if you really like reading about guys who break rules and laws to get their true love, then all of that is cool.  But, I get the sense that some authors aren't presenting this as naughty behavior the hero engaged in because he hadn't fully confronted his emotions, but more like silly things book heroes do.  That line is obviously going to be different for each reader, but nonetheless, I'm going to submit some suggestions.  

A storyline where the police officer hero is accused of police brutality but of course everyone knows he is innocent that makes absolutely no mention of the current political climate is a lot of fantasy to ask your reader to engage in. See also storylines involving accusations of rape or other police corruption.  Am I suggesting people can only write about good cops?  Oh, heck no.  But there are things that you may not have time to address in your story, and if you don't then you can't tiptoe up to it and leave it.  Just like I can't read your story about a real estate developer looking for a fourth wife who has declared bankruptcy a time or two without going hmm, there are things that are too close to current concerns that it's a lot harder to not think of current issues. .  

Anything your hero does that could be curtailed by the heroine calling the police (following her on dates, waiting for hours outside her apartment after she has told him she doesn't want to see him) takes on an added level of danger when it is done by a police officer. Goodness knows romance and other fiction have sometimes conflates stalking and romantic pursuit, and I am aware of some of the cultural reasons for such.  But right now, yeesh.  

And if your police officer hero constantly breaks both the rules and the laws, then you are likely over the line for most readers.  Sure, he may be doing it out of serious concern for another character.  But the point of him being a police officer is often that he represents the good guys. If you wanted to write an anti-hero, you can.  There is of course room in fiction for a police officer anti-hero, but I see police officer heroes who are presented as good guys who are just hampered by mean bosses who want them to follow protocol. That is so problematic.  I suspect some authors may do this to excuse violations of police procedure.  Or to give him a little edge.  But as a reader this looks to me like a character who should be fired.  Yes, being a police officer is a job that has a lot of rules that make the job take longer.  Yes, we all sympathize with that. If you want to write a character who keeps violating the law without addressing what that really means, then I question whether you actually meant to write a hero at all. 

 

Three Interesting Things

1. This case came to my attention on multiple fronts.  Imagine you wished the court case to be conducted in your native language.  Imagine the court case was taking place on your native lands.  Imagine the judge did not speak your native language so counted your appearance where you spoke only that language as your failure to appear in court.  This is actually happening in Hawaii. Yes the man also speaks English.  But restricting the defendant's ability to choose the language they feel most comfortable in seems a terrible precedent on multiple fronts, especially when there is a translator available.  

2. I do not watch this show. But this discussion of how the show went from cute idea with small conflicts to insane show with increasing level of manufactured conflict is something I think any reality TV watcher will appreciate.  Certainly I don't have access to the financials, but I do think in general the simple, I will watch people silently seethe over a small thing and discuss it endlessly with my friends gets overlooked by TV makers because the quiet buzz means I will watch ten episodes, where the people demonstrate they don't even care about their loved ones stuff gets old really fast. 

3. Jemele Hill wrote eloquently about how Michigan State, her alma mater, needs to wear it's shame in this gymnastics scandal. 

Sovereignty at Arena Stage

I saw a preview of "Sovereignty" at Arena Stage.  I felt it started a bit slow, but then picked up pace once it had done a good amount of explaining so on balance, was great.  I learned things, I laughed, I teared up, and I finished feeling mad and hopeful.  

The playwright for "Sovereignty" is a tribally enrolled lawyer, and it operates along two timelines, a present to future one, and one in the 1800's, both surrounding court cases - one that has happened and one that likely will happen.  The 1800's timeline looks at the legal fight between the Cherokee nation and the state of Georgia as Georgia essentially tried to make things uncomfortable enough for the Cherokee to leave.  The current to future timeline looks at where things are now.  Worcester v. Georgia was decided by the Supreme Court in favor of the Cherokee Nation having sovereignty over reservation land. But the Cherokee were still forced out of Georgia, and a subsequent case decided that reservations did not have legal jurisdiction over non-tribe members who commit crimes on reservation land.  This was loophole was addressed in the most recent version of the Violence Against Women Act, but it still creates some legal grey.  All of this sounds very lawyerly, the play has several characters of a legal bent, but makes great use of the characters to demonstrate the actual effects of these laws.  Members of the Ridge family exist in both timelines, both worried about how to live and love and protect their families. It's a tough play, a lot of folks end up dead and/or injured.  But there were light moments too.  There are eight cast members, so most everyone plays at least two characters and as the play progresses the timelines overlap more swiftly, until one moment where one character, turns around and switches roles onstage.  (I heard some fellow audience members who thought that was an error, it read as entirely intentional to me although I did know exactly which scene they meant.) 

