They want to think of themselves as vigilantes. Our culture (TV, movies, comics…) depicts accountable police respecting rights and following procedure as ineffective. We treat renegade cops and masked vigilantes as heroes who do what has to be done and the sort of cop who acts like Andy Griffith as ineffective, uncool, and an all around dupe.

When you look at all these people, they’re not hiding their media influence. In fact, theyre brazen to the point its really cringe actually. Cops with a punisher tattoo think of themselves as vigilantes. They joke about dirty Harry. They’ll say thst “this ain’t mayberry” to justify their hostility towards the general public. Because these are heroic masculine narratives, and the far right has been stoking those urges while the left has been aware of the reality that heroic individual narratives encourage antisocial behavior.

I’m increasingly coming to the position that we need more heroic depictions of actual civic duty. More legal dramas focusing on heroic defense attorneys with acknowledgements of the pathetic evil of loose cannon cops.

Or idk maybe we just need to mail copies of V for Vandetta to young men in the hopes that kids these days have media literacy.