The set design was amazing, and the play tackles themes of how much and when to fight which turns out to be incredibly relevant right now. 

Adoptive Cultures and Other Fun Words

I'm noticing a thing.  If someone says, "Wow, I like cheese, must be my Italian background," it is cute if you are Italian.  One imagines it's tongue in cheek, because we all (one hopes) get that Italians are not genetically required to like cheese, but Italians certainly might have been raised in a food culture that often features cheese. But, if you were for example Chinese and loved cheese, and said, "I must be secretly Italian", it's a little less funny.  Now of course, I have swapped out the power dynamics, the Chinese do not have a history of say, showing up in Italy and declaring it theirs, or mining the good stuff and shipping it home as far as I'm aware.  (The Chinese are certainly not innocent of colonialism.)  

And why so serious, it's only a joke.  Except it's not really funny. Because we're reinforcing bad ideas about people only being able to like and appreciate a culture if there are of that culture.  This is why you see so many pretendians, folks who have decided outside of any and all genealogical evidence that they are secretly Native American or First Nations, because those ideas speak to them.  This is why you get people claiming their are transracial who are not transracial adoptees.  

You can like and appreciate things that are not genetically yours.  You can like and appreciate things that differ from how you were raised, or who you grew up with.  And I get this is like the adult version of if you love cheese so much you should marry it, but you can love cheese and not marry it.  I swear!  

Where this really becomes problematic, is when people then decide their bone deep affinity for a thing means they get to do things that only folks of that culture should do.  You can't use words that are offensive, that have been used to oppress.  Your affinity is not an all access VIP pass.  You can love it deeply, fully, wholly, and still be respectful.  And if you can't, then you didn't really love it.  You just loved pretending. 

  

Top Chef and Dysfunctional Teams

I usually have less to say on a weekly basis about "Top Chef" but well, for those of you who watched this week and know my need to discuss the failures of dysfunctional teams, here we are.  The conceit was three teams of three with each chef's course having a time limit and a slightly different challenge in an Olympic nod. Skating judge type scoring would be used for each round, with the team's total being calculated across rounds for winning and losing teams.  

The white team lost.  What was clear to both the viewers at home and the folks in the room (where there were non-judge guests who had been assigned table colors to encourage them to route for a team) was that Claudette, who had the first round for her team really seemed to be working alone while a lot of help plating was being given to the other two team members up first.  Claudette was shown to ask for a number of things, and it was pretty clear that Tanya was frustrated since this was all happening at the time she could have been prepping for her stuff.  I go back and forth on this.  Tanya clearly felt she was helping more than she needed to, and at one point said, I'm gonna need your help because I'm behind now.  So Claudette stopped asking for help and then when called out for having a meal that lacked balance was very quick to note she had not gotten the help she'd needed. 

So, it was clear that these three chefs had very different ideas of what kind of teamwork should be put into place for this challenge and once you're in the weeds it can be really tough to figure out how to recover because you are already overwhelmed.  As someone who is still working on the remaining items from busy season at my day job, we've had a lot of meeting about what went wrong and why we're behind and a lot of it kind of looks like this - basically I would have been on time if these folks had been willing to provide me this assistance and if I had known going in they would be stretched or unavailable I would have planned differently. 

So, then Tanya was up and she had made a critical error guessing the temperature of her meat.  On top of that, she had taken the precise cuts round and felt she had needed early prep time to work on her cuts, and her prep time had, from her perspective become help Claudette time.  One thing I think the show kind of glided over was there was a third member of this team who really didn't seem to be helping anyone either.  Chris mentioned in his talking head spot he had noticed the tension and decided he couldn't be distracted by it which, umm, okay.  

So, in the end, this team ended up in the bottom but Chris, who mostly didn't help anyone, had the best meal of the three, so he wasn't in jeopardy. Which is not uncommon in these team challenges, and why so often you see folks saying, I knew we were going down, I just figured this was the thing I could save.  It worked for him, because from what we saw, no one cared that he hadn't helped his team, and no one was mad that he hadn't helped, Claudette was mad that Tanya hadn't helped enough, and Tanya was mad that Claudette didn't want to acknowledge the help that had been given, and so, Chris sat their looking like the nice guy, Claudette saved herself in part by blaming Tanya, and Tanya, in the end went to Last Chance Kitchen. Look Tanya made enough critical errors, that I'm not saying she didn't deserve to go home.  But, this was dysfunction across the team.  Sacrificing your food for others never works out, but it's so hard to watch not helping others get so rewarded. Or rewarded unequally.